In 1915, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) established a branch union, the Agricultural Workers' Organization (AWO). The AWO organized temporary harvesters, known as "harvest stiffs," in railroad yards, migrant camps, and shelters. At its height in 1917 the AWO had more than 70,000 members, but like the IWW it was undermined by President Woodrow Wilson's wartime attack on dissent and by local vigilante organizations. The AWO, like its parent organization, used folksongs, stories, and poetry to spread its message to migrants. One such song, "Harvest Land," by "TD and H," first appeared in the Little Red Songbook, a free booklet that IWW members regularly distributed to organizers and workers. Like most IWW songs, it set satirical lyrics to popular or traditional tunes, in this case "Beulah Land." "Harvest Land" attacked "John Farmer" for recruiting laborers with false promises, and it urged workers to withhold their labor until they received better wages.

Anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman's foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. McCarthy's apocalyptic rhetoric made critics hesitate before challenging him. Those accused by McCarthy faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. After the 1952 election, in which the Republican Party won control of Congress, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy then extended his targets to include numerous government agencies, in addition to the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, and the United Nations. After Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens, refused to intercede to halt an overseas assignment for McCarthy's chief consultant, G. David Schine, who had been drafted, McCarthy's committee began a two-month investigation of the Army. Viewers saw the following dramatic encounters televised live as they occurred between McCarthy, Special Counsel for the Army Joseph N. Welch, Counselor for the Army John G. Adams, and the subcommittee's chief counsel, Roy Cohn. Although McCarthy's power declined sharply following the hearings and the Senate voted to condemn him a few months later, scholars disagree on whether McCarthy's appearance before a mass television audience caused his fall. Historians do, however, credit ABC-TV's decision to broadcast the hearings live, the only one to do so, with the network's rise to prominence.

Pressures for abolition of slavery increased in the Revolutionary era; five northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804. Pennsylvania was the first in 1780 when its legislature passed a gradual abolition bill. However, no one was actually freed; all those enslaved when the law went into effect remained enslaved, and all those born after that date were required to provide their mothers' masters with twenty-eight years of servitude before they could obtain their freedom. Despite the law's extreme gradualism, the following year a more conservative legislature attempted to repeal it. Newly freed African Americans petitioned the Assembly to reject such a move. Cato, newly freed with his children, wrote to Philadelphia's Freeman's Journal, an African-American newspaper, in 1781, making his case by using the legislature's own words about the promise of universal civilization while adding his own views of the meaning of the Revolution. The legislature voted against repealing the gradual abolition act.

The Chicago radicals convicted of the infamous May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in which one policeman was killed remained openly defiant to the end. In his final letter to his wife, written August 20, 1886 from the Cook County "Bastille" (jail), convicted Haymarket bombing participant Albert R. Parsons, an Alabama-born printer, admitted that the verdict would cheer "the hearts of tyrants," but still optimistically predicted that "our doom to death is the handwriting on the wall, foretelling the downfall of hate, malice, hypocrisy, judicial murder, oppression, and the domination of man over his fellow-man."

The Chicago radicals convicted of the infamous May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in which one policeman was killed remained openly defiant to the end. Twenty-one-year-old German-born Carpenter Louis Lingg enthusiastically embraced the principles of anarchism and the violence he thought necessary to emancipate the working class in his final address before the court that convicted him of participating in the bombing.

The entry of Europeans into the Indian's world caused a series of dislocations through disease, trade, and warfare. Indian leaders, who encountered new diplomatic and trading partners, found themselves caught between a familiar old and an unsettling new world. John Lawson, employed by Carolina's proprietor to explore the colony's backcounry and aspiring to a career as a natural scientist, spent months traveling through the Carolina interior in the company of colonists and Indians. This excerpt from Lawson's published account of the trip describes the final leg of the journey, when Lawson relied on Enoe Will, the chief of the Eno-Shakori. Will was a well known and trusted guide among colonial traders. He confided to Lawson that he feared he had alienated some of his own people, and now sought European protection. But Will remained close to his native religion and roundly rejected Lawson's offer of conversion to Christianity.

