Though the Great Steel Strike of 1919 failed in its immediate aims, it left a legacy in the steel regions of the United States that lasted for decades. In 1974 when historian Peter Gotlieb asked former steelworker Joe Rudiak, the son of Polish immigrants, about his participation in unionization struggles in the 1930s, he started by recalling his memories of the 1919 steel strike as a young boy. Here, Rudiak told how his father was blacklisted for acknowledging his support of the union. From such experiences, he explained, unionism got "embedded in you."

In the 1960s, lottery-like contests designed to publicize products through sweepstakes competitions spread rapidly. In the 19th century, every state banned lotteries--defined as competitions in which chances to win prizes were sold÷to protect citizens. In 1868, Congress prohibited the distribution of lottery materials through the mail. The mid-20th century sweepstakes, however, did not require contestants to purchase tickets or products to win prizes and were thus considered legal. In 1966, the number of national sweepstakes exceeded 600 and consumer groups accused them of deceptive practices. An FTC investigation in 1968 into sweepstakes from oil companies and supermarket chains found evidence of deception. In the following excerpts from letters to a 1969 Congressional investigation, citizens urged Congress to take action to regulate sweepstakes. Their efforts failed to produce a bill that passed through Congress, however, and by 1998, the FTC estimated that more than 400 million sweepstakes flooded the mail annually and that consumers lost more than $40 billion each year through sweepstakes and telemarketing scams. In 1999, Congress passed the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act. Among other consumer protections, this Act required sweepstakes materials to clearly state odds of winning, value of prizes, and rules.

Farm households depended heavily on the work of women and children. At first children were assigned simple tasks; later they learned chores that were differentiated according to gender roles. In the 1790s, young unmarried women such as Elizabeth Fuller pursued work in the dairy or in home manufacturing along with their housework and garden tasks. Fuller lived in the central Massachusetts town of Princeton; her diary recorded her health, social activities, and any unusual events in her life. Mostly, she faced a regular round of household tasks such as making cheese or baking pies. She often washed, carded, and spun wool, since her most significant labor was the household textile production that provided most farm families with their clothing.

Some of the sharpest and most violent class struggles in American history were fought in the hard rock mining towns of the nineteenth-century West. 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 had been killed in numerous gun battles. The civil war was not only fought with fists, bullets, and dynamite in the streets and mines of Cripple Creek; it also was a war of words waged in the press. In June, 1904, the Mine Owners' Association and the WFM submitted these statements to eastern newspapers, expressing opposing viewpoints on the purpose of the strike.

The Democratic party arrived at its 1968 convention in Chicago torn apart by the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. As delegates and protestors arrived in Chicago in late August 1968, the Chicago American newspaper published a guide to the cast of characters" converging on the city. Illustrating student supporters of Eugene McCarthy

The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. Fears of the "tramp menace" that had been so strong in the seventies were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Most government officials and business leaders reacted with horror at the prospect of jobless men wandering the roads. A notable exception was the Populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Dow Lewelling. His executive proclamation of December 4, 1893, defended the rights of the homeless against arbitrary arrest by local police. His proclamation, published in the Topeka Daily Capital on December 5, 1893, became known as the "Tramp Circular." Lewelling's sympathy for the tramping unemployed may have come, in part, from personal experience; he himself had wandered the roads in search of work in the 1870s depression.

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city's poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans--their rivals in the city's labor market--for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York's devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

Hundreds of writers and artists lived in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and were part of a vibrant, creative community that found its voice in what came to be called the "Harlem Renaissance." Alain Locke's 1925 collection The New Negro --a compilation of literature by and essays about "New Negro" artists and black culture--became a "manifesto" of the movement. Some of black America's foremost writers contributed stories and poems to the volume. The work of these artists drew upon the African-American experience and expressed a new pride in black racial identity and heritage. Several factors accounted for the birth of the movement and propelled it forward. By 1920 the once white ethnic neighborhood of Harlem in upper Manhattan overflowed with recent African-American migrants from the South and the Caribbean. Black soldiers returning from World War I shared a new sense of pride, militancy, and entitlement, as expressed in Claude McKay's 1919 protest poem "If We Must Die."

Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey recognized that his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) would find its most enthusiastic audience in the United States, despite the organization's professed worldwide mission. After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to find intensified discrimination, segregation, racial violence, and hostile relations with white Americans. Sensing growing frustration, Garvey used his considerable charisma to attract thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers and became the most popular black leader in America in the early 1920s. The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. To this end, the movement offered in its "Back to Africa" campaign a powerful message of black pride and economic self-sufficiency. In Garvey's 1921 speech, "If You Believe the Negro Has a Soul," he emphasized the inevitability of racial antagonism and the hopelessness of interracial coexistence.

For centuries pirates, known as the Barbary pirates, operated out of the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. European states paid tribute to them to ensure their people's safe passage. Without British protection and with few financial or diplomatic resources, the new American nation's ships and citizens were vulnerable on the high seas. Between 1785 and 1820, more than 700 Americans were taken hostage and often enslaved. The American public was fascinated by these captives' stories; their tales of desert cities, caravans, and harems bridged the previously popular Puritan captivity narratives and emerging slave narratives. The most influential of all these American Barbary narratives was James Riley's Loss of the American Brig Commerce. A Connecticut sea captain, Riley ran aground in 1815 and was captured by wandering Arabs. He used his enslavement to call into question the enslavement of Africans and express a common humanity with the desert people he encountered.

