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Anti-Irish sentiment in America had dated to the early 1800s, when immigrants arrived to work on major infrastructure projects like canals and railroads. This only accelerated during the Great Famine (1845-52) and afterwards. Frederick Opper was the…

Influential account of two years lived near Walden Pond, MA by Transcendentalist writer. One recurring theme in the text is the search for a home and its cost, which Thoreau defined as "the amount of what I will call life which is required to be…

This structure was located on a 1500-acre cantaloupe farm in California's Imperial Valley near the US border with Mexico. Its photographer, Dorothea Lange, was one of the best-known photographers of the New Deal era, often recording poverty amidst…

The factory town of Lowell, MA was named after the inventor of a power loom that revolutionized manufacturing and, along with the technology, the structure of work. Owners of the mills employed thousands of people, most of them women called the…

Removal of trees so as to create farmland, and especially the stumps left behind, was an arduous process for European settlers. Although there were complex (and expensive) "patent machines" available, small farmers trying to remove fairly…

This idealized diptych appeared in The Genesee Farmer, an agricultural newspaper, showing its readers the clearing of forests so as to create farmland. By the date of publication, settlement and the "Pioneer" figure already was imbued with mythic…