Category: Learn History Through Fiction

In Bunting v. Oregon (1917), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 10-hour work day for men and women and required businesses to pay time-and-a-half for overtime up to three hours a day. It granted states the right to let workers and their employers implement a wage scheme agreeable to both. However, minimum wage laws were not changed until 20 years later. Read more about labor conditions and labor laws over the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS https://www.asewovenwords.com/novels/).

In November 1909, 23-year-old labor activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson led a strike of 20,000 women to protest the working conditions in New York City’s garment industry. Male union leaders had cautioned against the strike, but in February 2010 the “Uprising of the 20,000” got factory owners to agree to a 52-hour work week and recognition of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which subsequently achieved better safety regulations and higher wages. One holdout was the Triangle Waist Company, where just a year later, in 1911, a fire killed 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. Read more about the Triangle Waist Company fire and immigration in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS). Learn more about this labor pioneer in BEHIND THE STORY.

The city of was Topeka incorporated in 1857, benefitting at first from the Oregon Trail, which crossed the Kansas River there, and later from the railroads when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad system was established in 1878. After a decade of conflict between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, the Kansas territory was admitted to the Union in 1861 as the 34th state with Topeka as its capital. Read more Topeka and Kansas history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

The first successful school desegregation court order happened 23 years before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. On January 5, 1931 in San Diego, California, Lemon Grove Grammar School principal Jerome Green, acting under instructions from school trustees, turned away Mexican children. In the resulting lawsuit (Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District), the Superior Court of San Diego County ruled that building a separate school for the children of 50 Mexican families (said to be “backward and deficient” and in need of special Americanization education) violated CA laws because ethnic Mexicans were considered white under the state’s Education Code (which did allow segregating Oriental, Negro, and Indian children). Read more about this 1931 San Diego case as well as the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Topeka ruling in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In the last century, San Diego’s Italian immigrant population was small compared to other cities, but the “Italian Colony” (often called “Little Italy” elsewhere) was tight-knit and insular. Many became fisherman, especially hauling in tuna, although their livelihood was threatened when the U.S. imported tuna from other locations, such as Japan, and canned it for domestic consumption. Read more about poor labor conditions in the tuna industry in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

Marshall Field & Company, a Chicago landmark built 1891-1892, boasted lavish restaurants. The Narcissus Tea Room for women was named for a bronze statue atop a huge center fountain. Chicken croquettes cost 45¢. The Men’s Grill, where no women were allowed, featured heavy walnut furniture and table-cloth free tables. Read more Chicago history in Tazia and Gemma (see (NOVELS).

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared separate public schools for black and white students to be unequal and hence unconstitutional. The unanimous decision paved the way for subsequent civil rights legislation. Read more about race relations in Topeka and elsewhere 50-100 years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In 1910, there were only two Chinese Americans listed in the Las Vegas census. One immigrated in 1878, the other in 1880. Both owned laundries and lived on the same street. A somewhat larger Chinese community lived in outlying Clark County, mainly single males or men with wives left behind in China due to racist immigration restrictions in the U.S. Read more about the life of a lonely Chinese American during this period in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Topeka’s “Smoky Row,” set among the commercial buildings of lower Kansas Avenue, was the site of pool halls, liquor joints, and brothels. This disreputable area was a colorful part of Topeka’s turn-of-the-century prohibition history. Read more Topeka and Kansas history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, detailing the horrors of the Chicago meat-packing industry, was first published in serial form in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. Sinclair spent seven weeks as an undercover worker at a plant to research the story. What he revealed was so repulsive that U.S. meat consumption fell by half. Read more Chicago and labor history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).