Improved birth control was one crucial element in women's exercise of sexual freedom. Though people had practiced methods of fertility control for hundreds of years, the 20th century saw the advent of more reliable technologies that allowed a sharper separation between sex and reproduction. Before World War I, birth control advocates confronted a large and often hostile audience of opponents. By the 1920s, though, changing sexual ideologies made such ideas more widely acceptable. The major figure in the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, began her crusade as a militant radical whose birth control agitation grew out of her nursing experience in working-class communities. Sanger received 250,000 letters from women asking for advice about birth control. In 1928 Sanger published a selection of the letters in her book Motherhood in Bondage. The letters remain a powerful testament to the vulnerability of women without access to reliable contraception.

In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act making it illegal to support the overthrow of state or national governments. In 1949, 11 Communist Party leaders were convicted under this Act. The attorneys for the accused were themselves convicted of contempt of court and half served prison terms. Subsequently, most lawyers refused to represent suspected Communists unless they themselves were members of the Communist Party. In the following testimony before a House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearing investigating Communist activities in the San Francisco area, radical attorney Robert E. Treuhaft (1912-2001) described his unsuccessful attempts to hire respected lawyers--who privately disapproved of HUAC--to represent him. Treuhaft, an Oakland-based lawyer who had represented labor unions and African-Americans deprived of civil rights, had joined the Communist Party in the 1940s. Subsequently, he became the unpaid counsel for the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a trust fund that supplied bail money for Communists arrested under the Smith Act. The Justice Department included the CRC on their official list of subversive organizations, and following his appearance before HUAC, the Committee listed Treuhaft among the 39 most dangerous subversive lawyers in their pamphlet, "Communist Legal Subversives: The Role of the Communist Lawyer." Jessica Mitford, Treihaft's wife, wrote in her memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, that the San Francisco HUAC hearing targeted did serious damage "in destroying livelihoods and muzzling political dissent at the grass-roots level."

The reasons immigrants had for leaving their homelands and coming to America were as diverse as the backgrounds of the immigrants themselves. Although most immigrants came to the United States for economic reasons some sought a new home because of persecution based on their politics, religious beliefs, or even their sexual orientation. In this 1882 letter sent to medical writer and sexologist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a thirty-eight-year-old German-born merchant explained how a homosexual arrest in his homeland forced him to emigrate to the United States.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. Machines offered salvation through technology; scientific housework promised satisfaction through systematic and efficient methods. But middle-class wives themselves voiced a discontent that could not be addressed through new purchases or better systems. In 1923, Woman's Home Companion solicited readers' letters for a series that offered the magazine as a clearinghouse for women's household problems and solutions. In response, nearly two thousand women wrote letters to the magazine. Skeptical of the solutions afforded by washing machines and efficiency methods, many of them called for cooperative housekeeping, paid work, help from children and husbands, and equality in marriage--solutions not contemplated by the enthusiasts of either scientific housekeeping or the new household technology.

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. Unlike the other seven men convicted of the bombing, Oscar Neebe, a New York-born labor organizer who had been raised in Germany, received not death, but a fifteen-year jail sentence. Although Neebe insisted (accurately) that "there is no evidence"that he had connection with the bombing, he maintained, in this brief address, his solidarity with his comrades. "Your honor," he told the judge, "I am sorry I am not to be hung with the rest of them."

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was preceded by two other significant speeches. The subject under debate was the currency plank in the Democratic platform. The majority of members of the resolutions committee had endorsed the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) In the ensuing debate, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina spoke for the majority, framing the silver issue as a sectional one. His disastrous performance dashed his hopes to be the silverite candidate for the U.S. presidency. The speakers for the minority position, including Senator David Bennett Hill of New York--whose speech is excerpted here--defended President Cleveland and the gold standard.

