The interwar peace movement was arguably the largest mass movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a mobilization often overlooked in the wake of the broad popular consensus that ultimately supported the U.S. involvement in World War II. The destruction wrought in World War I (known in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Great War") and the cynical nationalist politics of the Versailles Treaty had left Americans disillusioned with the Wilsonian crusade to save the world for democracy. The antiwar movement drew on many tactics honed in earlier suffrage campaigns, including the use of pageants and plays. Circulated by the New Deal-sponsored Federal Theatre Project (FTP), these play synopses suggested the range and diversity of antiwar sentiment in the 1930s. The FTP vetted hundreds of scripts and prepared lists of plays for the use of community theaters. Antiwar dramas were among the most popular, with themes of religious pacifism, moral motherhood, and condemnation of war profiteering.

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, the following Jim Crow travel laws remained in force in 1954. That same year, the Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that separate public schools were "inherently unequal" and thus unconstitutional. In 1955, the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, organized a boycott of the city's segregated bus system. In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled Alabama's laws requiring segregated buses unconstitutional. The specific wording of these Jim Crow laws, crafted to maintain the status quo, revealed deep anxieties about race. By allocating to railroad and bus officials "police powers" to enforce segregated seating and in the case of Virginia, power to determine the race of passengers, state legislatures sought to ensure segregation. By exempting certain categories of persons, specifically nurses, servants, and prisoners, the laws also avoided disrupting ways of life that did not threaten tenets of white supremacy.

Richard L. Davis, the most important black leader of Ohio's miners, was called upon frequently in the 1880s and 1890s to serve as a spokesman for the many black miners in his home state, as well as the thousands more who labored in Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia. He was also called upon to serve as an intermediary between black rank-and-file miners and the white majority and white national leadership of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), dealing with such issues as black participation in the union, strike breaking by African Americans, and the racist attitudes of many rank-and-file white miners toward African Americans. (Davis was twice elected to the UMWA's executive board.) In this series of six letters submitted in 1891 to the National Labor Tribune, Davis reflected on the larger meaning and purpose of interracial unionism in an era of rising racial tensions and institutionalized discrimination.

From its inception, the Confederacy sought international recognition from European nations. Support from Europe would help persuade the North to accept Southern independence, and, more immediately, secure a source of manufactured goods needed for the war effort. Southern efforts to gain recognition focused on England, the largest purchaser of southern cotton. This 1862 cartoon from the northern satirical weekly, Vanity Fair, presented the Confederacy's president trying to gain diplomatic recognition from a skeptical Great Britain. I hardly think it will wash

Statistics on women's work in the early 20th century were invariably misleading: most women worked but only a minority were formally in the wage labor force. Nowhere was the discrepancy between the domestic ideal and the reality of women's work lives wider than in rural America. In 1913 the U. S. Department of Agriculture decided to investigate and document the lives of farm woman they discovered a vast reservoir of discontent. The report, reproduced here, was culled from letters responding to a questionnaire sent to the wives of farmers and commented on all aspects of rural life, especially the enormous burden of labor that these officially non-working women were expected to carry out.

The issue of race divided the Southern Populist movement. In some ways, it can be seen as uniquely interracial for its time, yet in other respects it was critically limited by racial divisions. Even in the heyday of Populism, not all members of the Southern Farmers' Alliance were equally committed to the interracial program that some leaders advocated. While white and Colored Farmers' Alliances joined at times in cooperative purchasing and marketing arrangements, the tension between black and white agrarians remained strong. In the late 1880s, African Americans, who were suspicious of the white Alliance, joined the Knights of Labor. Many southern whites--including members of the Farmers' Alliance--saw the growth of black locals of the Knights as a serious threat. This 1889 memorandum by white North Carolina plantation owner John Bryan Grimes recorded his efforts to infiltrate a Knights of Labor local that some of his black workers had joined. Although Grimes was himself a Populist, he viewed the Knights as a threat to his interests.

The 1920s and 1930s gave rise to new forms of popular humor, humor with a sophisticated edge drawn from a more prosperous, cosmopolitan urban experience. In New York, a circle of urbane humorists with a national audience rose around the New Yorker magazine and the famous "Algonquin Round Table," an informal group that met occasionally at the Algonquin Hotel. Ironic, witty, emphasizing word play and "in jokes," the New Yorker work of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, and Dorothy Parker satirized the pretensions of ordinary middle-class life. "Do Insects Think?," a 1922 essay by Robert Benchley, gleefully mocked the pretentious tone of American science, as well as the cult of pep, productivity, and activity that characterized the 1920s. Doing nothing, it suggested, offered the best evidence of intelligence.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, two representatives of labor unions voiced opposition to the ERA, arguing that it would threaten protective legislation based on gender difference.

The experiences of the half million Africans Americans from the South who headed North between 1916 and 1921 varied widely among individuals. Four letters by southern migrants who had settled in Philadelphia, Chicago, and East Chicago, Indiana, provided some insights into the diverse experiences migrants had in the North. Resettled southerners wrote to folks back home about "the true facts of the present condition of the north." These "facts" ranged from salaries, living conditions, and recent births and deaths, to the score of the latest Chicago White Sox baseball game. The letters, which were originally published in the Journal of Negro History, also described what it feels like to be out of the South: "don[']t have to mister every little white boy comes along."

