Driving Question: What are "citizenship" and "civic agency" in general? in America's constitutional democracy? How does voting relate to other forms of civic agency?

Young colonial girls raised in wealthy households were trained in the skills of a housewife early on. Samplers like this one displayed a girl's aptitude for needlework and could be hung as a piece of art in a family household.

In colonial New England, a primer like this one may have been in use as early as 1690. Children first learned their ABCs and basic literacy through primers. Since the Bible was seen as the primary means through which a child would attain literacy, these primers would often incorporate religious themes and morals.

Records from the Federal Writers Project are of immense importance in documenting and preserving the experiences of those who survived enslavement. ; Lewis’ account includes reference to the concept of hypodescent, which allowed intergenerational, chattel slavery to persist in the U.S. Lewis also makes note of his lack of access to education and some memories of his childhood.

At Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, and other residential schools like it, Native American children and teens were required to give up their tribal traditions and culture. Carlisle opened in 1879 as the first government-run residential school, aimed at forcing Indigenous youth to assimilate to White culture. These before and after photos were taken as a way to demonstrate the efforts at assimilation.

Life for a student at the Carlisle Indian School was highly regimented and militaristic, signaling the government’s influence on the school’s mission and identity. This source, paired with the images above, offers a glimpse into the daily experience of those enrolled in this program as well as information about the aims of the federal government in establishing institutions such as Carlisle.

Although it is not a certainty, some historians believe that the concept of the American “teenager” originated sometime in the 1940s. A liminal age, the teenager was neither child nor adult. This 1944 TIME Magazine article detailed the “life of the American Teenager” by photojournalist Nina Leen. The full article offers a glimpse into the perception of teens but also offers opportunities for students to consider the rise of the middle class, social status, and race in the middle of the twentieth century.

This photograph shows a group of children in the Weil Public School reciting the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag. The young girl in the front row center is Helen Mihara. A few months before this image was taken, Helen’s father, a San Francisco businessman, was arrested and detained in a Department of Justice camp for “enemy aliens.” Soon after this image was taken, Helen and her mother were placed in Tule Lake Relocation Center. Her mother later died in detention.

School segregation was among the most central concerns of the Civil Rights Movement since the 1930s. Activists for school integration argued that separate was not equal and every child, regardless of race, was entitled to education in a safe learning environment. These two images depict daily life in segregated classrooms in the same year, 1941. Brown v. Board of Education would not be passed for more than a decade.

Written three years after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, this telegram to President Eisenhower details the feelings of parents of the Little Rock Nine, who were a part of the busing program to integrate the Little Rock school system. The Little Rock Nine were the first African American students to enter Little Rock’s Central High School in Arkansas. The parents note that because of the supreme court ruling their “faith in democracy” had been renewed.

Even after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, school integration was protested. This image shows African American children entering their new school while white mothers protest school integration

In September 1958, Governor Faubus of Arkansas closed all Little Rock public high schools as a result of unrest due to integration. Known as the “Lost Year,” both teachers and students were blocked from their school buildings. This image shows three girls learning “remotely” during that time and offers a glimpse of the efforts to maintain continuity of education in the midst of upheaval.

Even after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, school integration was protested. This image shows African American children entering their new school while white mothers protest school integration

In July of 1903, Mother Jones led a march from Philadelphia to the home of President Rosevelt to protest the unsafe labor conditions of children working in mills. The story of Mother Jones and the children who accompanied her on her march showcases not only youth activism but also women in the labor movement at the turn of the century.

This ad was created after the passage of the Keating-Own Child Labor Act of 1916. This act limited the working hours of children and placed an age requirement of the age of 16 for any working child. It also forbade the interstate sale of goods produced in factories that employed child labor.

After the US declared war in 1917, children were encouraged to support the war efforts. The Girl Scouts of America provided an opportunity for girls to become involved in volunteer work for the war effort. Organizations like the Girls Scouts and 4H typically trained girls for domestic work. Skills like sewing and first-aid were put to use in new ways for members of the Girl Scouts and 4H during WWI. Here, scouts planted a Victory Garden. Victory gardens, or liberty gardens, first appeared during WWI. The federal government encouraged citizens to plant vegetable gardens to mitigate any food shortages that resulted from the war.

Boyscouts, like Girl Scouts, volunteered in the war effort during both WWI and II. Here, scouts who were too young to go to combat sell war bonds.

The 26th Amendment to the Constitution allowed for those 18 years old or older to vote in elections. Support for decreasing the voting age from 21 to 18 increased during World War II, as young men were conscripted to fight in the war as young as 18 but could not yet vote. This image depicts youth protestors in support of the 26th amendment.

