The New York Herald, more than any other of the penny newspapers, published topical pictures. Most of the time, the pictures were simple maps or crude portraits of people in the news. Occasionally, special events received greater pictorial coverage. But when the Herald published five detailed pictures on its cover showing New York's 1845 funeral procession honoring Andrew Jacksonthe first full-page cover devoted to pictures ever to appear in a U.S. daily newspaperrival newspapers charged that the same engravings had been used to illustrate Queen Victoria's coronation, William Henry Harrison's funeral, and the celebration of the opening of the Croton reservoir. The Herald discontinued illustrating the news after 1850, leaving that task to the weekly illustrated press.

Between 1910 and 1920, 500,000 African Americans left the South for northern cities, pulled by the promise of jobs in booming wartime industries and pushed by disfranchisement, poverty, racial violence, and lack of educational opportunities. The Great Migration" placed a strain on cities like Chicago

On May 4, 1886, in Chicago's Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded during a labor demonstration protesting the police shootings of four striking workers. In response, the government and business groups nationwide strengthened the police and the military in an effort to curb labor militancy and public disorder. As part of its coverage of the Haymarket incident, one newspaper displayed this scene from Chicago's police headquarters, showing the construction of a criminal identification system based on photographs. The Rogues' Gallery" served as an archive to identify individual criminals (including political dissenters and labor activists) and to discern

Press photographers are shown here taking pictures of President Ronald Reagan during a photo-opportunity." These formal photography sessions scheduled by the White House staff dated back to the 1930s

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including visual artists who were commissioned to paint murals in federal buildings around the country. Some of these painters found that their expressions clashed with local tastes, particularly when murals portrayed American society, past and present, in a critical light. In the case of this mural for Richmond's Parcel Post Building by Paul Cadmus, titled Pocahontas Rescuing Captain John Smith

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. Poet William Carlos Williams evoked the growing diversity of baseball's fans and their impact on the game in "The Crowd at the Ball Park," published in the Dial in 1923.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. In one of many parodies of "The White Man's Burden" from the time, labor editor George McNeill penned the satirical "Poor Man's Burden," published in March, 1899.

In the mid-19th century, moral reformers viewed the saloon with unmitigated outrage. By the turn of the 20th century, though, anti-liquor groups such as the "Committee of Fifty" attempted to take a more dispassionate look at the saloon and its appeal to workingmen. Their goal was to displace the saloon by sponsoring non-liquor centered "substitutes." These efforts largely failed, but reformers' inquiries produced highly informative descriptions of saloon life at the end of the 19th century. The following article by sociologist Royal Melendy on "The Saloon in Chicago," published in 1900, conveyed a sense of how the saloon met a range of urban workers' social, economic, and cultural needs. Melendy's use of the term "workingman" emphasized the male character of the saloon. This should not be taken to mean that working-class women did not drink, but that drinking frequently took place at home. Some women, however, especially German and English immigrants, did drink in saloons and beer gardens.

The founders of the great libraries of the 19th century were often ambivalent about whether their goal was to disseminate or conserve knowledge. They were also uncertain about the intended audience. John Cotton Dana of the Newark Public Library was atypical in his populist stance that "it is a proper function of a library to amuse." He argued that a "shallow mind" was better than an "empty one." Other librarians preferred to see themselves as cultivators of public taste and their buildings as uplifting houses of culture. The stuffiness and remoteness of late nineteenth-century libraries provoked satires such as this imaginary dialogue between a bartender (Mr. Dooley) and customer (Mr. Hennessy) in an Irish pub. Humorist Peter Finley Dunne published the piece in Dissertations by Mr. Dooley in 1906. Dunne's famous dialogues drew upon prevalent ethnic stereotypes that were a staple of late nineteenth-century humor. Dunne set his exchanges in an Irish bar, but other humorists of this era drew on German, Jewish, and black caricatures.

From the late 1920s, when the first rival radio broadcasting networks were formed, until the present day, as network television competes for viewers with cable and satellite fare, broadcasters and advertisers have sought ways to quantify information about their audiences. The first ratings system, devised by Archibald Crossley in 1929 for the Association of National Advertisers, relied on random telephone surveys. Interviewers asked what programs and sponsors listeners remembered from the previous day. By the late 1930s, C. E. Hooper successfully challenged this method by surveying only the shows respondents were listening to at the time of the phone interview. Hooper's method dominated until the A. C. Nielsen Company began attaching Audimeters directly to television sets. The following Collier's article from 1954 offered a critique of the four ratings methods in use at that time and discussed adverse consequences caused by the industry's reliance on ratings. This assessment by author Bill Davidson and the men in the industry whom he quoted showed signs of an assumed disparagement of ordinary American housewives, identified implicitly as the predominant audience for mass media consumption. Both the reliability of housewives as part-time interviewers and their ability as viewers to maintain accurate diaries were deemed suspect in this piece.

Beginning on June 17, 1942, Yank, the weekly magazine published by the U.S. Army, began its unprecedented worldwide publishing effort. Most of its 127-member staff of editors, reporters, photographers, artists, and cartoonists rotated from desk jobs in Yank 's main New York office to cover the war overseas and produce twenty-one separate weekly editions. The New York office published the American edition distributed to army camps in the United States and prepared basic material for Yank 's overseas operations in London, Sydney, Honolulu, Rome, Paris, Cairo, Tehran, Calcutta, Puerto Rico, and Panama. Sold for five cents, Yank reached a combined circulation of two million soldiers. The August 6, 1943, American edition of Yank, excerpted here, appeared twenty months after the United States entered the conflict, when the outcome of the war was still in doubt. It presented Yank 's typical miscellany of news, stories, poetry, cartoons, illustrations, photographs, notices, advice, and gripes about enlisted life in the wartime army.

