The introduction of new technologies has always altered the relationship between managers and workers, often by eliminating the need for skilled laborers. Helen Zalph and her colleagues in the printing division of the New York Daily News discovered this fact for themselves when computers revolutionized the way they put together the paper during the 1970s. What management gained in efficiency, workers lost in terms of their control over the production process, a sense of community and teamwork, and the sense of pride that comes with skilled craft work. They also lost many of their co-workers, who were no longer needed, and the power of their union. Now working largely in isolated cubby-offices, Zalph and many of her colleagues miss the older methods.

Lord Baltimore established the colony of Maryland in the upper part of Chesapeake Bay in the early 1630s as a refuge for his fellow Catholics. Baltimore's plans for a feudal system with labor performed by tenant farmers, along with many of the colonists' other high expectations, proved impossible to establish. The tobacco boom and offers of free land to Protestant and Catholic alike drew thousands of English immigrants to Virginia and Maryland. Over three quarters of the migrants to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake arrived as indentured servants, financing their passage by signing indentures, or contracts, for four to seven years labor. Most had agricultural backgrounds and were also fleeing poverty and unemployment in England. George Alsop was one such indentured servant, probably with experience as an artisan or mechanic. He offered an account that boasted of the favorable situation for servants, especially women, to counter other writers who compared conditions in the Chesapeake to slavery.

Early nineteenth-century cities experienced enormous growth. New York's population tripled after 1810, numbering over 312,000 by 1840. As the population exploded, the gap between rich and poor also deepened. Writing in a British periodical in 1845, "A Working Man" described changes in the urban workplace and also in residential and leisure patterns. Recounting his family's emigration to America in 1825-35, he emphasized emigrants' enormously high expectations and frequently ensuing disappointments. While work was plentiful, the pace was brutal and hours long. With its congested thoroughfares and colorful vistas, the city made a vivid impression upon residents and visitors alike. While residents could boast of an abundance of fruit and other items in the markets, the city's unstructured growth also resulted in rampant disease and filthy streets. "A Working Man" was struck by the city's youthful population, but also by the low esteem reserved for old age.

When the CIO initiated Operation Dixie in 1946 to challenge racial discrimination and organize workers in the largely unorganized South, Jack O'Dell signed up as a volunteer organizer. He was met with a steep resistance to racial integration and a groundswell of Cold War anti-communism that crippled and then killed the CIO's will to radically alter the working conditions of the South. Nationwide, the CIO expelled unions it claimed were influenced by communists – amounting to nearly a million workers. Jack O'Dell was one victim of the anti-communist purge. He lost his membership in the National Maritime Union in 1950, one day after the start of the Korean War.

Slavery and a society based on slave labor were well established in the Chesapeake region by the third decade of the 18th century. Hugh Jones described the beginnings of African-American culture as slavery spread in the Chesapeake. Virginia's slave population grew from 3,000 in 1680 to 13,000 in 1700. It further expanded to 27,000 by 1720. Despite Jones's rosy picture, he effectively depicted the enslaved population's contact with whites, the growth of a smaller group that spoke English, and the emergence of strong kinship bonds facilitated by a naturally increasing population, a first in the New World. Hugh Jones arrived from England and served as a minister in Jamestown and professor of mathematics at William and Mary. He authored The Present State of Virginia (1724) where he described the distinctive form of society emerging in Virginia of large and small landowners, poor white laborers, and enslaved Africans.