On August 28, 1963, thousands took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The March was instigated by a continuing lack of jobs for African Americans and the persistence of segregation. The march was influential in pressuring President John F. Kennedy to draft a strong civil rights bill. This photo depicts Edith Lee-Payne on her twelfth birthday. Edith attended the March with her mother.

Young colonial girls raised in wealthy households were trained in the skills of a housewife early on. Samplers like this one displayed a girl's aptitude for needlework and could be hung as a piece of art in a family household.

This document provides a glimpse into the experiences of colonial children who spent much of their childhood working for families that were not their own. This indenture arraignment also highlights the kinds of skills and education that were valued for girls. Namely, Elizabeth Fortune is said to receive training in the “art of housewifery” in exchange for her service.

In colonial New England, a primer like this one may have been in use as early as 1690. Children first learned their ABCs and basic literacy through primers. Since the Bible was seen as the primary means through which a child would attain literacy, these primers would often incorporate religious themes and morals.

Records from the Federal Writers Project are of immense importance in documenting and preserving the experiences of those who survived enslavement. ; Lewis’ account includes reference to the concept of hypodescent, which allowed intergenerational, chattel slavery to persist in the U.S. Lewis also makes note of his lack of access to education and some memories of his childhood.

At Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, and other residential schools like it, Native American children and teens were required to give up their tribal traditions and culture. Carlisle opened in 1879 as the first government-run residential school, aimed at forcing Indigenous youth to assimilate to White culture. These before and after photos were taken as a way to demonstrate the efforts at assimilation.

Life for a student at the Carlisle Indian School was highly regimented and militaristic, signaling the government’s influence on the school’s mission and identity. This source, paired with the images above, offers a glimpse into the daily experience of those enrolled in this program as well as information about the aims of the federal government in establishing institutions such as Carlisle.

This photograph shows a group of children in the Weil Public School reciting the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag. The young girl in the front row center is Helen Mihara. A few months before this image was taken, Helen’s father, a San Francisco businessman, was arrested and detained in a Department of Justice camp for “enemy aliens.” Soon after this image was taken, Helen and her mother were placed in Tule Lake Relocation Center. Her mother later died in detention.

This magazine spread on sharecropping children was published the same year that President Rosevelt established the Farm Security Administration. The FSA was a New Deal agency that provided assistance and relief to agricultural workers impacted by drought and the Great Depression.

During the Great Depression, The Farm Security Administration attempted to aid workers and farmers by setting up housing camps, providing loans and training to workers, among other forms of assistance. This source shows a group of children playing marbles in one of the FSA labor camps in Texas, offering a glimpse into daily life and play for children living through the Great Depression.

Although it is not a certainty, some historians believe that the concept of the American “teenager” originated sometime in the 1940s. A liminal age, the teenager was neither child nor adult. This 1944 TIME Magazine article detailed the “life of the American Teenager” by photojournalist Nina Leen. The full article offers a glimpse into the perception of teens but also offers opportunities for students to consider the rise of the middle class, social status, and race in the middle of the twentieth century.

School segregation was among the most central concerns of the Civil Rights Movement since the 1930s. Activists for school integration argued that separate was not equal and every child, regardless of race, was entitled to education in a safe learning environment. These two images depict daily life in segregated classrooms in the same year, 1941. Brown v. Board of Education would not be passed for more than a decade.

Written three years after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, this telegram to President Eisenhower details the feelings of parents of the Little Rock Nine, who were a part of the busing program to integrate the Little Rock school system. The Little Rock Nine were the first African American students to enter Little Rock’s Central High School in Arkansas. The parents note that because of the supreme court ruling their “faith in democracy” had been renewed.

Even after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education, school integration was protested. This image shows African American children entering their new school while white mothers protest school integration

On August 28, 1963, thousands took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The March was instigated by a continuing lack of jobs for African Americans and the persistence of segregation. The march was influential in pressuring President John F. Kennedy to draft a strong civil rights bill. This photo depicts Edith Lee-Payne on her twelfth birthday. Edith attended the March with her mother.

The 26th Amendment to the Constitution allowed for those 18 years old or older to vote in elections. Support for decreasing the voting age from 21 to 18 increased during World War II, as young men were conscripted to fight in the war as young as 18 but could not yet vote. This image depicts youth protestors in support of the 26th amendment.

In September 1958, Governor Faubus of Arkansas closed all Little Rock public high schools as a result of unrest due to integration. Known as the “Lost Year,” both teachers and students were blocked from their school buildings. This image shows three girls learning “remotely” during that time and offers a glimpse of the efforts to maintain continuity of education in the midst of upheaval.

