Farmers in the years before World War I faced thoroughly modern economic stresses and labor conflicts as the scale of their enterprises increased. By World War I, Midwestern and Great Plains farmers had come to rely on large pools of seasonal migrant labor, mostly unemployed urban workers from Chicago and other Midwestern cities, to harvest wheat or corn. Workers faced long hours and low wages, isolated in temporary camps without permanent homes or meeting places. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union attempted to organize these "harvest stiffs." The radical "Wobblies" argued that wheat farmers were businessmen in a protected industry who, thanks to wartime government price supports, reaped large profits and returned none of that wealth to those who actually harvested their crop. E. F. Doree, an IWW organizer, described in detail the difficult conditions migrants faced and mocked the idea of rural work as wholesome and benevolent with the famous joke that in the wheat states, the "eight-hour work day" prevailed--"eight hours in the forenoon, eight hours in the afternoon."

Working people agitated for several decades, beginning most actively in the 1880s, for laws that would limit the standard work day to eight hours. This eight-hour day" movement achieved a major victory when Congress passed the Adamson Act in 1916. The Adamson Act specified an eight-hour workday (with additional pay for overtime labor) for railroad workers

Through a range of political, social, and organizational venues, African-American women struggled to participate in the racial awareness and pride that characterized the "New Negro" movement of the 1920s. Alain Locke's important 1925 compilation of Harlem Renaissance writings, The New Negro, included an essay by Elise Johnson McDougald, a prominent black educator, social investigator, and journalist. McDougald's essay, originally published in the Survey, employed socioeconomic analysis to explore the particular problems, as well as contributions to society, of four groups of black women, from wealthy to working-class. Seeking to repudiate the monolithic way in which black women were perceived and represented by white America, McDougald not only focused on economics but also challenged stereotypical representations of blacks in the arts and advertising, as well as those surrounding black women's sexuality.

In 1849, New York's chief of police, George W. Matsell, chose to devote most of his semi-annual report to the problem of vagrant and delinquent children. By mid-century New York was crowded with immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Adult immigrants took jobs once occupied by child apprentices and, despite Matsell's reference to the city's public schools, schooling was not compulsory in New York State until 1874. The result was an excess of poor children on the streets earning money however they could, sometimes, Matsell suggests, in unsavory occupations. Matsell's anxiety about the city's street children cut two ways: he was concerned about the harm these children were doing to themselves, but he also worried that they would grow up to join a "dangerous class" of criminals that would terrorize the city. In these sentiments he was joined by Charles Loring Brace. In 1853 Brace formed the Children's Aid Society that initiated the "orphan trains." These trains transported poor children out of the city to farms in the west.

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height in the years between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. Writing in the Nation in March 1919, noted humorist Benchley described the climate of surveillance and sheeplike compliance that made the "Red Scare possible" and mocked the public's hunger for enemies.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood shared the romantic radicalism of Floyd Dell and other Greenwich Village bohemians in the early 20th century. They practiced open marriage, though not without pain and confusion. Written in 1916 for the Provincetown Players, an innovative theater group that operated between 1915 and 1922, Enemies was an autobiographical meditation on the emotional struggles of a couple in a non-monogamous marriage. The characters expressed considerable bitterness, yet in the end affirmed their partnership. In the first draft of the play the characters bore the names of their authors, clearly suggesting its autobiographical inspiration.

Wisconsin Republican Joseph R. McCarthy first won election to the Senate in 1946 during a campaign marked by much anticommunist Red-baiting. Partially in response to Republican Party victories, President Harry S. Truman tried to demonstrate his own concern about the threat of Communism by setting up a loyalty program for federal employees. He also asked the Justice Department to compile an official list of 78 subversive organizations. As the midterm election year got underway, former State Department official Alger Hiss, suspected of espionage, was convicted of perjury. McCarthy, in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, mounted an attack on Truman's foreign policy agenda by charging that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. Although McCarthy displayed a list of names, he never made the list public. The President responded the following month in a news conference by charging that McCarthy's attacks were in effect sabotaging the nation's bipartisan foreign policy efforts and thus aiding the Soviet Union. The following texts--McCarthy's speech, a public letter from McCarthy to Truman two days later, and a transcript of the Truman press conference--reveal the paranoid atmosphere that prevailed in the political arena and affected public discourse and policy.

