Chicago National Archives

The National Archives and Records Administration system of regional storage and primary source holdings offers the historically interested public nearly inexhaustible tangents of topics. Our Teach American History grant group spent Monday the 23^rd learning about possible avenues of research and primary source materials for instructional use in the classroom. Among the topics up for discussion and further learning was immigration and WWI. One of the many things that makes historical acquirement so exciting is the variety of angles that you can trace when traveling to the same historical spot. For example, our archivist tour guides presented the group with a passport written in Chinese. This may sound rather innocuous after all a passport is just a passport? However, as he began to dig deeper into the subject matter the story began to develop. This was not a mere passport for travel, but was a passport for historical discovery of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This then leads us to the further questions concerning limited immigration, racism, and worker protectionism. All of which mirrors the issues of today and Mexican immigration. These types of connections continued for the next hour involving many threads of history including, the splitting of the atom, Abraham Lincoln, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

So what is that we as teacher/scholars to do with such information? After a fantastic lunch of Chicago deep-dish pizza, 2 slices, we donned the role of student and were paired up to work on specific topics pertaining to WWI and immigration. For our part we received the Constitutionally Famous case of US v. Eugene Debs. Debs was, without digging too deep into the history, a Socialist leader and Presidential Candidate. The specifics surrounding this case involved a speech he gave in Canton, Ohio, June 16, 1918, denouncing United States involvement in WWI, again getting to history through the backdoor. Debs was arrested shortly thereafter on charges of violating the Espionage Act. The case included 10 counts of violation of these four were thrown out by the Grand Jury and six were sent to trial. The specifics of the case are not important here. For me as a teacher the violations are more important. As a teacher I would like my students to take preselected excerpts of the Canton speech and have them identify the violations, if they can, and then decide through a mock trial if the indictments should stick or should Debs, a possible subversive, be set free. Upon reaching a decision I will reveal the verdict of 1918 and discussion will surely ensue. To take this lesson a step further one could make strong connections to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the John Adams Administration further making my point that the avenues to learning history are many and varied.

Citation: US v. Eugene Debs (Verdict); Date: April 1918; File: Criminal Case 4057, US v. Debs (folders 1 & 2 of 10); Series: Criminal Case Files 1912-1969; Subgroup: US District Court Northern District of Ohio Eastern Division at Cleveland Criminal Records 1855-1969; RG21, National Archives and Records Administration—Great Lakes Region (Chicago)