Playwright and screenwriter John Howard Lawson, the president and organizing force of the Screen Writers' Guild and acknowledged leader of the Communist Party in Hollywood in the late 1930s, became the first "unfriendly" witness subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on October 27, 1947. This followed a week-long session during which numerous studio heads, stars, and others spoke at length about purported Communist activity in the industry. During that first week, film critic and former screenwriter John Charles Moffitt detailed Lawson's supposed instructions to writers on how to get propaganda into films. When his turn came, Lawson attempted unsuccessfully to read a statement into the record warning that the investigation threatened basic American rights and liberties. That statement appears below following the testimonies of Moffitt and Lawson. With nine other "unfriendly" witnesses, Lawson gambled that the Committee would issue contempt citations for their refusal to answer questions about their political associations and beliefs, and that after a court case and appeal, the Supreme Court would rule that such questioning violated their First Amendment rights. Further HUAC interrogations would thus be stopped. In 1949, however, before the appeal reach the high court, two liberal justices died, and the next year, the newly constituted Court refused to hear their appeal. The Ten were sent to prison as a result, and in 1951, HUAC continued its Hollywood probe.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Ellen N. La Motte was one of the first American nurses to serve in a French field hospital during World War I. The Backwash of War, a series of fourteen vignettes of a French field hospital, recounting her 1915 service in Belgium, was first published in fall 1916, before American entry into the world war. Once the United States had entered the war, La Motte's unsparing view of the devastation of war was suppressed by the pervasive national propaganda effort of the home front, and the publishers withdrew the book. Republished in 1934, the book found a new audience among Americans determined to avoid involvement in foreign wars. Included here is her introduction to the 1934 republication, which gave the book's publishing history, and one of the sketches.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the U.S. military. American intelligence, with the benefit of intercepted Japanese messages, had known for some time that Japan was planning an assault, but military leaders had no idea precisely when and where. Hawaii, they assumed, was so far away from Japan that the Japanese navy could never mount an effective attack. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. A radio broadcast from station KTU in Honolulu the day of the attack captured the events as they unfolded over several hours. From the roof of a Honolulu office building, the radio reporter described significant damage. Apparently, he was calling New York City on the phone, while the New York station broadcast his call to the nation at large.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people during World War II, the U.S. government viewed its popular performers--singers, dancers, and actors--as a crucial weapon. Even before Pearl Harbor, Treasury Department officials began making plans to raise money to finance the war by selling bonds to the public, which would be repaid with interest after the war was over. During the war, private citizens and organizations bought $190 billion worth of war bonds at the low interest rate of 1.8 percent. Hollywood stars became central to war bond drives. The glamorous actress Dorothy Lamour alone was credited with selling $350 million in war bonds. A September 1942 "bond blitz" enlisted more than three hundred actors who worked eighteen-hour days and sold more than $800 million in bonds. As the war dragged on, the Hollywood bond salespeople continued to motivate purchases even when allied victory seemed secure. This 1945 recording by Bing Crosby exhorted people to participate in the seventh war loan.

When the United States invaded Cambodia in 1970, college campuses around the country erupted in the most violent, disruptive set of antiwar demonstrations of the entire Vietnam period. The FBI listed 1,785 student demonstrations and 313 building occupations during the 1969-1970 school year. At Kent State University in Ohio, four undergraduates were killed on May 4, 1970 when the National Guard opened fire at an antiwar rally. Carol Mirman was a senior at Kent State in 1970, preparing to graduate with a degree in Fine Arts. Like other students, she was outraged that National Guard troops were stationed on campus. She took part in the rally on May 4, and witnessed, to her horror, the shooting deaths of her fellow students.

In 1981, the U.S. medical community noticed a significant number of gay men living in urban areas with rare forms of pneumonia, cancer, and lymph disorders. The cluster of ailments was initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Disease (GRID), but when similar illnesses increased in other groups, the name changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The mid-1980s saw a number of advances toward understanding and treating the disease, but no vaccine or cure was forthcoming. Gay advocacy and community-based organizations began providing services and pressuring government to increase funding for finding a cure and helping victims. Despite further drug therapy breakthroughs and prevention campaigns, in 1995 AIDS became the leading cause of death for Americans aged 25 to 44. By 2002, while the annual rate of new HIV cases dropped in the U.S. to 40,000 (from a 1980s high of 150,000), more than 20 million people worldwide had died from the disease, and 40 million were living with HIV. In the following 1983 testimony before a congressional committee, three AIDS patients described their personal experiences during the early years of the disease.

The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was practically defunct, yet by the fall of 1933 it was in the strongest position in its history. Perhaps the best historical narrative of the revival of UMWA was penned in lyrical form by an African-American former coal miner called "Uncle George" Jones. Jones had started working as a miner in 1889 at age seventeen but in 1914 blindness forced him out of the Alabama mines. Long known for his singing in church choirs, down in the mines, and on the picket line. Jones' "This Is What the Union Done" not only expressed the miners' sense of the role that Roosevelt and Lewis played in the union revival; it also beautifully captures a sense of the transformation when miners "got the union back again!"

