The end of World War II unleashed a new "war" at home--a war that pitted workers against employers. The year following V-J day saw more strikes than any other twelve-month period in American history: 4,630 work stoppages involving 5 million strikers and 120 million days of lost work. One of the most revealing of the postwar confrontations between labor and capital came in the November 1945 strike by 320,000 autoworkers against the nation's largest corporation, General Motors. UAW leader Walter Reuther took a new and radical negotiating stance, arguing that GM could afford to increase wages without increasing prices. In the process, Reuther challenged what had been a fundamental corporate prerogative to set its own prices. GM sharply rejected his demand that they "open the books" and show why they couldn't afford both lower prices and higher wages. That confrontation was captured in this transcript from one of the negotiating sessions.

Relatively few Americans directly experienced trench warfare and poison gas, innovations that rendered war newly terrible and fearsome. One such participant was William L. Langer, later a historian of the war, Harvard professor, and president of the American Historical Association. Langer served as an engineer in Company E of the 1st Gas Regiment, Chemical Warfare Service, of the U.S. Army. In this taut account, from Gas and Flame in World War I, he described a harrowing mission to move supplies and munitions near enemy lines, in preparation for a machine gun and gas attack. Langer noted that his story was probably the first published by an American unit after the war; four hundred copies were printed for the members of the 1st Gas Regiment.

Most people have a clear stereotype of the urban political boss of the early 20th century, and in many ways Murray Hall, a leader of New York City's notorious "Tammany Hall," was its embodiment. Hall was known as a poker-playing, cigar-chomping, whiskey-drinking, "man about town." But in one significant way, Hall departed from the stereotype: she was actually a woman (by the name of Mary Anderson) who "passed" as a man for more than a quarter century. Tragically, Hall died of untreated breast cancer and her deception was only discovered at her death in 1901. "Passing" was a strategy that some lesbians (a term that was not in use at that time) used both to avoid public condemnation and to increase their earnings so that they could live independently. It could also be an assertion of political independence--Hall managed to vote and serve as a political leader in an era when women were denied the franchise.

The penetration of the railroads into the West in the late nineteenth century had a profound impact on local economies. For a period of ten years in the 1880s the Latah County, Idaho town of Genesee experienced this phenomenon. One town boomed while its neighbors languished in economic isolation, largely as a result of the rail station in Genesee. In this oral history interview, Kenneth Platt described the railroad's impact on Latah County.

Beginning in the mid-1760s, colonists began taking to the streets in Boston and other port cities. Crowds of artisans and laborers joined the elite in protesting British policies, although their differing points of view revealed the divisions within colonial society. Protests mounted in 1767 when Britain passed the Townsend Act, which included a series of unpopular taxes. In Boston, resentment and tension also grew over the presence of British troops, quartered in town to discourage demonstrations, who were also looking for jobs. A private seeking work at a ropemakers' establishment sparked a confrontation on Boston's King Street. When some in the crowd pelted the assembled British soldiers, the troops opened fire; five colonists were killed and six wounded. George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker, participated in many of the key events of the Revolutionary crisis. Over half a century later, Hewes told James Hawkes about his presence at the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

One of the most notable Indian warriors of the post-Civil War era was Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witko), a military leader of the Teton Sioux. In the aftermath of Custer's defeat by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn in June 1876, U.S. troops relentlessly pursued both Indian leaders. Crazy Horse was arrested in September, taken to Fort Robinson (in what is now northwestern Nebraska), and ultimately killed by a soldier, perhaps after the Indian warrior resisted being locked in a guardhouse. One of the many versions of Crazy Horse's death and secret burial can be heard in this interview with George Kills in Sight, which was done by Joseph Cash of the University of South Dakota in 1967 when Kills in Sight was in his seventies. Kills in Sight's family--his father's mother was Crazy Horse's cousin and learned about Crazy Horse from his grandfather, Big Crow--taught him to revere Crazy Horse as a heroic figure. Kills in Sight concludes by describing how his grandfather and others took the body and secretly buried it.

