Behold the Dreamers (Common Text 2018-2019)

Chasing the Dream: Poverty and Opportunity in America explores the human stories of poverty and showcases promising solutions. A few decades ago, if you had a job, you probably did not live in poverty. But today, full-time, well-paying manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that were once a ticket to upward mobility have disappeared, and income disparity is growing. Increasingly, people working full-time in low wage jobs are living in poverty, and today, more and more of those making minimum wage are adults trying to support families.

The New-York Historical Society is proud to partner with CUNY Citizenship Now! to launch The Citizenship Project, a major initiative to help the more than one million legal immigrants in the New York region become American citizens through free civics and American history classes and other educational and digital learning tools.

In this digital exhibition, we highlight a selection of works in our collection by artists who immigrated to the US, often as refugees in search of safe haven, bringing their ideas and talents with them.

Immigration: Exhibitions and Presentations available from the Library of Congress.

This NPR special series explorers the state of the american dream today.

Photographs by the pioneering social photographer Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940) came to The New York Public Library primarily in two ways. Romana Javitz, head of the Library's Picture Collection, began to solicit gifts and buy prints from Hine himself shortly after he exhibited his photographs of the Empire State Building in 1931. Then, in 1949, the Russell Sage Foundation transferred to the Library a series of prints it had commissioned from Hine for its library.

The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government is a public policy think tank founded in 1981 that conducts cutting-edge research and analysis to inform lasting solutions to the problems facing New York State and the nation. The Institute’s mission is to improve the capacities of communities, state and local governments, and the federal system to work toward genuine, evidence-based solutions. Through rigorous, objective, and accessible analysis and outreach, we give citizens and governments reliable facts and tools to understand public problems and inform public decisions.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan asked Lee Iacocca, then Chairman of Chrysler Corporation, to head a private sector effort to raise funds for the restoration and preservation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation (SOLEIF) was founded. The Foundation's fundraising drive sparked a dramatic response. The American people contributed more than $700 million (and counting!) to the repair, restoration, and maintenance of these two great monuments to freedom. All funds for the Foundation's projects have come from the American people — no government funds have been used.

Lesson Overview: This lesson invites students to search and sift through rare print documents, early motion pictures, photographs, and recorded sounds from The Library of Congress. Students experience the depth and breadth of the digital resources of the Library, tell the story of a decade, and help define the American Dream.