Davy Crockett was a frontiersmen, soldier, and politician who used his autobiography to help create an image of himself as a larger-than-life American hero. The description of frontier politics presented here is based on his campaign for a seat in the Tennessee legislature in 1821. In the early decades of the 19th century, property qualifications for voting were lifted and more white men gained access to the vote. With this greater access came new and more democratic styles of political activity. To recruit support at elections, office seekers made public meetings and popular entertainments part of political life. Crockett's account reflected these changes, suggesting that humor, hunting skills, and male camaraderie were as important to electoral success as a clear stance on the issues of the day.

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 Hypnotist," 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.

The Communist-led Unemployed Councils mobilized jobless men and women in hundreds of local communities to demand jobs and better treatment from relief authorities. In these excerpts from a recorded interview, Anna Taffler, a Communist activist and a Russian Jewish immigrant, described how her own experience of facing eviction pushed her into organizing the unemployed. She also talked about the focus of local councils on issues like fighting for more relief and stopping evictions.

On July 1, 1946, less than a year after dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, the U.S. embarked on its first postwar atomic weapons test at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. David Bradley, a physician and member of the Radiological Safety Unit at Bikini, voiced concern over dangers from radioactivity in his 1948 best-seller, No Place to Hide. In response to Bradley and other critics, the Atomic Energy Commission, the military, and other government agencies attempted to diffuse growing fears about radioactivity. The following Collier's article by a military officer--using the same eyewitness-account format as in Bradley's book--tried to persuade its readers that fears about "lingering radiation" were unfounded by documenting a test in the Nevada desert in which the military deliberately sent soldiers close to "ground zero" soon after an explosion. Some readers remained unconvinced; their published letters can be found following the article. In 1963, the U.S. and Soviet Union signed a treaty to halt atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. By that time, some 300,000 U.S. military personnel and an unknown number of civilians in areas downwind from the test sites had been exposed to radiation. In subsequent years, studies revealed higher rates of leukemia, cancer, respiratory ailments, and other health problems among these groups. Underground atomic weapons tests continued at the Nevada Test Site until a moratorium was declared in 1992, after 928 nuclear tests.

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In hundreds of speeches, she apparently never said the one phrase most often associated with her name--the injunction that farmers should "raise less corn and more hell." Regardless of who called explicitly for more hell-raising, Lease was a powerful voice of the agrarian crusade.

"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ," declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of intelligence testing. The army's use of intelligence tests lent new credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. The idea that experts could confidently assign a man to his proper place in the army--and by extension, his place in life--suggested a kind of determinism that some found profoundly at odds with American democracy and its credo of upward mobility through hard work. In "The Great Conspiracy," Lewis Terman replied with acid commentary to a series of articles by Walter Lippmann criticizing IQ tests. Terman portrayed Lippmann as a sentimental humanist whose democratic dogma prevented him from accepting plain facts. According to Terman, Americans clearly exhibited a range of different intellectual endowments and the new science of psychology made it possible to measure and classify those differences.

After Reconstruction, most African Americans remained in the South and worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. But the limited economic possibilities, as well as escalating racial repression that accompanied the end of Reconstruction and the rise of a "redeemed" South, led some to move West. Kansas was the most common destination for southern black "Exodusters" as they were called, and more than 26,000 African-Americans immigrated to Kansas during the l870s. The Exodusters hoped to create quasi-utopian colonies entirely free from white control. The best known of these black settlements was Nicodemus, named for an African-born slave who was said to have prophesied the black Exodus. In this 1877 circular, town founders expounded on the enticements of Nicodemus with the hope of attracting "colored citizens" as new settlers. By 1880, Nicodemus had 700 residents. The colony enjoyed its greatest prosperity in the mid-1880s, but after that it suffered from a lack of rain and good rail connections. Still, the population continued to increase gradually into the beginning of the next century.

Huey Long, a senator and former governor of Louisiana, while initially a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became one of the most important critics of the New Deal during the Great Depression. To curb the power of the rich, Long proposed the Share Our Wealth Plan" that would redistribute wealth from large fortunes to the needy and enable the government to provide every family with "enough for a home

The interwar peace movement was arguably the largest mass movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a mobilization often overlooked in the wake of the broad popular consensus that ultimately supported the U.S. involvement in World War II. The destruction wrought in World War I (known in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Great War") and the cynical nationalist politics of the Versailles Treaty had left Americans disillusioned with the Wilsonian crusade to save the world for democracy. Senate investigations of war profiteering and shady dealings in the World War I munitions industry both expressed and deepened widespread skepticism about wars of ideals. On the right wing of the antiwar movement, Charles A. Lindbergh, popular hero of American aviation, was a champion of diehard isolationism and a prominent member of the America-First Committee, organized in September 1940. In this 1941 speech, he drew on a time-honored theme of American exceptionalism as he urged his listeners to avoid entanglements with Europe.

Tragically, contact between Indians and the Europeans extended beyond just trade goods; the invasion of foreign microbes devastated Indian communities well beyond the coastal region. When John Lawson visited the Carolina interior in the 1690s, he encountered the Congaree people, whose numbers and villages had been dramatically reduced by smallpox and other diseases. In 1660, Lawson, born into a London gentry family and aspiring to a career as a natural scientist, had set sail for the Carolina colony that was founded after the restoration of the British monarchy. He traveled more than a thousand miles as an employee of the colony's proprietors, who were eager to attract additional colonists and foster economic development. Lawson's keen eye for the native and non-native people, flora, and fauna of the region was evidenced in his journal A New Voyage to Carolina, published in 1709.