Modern History Sourcebook: Modern Social Movements

This site, maintained by Fordham University, holds primary documents from the following movements: feminism, black power, and lesbian and gay rights.

Modern History Sourcebook: Classical and Social Liberalism

This site includes several key texts illuminating the development of liberalism from the eighteenth century into the feminist and prohibition movement.

Haymarket Affair Digital Collection

The Chicago Historical Society provides on-line access to its primary source materials relating to the Haymarket Affair (1886), a controversial moment in Chicago's past and a pivotal event in the early history of the American labor movement. These primary sources are pieces of evidence which enable the user to reconstruct and interpret the historical events to which they relate.

Women and Social Movements in the United States

This excellent website is maintained by Prof. Kathryn Kish Sklar of Binghamton University. It contains documents clustered around a series of events and issues in the history of American women’s political activism. The persistent themes are women’s rights, labor rights, and state regulation of the economy. The documents also highlight the issue of cross-class alliances, which have been central to successful liberal initiatives in the 20th-century U.S.

Tamiment Library Labor History Archives

The Tamiment Library house collections focused on the U.S. labor movement. They maintain a number of online exhibits, featuring both documents and photographs, dealing with various labor-based and liberal political initiatives in modern America.

McCarthyism and the Vital Center

This page provides links to sources dealing with "The Literature and Culture of the 1950s." Compiled by Prof. Alan Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania, this site offers a wealth of readings concerning the conflict between centrist liberals and the Communist left in the era of McCarthyism.

WTO History Project

This trove of documents, maintained at the University of Washington in Seattle, chronicles the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. These documents offer a clear window on the views and activities of the protesters. At the end of the 20th century, things seem to have come full circle: as in the Gilded Age, activists posed a challenge to free trade economics. Some are utopians and anarchists, while others are social liberals who favor international regulation. On the other side of the fence are born-again classical liberals, whose “neoliberalism” dominates both major U.S. political parties.