Celebrities were no exception to the draft during the Vietnam War. Elvis Presley joined the army in 1958 and, in this letter, three girls from Nevada ask President Eisenhower not to shave off his sideburns. This source offers a window into the lives of American teens as well as an example of the role teens played in the evolution and development of American pop culture.

In July of 1903, Mother Jones led a march from Philadelphia to the home of President Rosevelt to protest the unsafe labor conditions of children working in mills. The story of Mother Jones and the children who accompanied her on her march showcases not only youth activism but also women in the labor movement at the turn of the century.

This ad was created after the passage of the Keating-Own Child Labor Act of 1916. This act limited the working hours of children and placed an age requirement of the age of 16 for any working child. It also forbade the interstate sale of goods produced in factories that employed child labor.

After the US declared war in 1917, children were encouraged to support the war efforts. The Girl Scouts of America provided an opportunity for girls to become involved in volunteer work for the war effort. Organizations like the Girls Scouts and 4H typically trained girls for domestic work. Skills like sewing and first-aid were put to use in new ways for members of the Girl Scouts and 4H during WWI. Here, scouts planted a Victory Garden. Victory gardens, or liberty gardens, first appeared during WWI. The federal government encouraged citizens to plant vegetable gardens to mitigate any food shortages that resulted from the war.

Boyscouts, like Girl Scouts, volunteered in the war effort during both WWI and II. Here, scouts who were too young to go to combat sell war bonds.

Images of children laborers at the turn of the century reveal the experiences of children who spent most of their days working in the oftentimes harsh and unsafe conditions of urban factories. After the Civil War, as industry grew in urban areas, children often worked in factories, in markets, and on the streets as vendors.

Like the image above, this source shows a young child operating machinery that he is not even tall enough to reach. Images like these and the one above were captured by activists for child labor laws. The Child labor standards act would be passed in 1916

Following the lynching murder of her fifteen-year-old son, Emmett Till,, Mamie TIll Mobley insisted on an open casket at his funeral; according to Time magazine, “When Till’s mother Mamie came to identify her son, she told the funeral director, ‘Let the people see what I’ve seen.’” The graphic images of his beaten body captured the attention of people across the United States, and the photo’s publication in Jet magazine is widely considered a galvanizing moment for the Civil Rights Era.

The March on Washington, 1963By 1963 the Civil Rights Movement had grown substantially. They had support for both the black and white communities, as well as many celebrities. The purpose of this march was to gain national support for legislation in Congress. One of the most famous moments of the march was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech. Originally proposed in 1941 as the “March for Jobs and Freedom” by A. Philip Randolph, photographs of the March became – and remain – some of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement.

Any number of images from the Civil Rights era would benefit a unit on freedom of speech, but this particular image does a few things: (1) it marks the occasion immediately before Martin Luther King’s assassination; (2) it provides an image of a single text used over and over, in contrast to the image above with multiple demands; and (3) it juxtaposes protesters exercising their first amendment rights with National Guard troops wielding weapons.

Aware of the platform provided by international television coverage of the Olympics, medal-winning U.S. track athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith chose to raise a fist during their medal ceremony to protest racial inequality in the country they were representing, at the very moment the Star Spangled Banner was playing.

The 1970s Women’s Strike was organized by feminist author Betty Friedan, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which prevented women from being denied the vote “on the basis of sex.” As reported by Time, “Friedan’s original idea for Aug. 26 was a national work stoppage, in which women would cease cooking and cleaning in order to draw attention to the unequal distribution of domestic labor, an issue she discussed in her 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique. It isn’t clear how many women truly went on ‘strike’ that day, but the march served as a powerful symbolic gesture. Participants held signs with slogans like ‘Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot’ and ‘Don’t Cook Dinner – Starve a Rat Today.’”

Vietnam War ProtestsThe Vietnam protest movement represented a growing anti-war movement in the United States in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Protestors spanned the racial spectrum and employed varying methods to end the war in Vietnam, started by the United States.

In many cases, anti-war protests combined with efforts to turn attention to domestic issues. As described in the Mapping American Social Movements Project of the University of Washington, “Chicanos in Los Angeles formed alliances with other oppressed people who identified with the Third World Left and were committed to toppling U.S. imperialism and fighting racism…. The Chicano Moratorium antiwar protests of 1970 and 1971…reflected the vibrant collaboration between African Americans, Japanese Americans, American Indians, and white antiwar activists that had developed in Southern California.”