Realizing that their best chance of emancipation lay with the British army, as many as 100,000 enslaved African Americans became Loyalists during the War for Independence. They risked possible resale by the British or capture by the Americans, and many became refugees when the British withdrew at the end of the war. Born near Charleston, South Carolina, Boston King fled his owner to join the British. He escaped captivity several times and made his way to New York, the last American port to be evacuated by the British. King was listed in the "Book of Negroes" and issued a certificate of freedom, allowing him to board one of the military transport ships bound for the free black settlements in Nova Scotia. There, King worked as a carpenter and became a Methodist minister. He moved to Sierra Leone in 1792 and published his memoirs, one of a handful of first-person accounts by African-American Loyalist refugees.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century Mohegan Indians had lost vast amounts of their land to the English colonists. They found it hard to continue with their traditional tribal economy; some turned to alcohol for escape and others found an answer in Christianity. Evangelical ministers converted Mohegan Samsom Occom to Christianity during the Great Awakening in the late 1730s and 1740s. He attended the Reverend Eleazer Wheelock's school and trained as a missionary and teacher for his people, first in New London, Connecticut, and then moving to Montauk on Long Island as an ordained Presbyterian minister. Occom composed a short autobiography where he described the difficulties of making a living, his experience as an Indian minister, and his poor treatment at the hands of the religious establishment.

In 1840, Unitarian minister George Ripley wrote to the Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson in an (unsuccessful) effort to convince him to join, or at least invest in, his planned utopian community, Brook Farm. Founders of antebellum utopian communities attempted to withdraw from what they saw as the hypocrisies and excesses of partisan politics, the inequities inherent in marriage and factory work, the evils of the slave system, and the corruption of cities and to create, in small scale, a more perfect place. Brook Farm began operations in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Brook farmers lived and dined communally, and divided their time between farm work and artistic and scholarly pursuits. Although other utopian communities, such as Oneida in upstate New York, and Amana, in Iowa, achieved self-sufficiency, Brook Farm ultimately failed. The community never recovered from a devastating fire in 1846, and it closed its doors in 1847.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings in 1947 on Communist activity in Hollywood. Ten writers and directors were held in contempt when they refused to answer questions regarding their political affiliations or beliefs. They later served prison terms after the Supreme Court in April 1950 turned down their appeal that such questioning violated their First Amendment rights. Hearings began again in March 1951, While almost half of those testifying from the entertainment industry informed on their colleagues, others like playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman invoked the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. This route insured that they would not be hired for future work in the industry. In the following letter to HUAC's chairman, Hellman offered to testify as to her own activities if she would not be forced to inform on others. When the Committee refused her request, she took the Fifth and was blacklisted.

James Meredith (b. 1933) served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1960, then attended Jackson State College in Mississippi. Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith applied to the all-white University of Mississippi believing, as he later wrote, that he had "Divine Responsibility to break White Supremacy in Mississippi." After his application was denied, he sued the university with legal help from the NAACP. In June 1962, a Federal court ruled that the school must admit Meredith. Although accompanied by Federal officials, Meredith encountered repeated resistance in his efforts to register from Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. In a move modeled on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's response to the similar situation in Little Rock, Arkansas, six years earlier, Kennedy sent Army troops to quell mob violence that had resulted in two deaths. In the following Look magazine article, Meredith assessed the situation at "Ole Miss" following his first semester and expressed the view that all African Americans had a responsibility "to do their part to bring about the changes necessary to equalize opportunity."

The women's movement of the 1970's had a far-reaching impact that was felt in every recess of American society. Working class women began to enter non-traditional jobs in trades and craft unions, and lesbians found a larger community in which to express their sexuality. In both cases, women faced resistance and sometimes violence as they charted new gender territory. Faith Robinson, one of those brave enough to break the gender barrier in the predominantly male telephone technician field, was also a lesbian – she faced a particularly difficult challenge. Robinson remembered one incident in 1979 in which anti-gay talk escalated to violence on the job site.

Fannie Lou Hamer, the last of 20 children and a Mississippi tenant farmer, leapt to national prominence during the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when she eloquently challenged Mississippi's segregated Democratic primary on national television. In 1962, she had become a leader of the African-American voting rights movement in Mississippi that culminated in 1964's Freedom Summer. Forced off her land when her landlord demanded that she take her name off the voter registration list, Hamer was repeatedly jailed and beaten during her voting rights activities. "The only thing they could do to me was kill me," Hamer said, "and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember."

By 1915, Americans began debating the need for military and economic preparations for war. Strong opposition to "preparedness" came from isolationists, socialists, pacifists, many Protestant ministers, German Americans, and Irish Americans (who were hostile to Britain). One of the hit songs of 1915, "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier," by lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi, captured widespread American skepticism about joining in the European war. Meanwhile, interventionists and militarists like former president Theodore Roosevelt beat the drums for preparedness. Roosevelt's retort to the popularity of the antiwar song was that it should be accompanied by the tune "I Didn't Raise My Girl to Be a Mother." He suggested that the place for women who opposed war was "in China--or by preference in a harem--and not in the United States."

