Lumberjacks often worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, faced incredible dangers on the job, and lived under horrendous conditions. They were one of the most abused groups of workers in the early 20th century. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was the only labor organization to pay any attention to workers in the lumber camps of the South and the Pacific Northwest. Although humorous in tone, the poem "The Lumberjack's Prayer" captured the grueling conditions that most lumbermen faced on and off the job. "The Lumberjack's Prayer" was written by T-Bone Slim and circulated on small colored cards that the IWW (also known as the "Wobblies") sold to raise money. T-Bone Slim (born Matt Valentine Huhta) was a popular Wobbly writer. The nickname "Slim" was often used by hoboes, perhaps because they tended to be skinny from lack of food. In Wobbly publications, Christ was sometimes called "Jerusalem Slim."

The fundamental appeal of the saloon to its working-class customers was social and recreational. The saloonkeeper presided over and fostered an atmosphere of good-hearted, informal socializing, in part by supplying jokes and stories. For those whose own supply of humor ran low, the A. V. Newton's Saloon Keeper's Companion provided bar owners with about fifty pages of assorted jokes and stories with which to amuse their customers. The jokes most often ridiculed hypocritical temperance advocates, dishonest police and politicians, unsophisticated and easily fooled clergy and church-goers, and stupid or pompous judges. Included here are two brief excerpts from The Saloon Keeper's Companion. The first, "The Use of Slander," expressed a cynical view of politicians that seems remarkably contemporary. The second, "Farmer and the Crow," wryly satirized the bartender's own profession. It also seems likely that bawdier, masculine humor circulated through nineteenth-century saloons, but genteel conventions probably prevented authors like A. V. Newton from publishing such jokes and stories.

The slinky style of the flapper" was celebrated in the popular press during the 1920s

By the mid-twentieth century, the movement of African Americans from farms to cities, along with their participation in World War II industries and union organizing, spawned the origins of the modern civil rights movement. Although conflict between white and black workers continued, many African Americans faced continued discrimination with a new sense of self-confidence and militancy, based on their identities as equal workers, soldiers, and citizens. This frame from Brotherhood of Man, an animated short produced by United Productions of America, a studio created by former Walt Disney animators, for the United Automobile Workers' 1946 interracial organizing drive.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

The movement between 1916 and 1921 of a half million African Americans from the South to cities in the North and West was known as the Great Migration. Black migrants told their stories in many forms from letters to poems to paintings. Music offered one of the most original forms in which the migration narrative was told."Times Is Gettin Harder" (a 1940 recording of an older blues tune by Lucious Curtis) described various incidents from racial injustice to economic hardship that prompted one man's journey away from the land of "cotton and corn."

This 1921 cartoon from the Chicago Tribune newspaper prescribes good old fashioned hard work" as the cure for the 1920-21 economic depression. While this artist attributed unemployment to lack of motivation

From smoking to skin care, advertisers rushed to identify their products with the war effort once the United States entered World War II. Using the war to pitch products was not the only way American businesses benefited from their association with the conflict. Although the government managed and regulated the wartime economy, it often did so to the benefit of large companies. The top 100 companies turned out 30 percent of the nation's manufactured goods in 1940; by war's end, those same companies held 70 percent of all civilian and military contracts. Business executives sat in many of the key posts of war production agencies, serving as dollar-a-year-men" while remaining on their company payrolls

John Ball was a lawyer, businessman, educator, civic leader, and traveler who was born on the Vermont frontier in 1794. Ball escaped the life of his father's farm to study at Dartmouth College. He then practiced law, taught, and eventually settled in Grand Rapids and became a Michigan state legislator and a founder of the state's school system. Before settling down, however, he led a life of great adventure. In 1832 Ball joined an expedition to Oregon, but tiring of Oregon--and suffering from the "ague"he mentions here--he boarded a Hudson Bay Company ship bound for Hawaii (or the Sandwich Islands, as they were called then). He landed in Honolulu on December 22, 1833. In Hawaii Ball observed the interactions among the native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, and American missionaries, merchants and diplomats. This selection comes from an autobiography Ball wrote at age eighty.

