On March 18, 1741, the first of a series of suspicious fires broke out in New York's Fort George. When a few weeks later a black man was seen running from the scene of one of these fires the cry went up: "The negroes are rising!" The extent of the plot, or even if there really was a plot, has never been absolutely proven. What is true is that the threat of a slave uprising was enough to send the city's white population into hysteria. Of the 181 people arrested during the "Great Negro Plot," 34 were sentenced to death and 72 were transported from New York. In this excerpt from the trials, several important witnesses provided evidence. Peggy was a white prostitute who lived in the home of John Hughson, a riverfront tavenkeeper and, like shoemaker John Romme, a receiver of stolen goods. Peggy's room was paid for by Caesar, a slave with whom she had a child. Today the trial transcripts are valuable for what they reveal about the shady, waterfront world shared by slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in 18th-century New York.

World War II was a period of economic and social advance for African Americans, and many who served overseas in the military, worked in defense industries, and listened to wartime propaganda about freedom became more assertive in their demands for equal rights. In 1942, Bayard Rustin, a pacifist whose expertise in non-violent protest would have a deep impact on the Civil Rights movement, helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The group, dedicated to non-violent direct action, was one of many rights groups that came to life during and immediately after the war. In 1947 Rustin led a group of whites and blacks on a "Journey of Reconciliation" to challenge racial segregation on inter-state buses. The willingness of Rustin and his companions to undergo arrest – at one point serving 30 days on a North Carolina chaingang – provided an important example for the more famous Freedom Rides of 1960.

This African-American family was photographed in 1862 after Union forces captured the Sea Island coastal area of South Carolina. One of four photographs taken by Timothy O'Sullivan of the J. J. Smith plantation, this picture was subsequently exhibited at Alexander Gardner's Washington, D.C., photography gallery in September 1863. In contrast to this Beaufort, South Carolina, family the history of the slave family was usually characterized by constant efforts by enslaved African Americans to maintain continuity in the face of forced break-ups and sales (exemplified in the naming of children to mark lineage).

During World War I, wartime inflation severely taxed the limited budgets of working-class families. Although wages also rose during the war, they could not keep up with prices. On February 20, 1917, after confronting pushcart peddlers who were charging exorbitant rates for necessities, thousands of women marched to New York's City Hall to demand relief. The food riot" precipitated a boycott campaign that eventually forced pushcart prices down. Women in Boston and Philadelphia took similar action."

On June 15, 1846, the United States and Britain signed a treaty dividing the Oregon Territory--which at that time stretched into British Columbia--at the forty-ninth parallel. The acquisition of Oregon, like the acquisition of Texas, was part of President Polk's program of territorial expansion. In 1847 the Illinois Journal, a newspaper based in Springfield, Illinois, decided to publish letters from former Illinoisans who had been tempted by the promise of Oregon and emigrated there. Readers curious about what life was like in the wild, northern territory got a mixed bag of reviews. While all the settlers agreed that the region was healthy, they had different views regarding its climate, soil, water, timber--and its overall capacity to provide permanent happiness to restless Americans. The newspaper's selections from these letters are included here.

The issue of protective legislation for women and mothers has divided reformers, labor unionists, legislators, courts, the military, and feminists since the end of the 19th century when a number of states passed statutes to limit women's work hours. At issue--equal treatment versus biological difference. During the Cold War era, this question informed the debate on the role of women in the military. Although the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 established a permanent presence for women in all branches of the armed forces, a new Army regulation in October 1949 required the discharge of female servicewomen with children under the age of 18. To guarantee passage of the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952, during the Korean War, a provision was dropped that would have reversed this regulation. Thus mothers of dependent children were ineligible to enlist in reserve units and were discharged after childbirth or adoption. In the following Congressional session, the Senate passed S. 1492, allowing the reinstatement of women with dependent children. The bill, however, died in the House Committee on Armed Services and failed to become law. In the following testimony to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, Mrs. Anna Gordon, a Reserve officer in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service--U.S. Navy Women's Reserve), emphasized that many mothers successfully combined motherhood and careers. She further argued that skilled, experienced women dedicated to military careers were too valuable for the nation to discard at a time of Cold War uncertainty. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