The Civil Rights Movement for Black equality inspired many other movements, including a national push for disability rights. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability and protected equal access for people with disabilities in areas including public services, employment, and education.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) states: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." First proposed as an Amendment to the Constitution in 1923, Congress finally passed the ERA in 1972. The senate vote was overwhelming: 84 to 8. The Amendment then went to state legislatures for approval, requiring 38 for ratification. 22 states ratified in that first year, and 8 more in 1973. But then a grassroots opposition movement made significant inroads. 35 states eventually approved it by 1977, but the passage of the Amendment then stalled and the deadline expired in 1982.

In these photos, women who fought both for and against the Amendment’s passage are pictured protesting. In the top photograph, American attorney and conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, founder of STOP-ERA, leads a protest against the Amendment. In the bottom photograph, women dressed in white – evoking suffragists of the past – protest in favor of the Amendment in Washington, DC on August 26, 1977 – the same date of the Women’s Strike seven years earlier (also included in this Spotlight Kit).

Dolores Huerta Lettuce Boycott Poster:Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez fought together for the rights and protections of the workers who picked fruits and vegetables in the fields and orchards, organizing a workers’ union and boycotts to gain attention and create economic pressure for the cause. Huerta led a successful lettuce and grape boycott, first in California and later on a national scale, that paved the way for migrant labor protection laws.

In the earliest years of the emergency of AIDS as a public health crisis, the American Government’s response was limited in terms of both resources dedicated to fighting the disease and public discussion of the disease, its victims, and public health strategies for prevention. Activists coined the phrase “silence=death” in 1987 to help raise awareness and spur the government to devote greater resources and attention.

After the financial crisis of 2008, a CNBC commentator, Rick Santelli, argued against President Obama’s mortgage relief policies and evoked the Revolutionary War-era Tea Party in calling for a protest against them. The “Tea Party Movement” took hold among some conservative and libertarian circles, leading to rallies and political campaigns arguing against federal taxation and in favor of fiscal conservatism and a free market economy. Several rallies were held specifically on April 15th – Tax Day – 2009.

The planned construction of The Dakota Access Pipeline and resulting protests is a recent example of Native Americans and U.S. industry clashing. One side feared for the quality of their water and lands being abused. Proponents of the pipeline included union members and business, who viewed the pipeline’s development as essential to the growth of the economy.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the intersection of disability rights and racial equity can be complicated for deaf members of the Black Lives Matter Movement: “The phrase begins with four fingers cut across the brow, followed by two thumbs drawn up like breath from navel to chest, ending with a fierce tug with two hands down from the chin into fists toward the heart.

Black. Life. Cherish. This is how Harold Foxx and many other black deaf Angelenos sign ‘Black Lives Matter,’ though it is by no means a universal translation. .. It is a reminder of an ongoing struggle for equity, representation and authenticity in ASL, a language deeply scarred by racism and exclusion.”

On June 5, 2020, CNN reported: “Washington, DC is painting a message in giant, yellow letters down a busy DC street ahead of a planned protest this weekend: BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The massive banner-like project spans two blocks of 16th Street, a central axis that leads southward straight to the White House. Each of the 16 bold yellow letters spans the width of the two-lane street, creating an unmistakable visual easily spotted by aerial cameras and virtually anyone within a few blocks. The painters were contacted by Mayor Muriel Bowser and began work early Friday morning, the mayor’s office told CNN. Bowser has officially deemed the section of 16th Street bearing the mural ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza,’ complete with a new street sign.”

During the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, all levels of government – federal, state, and local – were required to respond to information emerging daily about what policies and practices would be safest for the public. In many places, including public spaces and schools, people were required to wear masks. Some people pushed back against these requirements, arguing that mandates were a violation of their individual rights.

While “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) is taught primarily in law schools, protests began in 2021 against the teaching of CRT at local school board meetings in many places across the country. Often, participants in these protests raised a range of concerns about how topics including, but not limited to, race are covered in school curricula. These protests became part of a larger “parents’ rights” movement, arguing that parents should have a greater say in determining what their children learn in school.

As reported by NBC News, “Last winter, as violent attacks against Asian elders began to spike, vividly painted portraits of Asian, Pacific Islander and Black people — flanked by vibrant florals and messages like ‘I am not your scapegoat’ — appeared on the walls of New York City's busiest subway and bus stops. Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s I Still Believe In Our City public art series, created in partnership with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, reminded millions of commuters of the humanity, diversity and beauty of Asian Americans at a time when many saw them as mere carriers of a deadly virus.”

As reported by the New York Times in March of 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed House Bill 1557, “which supporters call the ‘Parental Rights in Education’ bill, but that opponents refer to as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.” Among the provisions of the bill, “Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades; schools would be required to notify parents when children receive mental, emotional or physical health services, unless educators believe there is a risk of ‘abuse, abandonment, or neglect’; and parents would have the right to opt their children out of counseling and health services.”