Radio and other popular entertainments, like movies, created a truly national popular culture during the 1920s. Pausing to tune in to his favorite program, this farmer represents an extreme example of radio's broad popularity during the 1920s. For rural Americans, radios not only delivered music and sports but also vital information on commodity prices and weather reports. While they linked rural residents to the rest of the country, radio broadcasts and movie theaters also provided a vehicle for advertising and a spur for consumer culture.

The Birth of a Nation, which opened in March 1915, was simultaneously a landmark in the history of American cinema and a landmark in American racism. The film depicted the South, following the assassination of President Lincoln, as ruled by rapacious African Americans, who by the film's end were heroically overthrown from power by the Ku Klux Klan. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to mount boycott of the film, but it failed to stir significant white opposition. The NAACP changed its tactics; this April 17, 1915, letter from NAACP national secretary Mary Childs Nerney described the organization's efforts, largely in vain, to get local film censors to remove particularly racist scenes. The NAACP's ongoing national campaign to censor the film produced decidedly mixed results. Despite success in Boston and Chicago in securing several minor cuts in the film's release print, by year's end distributors could show The Birth of a Nation almost anywhere in the country.

Baseball's growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games. Baseball commentators and critics expended much ink during the 1920s discussing the exact nature and composition of this new and expanding fan population. Some derided the influx of new fans to urban ballparks, in part because of the growing visibility in the bleachers of the sons and daughters of working-class Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, and in part because the game seemed to be straying from its origins in traditional rural and small-town America. On the other hand, writer Edgar F. Wolfe argued in the 1923 Literary Digest that the urban ballpark was a meeting ground for Americans of all classes and backgrounds.

In this video segment adapted from Haskell Indian Nations University, student filmmakers explain why it is important to them to make a video about climate change.

In this video segment adapted from Haskell Indian Nations University, student filmmakers explain why it is important to them to make a video about climate change.

Many artists working in the decades after the American Revolution came from the ranks of artisans and mechanics. In a republic that dispensed with aristocratic patrons and royal academies, art came to be supported by a middling populace more interested in portraits than grand history painting. Sculpture in marble, time consuming and expensive, was even more remote than paints, and the new nation lacked grand palaces or mansions for display. John Frazee, born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1790, lacked the benefit of formal instruction but still progressed from carving lettering on gravestones to fashioning busts of the rich and famous. Without formal knowledge or the constraints of European customs, American-born and trained artist-artisans such as Frazee resorted to indigenous and ingenious solutions to the problems they faced in a commercializing society, such as Frazee's mechanical invention to transfer an image from painting to a marble bust.

The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: "To Bob or Not to Bob?" The short, sculpted hair of the "bob" marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as "America's Sweetheart"), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

In the 1920s, in part because of prohibition and the emergence of speakeasies, homosexuality became more open. At the same time, psychologists, physicians, and social reformers had been at work for several decades attempting to study, classify, categorize, and label human sexual behavior. Practices that had long been common, or at least tolerated, were now being viewed as problematic. In an excerpt from Ten Sex Talks to Girls, published in 1914, Dr. Irving Steinhardt of New York warned that any affection or intimacy--indeed, any sort of physical contact between women at all--carried the potential for disease, pauperism, and death. Steinhardt's book attempted to classify as dangerous forms of intimacy between women that previously had seemed completely "natural."

Many Americans blamed themselves for their troubles during the early years of the Great Depression. Middle-income workers, while financially better prepared for the economic hard times than were most workers, were psychologically vulnerable and often felt shame at even modest economic setbacks. With men out of work and deeply depressed, women also found it difficult to keep going. Mama

Anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman's foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. McCarthy's apocalyptic rhetoric--he portrayed the Cold War conflict as "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity"--made critics hesitate before challenging him, as his purported lists of Communist conspirators multiplied to include employees in government agencies, the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, the United Nations, and the military. Most of those accused by McCarthy were helpless to defend their ruined reputations and faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. The following editorial from the popular magazine Collier's sharply criticized McCarthy's tactic of trying to scare away advertisers from a magazine that had publicly criticized him. Collier's made sure, however, to announce to its readers--some of whom responded in letters included below--their own solemn concern about "Communist infiltration in government."

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. Although a number of stars directly joined the military, those who made movies probably contributed the most to the war effort. 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. In addition to their work as bond sellers, movie stars also encouraged the populace to follow wartime policies, particularly exhorting them (or joking with them) to observe rationing and save scrap metals. One of the more unusual public service announcements was this 1942 song from Tony Pastor and His Orchestra: "Obey Your Air Raid Warden."