At the turn of the century the group of black women most subject to sexual exploitation and abuse were those who lived under the system of quasi-slavery known as "peonage."Under contract labor laws, which existed in almost every southern state, a laborer who signed a contract and then quit his or her job could be arrested. The horrors of this system of forced labor (as well as the equally horrific system of convict labor) are detailed in this stark, turn-of-the-century personal account of life under the "peonage" system in the South, published in the Independent magazine in 1904. Although this account by an African-American man did not focus especially on the sexual exploitation suffered by his wife and others, his report described how his wife was forced to become a mistress to the plantation's owner.

Between 1820 and 1860, 1,500,000 immigrants arrived in America from Germany. Many of the new arrivals who settled in cities such as New York worked as shopkeepers and skilled tradesmen, although many more worked as employees in construction, brewing, and manufacturing. Although German immigrants did not mix politics and liquor, reformers were disconcerted by the atmosphere of their social establishments. Unlike the bars in Irish neighborhoods, the beer gardens catered to whole families. As this 1859 engraving shows, public drinking was only one attraction at a beer garden; but to reformers the presence of women and children suggested immorality.

Women who settled the West in the years after the Civil War often faced harsh and unremitting toil. Laboring from well before dawn until well after the sun had set, women helped plant and harvest crops, raised large families, and kept house with the most rudimentary of equipment. Long periods of isolation from neighbors and kin were common; social occasions or visits by travelers and kin were rare and cherished events. Sarah Thal, a German Jew who immigrated to North Dakota in 1882, recalled that "getting mail was a big event" on their North Dakota farm and that when she looked out the window onto the flat prairie she was "still unable to realize the completeness of our isolation."

Labor organizer and newspaper editor Oscar Ameringer the "Mark Twain of American Socialism," as he was often called, was born in Bavaria in 1870 to a cabinetmaker father and a freethinking mother. In this excerpt from his autobiography, If You Don't Weaken, published in 1940, he discussed his decision to emigrate to America in 1885 as a fifteen-year-old "hellion." In America, Ameringer ultimately carved out a remarkable and colorful career as a musician, labor organizer, and especially, an editor of socialist and radical newspapers.

Department stores 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 short story, titled "The Frog and the Puddle," Ferber described the lonely life of a young sales girl in a Chicago department store and the attentions of a male neighbor, whom she meets unexpectedly one night in the boarding house in which both reside.

Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. Lynchings, often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. Lynching was especially prevalent in areas of low population density, recent increase in black population, and high rates of transiency, where strangers feared one another and whites judged legitimate law enforcement weak. As the following testimony by a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper reporter to a 1949 House subcommittee shows, acts of violence by vigilante groups in the South were directed not only toward blacks. The virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-foreigner Ku Klux Klan of the 20th century violently attempted to impose its code of morality on men, women, and children who violated their beliefs of community norms.

In the early 20th century, German Americans were the nation's largest immigrant group. Although they were regarded as a model of successful assimilation, they faced vicious--and sometimes violent--attacks on their loyalty when the United States went to war against Germany in 1917. The most notorious incident was the lynching of German-born Robert Prager in Colinsville, Illinois, in April 1918. Other incidents stopped just short of murder. In a statement made on October 22, 1918, John Deml, a farmer in Outagamie County, a heavily German and Scandinavian area of Wisconsin, described the nativist mob that had visited him two days earlier. Suspected of not strongly enough supporting the war effort, he was narrowly saved from lynching.

As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend overseas. In the spring and summer of 1919, murderous race riots erupted in 22 American cities and towns. Chicago experienced the most severe of these riots. On Sunday, July 27, white bathers attacked several black youths swimming near one of Lake Michigan's white beaches, resulting in the death of an African-American boy. Five days of intense racial violence followed, claiming the lives of 23 black and 15 white Chicagoans, with more than 500 others wounded and thousands of black and white citizens burned out of their homes. A plethora of news reports and editorials offered instant analysis and helped shape local and national attitudes. Like white newspapers, the city's leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, helped foment the escalating racial violence that gripped the city. An August 2 Defender article recounted the unsubstantiated beating of an "unidentified [black] woman" and her baby. On a daily basis, the black press rivaled the mainstream white press in its efforts to offer the most gruesome and sensational accounts of the riot.

