The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings in October 1947 on Communist activity in Hollywood. In the following testimony, Eric Johnston, a successful businessman who in 1945 succeeded Will H. Hays as President of the Motion Picture Association of America--the industry's institution for self-regulation--defended Hollywood against HUAC's attacks and complained vigorously that the "atmosphere of fear" resulting from the investigation precluded the production of "good and honest motion pictures." Although Johnston earlier had argued against the Committee's request that studio officials discharge known Communists, in November 1947, after ten screenwriters and directors who refused to cooperate with the Committee were cited for contempt of Congress, Johnston and the studio heads issued a statement that the studios would not employ Communists and would dismiss or suspend the ten. HUAC then agreed to stop investigating studios and the content of films and limited their inquiries to personnel. Although Johnston insisted that the industry did not engage in blacklisting, those in the filmmaking community who did not deny that they were Communists and refused to inform on others when questioned at HUAC hearings were prohibited from working in the industry.

The author of this letter, who used the pseudonym "Dame Shirley," was Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819-1906). The letter was written to Clapp's sister, Molly, in Massachusetts, but was subsequently published as one of a series of twenty-three in the Pioneer, a California literary magazine. Clapp's subject in the "Shirley letters," as they are called, was life at the gold mining camps of mid-19th-century California. Clapp knew about life in the world of California gold mining from first-hand experience. With her husband, a doctor, Clapp left the East Coast for California in 1849. At first the couple settled in San Francisco, but in 1851 they left for the Sierra Nevada mountains so that Dr. Clapp could regain his health in the mountain air. In the Sierra Nevadas, they spent more than a year at two gold mining camps, Rich Bar and Indian Bar, on the Feather River. As the self-conscious tone of these letters suggests, Clapp aspired to be a literary writer. As a woman, her perspective on life in the nearly all-male camps was unique. The letters allegedly provided material for Bret Harte's stories. Today we can appreciate them for their historical value as observations of life during the California gold rush.

Although we sometimes think of farm and factory as antithetical, many people moved easily between the two. Icy Norman grew up in North Carolina, the daughter of a miner. As a young woman she worked long hours in a textile mill, but she also helped with the farm chores, especially seasonal chores like the corn shucking described here. In this excerpt from a 1979 interview conducted by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, she recalled family and friends rolling up the rug for dances and parties when the day's work was done.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the United States military. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. President Franklin Roosevelt quickly addressed Congress to ask for a declaration of war as illustrated in this audio excerpt. Although he never mentioned Europe or the fact that Germany had by then declared war on the United States, the Pearl Harbor attack allowed him to begin the larger intervention in the European war he had long wanted.

The best-known image of America's 1898 war with Spain is that of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback charging with his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba. While the Rough Riders fired the first shot in the war and were the first to raise the U.S. flag in Cuba, their exploits were greatly mythologized. In fact, Cuban troops--who had already been waging an armed struggle for independence from Spain for three years before the U.S. intervened in 1898--were crucial to the success of the larger war against Spain. Some sense of their importance can be gleaned from this account by N. G. Gonzales, the American editor of a pro-Cuban newspaper. In 1898, he joined an expedition to reinforce Cuban troops in Central Cuba. Cuban cigarmakers from Key West and Tampa (centers of Cuban-American trade union and socialist sentiment) dominated the expedition, though at least fifty black troops from the 10th Cavalry also participated. Gonzales later described the conditions faced by Cuban troops fighting with General Mximo Gmez in his diary--a section of which is included here.

Traditional craft production centered around an independent master artisan, his journeymen, and the apprentice helpers who worked together in small shops. Apprentices worked alongside masters and received training in the "mysteries of the craft" in exchange for their labor. Journeymen looked forward to becoming proprietors when they accumulated sufficient capital and skill. In his Sketches of Lynn (1880), David Johnson recalled the masculine work culture and small-scale setting of the shoe industry in early-19th century Lynn, Massachusetts. With transportation improvements and growing commercial activity, manufacturing moved from small shops engaged in custom work to larger-scale production of ready-made goods. No area experienced greater dislocation than Lynn, where shops multiplied, the division of labor increased, and some masters opened larger central shops. Less skilled workers, including women and children, replaced journeymen, apprenticeship declined, and the world that Johnson described faded.