Most people assume that the pledge of allegiance is as old as the Republic. In fact, it was invented in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, director of youth activities for the magazine Youth's Companion. Bellamy drew up the "pledge to the flag" (as it was then called) and publicized it as part of the activities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in America. On Columbus Day in 1892, ten million children recited Bellamy's pledge and it soon became a daily ritual in American schoolrooms. Its widespread adoption reflected both the anxieties about insuring an "American" identity in the midst of a renewed wave of European immigration and a growing nationalistic feeling that would soon help foster American expansionism overseas. The salute to the flag, described below, was dropped in 1942 because of its similarity to Hitler's fascist salute, and replaced with the "modern" salute (right hand over heart). In 1954--in the midst of another wave of American anxiety (this time about domestic and foreign Communism)--the words "under God" were added to the pledge in an effort to distinguish true Americans from "Godless Communists."

While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation's children. Although Congress held its first hearing on the subject in 1952, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. In 1954 and 1955, Congress conducted additional hearings to investigate whether television--along with other mass media products that appealed to children, such as comic books and motion pictures--had anything to do with the documented rise in incidents of juvenile crime. As the renowned media researcher Paul Lazarsfeld testified, studies showed that the hearings, which themselves were televised, only led to worry among viewers rather than to practical measures to correct any perceived problem. In the following testimony from the 1955 hearings, child psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby discussed her research findings, while Lazarsfeld advocated the funding of long-term projects. Both stressed the limitations of research for providing reliable evidence that would definitively link juvenile delinquency to television viewing.

Thomas Minor was born in England and came to New England in 1630. By 1668, when this selection from his journal was written, Minor, his wife Grace, and their children were living in what is now Stonington, a town on the Connecticut coast. Indians lived nearby, and the journal shows Minor and his family interacting with them. Minor was a farmer, and he also had a number of public responsibilities. These included town treasurer, leader of the militia, selectman, and brander of horses. He also participated in church and in town meetings. This selection records one year in Minor's life. He began the year in March, as people in England and New England did until the mid-eighteenth century. While his spelling is idiosyncratic and therefore difficult to read, the journal is a valuable record of how written English looked at that time--and probably also of how Minor pronounced his words.

Farming was not the only occupation in early nineteenth-century rural America. Many young entrepreneurs were able to take advantage of the countryside's increasing commercial activity and growing consumer desires by taking to the road to work. Chester Harding, born in Conway, Massachusetts, survived by working in a variety of country crafts as he related in his 1866 autobiography My Egotistigraphy. His early skill in painting signs led to his painting faces, and he grew more expert in portraiture as he practiced on his business patrons, providing them with a rare likeness to display in their homes. Initially far more artisan than artist, Harding, unlike most of his fellow itinerant and self-taught colleagues, ended up one of the most renowned academic artists in antebellum America.

The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Fears of the "tramp menace" were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. The 1878 work Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives, written by the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, presented a somewhat more mixed portrait of the tramp. In this chapter on "Tramp Printers and Tramp Encampments," Pinkerton expressed some sympathy for the plight of people thrown out of work by the depression, grudgingly admired the audacity of the tramping printers, and argued against treating all tramps as criminals. Still, like other middle-class observers before and since, Pinkerton wanted to separate those he saw as the "deserving" poor from poor people he viewed as undeserving and possibly dangerous.

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. In this article, published in Common Ground just a few months after the riots, George I. Sanchez examined the social context in which the pachuco movement developed and offered a detailed picture of the racism and discrimination faced by Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1913, silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike. Journalist John Reed--one of the artists and intellectuals who made New York City's Greenwich Village a center of bohemian culture--decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden, ending with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the "Internationale," the anthem of international socialism. Neither the pageant nor the strike were triumphant: the pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism. The pageant also focused media attention on the strike, as shown in these June 1913 articles from Current Opinion and Survey.

On September 19, 1873 the nation plunged into the longest and most severe economic depression up to that time. Thousands of businesses, large and small, went bankrupt, and the human toll was immense: fully a million workers were unemployed by 1874, and in some cities, unemployment levels reached 25 percent. The depression delivered a fatal blow to Reconstruction, as northern businessmen shifted their attention away from the rights of African Americans. It also nearly destroyed the labor movement, as pre-depression wage gains were erased and union membership plummeted. Despite the ghastly appearance of the figure representing financial panic, this New York Daily Graphic cover cartoon of September 29, 1873, subscribed to the belief that such financial busts" cleansed the economy

In 1913, John Reed (later famous for his firsthand account of the Russian Revolution) met Bill Haywood, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Reed ventured to Paterson, New Jersey, to learn about the Wobbly-led silk workers' strike then in progress and decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden and ended with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the "Internationale," the anthem of international socialism. Unfortunately, neither the pageant nor the strike ended on a triumphant note. The pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism.