Browse Items (1264 total)

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…

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…

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…

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…

A small sample drawn from 500 photographs taken during a day-long workshop sponsored by the Creative Artists Migrant Program Services (CAMPS). Held at Sodus Central School, the activities included drawing, photography, papier-mâché, collage, and…

This is a halftone image created from an original pen-and-ink drawing no longer available. It was drawn by a Haitian immigrant farmworker living at the Hoehandle labor camp in Castile, NY. His work was featured in the 1986 gallery show African Past:…

As the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT explains: "European Cabinets of Art and Curiosity were places of universal learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries....They were the museums of their time, offering visitors first-hand knowledge of…

For the 1985 Genesee Migrant Center exhibit African Past: Migrant Present, this drawing was titled "Ghost"; for the 1991 exhibit Passages, it was title "Voudo Man." Cantave Sean's stylized figure recalls the vèvè of Voudon, symbols that were to act…