The New Deal launched a series of federal employment programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which not only provided jobs but also initiated many important studies of the depression's human toll. One such study, published by the WPA Division of Research in 1939, included transcripts of interviews by WPA workers with Dubuque, Iowa, families. The DiMarcos interview revealed that the disabled faced a double challenge during the depression: finding employment while competing for scarce jobs with the able-bodied. The DiMarcos, a deaf couple with a small child, recall in their own words (because they were deaf they had to write responses to the WPA interviewer's questions), the struggles they endured during six years of unemployment.

In 1912, four candidates battled to become President of the United States. Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a moderate governor, represented the two major parties. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, angered over what he felt was a betrayal of his policies by Taft, his hand-picked successor, abandoned the Republican party and founded the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. While all four candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, whose votes would prove decisive, by far the most radical platform in the campaign was that of the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs. Running for the fourth time, Debs called for the abolition of capitalism rather than for its reform. In this speech accepting the party's nomination he proclaimed the Socialist Party "the party of progress, the party of the future." Debs finished last in the contest, receiving 900,000 votes.

"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ," declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of intelligence testing. The army's use of intelligence tests lent new credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. The idea that experts could confidently assign a man to his proper place in the army--and by extension his place in life--suggested a kind of determinism that some found profoundly at odds with American democracy and its credo of upward mobility through hard work. Walter Lippmann, an influential political commentator and journalist, skewered the army intelligence tests in a series of six essays that appeared in the New Republic in 1922. He denounced as "nonsense" the claim that the average mental age of an American adult was fourteen years, and forcefully warned his readers of the danger of uncritical acceptance of IQ as destiny. He addressed the conditions of IQ testing, the possible biases of army intelligence tests, and the larger social problems raised by such classifications.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee, including Frank L. Sundstrom, Representative of New Jersey, created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, New Jersey spokespersons for tenants quoted the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner legislation and described housing conditions, while a number of tenants related their own difficult living situations.

For the people of Vietnam, who were just beginning to recover from five years of ruthless economic exploitation by the Japanese, the end of World War II promised to bring eighty years of French control to a close. As the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), better known as the Viet Minh, Vietnamese nationalists had fought against the Japanese invaders as well as the defeated French colonial authorities. With the support of rich and poor peasants, workers, businessmen, landlords, students, and intellectuals, the Viet Minh (led by Ho Chi Minh) had expanded throughout northern Vietnam where it established new local governments, redistributed some lands, and opened granaries to alleviate the famine. On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi's Ba Dinh square. The first lines of his speech repeated verbatim the famous second paragraph of America's 1776 Declaration of Independence.

After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and the right of self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to face intensified discrimination, segregation, and racial violence. Drawing on this frustration, Marcus Garvey attracted thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. The Black Star Line, an all-black shipping company chartered by the UNIA, was the movement's boldest and most important project, and many African Americans bought shares of stock in the company. A 1920 Black Star Line business meeting in Harlem's Liberty Hall brought together 25,000 UNIA delegates from around the world, and produced an important statement of principles, the "Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World."

Started by Confederate veterans in 1866 and led by prominent planters, the Ku Klux Klan grew quickly during Radical Reconstruction. Hooded Klansmen terrorized individuals and freedpeoples organizations, breaking up meetings, shooting and lynching Union League leaders, and driving people away from the polls across the South. In its nighttime whippings, killings, and rapes, the Klan targeted freedpeople who showed signs of independence, such as those who bought or rented their own land, or community leaders, such as teachers. The criminal, terrorist nature of the organization was later glossed over. By the turn of the century, popular novels like Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s The Traitor, published in 1907, transformed the bloody record of the Ku Klux Klan (here softened by the euphemism Invisible Empire") into tales of gallantry

The post-World War I period in the United States saw devastating race riots around the nation: in small cities and in larger ones. But the Tulsa race riot in 1921 was perhaps the worst. Sparked by the supposed sexual assault of a white woman by a young black man, white Tulsa residents went on a twenty-four-hour rampage which resulted in the death of anywhere from 75 to 250 people and the burning of more than 1,000 black homes and businesses. Yet the African-Americans of Tulsa were not passive victims: when armed whites congregated at the Tulsa courthouse planning to lynch the young black imprisoned for the rape they were met by a crowd of equally angry blacks determined to prevent the lynching. In this interview with historian Scott Ellsworth, W. D. Williams proudly remembered the self-assertiveness of local black citizens, including his father, who took up arms to defend home and community.