In the 1890s, Charles Dana Gibson's magazine illustrations of fashionable young women gained wide popularity. The physical type he portrayed became the standard of beauty, a romantic ideal that suggested a new female independence while also celebrating the privileges and glamour of elite society. Within a few years, women who viewed Gibson's illustrations in magazines were more likely to work for wages. Growing opportunities for white collar work in stores and offices attracted white women who spoke English, although they were paid roughly half of what their male counterparts received and were often subjected to discrimination and harassment.

On the morning of October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday"), billions of dollars in stock value were wiped out before lunch. Prices recovered somewhat that afternoon, but the Great Crash was underway. The next day President Herbert Hoover counseled reassurance, but as stock prices continued to plummet Hoover's reassurances rang increasingly hollow. The president's efforts to reassure the public did not stop, in part for political reasons. To win reelection in 1932, he would have to convince voters that his policies were bringing recovery. In this excerpt from an October 22, 1932, campaign speech on "The Success of Recovery," Hoover told a partisan crowd of twenty-two thousand in Detroit's Olympia Arena that success would have come even sooner if not for Democratic obstruction. The Detroit faithful and radio audiences heard Hoover hail ten sure signs of "economic recovery." (Less enthusiastic were hundreds of unemployed men who greeted him at the train station with signs like "Hoover--Baloney and Apple Sauce.")

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. One of its most famous proponents was the author Horatio Alger, whose novels showed how poor boys could move from "rags to respectability" through "pluck and luck." Between the late 1860s and his death in 1899, Alger published more than 100 of these formulaic stories about poor boys who made good more often because of fortunate accidents than because of hard work and denial. Not all Americans, however, bought into this ideology of success. Mark Twain's 1879 short story, "Poor Little Stephen Girard," took satirical aim at the poor-boy-done-good theme that permeated dozens of Alger stories.

The first great American conservation movement was born during the Progressive Era out of the concern that industrial growth and urban development threatened to extinguish America's wilderness. The era's most controversial environmental issue was the five-year struggle over federal approval for the flooding of a remote corner of federally-owned land in California's Yosemite National Park to build the Hetch Hetchy dam. The city of San Francisco, rebuilding after the devastating 1906 earthquake, believed the dam was necessary to meet its burgeoning needs for reliable supplies of water and electricity. In their 1913 testimony before the House Committee on Public Lands, former San Francisco Mayor James Phelan and Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief Forester of the United States and the most noted conservationist of his generation, put the utilitarian needs of San Francisco's citizens above the aesthetic and moral advantages of leaving Yosemite a pristine wilderness. In the end Congress chose management over aesthetics, voting 43-25 (with 29 abstentions) to allow the Hetch Hetchy dam on federal land.

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 generally delighted in the "extra hour," but protests by farmers and other rural citizens brought the experiment to an end after only one year. Farmers, rural Americans, and those whose jobs forced them to work very early hours disliked the measure intensely. They bombarded Congress with petitions, letters, and angry telegrams demanding the return to "God's time." According to farmers, city dwellers who wanted more leisure in the afternoon could just show up for work an hour earlier and leave an hour earlier.

The American West's history of radical unionism at the turn of the century reflects the breadth of nineteenth-century class struggle. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, for example, violent conflict broke out in 1903 between members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and corporate mining interests determined to crush the union. Before it was over, thirty men were dead and the union was defeated. Though hostile to the Socialist-leaning WFM, American Federal of Labor leader Samuel Gompers issued the following June 20, 1904, statement in support of the striking miners at Cripple Creek.