The War Labor Board (WLB) and its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board, had a profound impact on relations between employers and unions during World War II. The WLB--made up of representatives from government, labor, and management--provided protection for unions from hostile bosses, increased the wages of the lowest-paid workers, helped set industry-wide wage patterns, and established methods of resolving shop floor disputes. Although the WLB operated in routinized and bureaucratic ways, its decisions could also carry powerful ideological messages. That became clear in the following document, which insisted upon the policy of equal pay for equal work--a seemingly self-evident principle that was not standard practice in American industry. This board decision mandated equal pay for women.

Although Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, and sex, as of 2002, no Federal law prevents an employer from discrimination based on sexual orientation. With the advent of the gay liberation movement in 1969, grassroots and national groups fought for legal protection for gay men and lesbians in the workplace, educational institutions, and housing. In 1972, East Lansing, Michigan, became the first city to forbid discrimination in local government hiring based on sexual orientation. While more than 175 localities and 13 states have passed similar antidiscrimination legislation, opponents have successfully campaigned to stop or repeal such laws by arguing that they conferred "special rights" on gay men and lesbians. Colorado voters in a 1992 referendum adopted an amendment to their State Constitution to prohibit protection of persons based on their "homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships." Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that the Colorado amendment violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and President Bill Clinton issued an Executive Order in 1998 that explicitly prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation for Executive Branch civilian employment, gay and lesbian employees remain unprotected from discriminatory practices in many areas of the country. In the following testimony to a House subcommittee in 1994, five advocates for federal legislation presented arguments and personal accounts to demonstrate the need to establish, in the words of one of the witnesses, "the equal right to work in the U.S."

The Atlanta Compromise speech, which Booker T. Washington delivered before the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895, established Washington as the leading black spokesman in America. He came to control enormous amounts of northern white philanthropy directed at African Americans as well as much of the federal patronage dispensed to them by the Republican party. In this excerpt from his autobiography Up From Slavery, Washington described the reactions of both black and white Americans to his speech.

The years following World War I in the United States saw devastating race riots around the nation: in small cities like Elaine, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee as well as in larger ones such as Chicago, where a four-day riot in 1919 left two dozen African Americans dead and more than 300 injured. But the Tulsa race riot was perhaps the worst. In fact, white Tulsans' 24-hour rampage was one of the most vicious and intense race riots in American history before or since, resulting in the death of anywhere from 75 to 250 people and the burning of more than 1,000 black homes and businesses. Walter White, an official of the NAACP, traveled to Tulsa in disguise to survey the damage caused by the 1921 race riot. His report, one of many articles on the riot, was published in the Nation in the summer of 1921.

By mid-century, slavery had become the central, defining institution of southern cultural and economic life. As slavery became more entrenched in southern society, so too did the everyday resistance of African-Americans. Slaves resisted the regimen of work by feigning ignorance, breaking tools, or injuring animals. By forming communities and maintaining familial ties as best they could, slaves asserted their humanity in the face of the dehumanizing effects of bondage. Running away also remained an important form of resistance. This icon, or symbol, appeared on notices about fugitive slaves in the classified section of the Mobile, Alabama, Commercial Register in the 1830s.

America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. The federal government tried to monitor conditions inside the relocation camps and keep tabs on the feelings and attitudes of the internees. An interview conducted in the Manzanar, California, camp in July 1943 by a U.S. government employee with a man identified only as "an Older Nisei" (an American-born person whose parents were born in Japan) revealed the anger many internees felt toward the United States. Asserting his loyalty and his early willingness to support the war effort, the Older Nisei condemned the evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. He questioned why the government did not act similarly against citizens of German and Italian descent.

