In 1919, during the post-World War I "Red Scare," the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protection of free speech was not applicable in circumstances in which there was a "clear and present danger" that "substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent" would occur as a result of that speech. In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act, making illegal the advocacy of overthrowing state or national governments. Although the Act was not used against members of the Communist Party during World War II, 11 Communist Party leaders were convicted under the Act in 1949 following the build up of Cold War tensions. In the following opening statements of that trial, the U.S. prosecuting attorney, John F. X. McGohey and the general secretary of the Communist Party, Eugene Dennis, offered widely divergent descriptions of the Party's goals. The Supreme Court upheld the guilty verdicts in 1951, ruling that government action against the defendants was required under the "clear and present danger" test. The ruling further argued that the Party, which was "in the very least ideologically attuned" with Communist countries, had formed "a highly organized conspiracy," that created the present danger. In subsequent years, Congress passed additional anti-Communist laws, and courts obtained 93 convictions of Party members. After the liberal-leaning Warren Court's 1956 ruling that mere advocacy of revolution was insufficient grounds to convict, the U.S. government ended their prosecution of Communists for Party membership alone.

Mae West spent her career on the stage and screen skirting--and sometimes transgressing--the boundaries of sexual and moral propriety. In 1926 and 1927, she outraged some critics (and landed herself in jail) with two sensational Broadway productions, Sex (a play she wrote about a Montreal prostitute, in which she also starred) and The Drag (a "homosexual comedy-drama" that she wrote and staged). In 1928, New York police arrested her again, this time for her play about a troupe of female impersonators, Pleasure Man. In 1932, she brought her brand of ribald humor to the movies. West's move from Broadway to Hollywood was surprising, given the substantially tighter moral scrutiny under which the film industry operated. Adopted in 1930 by the Association of Motion Picture Producers, the Motion Picture Production Code, excerpted below, spelled out in detail what was and was not permissible in the nation's most popular form of entertainment.

When it began publication in 1924 Bernarr Macfadden's New York Graphic claimed to inaugurate a new brand of journalism. Its brazen exploitation of the sensational; focus on crime, gossip, sex, and scandals; and utter disregard for the truth set a model for tabloid" journalism to this day. The Graphic 's inventiveness extended to publication of "composographs

While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation's children. Earlier in the century, anxieties by both Progressives and traditionalists about harmful effects of movies on youth had led to Congressional hearings regarding Federal censorship. Reformers, however, lacked convincing evidence to support their claims and the motion picture industry developed an effective self-censoring mechanism to maintain control over screen content. Similarly, after Congress held its first hearing in 1952 on the effect of television on children, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. A Senate report issued after hearings in 1954 and 1955 on the possible influence of television on juvenile delinquency summarized studies to determine the quantity of criminal and violent acts on television shows accessible for children to view. The report also presented a range of views on whether a "cumulative effect of crime-and-horror television programs" could be harmful to children. Excerpts from the report are followed by additional opinions submitted by the National Association for Better Radio and Television, an advocacy group organized in 1949.

After the fall of Atlanta in 1864, the Union Army under General William T. Sherman marched through Georgia to the sea, bringing destruction in its wake. Nearly 18,000 slaves left plantations and attached themselves to the army during its march. This 1865 illustration showed a stereotyped view of the men, women, and children who followed Sherman's army. But to northern readers, the engraving's significance may have lay in its unmistakable message about slaves' utter hatred of slavery. The oft expressed fallacy that they preferred slavery to freedom

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including creative artists. Visual artists working for the Federal Art Project created murals for the walls of federal and state buildings and established community art centers in remote areas. The murals often depicted ordinary Americans, at work or in struggle, rendered in heroic, larger than life style. Few of the post office murals commissioned by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Art displayed the humor of Orr C. Fisher's paean to corn. But the Iowa-born Fisher's work suggests the kind of regional boosterism and pride of place that characterized many murals painted by local artists.

