In the 1940s and ‘50s, farm laborers in California, many of them Mexican and Filipino, faced low wages and brutal working conditions. Their demands for change were often met with harsh tactics from the powerful growers. Soon, a plainspoken but magnetic labor organizer named Cesar Chavez stepped forward to rally workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Cha ... Show More
May 2023
United Farm Workers | The Grape Strike | 2
<p>In 1964, the United States finally ended the controversial Bracero Program, which had flooded American farms with millions of low-paid guest workers from Mexico who competed for jobs with resident laborers. Soon after, the two largest farm worker unions in California united an ... Show More
41m 49s
Jan 2021
Agriculture and Complex Societies in the Americas, 4000-1500 BC
<p>Agriculture was invented in no fewer than three, and probably four, places in the Americas. It went along with sedentary living and complex societies, but in complicated ways: fishing villages along the Andean coast grew into the cities of Norte Chico, but hunter-gatherers pro ... Show More
47m 22s
Jan 2021
The Americas from Foraging to Agriculture, 10,000 BC-4000 BC
<p>The initial migrations to the Americas get most of the attention, but people didn't stop living there in the aftermath of those first movements of peoples; they spread out over the Great Plains and the forests of the eastern United States, south into the deserts and jungles of ... Show More
47m 18s
Nov 2020
Classic Tides | Peasants' Rebellions and Resistance
<p>Peasants and common folk were oppressed by their social superiors, but they didn't accept that as a natural state of affairs: They resisted in small, everyday ways, and they rebelled, sometimes spectacularly.</p><p><em>This episode originally aired on September 20, 2018.</em>< ... Show More
51m 53s