The Haymarket Affair, as it is known today, began on May 1, 1886 when a labor protester threw a bomb at police, killing one officer, and ended with the arrest of eight anarchist leaders, three of whom were executed and none of whom was ever linked to the bombing. Some labor organizations saw the executed men as martyrs and tried to rally support but in the end, the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists not only emboldened capitalists, it undercut labor unity. Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly was desperate to distance his organization from the accused anarchists and maintain the order's respectability. In this excerpt from his 1890 autobiography Powderly explained his decision three years earlier to keep mainstream labor out of the furor that surrounded the Haymarket Affair.

The rise to prominence in the 1930s of legendary black sports figures--the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and the Olympic track and field star Jesse Owens--challenged the barriers that separated white and black American athletes and their fans. Louis's boxing prowess had excited black fans as early as 1934, and he quickly worked his way through the heavyweight ranks, dispatching white and black opponents alike with brutal efficiency. Louis's one defeat before attaining the title came at the hands of the German fighter and ex-champion Max Schmeling, who knocked Louis out in twelve rounds at Yankee Stadium in 1936. Two years later, Louis faced Schmeling in a rematch, this time not only with the championship belt on the line but bragging rights among nations lurching toward war. Louis knocked out Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds of the first round. The radio announcer's call of the fight, including the knockout punch, conveyed the drama, as did a postfight radio interview with the Champ.

This recorded section of Russell Conwell's popular lecture "Acres of Diamonds" comes from a 1916 record. To modern listeners, Conwell's monotone might seem considerably less compelling than it apparently was to his own contemporaries. Still, his message that it was easy to get rich quick remains a familiar one. (Click here for a text excerpt of another portion of this lecture.)

The 1912 presidential election offered American voters a choice between a conservative and generally unpopular Republican incumbent (William Howard Taft), a moderate governor who won the heavily contested Democratic nomination (Woodrow Wilson), third party candidate former President Theodore Roosevelt, and a Socialist Party candidate running for the fourth time (Eugene V. Debs). Angered over what he felt was a betrayal of his policies by Taft, his hand-picked successor, Roosevelt and others abandoned the Republican party and founded the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. Voter interest, already piqued by the unusual campaign and the candidates' slashing attacks on one another, was further heightened by the availability of sound recordings of campaign addresses and, for the first time, film footage of the candidates on the campaign trail. In this recorded speech, entitled "The Liberty of the People," Roosevelt took the most openly pro-labor stance of the three major candidates. When the voters went to the polls in November, however, Wilson was the clear victor.

In the 1912 presidential election, Republican incumbent William Howard Taft faced not one but three opponents: moderate Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt leading the breakaway Bull Moose party, and Socialist Party stalwart Eugene Debs, running for the fourth time. Voter interest, already piqued by the unusual campaign and the candidates' slashing attacks on one another, was further heightened by the availability of sound recordings of campaign addresses. Though his administration had adopted some anti-trust policies, Taft generally embraced a non-interventionist approach to the problems that plagued American society in 1912. When asked by reporters in 1912 how he would relieve the nation's severe unemployment, Taft replied, "God knows," a position not calculated to win over many working-class voters. Taft's attitudes were well captured in this recorded selection from one of his campaign speeches, entitled "On Popular Unrest" (which was recorded in a studio on wax cylinder). When the votes were tallied, Taft placed a distant third behind Wilson and Roosevelt.

The 1912 presidential election featured four candidates: Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt representing the breakaway Bull Moose party, and Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs, who was making his fourth run for President. All four presidential candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, who proved pivotal to the outcome. Voter interest, already piqued by the unusual campaign and the candidates' slashing attacks on one another, was further heightened by the availability of sound recordings of campaign addresses and, for the first time, film footage of the candidates on the campaign trail. In this campaign speech, Wilson argued against a minimum wage for women workers and called for the end of business monopolies. Wilson was the eventual winner, with over six million popular and 435 electoral votes.

Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust (found in sand, quartz, and granite), became a national cause clbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. While silicosis was a crisis for the federal government, business, and insurance companies as well as labor organizations, its most devastating effects were on the workers who contracted the disease and the families and communities who watched previously healthy men waste away and die. The lasting impact that the silicosis "plague" had on individual workers' lives in the 1930s is evident here in Laurie Mercier's 1981 interview with Helen Raymond, who opened a tavern that catered to miners in Virginia City, Montana, in 1934.

