In 1870, the Boston firm of Louis Prang and Company published a chromolithograph (an inexpensive type of color print) portrait of the first African-American United States senator. One prominent admirer of the portrait was Frederick Douglass: "Whatever may be the prejudices of those who may look upon it," he wrote to Prang, "they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi senator is a man, and one who will easily pass for a man among men. We colored men so often see ourselves described and painted as monkeys, that we think it a great piece of good fortune to find an exception to this general rule."

In the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket bombing Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly was desperate to distance his organization from the accused anarchists and maintain the order's respectability. The day after the bombing he stated that it was the duty of every organization of working men in America to condemn the outrage committed in Chicago in the name of labor. Though there were exceptions, most assemblies of the Knights followed Powderly's lead. Albert Parsons, a long-time member of the Knights and one of the Haymarket defendants, viewed Powderly's lack of support with bitterness and wrote the following letter from jail on his tenth anniversary of joining the Knights, July 4, 1886.

Even before the United States entered World War I, some young men signed up with the volunteer ambulance corps, which recruited college students and recent graduates to serve on the French and Italian fronts. Among them were such later famous writers as e. e. cummings, Dashiell Hammett, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway. Not surprisingly, many of these former ambulance drivers later wrote about their experiences in memoirs and novels. In this passage, from a book-length memoir, Robert Whitney Imbrie wrote in a humorous vein of the bond of affection and loyalty between an ambulance driver and his car.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted young people and local leaders to register and encourage southern African-Americans to vote during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. Because the young organizers faced tremendous risks by challenging segregation and encouraging people to vote, the group earned a reputation as the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights Movement. Hollis Watkins joined SNCC in the early 1960's and canvassed potential voters in the area of McComb, Mississippi. He also participated in direct actions, for which he served time in jail. Watkins remembered the risks SNCC organizers faced when working alone and in pairs, and the support they received from the African-American community.

This illustration from the widely-circulated 1950 book How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, which designated "appropriate" civil-defense jobs for men and women, reflected the contemporary labor market. While more women worked outside the home, they were largely confined to a female job ghetto, where wages were low, and prestige and opportunities for career advancement limited. Their subordination in the labor market coincided with a new postwar sexual ideology marked by rigidly defined gender roles that emphasized women's submissiveness and confinement to housework.

Many working people responded to industrial capitalism with strategies that were neither purely individualistic nor collective. On the one hand, the quest for home ownership, which absorbed so many working-class families, was an individual--or family-based--effort. On the other hand, working people often employed their own community-based institutions such as savings and loan associations to achieve the goal of owning their own homes. Outsiders, like the authors of this 1889 Pennsylvania government report on building and loans associations, might celebrate the ways that these associations served as an "antidote against anarchism." But for working people themselves, the building and loan associations were simply vehicles for attaining independence and security.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. In the late 1930s writers employed by the Federal Writers Project in Texas interviewed more than 400 cowboys, providing some of the only firsthand sources about late 19th-century cowboys. In this interview, cowboy Richard Phillips offered a firsthand glimpse of the hard life that awaited the men who trailed cattle to market.

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. The tale of Frank Courtney's lucky break in The World Before Him (1880) was typical of these stories. In this selection, young Frank grabs the proverbial golden ring of success less by pluck than by sheer luck.

The canteen girl stood as symbol of American volunteerism and femininity in World War I. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. In Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl, Kathleen Morse described the challenges of dispensing hot chocolate and planning entertainments with sparse supplies. At the same time, her letters revealed the less tangible work of the canteen girls: to boost morale by providing reminders of the comforts of home and by representing the sweethearts, sisters, and mothers left behind.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." Women's magazines also took up the home conservation crusade, some employing military analogies to promote the recommendations of the Food Administration. Presenting domestic work as patriotic effort, this U.S. Food Administration campaign in Good Housekeeping offered women a membership shield and even provided instructions for sewing a "patriotic" housekeeping uniform.

In this article, written 24 years after the war for the children's magazine St. Nicholas, former Harper's Weekly sketch-artist Theodore R. Davis recollects the hazardous and inventive ways that pictorial journalists reported the Civil War. While photography was still in its infancy--unable yet to capture action or to be cheaply reproduced in periodicals or books--artists' battlefront sketches were the public's primary source of visual news of the war's people, places and events. Davis, who was 21 at the start of the war, was typical of this new type of reporter, recording direct observations or collected stories in rough sketches and notes that were dispatched to newspaper offices in New York where they were made into wood engravings and printed as illustrations in publications such as Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and the New York Illustrated News (the South had no comparable pictorial news resource).