Few Anglos lived in San Antonio after the Texas Revolution of 1835-36 and Tejanos (Texas-Mexicans) continued their rule. Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was born into a prominent tejano family and had close ties with Stephen Austin, leader of the first American settlers in Texas. He became mayor or alcade at an early age and fought on the Anglo side with the coming of Texas' revolt against Mexico. However, his political situation increasingly became fragile because of the changing balance of power and Anglos' efforts to wrest control. When the Mexican General Vasquez captured San Antonio in 1842, he announced that Seguin held loyalties to Mexico and Seguin's enemies denounced him as a spy. Seguin fled to Mexico. Those Tejanos who remained in Texas often found their livestock and corn stolen; others had their land taken in disputes. After the Mexican War of 1846-48, Seguin returned north. The writing and publication of the Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin was part of his effort to set the story straight and appeal to Americans while also lashing out about the conflicted position of Mexican Texans.

Most historians who have written about the 1903 strike of Mexican and Japanese farm workers against the Oxnard, California, sugar beet growers have relied on John Murray's first-hand account of the strike and its aftermath. Murray, a socialist union organizer, went to Oxnard after learning of the strike through newspaper accounts of strike-related violence and rioting. Along with fellow union organizer Fred C. Wheeler, Murray assisted the farm workers' union, the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association (JMLA), in negotiations with the Western Agricultural Contracting Company, which contracted laborers for local sugar beet farmers. When the American Federation of Labor refused to grant a charter to the JMLA unless the union excluded all Asian workers, Murray wrote this article, "A Foretaste of the Orient," as both a chronicle of the strike and as a biting criticism of the AFL's refusal to accept Asian- and African-American workers as members.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born in slavery in Virginia around 1818 and purchased her freedom in 1855. In 1862 she was living in Washington DC and working as a skilled dressmaker; her principal client was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the president. Keckley sympathized with the former slaves, or "contraband," as they were called, who fled to the relative safety of Washington during the Civil War. The Contraband Relief Association, which Keckley founded and headed, gathered funds and clothing for the poor former slaves. Yet, as her rather condescending remarks make clear, Keckley felt superior to the people she helped. Keckley's memoir Behind the Scenes was published in 1868. The book included revelations about Mary Lincoln's private life, and, feeling betrayed, the former First Lady shunned Keckley. Her dressmaking business declined, and she died in poverty in 1907 at the Home for Destitute Women and Children in Washington, one of the institutions she had helped to found.

For workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in the 1890s, home was the company town of Pullman, Illinois, and rent was deducted from their wages. While owner George Pullman touted it as a model town, the men and women who labored there during the 1893 depression endured starvation wages, deplorable living and working conditions, and, worst of all, Pullman's paternalistic control over all aspects of their lives. Workers appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU), which organized a nationwide strike and boycott against Pullman. In this open letter in the Chicago Herald in June 1894, as the strike began, Pullman explained his motives for cutting wages during the economic depression of 1893.

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, George Milkulvich, an immigrant from the Croatian region of Dalmatia (along the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea), gave a straightforward explanation of what he was striking for--"better treatment."

During World War I, the United States fought a war of ideas with unprecedented ingenuity and organization. President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to manage news and solicit widespread support for the war at home and abroad. Under the energetic direction of Mississippi newspaper editor George Creel, the CPI churned out national propaganda through diverse media. Creel organized the "Four Minute Men," a virtual army of volunteers who gave brief speeches wherever they could get an audience--in movie theaters, churches, synagogues, and labor union, lodge, and grange halls. Creel claimed that his 75,000 amateur orators had delivered over 7.5 million speeches to more than 314 million people. CPI publications from the Four Minute Man crusade offered tips on developing and delivering a brief, effective speech--the predecessor to today's "sound bite." They also recognized diverse audiences, with reports of Yiddish speakers in theaters and workplaces, a Sioux Four Minute Man, and a speech called "The Meaning of America" delivered in seven languages.