The "Great Migration" of the second two decades of the 20th century (the teens and twenties) reshaped northern cities--roughly 70,000 southern blacks settled in Chicago alone. Many used the city only as a temporary destination, moving to other cities in the North and West. During these years New York's black population grew from 91,709 to 152,467; Detroit's from 5,741 to 40,878; and Philadelphia's from 84,459 to 134,229. Northern newspapers, word of mouth, and letters sent home by earlier migrants all contributed to the anticipation black southerners felt about opportunities for a new life in the North. Once they had settled in northern cities, however, many newcomers responded more ambivalently to their new surroundings in the face of northern-style racism, cold weather, high prices, crime, and loneliness. Some African-American blues musicians used their songs to describe the migrants' reactions to their new homes. Lizzie Miles's "Cotton Belt Blues," recorded in 1923, expressed yearning for a former southern home.

The Crisis was a monthly magazine put out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that advocated for African-American civil rights, and was edited by the black activist intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. Heralding the style and substance of the Harlem Renaissance, The Crisis reached from 60,000 to nearly 100,000 readers monthly during the 1920s. The flowering of black culture known as the Harlem Renaissance took inspiration from the emergence of pan-Africanism as an intellectual and political movement, and a growing sense of racial pride. In an era when white publications largely ignored African Americans, The Crisis presented a mix of news of African-American accomplishment; exposes of southern and northern racism; reports on efforts to improve the political, economic, and social circumstances of African Americans; and incisive editorials penned by Du Bois himself. The magazine also promoted African-American artistic production by publishing the work of and sponsoring contests for writers, composers, and visual artists.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed. Poet Ernest Crosby penned a parody of Kipling's work, "The Real White Man's Burden," and published it in his 1902 collection of poems Swords and Plowshares. Crosby also wrote a satirical, anti-imperialist novel, Captain Jinks, Hero, that parodied the career of General Frederick Funston, the man who had captured Philippine leader Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901.

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--he portrayed the Cold War conflict as "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity"--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 both branches 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. His dramatic hearings investigating purported Communist infiltration in the Army were televised live to the nation. The following editorial from the popular magazine Collier's assessed the damage to public perception of governmental institutions.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings in October 1947 on Communist activity in Hollywood. In the following testimony, Eric Johnston, a successful businessman who in 1945 succeeded Will H. Hays as President of the Motion Picture Association of America--the industry's institution for self-regulation--defended Hollywood against HUAC's attacks and complained vigorously that the "atmosphere of fear" resulting from the investigation precluded the production of "good and honest motion pictures." Although Johnston earlier had argued against the Committee's request that studio officials discharge known Communists, in November 1947, after ten screenwriters and directors who refused to cooperate with the Committee were cited for contempt of Congress, Johnston and the studio heads issued a statement that the studios would not employ Communists and would dismiss or suspend the ten. HUAC then agreed to stop investigating studios and the content of films and limited their inquiries to personnel. Although Johnston insisted that the industry did not engage in blacklisting, those in the filmmaking community who did not deny that they were Communists and refused to inform on others when questioned at HUAC hearings were prohibited from working in the industry.

Although we sometimes think of farm and factory as antithetical, many people moved easily between the two. Icy Norman grew up in North Carolina, the daughter of a miner. As a young woman she worked long hours in a textile mill, but she also helped with the farm chores, especially seasonal chores like the corn shucking described here. In this excerpt from a 1979 interview conducted by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, she recalled family and friends rolling up the rug for dances and parties when the day's work was done.