The Appeal to Reason was the most popular radical publication in American history. This socialist newspaper, whose founding in 1895 predated the creation of the Socialist Party in 1901, reached a paid circulation of more than three-quarters of a million people by 1913. During political campaigns and crises, it often sold more than four million individual copies. From its headquarters in Girard, Kansas, the Appeal published an eclectic mix of news (particularly of strikes and political campaigns), essays, poetry, fiction, humor, and cartoons. During and after World War I, the paper declined in circulation because of the deaths and departures of key editorial figures, the declining fortunes of the Socialist Party, and the repression of U.S. radicalism. It ceased publishication in November 1922. These snippets of working-class humor and human drama were compiled for the December 23, 1911, issue.

When AIDS struck the gay community during the early 1980's, many who had not previously consider themselves activists, like Bruce Priebe, became politically active. Militancy, political action, and demands for rights and recognition within the gay and lesbian community had been building throughout the post-war period. While many homosexual men and women first expressed their sexuality during World War II, a period of relative, albeit silent, tolerance, the movement for gay rights became more assertive following the 1969 Stonewall Riot, when New York City police raided a gay club. The burst of community health activism in response to the AIDS epidemic built on these earlier expressions of "gay pride" and activism.

Four million workers—one fifth of the nation's workforce—went out on strike in 1919, seeking to consolidate and expand the gains they had achieved during World War I and to make real the war's rhetoric of democracy. The most important of these strikes began in September, when 350,000 steel workers walked off the job. Steel companies responded with a reign of terror, aided by local governments. Strikers were beaten, arrested, shot, and driven out of steel towns. Management brought in African-American and Mexican-American strikebreakers to split workers along racial and ethnic lines and tried to portray the conflict as an attempted revolution by foreign-born radicals. Eventually, the strike was broken. This strike ballot distributed by the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers—printed in English, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Polish—indicated the range of nationalities composing the industry's workforce in 1919.

During World War II, Chinese Americans, who had often been lumped together with other Asians and even called Japs

Huey Long, elected Governor of Louisiana in 1928 and U.S. Senator in 1930, ruled Louisiana as a virtual dictator, but he also initiated massive public works programs, improved public education and public health, and even established some restrictions on corporate power in the state. While Long was an early supporter of President Roosevelt, by the fall of 1933 the Long-Roosevelt alliance had ruptured, in part over Long's growing interest in running for president. 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. Hodding Carter, the liberal editor of the Daily Courier in his hometown of Hammond, Louisiana, however, repeatedly warned against Long's corruption and demagoguery. When the New Republic published an attack on Long by Carter, it also ran this strong defense by one of Long's closest associates, Gerald L. K. Smith.

The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, China during September 1995. The conference, which called for gender equality, development, and peace, grew out of the international women's movement and marked the end of the official United Nations decade of Women. For women like May Chen, Vice President of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), the conference was an opportunity to share their activist experiences and learn about issues confronting women around the world, including political and domestic violence against women and families, economic and cultural marginalization, and unfair labor practices. Chen, a long-time activist in the Asian-American community, relished the opportunity to meet and learn from well-prepared women who insisted that women's rights – and worker's rights – were human rights.

In the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans were eager to acquire the Mexican land of California and New Mexico, enough to provoke a war with Mexico. In 1845 U.S. President James K. Polk sent envoys who offered to buy Mexican territory and stationed federal troops in the border areas. Naval forces patrolled the Gulf coast and American consuls in California stirred up annexation fever. When the presence of those troops brought an anti-American government to power in Mexico in 1846, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor and his troops to the Rio Grande and declared war. Taylor pursued retreating Mexican forces 100 miles into Mexico to the heavily fortified city of Monterrey. New Englander Samuel Chamberlain was eager to do battle against the Mexicans and expand the American empire. This excerpt from his illustrated manuscript, "My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue," described his participation in the fierce house-to-house battle for Monterrey in September 1846.

Angered by the effect of the British naval blockade on cotton prices and British support for Indian attacks against white frontier settlers, farmers in the South and West strongly supported the War of 1812. The war ended two years later with few issues settled between the two nations. The most significant battle took place after the peace treaty was signed in 1814, when General Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder, decisively defeated the British forces at New Orleans. This resounding victory made him a national hero and symbol of frontier fighters and earned him the nickname "Old Hickory." Although he secured victory using regular troops armed with artillery power, ten years later Samuel Woodward celebrated the role of sharpshooters armed with Kentucky long rifles in his song "The Hunters of Kentucky." This immensely popular song, filled with images of Old Hickory and his men overwhelming the well-trained army of John Bull (a symbol of Britain), became an effective element in Jackson's successful 1828 campaign for president.

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war, thousands of Americans enlisted in the U.S. armed forces. Among them was twenty-year-old Bronx resident Ben Hurwitz. Like many of the men and women who entered military service, Hurwitz (who changed his name to Brown after the war) kept a record of his experiences. But his "journal" was a sketchpad, and, during his two years in North Africa and Italy, Corporal Hurwitz drew and painted at every opportunity. Hurwitz's pictures are accompanied by the artist's commentary transcribed by historian Joshua Brown in November 1996. Sketches used with permission of Eleanor A. Brown.