Little Rosebud's Lovers was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a popular author of popular fiction. Between 1882 and 1902, she wrote more than 50 different serials for the story papers. She was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots. In this selection, the first chapter of Little Rosebud's Lovers, the heroine finds herself the unwitting object of desire of a wealthy Bostonian. The selection ends on a note of foreboding--in subsequent chapters Little Rosebud becomes homeless and impoverished before her inevitable redemption. What did women workers take away from their reading of the novels of Libbey and others? Historian Michael Denning has speculated that these stories were "an interruption in the present, a magical fairy tale transformation of familiar landscapes and characters, a death and rebirth that turned the social world upside down, making proud ladies [into] villains, and working-girls [into] ladies."

Soon after passage of the Fugitive-Slave Law, Margaret Garner fled from her Kentucky master with her four children. Slave patrollers followed her to Ohio. Faced with capture, Garner killed two of her children rather than have them return to slavery. The surviving children were taken from her and, on the return trip to Kentucky, Garner drowned herself in the Ohio River. Her story inspired an acclaimed nineteenth-century painting by Thomas S. Noble (on which this engraving was based) and Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize novel, Beloved.

Frenchman Louis Daguerre's improvements in photography reached America in the 1840s. Personal portraits were soon the craze, and daguerreotype' studios sprang up in every city, while traveling daguerreotypists served the countryside. This picture presents the controlled environment of the early studios. It took so long to properly expose a photographic plate that the subject needed a head brace to hold a pose.

Davis Waite, the Populist and pro-labor governor of Colorado, won national notoriety in the summer of 1893 after he declared that if change would not come peacefully, it was "better, infinitely better that blood should flow to the horses' bridles than our national liberties should be destroyed." A Republican-controlled lower house blocked many of Waite's initiatives, but he was nonetheless able to use his administrative powers to support workers. In the Cripple Creek strike of 1894, he brought in state troops on behalf of the striking miners--a rare use of state police power in an era when troops were routinely employed to break strikes. When opponents charged Waite's administration with partisanship, he replied defiantly: "Well, what if it is? Is it not the truth that for thirty years the two old parties have been legislating for the creditor class? It is true, and turn about is fair play."

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this autobiography, a twenty-year-old college "boy" from an immigrant Jewish family described his changing tastes in movies.

College education was rare in colonial America, mostly intended for young men entering the ministry. Artisans learned the skills and secrets of their trade through an apprenticeship to a master as Benjamin Franklin related in this excerpt about his education as a craftsman from his famous autobiography. After their service they became journeymen, hired for a time while they saved to open a workshop of their own. Franklin's father, with seventeen children, had to plan carefully in order to secure a niche for his youngest child, Benjamin. Printers stood near the top of the mechanical arts because the trade required literacy. Printers, clustered in the port cities, often formed a network of interrelated families; Benjamin's brother James was a master before him. Benjamin quickly learned the printing trade and ventured out into independent activities. Armed with his valuable training and a penchant for independence, he never finished his term of service and instead moved on to ply his trade in Philadelphia and London.

An unknown photographer captured this scene of men, women, and children picking cotton under the watchful eye of an overseer. Slaves on cotton plantations worked under harsh conditions. The working day began at dawn and often lasted well into the night. Work was done in gangs, where discipline and the unrelenting pace of work was enforced by a driver or overseer. Whipping was regularly used to enforce picking quotas or increase the pace of work. In what little time they had besides what they spent working for the master, slaves had to do all the chores of daily life: they prepared their own meals, washed and fed their children, cleaned their cabins, washed and mended their clothes, and, if they were especially fortunate, tended their own vegetable gardens.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this excerpt from Blumer's study, the sociologist collected together comments from young people describing how the movies led to dissatisfaction with their lives and conflicts with their parents.