Tobacco was promoted in Europe in the 17th century as a cure for a number of ailments, including toothache, fatigue, and joint pains, as well as a calming agent. Smoking for enjoyment, however, was mainly responsible for the growth of the tobacco industry. By the time the following Collier's article was published in 1950, a campaign to warn smokers--who by then made up more than half of the American population--of potential dangerous effects of smoking was underway. Opposed to these efforts, the author argued that scientific attempts to link tobacco products to lung cancer and heart disease had failed and that the antismoking crusade interfered with needed research into more likely cancer causes. In 1951, an important medical study in London concluded that smoking was "an important factor" contributing to lung cancer. Despite a growing antismoking movement, aided by a 1979 Surgeon-General's report linking smoking to heart disease and the classification of nicotine as an addictive drug by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, over five trillion cigarettes were sold that year. Threatened with state and local class-action lawsuits, the U.S. tobacco industry agreed in 1998 to a consent decree that settled 37 pending cases, quieted future claims, and ended certain types of tobacco advertising.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born around 1818 in Virginia, a slave of the Burwell family. At fourteen she was loaned to the Rev. Robert Burwell, her master's son, who lived in North Carolina. There she gave birth to her son George, the product of an unwanted encounter with a white man. After several unhappy years with Robert Burwell and his family, Keckley was sent to live in St. Louis with Anne Burwell Garland, a married daughter of the Burwells. In this selection from her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, Keckley describes how she bought her freedom from the Garland family, a process that was completed in November 1855. Her sincere efforts to live within slavery's rules are striking and indicate how deeply the slave system's practices and values permeated both the black and white cultures of the South. After her emancipation Keckley earned her living as a dressmaker in Washington, D.C.; she died there in poverty in 1907.

The sharecropping system that emerged in the South in the last three decades of the 19th century afforded southern black families a certain measure of control over their daily lives and labor. But the white landowners were able to use the legal mechanisms of sharecropping to assure control over the largely African-American workforce that toiled on the farms. Here Hughsey Childes, interviewed by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, described what seems like a matter of fact exchange in which the white landowner cheated the black sharecropper. But when the sharecropper got a little wise and withheld some of the crop from the landlord, the punishment was swift and final.

Socialist leader and four-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was known as one of the most gifted orators of his generation. One listener recalled his impact as "something more powerful, penetrating, and articulate than mere words." Although Debs apparently never entered a sound studio, a recording of a Debs speech was widely circulated in the first decade of the 20th century. For many years, the speech was believed to have been in Debs' voice, and it was catalogued as such in libraries and record collections. In fact, the speech was written by Debs but recorded by actor Leonard Spencer, who was famous for his recorded versions of comic and dramatic monologues. It was not uncommon in the early days of recording to have actors read the words of politicians. (This was before actors became politicians.) Even if this recording does not give us Debs' actual voice, its circulation indicates his popularity. Faithful socialists wanted to be able to listen at home to Debs' attacks on the rapacious nature of capitalism and his argument that socialism was the only answer to human problems.

Mid-nineteenth century immigrants inhabited a social world far removed from that of native born, middle class Americans, one often marked by economic hardship. With no government relief and only limited private efforts, poor New Yorkers often searched everywhere for means to survive. This engraving showed people scavenging on garbage barges, searching for coal, rags, and other discarded items that might be used or sold to junk dealers. The picture, according to a Harper's Weekly editor, showed how some people in New York were forced to live upon the refuse of respectable folk.""

The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. Belle Kearney, a white Mississippi suffragist who addressed the 1903 NAWSA convention, raised the specter of black male political power to argue for the enfranchisement of white women.

Henry Hudson, employed by the Dutch India Company, anchored off of Manhattan in 1609 and traded with local Indians. Hudson then headed up the river (later named the Hudson River) seeking Northwest Passage to Asia. Other Dutch settlers soon followed. Delawares and Mahicans, who had been living along the coast of New Jersey and up the Hudson River when the Dutch arrived, were driven westward by expanding European settlements. The Reverend John Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary in the Ohio Valley, took down this particular narrative in the 1760s "as it was related to me by aged and respected" Delawares and Mahicans. Indian stories of the first encounters between Indians and Europeans often depicted the Europeans as "the great Mannitoo" or Supreme Being. This account went on to describe the trading and hospitality that followed the first encounter and the Europeans' eventual desire for land above all else.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fraternal organizations were ubiquitous. Their structure and rituals influenced a wide range of other groups, from the Knights of Labor to the Grange, from the American Protective Association to the Ku Klux Klan. In the last two decades of the 19th century, Americans created almost 500 national beneficiary orders and thousands of local lodges. The enormous membership of fraternal organizations attracted the attention of early sociologists. In this excerpt from an article published in the March 1901 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, B. H. Meyer surveyed "Fraternal Beneficiary Societies in the United States." Although fraternal organizations like the Masons sometimes crossed class, ethnic, and religious (but almost never racial) lines, they more often reinforced those divisions. African Americans, immigrants, and the working class thus created their own complex of social and fraternal orders.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage. In October 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949, raising the minimum wage to 75 cents hour and extending coverage, but still leaving many workers unprotected. In the following statement to the 1949 Senate subcommittee on FLSA amendments, the chairman of a small advocacy organization appealed to Congress to extend the minimum wage and child labor provisions to cover agricultural workers.

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. Ferber's shop-girl heroines were strong-willed, and though they expressed vulnerability and desire for male companionship, they valued their careers. In this 1912 Ferber short story, titled "One of the Old Girls," the head of the corset department in Spiegel's department store is faced with a hard decision when her longtime swain "pops the question."

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Slavic steelworker Andrew Pido described the discrimination faced by some immigrant workers and how that discrimination - along with long pay and poor conditions--encouraged them to unionize and strike.