What many former slaves wanted most, both for themselves and their children, was education. With their own resources and help from northern missionary groups and the government, freedpeople built and maintained schools and hired black teachers all across the South, sometimes in places that symbolized the old oppression, such as the Savannah slave market. Northern reformers prepared textbooks for freedmen and women, which often contained more than practical lessons. Besides instructions on spelling, reading, and pronunciation, this page from The Freedman's Second Reader presented a model" black household that exhibited the gentility of the northern middle-class ideal of the family."

The 1841 issue of the Crockett Almanac, named after the Tennessee backwoodsman, Davey Crockett, made famous by his self-serving tall tales, portrayed a rough rural sport." The inexpensive comic almanacs combined illustrated jokes on topical subjects with astrological and weather predictions. While presented here as a rllicking free-for-all

Organized temperance movements have been part of the American political landscape since the early 19th century. Reform groups, dominated at various times by clergy, social elites, workingmen, and clubwomen, tried alternately to convince individuals to take a pledge against drinking alcohol, to promote drinking only in moderation, and to enact laws prohibiting the production and sale of liquor. Prior to the ratification in 1919 of the 18th Amendment banning liquor nationwide, two-thirds of the states had passed similar legislation. After rampant noncompliance with the Amendment led to its repeal in 1933, anti-liquor advocates focused protests against liquor advertising on the radio. While the Federal Communications Commission did not have the authority to ban liquor ads, their threats to hold license renewal hearings for offending stations induced broadcasters to self-impose a ban. Similarly, in 1948, the television industry voluntarily decided to restrict alcoholic beverage advertising to beer and wine commercials. Congress, nevertheless, proposed legislation in the 1950s to prohibit all liquor ads from radio, TV, and in interstate commerce. In the following testimony, an attorney for an advertising association argued that a proposed House bill would interfere with the "right to sell," while a police sergeant and member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union contended in a Senate hearing that children should be protected from televised liquor ads in their homes. No legislation was enacted, and in November 1996 due to a sharp decrease in sales of hard liquor, the Distilled Spirits Council voted to allow advertising of its products on TV. In December 2001, NBC became the first network since 1948 to broadcast hard liquor ads.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. By the 1920s and 1930s, John and Alan Lomax were recording southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Run, Old Jeremiah," sung by Joe Washington Brown and Austin Coleman in Jennings, Louisiana, in 1934, was a ring-shout, a religious song using a West African dance pattern, where the performers shuffled single file, clapping out a complex counter-rhythm. The ring-shout was common during slavery and remained popular well into the 20th century as a means of emotional and physical release during religious worship. The lyrics of the ring-shout spoke of escape from the travails of the present.

Sarah Smith Emery, in her nineties when she wrote this memoir, grew up around the turn of the 19th century in the Massachusetts countryside. Her family lived on a farm near the port town of Newburyport, on the Merrimack River. Life on the farm, as she described it, was a series of peaceful routines organized by season, time of day, age, and gender. Emery described the home production of food, such as butter and cheese, and household items, including candles, soap, and clothing. Spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, dressmaking, cooking, preserving food, and housecleaning filled this early nineteenth-century girl's life, while the men in her family farmed, butchered, and chopped wood. Militia training took place twice each year, in spring and fall. At the time that Emery was writing, the United States was rapidly shifting from an agricultural to an urban industrial economy, and nostalgia for rural life thus colored her recollections.

We often like to imagine rural life in the past as timeless, "traditional," and in some way simpler and more authentic. Yet, rural life in the years around World War I, while sometimes recalled as simpler, could often seem very much like life anywhere else. In this interview, conducted by Laurie Mercier in 1982 for the Montana Historical Society, Tom Staff remembers how Montana farmers took other jobs to supplement their incomes. Here he described how the road crew he worked on left camp for dances in town--events which, well after midnight, might turn a little ugly.

Department stores not only became a major source of employment for young urban white women beginning in the late 19th century; they also offered a new focus for stories and novels about life in America's burgeoning cities. Writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and O. Henry often used the world of department stores and the shop girls who worked there to create a modern fiction (including a brand new form--the short story) that allowed readers to feel the texture of urban life. In "The Trimmed Lamp" (1906), O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) offered a sentimental and moralistic portrait of the after-hours lives of young New York working women. While Porter's stories often focused on shop girls' predicaments (he was considered, in the words of fellow writer Vachel Lindsay, "the little shop girls' knight"), they were typically bathed in a sentimental glow.

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. The Senate report held hearings in 1954 and 1955 on the possible influence of television on juvenile delinquency. The resulting report summarized standards included in the Television Code pertaining to the portrayal of crime, horror, sex, and law enforcement, and to the industry's responsibility to provide "wholesome entertainment" for children. The report also presented testimony from a television executive who cited the motion picture industry's history of successful self-regulation to ward off government censorship. The Senate report--excerpts of which are included below--also presented the preamble to the Code and detailed the Code's review mechanism.

Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, published in 1791, was the first American bestseller. The author, Susanna Haswell Rowson, was born in England circa 1762, and died in Massachusetts, where she spent most of her life, in 1824. Charlotte Temple tells the story of a young English girl who is lured away from her school by an army officer, Montraville. On board ship to his posting in revolutionary-era New York, Montraville seduces Charlotte. Once in New York, Montraville gradually abandons the "ruined" Charlotte who, after a downward spiral into remorse, illness, poverty, and the birth of a child, dies. Seduction novels were popular in the 18th century, and the widely read Charlotte Temple went through more than two hundred editions. But Rowson, who despite her childhood as the daughter of an English revenue officer became a committed republican, used her novel to protest the sexual double standard that ruined the lives of women like Charlotte.