The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in the United States in the state of Arizona. It is contained within and managed by Grand Canyon National Park, the Hualapai Tribal Nation, and the Havasupai Tribe. President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of preservation of the Grand Canyon area, and visited it on numerous occasions to hunt and enjoy the scenery. It is considered one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,000 feet / 1,800 metres) Nearly two billion years of the Earth's geological history have been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted. While the specific geologic processes and timing that formed the Grand Canyon are the subject of debate by geologists, recent evidence suggests the Colorado River established its course through the canyon at least 17 million years ago. Since that time, the Colorado River continued to erode and form the canyon to its present-day configuration.

For thousands of years, the area has been continuously inhabited by Native Americans who built settlements within the canyon and its many caves. The Pueblo people considered the Grand Canyon ("Ongtupqa" in Hopi language) a holy site and made pilgrimages to it. The first European known to have viewed the Grand Canyon was García López de Cárdenas from Spain, who arrived in 1540.

The art of Tuvan throat singing is a style in which one or more pitches sound simultaneously over a fundamental pitch, producing a unique sound. The history of Tuvan throat singing reaches very far back. Many of the male herders can throat sing, but women are beginning to practice the technique as well. The popularity of throat singing among Tuvans seems to have arisen as a result of geographic location and culture. The open landscape of Tuva allows for the sounds to carry a great distance. Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing in these areas mark khoomei as an integral part in the ancient pastoral animism that is still practiced today. Often, singers will travel far into the countryside looking for the right river, or will go up to the steppes of the mountainside to create the proper environment for throat-singing.

Inuit throat singing or katajjaq, also known as (and commonly confused with) the generic term overtone singing[citation needed], is a form of musical performance uniquely found among the Inuit. (There used to be a similar style, Rekuhkara, practiced by the Ainu in Hokkaidō, but that has since died out.) Unlike the throat singers in other regions of the world, particularly Tibet, Mongolia and Tuva, the Inuit performers are usually women who sing only duets in a kind of entertaining contest to see who can outlast the other. However, at least one notable performer, Tanya Tagaq, performs throat singing as a solo artist and as a collaborator with non-throat singing musicians such as Björk. The musical duo Tudjaat performed a mixture of traditional throat singing and pop music.

Before the 1860s, most of the people living on the Great Plains were Native Americans. In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, allowing men or women who were 21 years old or older to "stake a claim" to 160 acres of land. Homesteaders agreed to build a home within six months and then live there for the next five years.

People who dreamed of owning a farm of their own or a bigger farm came from all around the country and the world to try to build a better future for themselves and their families.
The land the settlers found was flat and treeless. Many people said that it looked like an ocean of grass. Without trees or rocks to build houses with, settlers used sod, a tough combination of dirt and the roots of grass.

Florence Owens Thompson (September 1, 1903 – September 16, 1983), born Florence Leona Christie, was the subject of Dorothea Lange's photo Migrant Mother (1936), an iconic image of the Great Depression. The Library of Congress entitled the Migrant Mother image, "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. For it he won the annual National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for novels and it was cited prominently when he won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of sharecroppers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial and agricultural industries. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they sought jobs, land, dignity, and a future.

The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made in 1940.

The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement. Although its causes are still uncertain and controversial, the net effect was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future. The usual explanations include numerous factors, especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, the lack of high-growth new industries, all interacting to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending, falling confidence, and lowered production.

Industries that suffered the most included construction, agriculture as dust-bowl conditions persisted in the agricultural heartland, shipping, mining, and logging as well as durable goods like automobiles and appliances that could be postponed. The economy reached bottom in the winter of 1932–33; then came four years of very rapid growth until 1937, when the Recession of 1937 brought back 1934 levels of unemployment. The depression caused major political changes in America. Three years into the depression, Herbert Hoover lost the 1932 presidential election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a sweeping landslide. Roosevelt's economic recovery plan, the New Deal, instituted unprecedented programs for relief, recovery and reform, and brought about a major realignment of American politics.

Recorded in 1940, and later reissued by Folkways Recordings in 1950, Guthrie’s first album chronicles the American Dust Bowl through his prosaic style of talking blues. Using only guitar and vocals, the album follows the exodus of Midwesterners headed for California and mirrors both Guthrie’s own life and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. Along the way, characters are forced into theft, murder, and unbearable hardship against a biblical backdrop of the American West. Hugely influential, Dust Bowl Ballads has been revered by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen.

In Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, Steinbeck wrote of Guthrie: "Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit."

On the fourteenth day of April of nineteen thirty five,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky:
You could see that dust storm coming, the cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track...
This storm took place at sundown and lasted through the night,
When we looked out this morning we saw a terrible sight:
We saw outside our windows where wheat fields they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.
It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and windy storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,
We rattled down the highway to never come back again.
(Woody Guthrie, from “Dust Storm Disaster”)

In commemoration of the bicentennials of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the President enacted Public Law 108-15 to modify the Jefferson 5-cent coin (nickel) to reflect images evocative of the historic expedition into the Louisiana Territory. The United States Mint began the Westward Journey Nickel Series™ in 2004 with the release of the Peace Medal and Keelboat nickels. In 2005, a contemporary image of President Jefferson will appear on the nickel, along with two new reverse designs that recognize the American Indians and wildlife encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition and the progress and culmination of the journey. Depictions of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson will return to the nickel in 2006.

As 19th-century America expanded, so too did the "ribbons of iron" that crisscrossed the vast landscape and sparked the imagination of music-makers. Work songs, ballads recounting riveting exploits, and instrumental echoes of the once familiar sounds of the steam locomotive have enshrined the railroad in our musical memory.

Railroads have moved people and cargo around America for more than 180 years.

Jingle the Brass is a book about a young boy who learns words used by railroad workers of the steam-engine era while on an exciting train trip.

This collection of resources is based upon the children's book, "Jingle the Brass," a selection of the Smithsonian's "Our Story" series (National Museum of American History) about the John Bull steam locomotive.

This is a Primary Source Set dedicated to the topic of the Japanese Internment during World War II under President Roosevelt.

Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States government in 1942 of approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called "War Relocation Camps," in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps.

During World War II, the United States was at war with Japan. By an executive order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, all Americans of Japanese descent living in military exclusion zones on the West Coast were forced to leave their homes and move to internment camps.

This collection of resources is based upon the children's book, Baseball Saved Us," a selection of the Smithsonian's "Our Story" series (National Museum of American History) set during the Japanese Internment.

The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico have been living in the upper region of the Rio Grande River for more than 600 years.

During that time, their way of life has been challenged many times, but they have managed to maintain their most basic beliefs and traditions.

The people of the Santa Clara Pueblo have the same word for clay and for people, nung, because they believe that the first people emerged from Mother Earth.

Clay is a very important part of their lives. They say prayers when removing it from its home — the earth — and while preparing it for making pottery. Creating pottery fulfills them spiritually and creatively. Selling it provides income with which they support their families.

The area where the Pueblo Indians live is hot and dry. Their ancestors made pots in which to collect and store water. Investigate the roles that pottery and water play in their lives by discovering the symbolism of two modern pots in "Explore Pueblo Pots," and by reading When Clay Sings.

The American Old West, or the Wild West, comprises the history, geography, people, folklore, and cultural expression of life in the Western United States, most often referring to the latter half of the 19th century, between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the end of the century. After the 18th century and the push beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the term is generally applied to anywhere west of the Mississippi River in earlier periods and westward from the frontier strip toward the later part of the 19th century. Thus, the Midwest and American South, though not considered part of the Western United States today, have Western heritage along with the modern western states. More broadly, the period stretches from the early 19th century to the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920.

Through treaties with foreign nations and native peoples, political compromise, technological innovation, military conquest, establishment of law and order, and the great migrations of foreigners, the United States expanded from coast to coast (Atlantic Ocean to Pacific Ocean), fulfilling advocates' belief in Manifest Destiny. In securing and managing the West, the U.S. federal government greatly expanded its powers, as the nation evolved from an agrarian society to an industrialized nation. First promoting settlement and exploitation of the land, by the end of the 19th century the federal government assumed stewardship of the remaining open spaces. As the American Old West passed into history, the myths of the West took firm hold in the imagination of Americans and foreigners alike.

Recorded in 1940 and 1941 by the Library of Congress, these recordings feature interviews and folksongs performed by migrants in FSA camps during the Great Depression.