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The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of tea, imported by the British East India Company into the harbor. The event was the first major act of defiance to British rule over the colonists. It showed Great Britain that Americans would not tolerate taxation. -
Though preceded by years of unrest and periodic violence, the Revolutionary War began in earnest on April 19, 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord. The conflict lasted a total of seven years, with the major American victory at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 marking the end of hostilities, although some fighting took place through the fall of 1783. The Treaty of Paris was signed two years later, on September 3rd, 1783, by representatives of King George III -
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In the 1830s, half a century before the better-known mass movements for workers' rights in the United States, the Lowell mill women organized, went on strike, and mobilized in politics when women couldn't even vote—and created the first union of working women in American history. -
With slavery less than two decades behind them, thousands of black laundresses went on strike for higher wages, respect for their work, and control over how their work was organized. In the summer of 1881, the laundresses took on Atlanta’s business and political establishment and gained so much support that they threatened to call a general strike, which would have shut the city down. -
Events took a turn for the worse in 1886 when the Haymarket riot saw the message of the Knights overshadowed by the death of a police officer in a bomb blast. Public opinion turned against the anarchist movement in general and the union collapsed. It was only after the advent of the American Federation of Labor, set up by Samuel Gompers in 1886 and acting as a national federation of unions for skilled workers, that the labor movement became a real force. -
American Experience -
The Pullman Strike was two interrelated strikes in 1894 that shaped national labor policy in the United States during a period of deep economic depression. First came a strike by the American Railway Union against the Pullman factory in Chicago in spring 1894. -
The strike took place at the huge Pressed Steel Car Co. plant in McKees Rocks, a few miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, where between 5,000 and 8,000 mostly immigrant workers from some 16 nationalities created railway cars. "The greatest labor fight in all my history in the labor movement." Yet today, few remember this struggle when immigrant workers rose up and changed the course of American unionism. -
Martin Luther King jr. King is saying that like Moses, he has "been to the mountaintop" and seen the Promised Land – a society where black people have peace and equal rights. He knows that he may not get to this Promised Land with them because he might die first -
Maybe Time was stunned. But 200,000 postal workers had a different view. For them, the Great Postal Strike of 1970 was the moment they were "standing 10 feet tall instead of groveling in the dust," as a Manhattan letter carrier put it. They got fed up, joined together, and transformed both the Postal Service and their own lives forever. was an eight-day strike by federal postal workers in March 1970 -
The rhetoric used by Cesar Chavez in “He Showed Us the Way” worked because he was asking for people to step forward and take action, using the best tool possible. The main theme of the artifact is nonviolence over violence. -
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On Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Firefighters arrived at the scene, but their ladders weren’t tall enough to reach the upper floors of the 10-story building. Trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors, workers jumped to their deaths. In half an hour, the fire was over, and 146 of the 500 workers—mostly young women—were dead.