In 1918 and 1919, the Spanish influenza killed 550,000 people in the United States and 20 to 40 million worldwide. In a 1982 interview with Laurie Mercier, Loretta Jarussi of Bearcreek, Montana, described how people would pass through that tiny town seemingly healthy, only to be reported dead two days later. Her father went undiagnosed for many weeks and had plans to go to a nearby hot springs to rest. She believed that her father's death was averted only because the son of the local doctor was an army doctor who recognized flu symptoms that others missed.

When the United Automobile Workers won a six week sit-down strike in 1937 against General Motors, the largest corporation in the United States, a fever of organization and a sense of empowerment spread throughout working-class communities in the Northeast and Midwest. That year, 5 million workers took part in some kind of industrial action, and nearly 3 million joined a union. Denys Wortman's cartoon in the March 25, 1937 New York World-Telegram captures the excitement and sense of power felt by many working men and working women when they participated in militant labor action.

During World War II, a dozen female broadcasters, collectively dubbed "Tokyo Rose" by U.S. troops, provided a diversion from the horrors of war. Set up by the Japanese military and using the powerful signal of Radio Tokyo, these Tokyo Roses were on the air nightly, broadcasting English-language shows designed to make American soldiers and sailors nostalgic and homesick. One such Tokyo Rose, U.S. citizen Iva Ikuki Toguri D'Aquino, described her August 14, 1944, broadcast as "sweet propaganda" and played tunes whose titles (for example, "My Resistance Is Low") were designed to demoralize her listeners. Although some soldiers and sailors may have felt the occasional twinge of homesickness while listening to Tokyo Rose's broadcasts, most simply ignored the propaganda and insults while hoping to hear their favorite popular songs.

The vision of a "New South" was heralded by southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors in the decades following the Confederacy's defeat in 1865 and the abolition of racial slavery across the South. These "New South" boosters argued that, with its plantation economy destroyed by the Civil War and Reconstruction, the South would develop a new economy more attuned to the industrial capitalism that defined the rest of the American economy. Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady was the leading exponent of a "New South" based on industrial development, giving speeches throughout the country and writing articles and editorials in his newspaper. Both of the following speeches by Grady--one given in Boston in 1889, the other in New York in 1886--conveyed not only the message of industrialization as a panacea, but also Grady's fierce regional pride and his general moderation on racial issues, which were becoming increasingly contentious in these years.

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. In this 1891 speech to the National Council of Women, African-American abolitionist, lecturer, and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper answered the racist charges of white suffragists who saw the vote for (white) women as a way to maintain white supremacy. The vote for African-Americans, both men and women, Harper argued, was a matter of "justice, simple justice."

Huey Long first came to national attention as governor of Louisiana in 1928 and U.S. Senator in 1930. In 1934 Long organized his own, alternative political organization, the Share-Our-Wealth Society, through which he advocated a populist program for redistributing wealth through sharply graduated income and inheritance taxes. Long also garnered attention with his story-telling, his jokes, and his quick wit. He embraced the nickname "Kingfish" from a clownish character on the popular Amos and Andy radio show. He also adopted the slogan "Every Man a King, But No One Wears a Crown," from a speech by the great populist speaker William Jennings Bryan, then popularized it by writing a song, "Every Man a King," and singing it over the radio and on newsreels. Not everyone was captivated by Long's oratory, humor, or singing, however. Hodding Carter, the liberal editor of the Daily Courier in Hammond, Louisiana, repeatedly warned against Long's corruption and demagoguery.

During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by women workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that women employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. It did not, however, prevent companies from hiring only men for higher paying jobs. The following year, Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment, but did not include educational institutions. The following testimony to a Congressional hearing in 1970 emphasized the need to extend sex discrimination legislation to the academic world. In 1972, Congress passed the Higher Education Act. Title IX of this Act forbade federal financial assistance to educational institutions that practiced sex discrimination.