Strikes affect an entire community, and in the end they need that community's support to succeed. This is especially true in the case of a sit-down strike like the legendary sit-down strike at Flint, Michigan, in 1936, when the strikers occupied the GM plants. The strikers, isolated at first inside the Fisher Body Plant Number One, needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women's Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped found the Women's Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike's key leaders. In this interview, conducted by historian Sherna Gluck in 1976, Genora Johnson Dollinger described first how the strike affected her family.

Mary Ballou and her husband ran a boarding house in the gold mining town of Negro Bar, California. While most of the "Forty-niners" who rushed to California went to pan gold, others, like Ballou and her husband, went to reap high profits by providing services to the miners. Ballou's letter to her son, written in 1852, evoked the rough housing, violence, and high prices (from which the Ballous profited) in California during the gold rush. She also described the limited number of women among the flood of male miners, and how important they were to each other for companionship and consolation. Ballou's references to "the States" are an expression of how far from home California must have felt since California was a state÷it had been admitted to the union in 1850.

The "locomotives," "conductors," "depots," and "roads" Levi Coffin mentioned in this segment of his Reminiscences (published in 1876) are all metaphorical. The Underground Railroad was not composed of steel rails and puffing locomotives but was instead a system of routes, guides, and safe houses used by escaped slaves as they traveled to the freedom of the northern states and Canada. Because of the necessary secrecy of their journeys, it is impossible to know exactly how many slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad during the antebellum years. Historians estimate that the number ranged from several hundred to 1,000 per year. Even with the help of the Underground Railroad, the trip was difficult and dangerous. Escaped slaves typically traveled at night and hid during the day, always on the lookout for slave catchers. Levi Coffin, a Quaker shopkeeper who lived in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, worked on the Underground Railroad for many years. After emancipation, he devoted himself to assisting the freedmen.

During World War I, laws restricting freedom of speech and the arrest and prosecution of those who opposed the war created an atmosphere of repression, hysteria, and vigilantism. While President Woodrow Wilson called for 100 percent Americanism

During the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was faced with both the rising popularity of the People's Party in rural areas and attempts by the Populist movement to create a farmer-labor alliance. At the same time, socialist trade unionists lobbied for greater political involvement and adoption of several key socialist positions by the AFL. One of those socialist trade unionists was J. Mahlon Barnes, a Philadelphia cigar maker, member of the Cigarmakers' International Union, and member of the Socialist Labor Party. Barnes was a sharp critic of longtime AFL leader Samuel Gompers. In 1894 he played a key role in the only defeat that Gompers suffered in election to the AFL presidency. In this 1896 speech in Boston, Barnes chided Gompers and like-minded mainstream labor leaders for refusing to endorse socialism and, more generally, any form of direct political action.

Henry George's 1886 mayoral campaign generated tremendous enthusiasm among New York City's working people, particularly trade union members. George, author of the 1879 book Progress and Poverty, considered private land ownership to be the cause of inequality and advocated a "single tax" to remedy it. Although George campaigned for less than a month, he spoke more than one hundred times, sometimes addressing five or more labor unions and church groups in a single evening. His acceptance speech for the nomination of the United Labor Party, delivered at Cooper Union on October 5, 1886, conveyed George's identification with organized labor and his desire to channel the ground swell of working-class activism of the mid-1880s toward electoral politics. Some sense of George's rapport with his working-class supporters can be glimpsed in the audience reactions of "laughter" and "vociferous cheers" that a reporter for the New York World recorded in this account of George's acceptance speech.

Around 1903, employers began to mount organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions, particularly in the metal trades. Employers had a broad array of weapons in their arsenal, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. In the first two decades of the 20th century, 775 injunctions were issued against labor activities. During the previous two decades, only 150 injunctions were issued. Although early twentieth-century employers had reliable allies in state police forces and tightly controlled local police, they continued to hire their own private police--detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. This 1903 letter promoted the services of the Corporations' Auxiliary Company of Cleveland, Ohio, to prospective clients.