In the early nineteenth century a woman in the emerging middle class was often dependent on her father or husband's position. Many women, however, chose or were forced to seek independence and autonomy in their work and family lives. Anne Carson was one such person. With an alcoholic father and a timid mother, her middle status in port city Philadelphia was always shaky. She attended one of the first coeducational academies in the new nation but her unemployed father forced the 15-year-old to marry a 41-year-old ship captain. Her husband's frequent abuse and absences left her without financial support, and Anne worked as a seamstress and opened a china shop to support her parents, siblings, and four children. She achieved modest success, but economic distress after the War of 1812 and her involvement in a murder case sent her spiraling into Philadelphia's underclass. In an effort to earn money she published her autobiography, where she recorded the variety of work available to women in the commercial cities of the early Republic.

After World War I, a "red scare" gripped the United States. One reflection of this climate of hysteria was in the "Palmer raids" on radicals. Striking without warning and without warrants, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. They concentrated whenever possible on aliens rather than citizens, because aliens had fewer rights. In December 1919, in their most famous act, Palmer's agents seized 249 resident aliens. Those seized were placed on board a ship, the Buford, bound for the Soviet Union. Deportees included the feminist, anarchist, and writer Emma Goldman, who later recalled the deportation in her autobiography, Living My Life.

For Arab and Muslim Americans, especially those living in New York, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were particularly painful; they not only had to confront the sorrow of the attacks, but they also faced a tide of discrimination, harassment, and in some cases violence aimed at Arabs and Muslims. Emira Habiby-Browne, the director of the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn, spoke about the hostility many community members faced on the job, and the fear that spread as hundreds of Arab and Middle Eastern men were detained in secret by the federal government. Like other groups whose loyalty was questioned during wartime due to their ethnic background, Arab and Muslim Americans identify themselves closely with their country and were deeply saddened and frustrated by the suspicion targeted at them.

Lillian Roberts came to New York in 1965 during a peak in labor militancy led by state and municipal government employees. Teachers, social workers, and sanitation workers all fought for better working conditions, improved pay scales, and reformed social services. Roberts, an African-American woman from Chicago, was an organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and helped AFSCME's local D.C. 37 win the right to represent thousands of hospital employees. She led series of strikes at New York State hospitals to protest Governor Nelson Rockefeller's opposition to unionization. Her efforts landed her in jail for a month, where she found it hard despite gestures of solidarity from her fellow prisoners.

During the Cold War era, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) interrogated more than 3,000 government officials, labor union leaders, teachers, journalists, entertainers, and others. They wanted to purge Communists, former Communists, and "fellow travelers" who refused to renounce their past and inform on associates from positions of influence within American society. Among the Committee's targets were performers at events held in support of suspect organizations. Pete Seeger acquired a love of American folk music while traveling through the South in the 1930s with his father, a musicologist and classical composer, and as an employee in the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folk Song. As a folksinger motivated by concerns for social justice, cross-cultural communication, and international peace, Seeger performed songs from diverse sources to many kinds of audiences, and in 1948 campaigned for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace as part of the folk music organization People's Songs. In the following testimony before HUAC, Seeger refused to invoke the Fifth Amendment, protecting citizens from self-incrimination. Instead he insisted that the Committee had no right to question him regarding his political beliefs or associations. This strategy resulted in prison terms for contempt of Congress for the Hollywood Ten in 1947. Seeger himself was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt, but the verdict was reversed in 1962. Nevertheless, Seeger remained on a network television blacklist until the late 1960s.

Immigrants and African Americans decisively shaped a multiethnic urban popular culture in the late 19th century, built in large measure on the emergence of vaudeville. Vaudeville blended slapstick comedy, blackface minstrelsy, and sentimental songs into a rich and highly popular cultural stew. Among the most successful vaudeville practitioners were two Jewish singers and comics from the mean streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Joe Weber and Lew Fields. Weber and Fields' routines usually featured broad stereotypes of German immigrants: Fields played "Meyer," the shrewd German slickster who wanted to "put one over" on Weber's "Mike," the dumb "Dutch" newcomer. At the peak of their popularity in 1904, Weber and Fields recorded this popular routine, "The Drinking Scene," for commercial sale. Ironically, just a few months after recording this routine, the Weber and Fields team broke up, ending nearly three decades of public performances, the longest of any team in American popular theater.