The threat of lynching was a powerful mechanism for keeping black Southerners in line. Although this interview (conducted by historian Charles Hardy for a radio program) took place in 1985, "William Brown" (a pseudonym) could still vividly recall the smell of burning flesh that lingered after a 1902 lynching that he witnessed in Jacksonville, Florida, when he was five years old.

In 1897, Scribner's published a series of articles on "The Conduct of Great Business." This article by Philip Hubert on a New England textile mill conveyed some of the sense of wonder that Americans felt at the enormous new factories suddenly emerging in what had been primarily an agricultural nation. Although other contemporaries--both agrarian radicals and trade unionists--viewed the new industrial behemoths with skepticism or even horror, middle-class observers like Hubert celebrated the achievements of the capitalists who organized and managed these vast and complex enterprises. Hubert had little interest in or sympathy for the thousands of workers who toiled in the textile mill that he visited, echoing the view that the "character of the machinery" was more important than "the character of the hands." But his account, including a vivid description of the mill at quitting time, captured the sheer size and dehumanizing impact on workers of the new industrial enterprises.

With his famously laconic style, President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even while it concealed some of the wrenching cultural changes that were required to accommodate a commercial civilization. An even more forceful publicist for the view that business and spirituality were compatible was Bruce Barton. The son of a Congregational minister, Barton co-founded one of the nation's largest and best-known advertising agencies. Barton's greatest fame, however, came from his 1925 best-selling book, The Man Nobody Knows, in which he crafted a new vision of Christ and Christianity that was not simply compatible with but organically connected to the business-oriented 1920s. Barton's aggressive efforts to merge business and Christianity may seem comical in the late 20th century, but his exertions were sincerely felt by him and sincerely received by many Americans. Edward E. Purinton's 1921 article, "Big Ideas for Big Business," from the magazine Independent similarly promoted business as "the salvation of the world."

In order to challenge the emphasis on extreme economic individualism espoused by Gilded Age industrialists and laissez-faire theorists, labor writers drew on diverse historical and religious traditions. Jose Gros, writing in The Carpenter in 1895, turned to religious traditions, specifically the biblical parable of Cain and Abel. Gros used the parable's central question--"Am I my brother's keeper?"--to criticize economic individualism and make the case for cooperation and brotherhood.

An officer of the Communications Workers of America Local 7704 in Salt Lake City and an out gay man, Cal Noyce began to raise issues of gay, lesbian, and bisexual equity within the union during the early 1990's. By forming an organization of gay trade unionists in Utah, as well as the national gay, lesbian, and bisexual group Pride at Work, Noyce joined a larger push to link the gay rights movement to the labor movement. Noyce and his associates won the support of Utah AFL-CIO president Ed Mayne, who, like many, recognized the organization as important way for organized labor to reach out to gay and lesbian communities and bring gay men and lesbians into the labor movement as motivated activists.

As the 19th century drew to a close, labor activists were forced to confront the implications of a long string of defeats suffered by their movement in recent years. One of the most venerable of labor editors, George McNeill, writing in the official journal of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in December 1896, encouraged trade unionists to renew their commitment to a struggle that had not always been successful. At the same time, he accurately predicted an even more momentous battle in the next century between the trade unions and "the giant monopolies."

When 30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912, they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March 1912. Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in 1912--in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.

Although experimental telecasts began in the 1920s and commercial broadcasting made a tentative start in 1939, the television industry first blossomed after World War II. In 1949, one million sets were in use, mostly in urban areas. By the end of the 1950s, Americans had purchased more than 50 million sets. As with earlier forms of mass culture--especially radio and movies--the advent of television on a national scale brought forth a debate in popular forums on its quality, societal effects, and potential. While writer Paddy Cheyevsky in 1953 characterized television as "the marvelous medium of the ordinary," Federal Communications Commission Director Newton Minow, eight years later, charged that broadcasters had created "a vast wasteland" inhabited predominately with "game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons." The following article shows how a popular magazine assessed television's past, present, and possible future in 1960.

In the 1910s hundreds of thousands of African Americans headed North in the Great Migration. Arthur Dingle was one of them. Dingle was born in the small town of Manning, North Carolina, in 1891. After holding hotel jobs in several cities, he took a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad in Philadelphia. Promised his job back if he enlisted in World War I, the company made good on its promise when Dingle remained in Philadelphia after the war. This interview with Arthur Dingle was conducted by Charles Hardy in 1983 for the Goin' North Project.

In the decades after the American Revolution, improvements in transportation facilitated the growth of internal commerce in the United States. State and local governments planned turnpikes, roads, and canals, and New York State built the grandest one of the era: the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal was constructed at public expense by thousands of laborers between 1817 and 1825. The canal stretched 364 miles from Albany to Buffalo and linked the new nation's heartlands in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley with New York City and the Atlantic coastal trade. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his travels along the waterway in this 1835 sketch, noting the traffic in goods and people along with the rise in commercial activity along its path. The canal and other improvements, however, also threatened farmers 'abilities to withstand the market's fluctuations and maintain local sufficiency.

