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.

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.

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.

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.

Airplanes are more than just a way to get from one place to another quickly—they are historical artifacts! To keep those planes flying high and on the right route, lighted airway beacons and radio communications were developed during the “Golden Age of Aviation” between World War I and World War II. Even during the challenging years of the Great Depression, these innovations propelled the use of planes by services like the United States Postal Service to get mail across the state, country, and world faster than ever before.

This episode is part of The Look Back, a series made for learners in grades 4-6 that explores eras from Wisconsin’s history through artifacts. The collection is hosted by historians who model an inquiry process: sharing artifacts, asking questions, visiting archives and museums to learn more, telling the story of their findings as they go, and making connections to our lives today.

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.

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.

The American soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp had powerful reactions to what they saw, often shaped by their own backgrounds. Leon Bass was a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant serving in a segregated army unit when he encountered the "walking dead" of Buchenwald. Like many others, he tried to repress his memories of the horrors that he saw there and "never talked about it all." But in the 1960s, while involved in the Civil Rights movement and teaching, he met a Holocaust survivor and felt moved to declare to his students that "I was there, I saw." In this interview with Pam Sporn and her students, he linked the oppression of the Jews and other Nazi victims with the segregation and discrimination faced by African Americans.

The Women's Emergency Brigade, which Genora Johnson Dollinger helped organize, saved the 1936 sit down strike at Flint, Michigan more than once. In this 1976 interview with Sherna Gluck, Dollinger recalls the famous "Battle of the Running Bulls" when police--bulls--tried to regain control of the GM plant by force. Dollinger and the other organizers of the Women's Emergency Brigade faced constant sexist attitudes in their efforts to win the strike, even as they demonstrated their determination to put their bodies and their families' well-being on the line. Sometimes this sexism took the form of an unwillingness to allow women to speak, sometimes it took gentler forms: Dollinger recalls how, in the heat of battle, a passing striker tipped his hat to her. In a key moment, Dollinger took a loudspeaker and persuaded women in the crowd to join the group in front of the plant. Overwhelmed, and afraid to shoot at women, the police abandoned their assault.

We generally think of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. mainland as largely a post-World War II phenomenon, since more than 800,000 Puerto Ricans came to the United States between 1940 and 1969. But immigration actually started much earlier in the century; between 1915 and 1930 more than 50,000 Puerto Rican migrants headed for the United States--especially New York City. The new immigrants faced a mixed reception, particularly from immigrants from other countries. In this interview for the radio program "Nosotros Trabajamos en la Costura"(We Work in the Garment Industry), garment worker Luisa Lopez told how she faced discrimination from European immigrant workers when she went to work in garment factories in the 1920s. Yet sometimes alliances crossed ethnic lines: Lopez found an ally in an Italian-American socialist.

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.

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.

Uses the tools of macroeconomics to study three macroeconomic policy problems in depth. Possible topics include long-run economic growth, the macroeconomics of the transition to a modern capitalist society, federal government surpluses and deficits, Social Security, the distribution of earnings and income, and the Great Depression. Requires a 20-page paper on a subject related to one of the topics considered in the class. This subject considers three topics of macroeconomics that are alive and controversial for policy today. The topics are: economic growth - the roles of capital accumulation, increased education, and technological progress in determining economic growth; savings - the effect of government and private debt on economic growth; and exchange-rate regimes - their role in the Great Depression and today.

This December, 1930, edition of the League for Industrial Democracy's The Unemployed satirizes three common business perspectives on the unemployment problem." Diagnoses of the causes of the Great Depression varied

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. In this 1970 interview with historian Herbert T. Hoover, Amos Owen, Mdewakanton Sioux tribal chairman, gave a mixed verdict on the Indian Reorganization Act.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. But in this 1970 interview, Sioux tribal leader Alfred DuBray argued that the Indian New Deal, on balance, brought positive changes.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. In this 1968 interview with historian Joseph H. Cash, attorney Ramon Roubideaux, a Brule Sioux, denounced the Indian Reorganization Act as "a white man's idea" of how Indians should live and argued that it "set the Indian people aside from the mainstream of American life and made them a problem."