Free Printable Social Studies Reading Worksheets (Grades 3-4)

In 1955 the buses in Montgomery, Alabama were segregated. Black riders paid the same fare. But they had to sit at the back. If the front filled up, they had to give up their seats.

On December 1 a woman named Rosa Parks got on a bus. She was asked to stand up. A white passenger wanted her seat. She said no. She was arrested.

People sometimes say she refused because her feet were tired. Parks wrote later that this was not true. She was the secretary of her local civil rights group. She had worked on cases like this for years. She was tired, she said, of giving in.

Four days later, Black riders in Montgomery stopped using the buses. They walked. They shared cars. Many walked several miles each way to work.

The boycott lasted 381 days. Most bus riders in the city were Black. So the bus company lost most of its money. In November 1956 the Supreme Court ruled against the city. It said segregation on buses was against the Constitution.

1In 1848 a meeting was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The people there asked for something new. They asked that women be allowed to vote. Most Americans then thought the idea absurd.

2It took seventy-two more years. Women marched. They published newspapers. They spoke in every state. Some were jailed for picketing outside the White House. Some of the women who signed the 1848 document died without ever voting once.

3A change to the Constitution is not easy. Three quarters of the states must agree to it. By the summer of 1920, thirty-five states had approved the Nineteenth Amendment. Just one more was needed.

4It came down to Tennessee. The vote in its legislature was tied. A young lawmaker named Harry Burn had planned to vote no. That morning a letter came from his mother. She told him to vote yes. He did. The amendment passed by one vote.

5But the amendment did not give every woman the vote in practice. In much of the South, Black women were still kept from the polls. Poll taxes and unfair tests stopped them. So did threats. That did not change until 1965, forty-five years later. In that year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

In 1860 mail from Missouri to California moved slowly. A letter took about three weeks. It went by ship or by wagon. People wanted it faster.

So a company started the Pony Express. A rider carried the mail on a horse. He rode hard for about seventy-five miles. Then a fresh rider took the bag. He kept going.

The horses changed even more often. A fresh horse came about every fifteen miles. A tired horse is a slow horse. So no horse ran far.

The whole route was nearly two thousand miles. The mail crossed it in about ten days. That was twice as fast as anything before it.

The Pony Express lasted only eighteen months. In October 1861 a telegraph line reached California. Now a message could cross the country in minutes. Two days later the Pony Express shut down.

1In 1863 two companies began building a railroad across the country. One started in the east and built west. The other started in California and built east. They would meet somewhere in the middle.

2The crew building east met the Sierra Nevada mountains almost at once. Tunnels had to be cut through solid granite. One winter the crews worked through deep snow. The drifts were deep enough to bury the camps.

3That company hired thousands of workers from China. Soon they were most of its workforce. They were paid less than white workers. At first they were given no food and no housing. In 1867 thousands of them went on strike. They wanted better pay and shorter hours.

4The two tracks met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869. A ceremony was held. A famous photograph was taken. Almost none of the Chinese workers appear in it.

5The trip from New York to San Francisco had taken months. Now it took about a week.