In 1753, fifteen year old Mary Jemison was captured by Indians along the Pennsylvania frontier during the Seven Years War between the French, English, and Indian peoples of North America. She was adopted and incorporated into the Senecas, a familiar practice among Iroquois and other Indian peoples seeking to replace a lost sibling or spouse. Mary married and raised a family in the decades before and after the American Revolution; many captives, once adopted and integrated into an Indian community, refused the opportunity to return home, finding life in Indian society more rewarding. In 1823 Mary Jemison related her life story to James Seaver, a doctor who lived near her home in western New York. Seaver's story of "the white woman of the Genessee," as she became known, sold over 100,000 copies in 1824.

In his essay "Wealth," published in the North American Review in 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were duty bound to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. Carnegie's essay later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth," and in 1908, at age seventy-three, Andrew Carnegie recorded a portion of it under that title. (Click here to read the full text of the article.)

Great Britain recognized the lucrative possibilities of the Atlantic slave trade long before it permanently colonized North America. By the mid-sixteenth century, British ships followed Spanish and Portuguese vessels along the West African coast and familiarized themselves with the trade between the Portuguese and Africans. John Hawkins, an admiral with royal backing, inaugurated the British slave trade with three expeditions. On his 1562 voyage, he purchased slaves from the Portuguese in West Africa and sold them to the Spanish in Hispaniola at great profit, despite Spanish prohibitions. In 1567, he seized 500 Africans in Sierre Leone and set off across the ocean, but the Spanish fleet captured him in a Mexican port and destroyed many of his ships. Although he escaped, 100 of his men were left in the Bay of Mexico; only three eventually returned England. One of those was 17-year-old Job Hortop, who wrote this narrative after 23 years in Spanish captivity.

During World War I, the United States fought a war of ideas with unprecedented ingenuity and organization. President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to manage news and solicit widespread support for the war at home and abroad. Under the energetic direction of Mississippi newspaper editor George Creel, the CPI churned out national propaganda through diverse media including films, cartoons, and speeches. The CPI's home-front propaganda cartoons were no laughing matter. The Bureau of Cartoons, headed by George Hecht, exhorted cartoonists to use their popular medium to support the war effort. Like other CPI pamphlets that urged Americans to integrate the war effort into their home and work lives, this excerpt from the CPI's Bulletin for Cartoonists provided a mixture of suggestions, practical advice, and inspirational prose.

A wave of strikes in 1941 affected at least one West Coast industry previously untouched by the labor movement. By the 1930s, animation had become a significant sector of the Hollywood film industry, its production based on factorylike techniques of mass production. World War II deprived Walt Disney of his lucrative foreign market at just the moment when he needed it most; neither Pinocchio nor Fantasia had earned revenues to cover their high production costs and, with the expensive relocation of his studio to Burbank, Disney faced a $4.5 million debt. Relations with his employees worsened as Disney cut wages, laid off staff, and denied long-deferred bonuses. Answering writer Dorothy Parker's admonition "Don't let Mickey Mouse become a rat," other unions came to the support of the Disney strikers. The business agent of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers, Herb Sorrell, testified before a congressional subcommittee that the strikers were bolstered by sympathizers in the other animation studios, principally Warner Brothers' Schlesinger studio.

Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile mill workforce remained entirely white for a number of reasons: landlords wanted African Americans to work in cotton fields; white leaders promoted industrialization as the salvation of poor whites; and the dominant racial ideology forbade the mixing of white women and black men in the workplace. Although planters and manufacturers had the most to gain from a segregated work force, white workers--as this 1898 protest from the women of Atlanta's Fulton Mills indicated--accepted the idea that factory work was the privilege of "loyal white citizens." There were few opportunities for white women to earn cash wages in this period, and family farms yielded little cash. The only jobs open to black women--domestic service--paid even less.

In 1895, Booker T. Washington gave what later came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise speech before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His address was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history, guiding African-American resistance to white discrimination and establishing Washington as one of the leading black spokesmen in America. Washington's speech stressed accommodation rather than resistance to the racist order under which Southern African Americans lived. In 1903, Washington recorded this portion of his famous speech, the only surviving recording of his voice.

The National Police Gazette portrays, in a characteristically lurid fashion, an industrial accident in a North Grosvenor, Connecticut, cotton mill. Many late-nineteenth century businessmen ignored hazardous working conditions, since they had little financial incentive to make the workplace safer. In 1881 alone, 30,000 railway workers were killed or injured on the job, and industrial hazards existed in other industries, including textiles. A national weekly magazine, the National Police Gazette enthusiastically violated the mores of genteel culture, focusing on legal and illegal sports, violent crimes and accidents, and sex. Women were often depicted as perpetrators or victims of violence, providing titillation to the weekly magazine's male readership.

After the Civil War began, slaves were sometimes seized from their masters and forced into service for the Confederate army. This illustration from a May 1862 issue of Harper's Weekly depicted one way that the institution of slavery contributed to the Confederacy's war effort. According to the caption, the northern newspaper artist observed this struggle between two Negroes and a rebel captain" through a telescope. The captain "insisted upon their loading a cannon within range of [Union] Sharpshooters. . . . [He] succeeded in forcing the Negroes to expose themselves

Americans were not prepared for the ravages of modern warfare. Early in the war, artists often drew highly romantic and very inaccurate pictures. Soldiers in the field viewed such feats as firing from the saddle with great amusement; they enjoyed seeing illustrations of their exploits almost as much as they enjoyed criticizing their inaccuracies. As the war continued and the carnage mounted, increasingly realistic battlefield sketches conveyed the horrors of war to the northern public.