On March 25, 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City killed 146 workers, mostly young women. The accounts of the survivors and witnesses, along with the unsafe conditions which prevented more of the workers from escaping the blaze helped fuel industrial safety regulations during the Progressive era.
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Tag Archives: 1910s
Sexual Politics
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was one of the pioneers of the birth control movement. Her writings, as seen here with her magazine The Woman Rebel caused her to run afoul of postal authorities who were bound by laws at the time to confiscate and destroy any material sent through the mail that was judged “obscene.”
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Progressive Morality at the Front
For the United States, entry into World War I came at the close of the Progressive Era. One feature of this period was an emphasis on social control–using the power of government and other powerful institutions to manage people’s behavior.
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A Call for War
The First World War was a conflict which the United States remained out of until April 1917. Throughout the years leading up to American entry, debate took place over the war’s justness and whether or not there was a concrete reason for the United States to declare war on Germany.
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Poetry of The Great War
The Great War (later, referred to as World War I) took place from 1914 to 1918 and saw the beginning, in many ways, of the 20th century.
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Native American Creation Stories
This page (from the Exploring US History site at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) contains several Native American creation myths from across several centuries, as well as discussion questions.
The Modern Age and the Turn of the Century
The transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries saw massive technological changes (electricity, the automobile, powered flight) combined with political changes (the collapse of Qing China, the unifications of Italy and Germany) and social changes (urbanization, massive migration).
This led, unsurprisingly, to cultural shifts that reflected the unsettled world. Some of these were confined to the upper reaches of high culture. Others were visible within the popular culture. Below are some examples of these sweeping cultural changes.
Modernist Thought: The Futurist Manifesto
The Futurist Manifesto- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909)
Futurism was an artistic and literary movement which emerged in the early twentieth century in Italy, spreading to other nations in Europe within a few years. Like many artistic and cultural trends in the Fin de siècle era, it rejected the Enlightenment era past and glorified the new. Marinetti (1876-1944) was an Italian poet who claimed to undergo a conversion of sorts to more modern ideas after a car accident caused him to re-evaluate art.
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