Started by Confederate veterans in 1866 and led by prominent planters, the Ku Klux Klan grew quickly during Radical Reconstruction. Hooded Klansmen terrorized individuals and freedpeoples organizations, breaking up meetings, shooting and lynching Union League leaders, and driving people away from the polls across the South. In its nighttime whippings, killings, and rapes, the Klan targeted freedpeople who showed signs of independence, such as those who bought or rented their own land, or community leaders, such as teachers. The criminal, terrorist nature of the organization was later glossed over. By the turn of the century, popular novels like Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s The Traitor, published in 1907, transformed the bloody record of the Ku Klux Klan (here softened by the euphemism Invisible Empire") into tales of gallantry

This cover of the December, 1942, issue of Collier''s magazine commemorated the first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The vampire-bat portrayal of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo indicates one way in which American popular media and war propaganda presented the Japanese. Unlike images of the European enemy, the Japanese were depicted as vicious animals, most often taking the form of apes or parasitic insects. The same racial stereotypes were also applied to Japanese living in America. Suspecting their loyalty, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese Americans living on the west coast citizens and non-citizens alike and transported them to detention centers in the West. Forced to abandon their homes, jobs, and businesses, Japanese Americans remained detained in camps for the duration of the war.

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. The antiwar movement drew on many tactics honed in earlier suffrage campaigns, including the use of pageants and plays. Circulated by the New Deal-sponsored Federal Theatre Project (FTP), these play synopses suggested the range and diversity of antiwar sentiment in the 1930s. The FTP vetted hundreds of scripts and prepared lists of plays for the use of community theaters. Antiwar dramas were among the most popular, with themes of religious pacifism, moral motherhood, and condemnation of war profiteering.

From its inception, the Confederacy sought international recognition from European nations. Support from Europe would help persuade the North to accept Southern independence, and, more immediately, secure a source of manufactured goods needed for the war effort. Southern efforts to gain recognition focused on England, the largest purchaser of southern cotton. This 1862 cartoon from the northern satirical weekly, Vanity Fair, presented the Confederacy's president trying to gain diplomatic recognition from a skeptical Great Britain. I hardly think it will wash

The page provides a short video describing what each of the six disciplinary literacy tools look like in the arts.

Statistics on women's work in the early 20th century were invariably misleading: most women worked but only a minority were formally in the wage labor force. Nowhere was the discrepancy between the domestic ideal and the reality of women's work lives wider than in rural America. In 1913 the U. S. Department of Agriculture decided to investigate and document the lives of farm woman they discovered a vast reservoir of discontent. The report, reproduced here, was culled from letters responding to a questionnaire sent to the wives of farmers and commented on all aspects of rural life, especially the enormous burden of labor that these officially non-working women were expected to carry out.

The 1920s and 1930s gave rise to new forms of popular humor, humor with a sophisticated edge drawn from a more prosperous, cosmopolitan urban experience. In New York, a circle of urbane humorists with a national audience rose around the New Yorker magazine and the famous "Algonquin Round Table," an informal group that met occasionally at the Algonquin Hotel. Ironic, witty, emphasizing word play and "in jokes," the New Yorker work of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, and Dorothy Parker satirized the pretensions of ordinary middle-class life. "Do Insects Think?," a 1922 essay by Robert Benchley, gleefully mocked the pretentious tone of American science, as well as the cult of pep, productivity, and activity that characterized the 1920s. Doing nothing, it suggested, offered the best evidence of intelligence.

Socialist leader and four-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was known as one of the most gifted orators of his generation. One listener recalled his impact as "something more powerful, penetrating, and articulate than mere words." Although Debs apparently never entered a sound studio, a recording of a Debs speech was widely circulated in the first decade of the 20th century. For many years, the speech was believed to have been in Debs' voice, and it was catalogued as such in libraries and record collections. In fact, the speech was written by Debs but recorded by actor Leonard Spencer, who was famous for his recorded versions of comic and dramatic monologues. It was not uncommon in the early days of recording to have actors read the words of politicians. (This was before actors became politicians.) Even if this recording does not give us Debs' actual voice, its circulation indicates his popularity. Faithful socialists wanted to be able to listen at home to Debs' attacks on the rapacious nature of capitalism and his argument that socialism was the only answer to human problems.