The riots that broke out between 1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that included several hundred lynchings each year. One of the most savage race riots in these years erupted in Atlanta on September 22, 1906 after vague reports of African Americans harassing white women. Over five days at least ten black people were killed while Atlanta's police did nothing to protect black citizens, going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while allowing whites to remain armed. In this selection from his memoirs, Walter White, the future head of the NAACP recalled how, at age 13, he and his father defended their home from white rioters.

The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" laws when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana statute requiring "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment clause guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the laws. (Jim Crow, the colloquial term for segregation, referred to a blackface character popular on the minstrel stage.) Jim Crow legislation extended throughout the South to schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theaters, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, Jim Crow travel laws remained in effect in the South. In the follow 1954 testimony to a House committee hearing on proposed legislation to end segregated travel, an attorney for the National Council of Negro Women argued that discriminatory practices were contrary to foundational American principles and recounted the humiliating arrest of a member of the WACS for disobeying a bus driver's order to move from her seat. The bills under consideration never made it to the House floor for a vote. In 1956, following a boycott by the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, against the city's segregated bus system, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

The Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, helped middle-income families buy new homes and improve existing ones. Federal loans for low-cost housing, however, became available only after passage of the Wagner-Steagle Housing Act of 1937, and then only in modest amounts. To address a growing crisis, President Harry S. Truman, as part of his "Fair Deal" initiative, called for new slum clearance and housing legislation. Despite accusations of "socialized housing" and opposition from the real estate and construction industries, on July 15, 1949, Truman signed into law a bill providing $1.5 billion in loans and grants.Available to localities, this money would, in the President's words, "open up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome surroundings for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums." In the following article published just prior to the bill's passage, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, a professor of economics and former New Deal supporter, argued for effective legislation. Despite the law's progressive intent, urban renewal programs ultimately destroyed formerly vibrant neighborhoods. These programs were also used throughout the South and in Northern cities to strengthen segregation by relocating African-Americans away from white school districts.

This cover of the December, 1942, issue of Collier''s magazine commemorated the first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The vampire-bat portrayal of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo indicates one way in which American popular media and war propaganda presented the Japanese. Unlike images of the European enemy, the Japanese were depicted as vicious animals, most often taking the form of apes or parasitic insects. The same racial stereotypes were also applied to Japanese living in America. Suspecting their loyalty, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese Americans living on the west coast citizens and non-citizens alike and transported them to detention centers in the West. Forced to abandon their homes, jobs, and businesses, Japanese Americans remained detained in camps for the duration of the war.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930's the Beuschers--he was a sixty-two-year-old railroad worker; she was the mother of their eleven children--had been fairly prosperous: they owned their home and had several life-insurance policies serving as savings. But by the time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewed them in 1937, their lives had dramatically changed: the father had lost his railroad job and the mother was taking in sewing. This interview summary, published by the WPA, showed how they struggled to make ends meet during The Great Depression.

John Dane, a tailor, was born in Berkhampstead, England, around 1612. In the late 1630s, which he recollects here as a period of "a great coming to New England," he and his family emigrated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. He died in Ipswich in 1684. Dane's parents, like many Puritan parents, raised their children to carry what historian Philip Greven calls an "inner disciplinarian" within their own consciences at all times. Dane's mother reminded him: "Go where you will, God will find you out." In this narrative, Dane, who always remembered her warning, related the temptations he faced over the course of his life--to steal, to accept the advances of women, to avoid church--and the prices he negotiated with an all-seeing God. (The spelling of this selection has been regularized to make it easier to read.)