After the Civil War, southern African Americans exercised their new freedom in many ways; one of them was traveling where and when they chose. Thousands of newly freedpeople took to the roads at war's end, most of them trying to reunite with family members sold away or displaced during the war. In some cases, freedmen and women walked hundreds of miles in search of parents, children, siblings, or spouses. This engraving was published in Edward King's The Great South, one of many postwar surveys of southern life that fed northerners' curiosity about the region that they had defeated in war.

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. In the 1920s and 1930s, John Lomax (and other members of his family) recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Trouble So Hard," sung by Dock Reed, Henry Reed, and Vera Hall in Livingston, Alabama, in 1937, was reminiscent in style of the slavery era, when the congregation sang without hymnbooks or musical accompaniment. The style of singing--the lead singer's call and the congregation's increasingly loud and forceful response--had its roots in African religious practice.

Life in the armed services had a long-lasting impact on America's homosexual population. Far from home, many gay men and lesbian women felt less social pressure to conform to heterosexual social norms, and the need for manpower made the military somewhat more tolerant of homosexual men and women in its ranks (although it still purged many gay and lesbian soldiers). Many who first expressed their sexual orientation during the war later became pioneers in the gay and lesbian rights movement. This towel advertisement was one of a series published during 1943-44 that framed its sales-pitch in homoerotic imagery inspired by purported testimony from G.I.s overseas. The ads, which are sexually ambiguous, suggest how the same-sex environment in the military afforded young men, both gay and straight, with opportunities for sexual self-discovery.

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. As a result of his appearances as a triumphant contestant on one of the genre's most popular programs, Twenty-one, Charles Van Doren, an instructor in the English department of Columbia University and son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, tried to use his newfound celebrity to promote values of "true education" to the television-viewing public. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, Van Doren dramatically confessed a long-suppressed secret: Twenty-one had been rigged and he had willingly, though with pained ambivalence, participated in the deception. Prior to airtime he had been told the questions he would be asked and instructed on how to be more "entertaining" as he answered. Van Doren, along with seventeen other contestants, subsequently received a suspended sentence for lying to a grand jury. In later years, he wrote numerous books that dealt with world history and the history of knowledge and served for 20 years as an editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Although by 1919 radical and labor movements had been seriously weakened by the government's repression and persecution during World War I, loyalty" organizations and the U.S. Department of Justice used fears spawned by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to prosecute a crusade against radicals

In late 1932, the United Mine Workers of America was an organization struggling to survive. Yet by the fall of 1933, with the signing of an agreement with coal operators, it was strong. The miners' union had finally won a contract that guaranteed it recognition and stability in the hitherto nonunion southern Appalachian coalfields. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act set off the spark of unionization in coal and other industries and many coal miners felt that they owed a debt of gratitude to the man who had become president of the United States in March--Franklin D. Roosevelt. For coal miners, one way of expressing that gratitude was in song. "Union Dues," collected in the 1940s by folklorist George Korson, used the blues, a musical idiom that had become popular in southern black communities in the 1920s, to explain what President Roosevelt had given coal miners.

The quest for efficiency touched nearly every aspect of American life during World War I, including the nation's clocks. Daylight saving first appeared during the war years as an experiment to save fuel. Theoretically, people would use less artificial light in the evenings thanks to the extra hour of daylight. Urban dwellers, and those working regular hours in factories and offices, generally delighted in the "extra hour," but protests by farmers and other rural citizens brought the experiment to an end after only a year. For most of the 20th century, however, the push for or against daylight saving came from businesses. The makers of sporting goods, charcoal briquettes, and mosquito repellents continued to fund a "National Daylight Saving Coalition" to lobby for an extended period of "fast time." The movie industry, however, long resisted daylight saving. In this 1930 letter to E. B. Duerr of Path Studios, the president of Fox West Coast Theaters warned of dire economic consequences for the motion picture industry if California adopted daylight saving.