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. When the public learned in 1959 that a substantial number of shows had been rigged, a great many were offended. One survey, however, showed that quite a few viewers didn't care. Following the revelations, prime-time quiz shows went off the air, replaced in large part by series telefilms, many of which were Westerns. The industry successfully fended off calls for regulation, and by blaming sponsors and contracted producers, networks minimized damage and increased their control over programming decisions. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, a producer described one program's system of control over the seemingly spontaneous on-air contests. Several congressmen then aired their views on the ethics and effects of such deceptive television practices.

As the severity of the AIDS epidemic increased during the mid-1980s, the inadequacy of AIDS education and treatment came under assault from activists, many of whom were themselves infected with the disease. Michael Yantsos, who became infected with AIDS in prison in 1983, was one of those who spoke out when conditions at Rikers Island Prison Hospital in New York City became unbearable. In 1986, as prisoners were dying at the rate of one every two weeks from AIDS, Yantsos and his fellow inmates went on hunger strike to publicize the unsanitary conditions in the prison's AIDS ward, which included leaks, rodents, insects, and inadequate food and medical attention. The prisoners' efforts succeeding in publicizing the issue and winning some reforms in the ward's conditions.

Before the general public began to understand the health dangers of sunlight overexposure, a fair number of white Americans devoted much time and effort to acquiring a "perfect tan." The suntan craze began in the mid-1920s, as outdoor recreation became more popular among middle-class Americans. Marketers also promoted the practice--once convinced that suntanning was not just a fad--with products designed to assist the quest to be tan. The following 1949 editorial from the popular magazine Collier's offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of tanning, calling attention to peer group pressures of social conformity and competitiveness inherent in tanning rituals. Absent from the piece is any consideration of the racial aspects of such a practice, centered on darkening the color of one's skin, and performed, as it was, in a multiethnic, but white-dominated society.

Engraver Thomas Woodcock was born in Manchester, England in 1805 and emigrated to the United States in 1830. In 1836 he took a trip to Niagara Falls, traveling north from Manhattan up the Hudson river and west on the Erie Canal. Niagara Falls was a favorite destination for tourists in the 1830s, made possible in part by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. The trip was popularized by authors like Basil Hall, whose 1829 Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and '28 Woodcock mentions several times here. Woodcock's narrative is noteworthy less for his appreciation of the natural wonders of the falls than for his shrewd appraisal of business practices in western New York. This selection from his private journal begins on the Erie Canal with his trip from Schenectady to Utica by packet boat.

The availability of rail connections often determined whether a western community would survive or die. The rails fostered prosperity by bringing both goods and people. This trade, and the local service industries that sprouted up to capitalize on the movement of people and goods, drove many local economies. Here, David Hickman talked about the boom years that followed the arrival of the railroad in the Latah County, Idaho town of Genesee in the 1880s.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act attempted to raise disastrously low commodity prices by authorizing the federal government to pay farmers to raise fewer crops. These crop reduction subsidies enabled landlords to dispossess so many African-American tenants and share-croppers that the bill was often referred to sardonically as the Negro Removal Act." Despite such unintended consequences and other exclusions from New Deal programs

During the Civil War, when Union forces occupied the South Carolina sea islands of St. Helena and Port Royal, white slaveowners fled but their slaves remained. It was here, in October 1862, that Charlotte Forten arrived under the auspices of the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association to teach the newly liberated slaves. Forten (later Charlotte Forten Grimke) was born in Philadelphia in 1837 into a family of well-to-do, free blacks who were active in the abolitionist movement. Forten was a teacher and a writer, known today for her extensive diaries and her articles. An educated woman and a product of free black society, Forten hovered uneasily between the worlds of blacks and whites. In this article for a white audience she expressed her jubilation about the freedom her students were newly experiencing. She also revealed her ambivalence about these people who were similar to herself, yet at the same time so different.