President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to explain the riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission's 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Unless conditions were remedied, the Commission warned, the country faced a "system of 'apartheid'" in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of "white society" for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums--primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing. President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In the following statements to a joint Congressional committee hearing on urban employment problems, two directors of community-based job training programs in Philadelphia and New York City described their efforts. Both emphasized the need for increased federal funding to support practical ways to implement the Commission's recommendations.

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 Knights of Labor, a nineteenth-century labor union, employed elaborate rituals and symbols in their local assembly meetings. The initiation ceremony for new members, for example, relied heavily on religious imagery and language. It also drew on the rituals of other fraternal organizations like the Masons and the Odd Fellows, that had many working-class members. The ceremony emphasized that all that was valuable and worthy in society derived from human labor. New Knights agreed to commit themselves to improve the conditions of all working people. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the 1880s were "baptized" in a Knights of Labor initiation ceremony that required the following promises.

The violent labor struggles of the early 20th century engendered concern at all levels of society and led to the appointment of a federal Commission on Industrial Relations in early 1913. Headed by Kansas City lawyer-reformer Frank Walsh, the commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when the southern Colorado coal strike erupted late in 1913. The killing of three women and eleven children at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado, on Easter night, 1914, sent shock waves across the country. After the "Ludlow massacre," as it came to be known, the commission held public hearings in Colorado where they heard horror stories about the brutality and rapacity of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the region's largest operator of coal mines. These articles from the New York Times described the testimony of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., before the commission, where he denied any knowledge of his company's brutal actions against the Ludlow strikers.

In 1852-53, the popular British writer William Makepeace Thackeray toured the United States. While he lectured to enthralled American audiences, his secretary Eyre Crowe meticulously recorded the trip in words and pictures. Crowe, who studied painting in France, later published an illustrated memoir of the U.S. trip called With Thackeray in America. Crowe included in his account a visit to the Richmond, Virginia, slave market where he witnessed and sketched a slave auction. As this excerpt demonstrates, his simple act of drawing the harsh circumstances of the slave trade was viewed by the auctioneer and planters as a threat. After his return to England, Crowe turned his sketches into a series of paintings that starkly depicted the auction and the subsequent forced separation of family members and friends.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from 1969, two migrant farmworkers from Florida and a UFW organizer from Washington State discussed their experiences and proposed legislative remedies to a Senate subcommittee. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. Indiana coal miner's wife Ettie West pined for the "good and religious" ways of her mother's time in this letter to the editor, published in 1900 in The United Mine Workers Journal.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. The power loom weavers of Rhode Island were the intended audience of this "catechism" written by labor activists "Bobba Chuttle" and "Betty Reedhook" (pseudonyms evocative of the tools of the textile worker's trade) in 1887. Drawing on church traditions, the pair patterned their educational effort, published in The People, along the lines of a call-and-response format.

From the Civil War through the 1920s, there were numerous clubs, saloons, and dance halls, in New York and other American cities, known for transvestism (men or women dressing as the opposite sex), for male prostitution, or as places that catered to a "gay crowd"--meaning men and women interested in a less conventional evening's entertainment. In the 1920s, due in part to Prohibition and the emergence of speakeasies, homosexuality became even more open. At the same time, psychologists, physicians, and social reformers had been at work for several decades attempting to study, classify, categorize, and label human sexual behavior. Working to establish "norms" for human behavior, they increasingly treated such gathering places as a danger. A 1911 report from a Chicago vice commission on "The Social Evil in Chicago" managed to mix disapproval, fascination, and paranoia, suggesting that "sex perverts" were a small minority but that their "secret language" pervaded ordinary entertainment.

During their 26 years of marriage, New Englanders Abigail Abbot and Asa Bailey lived on farms in Haverhill and Landaff, New Hampshire, and had 14 children. In 1770, Asa conducted an affair with one of the farm's hired women. Three years later, a second farm servant accused him of rape. Asa also beat his wife. In the eighteenth century, the social and economic consequences of divorce for women were grave, and Abigail chose to remain with her husband. But in late 1788, Asa perpetrated an act of incest on their 17-year-old daughter, a crime his wife could not forgive. Abigail sent him away, endured his return on several occasions, and finally divorced him in 1793. As the marriage unraveled, a religious revival unfolded in the region around her New Hampshire town. Influenced by the revival, Abigail's memoir, from which this selection is drawn, is as much a record of her relationship with God as it is a story of her trials with her husband.

Many Indian peoples had and still have stories of creation that explain how they came to be and to live in their homelands. These narratives offer a glimpse into the belief systems present before Europeans entered North America. Many northeastern Indian peoples share a legend of how the world was created on the back of a giant sea turtle (some still refer to North America as a "turtle island"). While there are many versions of the tradition, the following selection is from the Iroquois Indians of New York State. Anthropologists collected and transcribed most versions of the Iroquois creation myth in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. However, John Norton, son of Scottish and Cherokee parents and adopted by the Mohawks, recorded this version, one of the earliest, in 1816. Norton traveled widely in the eastern woodlands, playing an important role in the life of the Mohawks in the early-nineteenth century.

Samuel de Champlain was a trader, soldier, explorer, diplomat, and author. The critical figure in French efforts to establish the colony of New France along the St. Lawrence river, he set up a small trading post at Quebec, the capital of the colony, in 1608. Given the small numbers of French colonists and their primary interest in the fur trade, Champlain recognized that success depended on alliances with the native peoples of the northern region. In June 1609, Champlain and nine French soldiers joined a war party of Montganais, Algonkaian, and Hurons to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. They met their foe, probably about 200 Mohawks, along the lake later named Lake Champlain. The French firearms caused death and consternation among the Indians and introduced such weapons to native conflicts. Over the next decades, Champlain chronicled his explorations and observations of New France in several volumes, providing important information on life and warfare in seventeenth-century North America.

Professional psychiatry was only in its infancy at the end of the 19th century, and many physicians disputed its scientific basis. In 1896, psychiatrists--or alienists as they were then called--entered the political arena in a controversy over the sanity of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was heartily disliked by many middle-class urban professionals, precisely the sort of people who became alienists. In a letter to the New York Times of September 27, 1896, a self-identified anonymous "Alienist" declared that Bryan was of a "mind not entirely sound." In this editorial, published the same day, the Times soberly endorsed the psychiatrist's diagnosis. A few days later, it polled nine New York alienists, among them the leaders of the psychiatric profession, on Bryan's sanity: two refused comment; three believed him to be of "sound mind;" and four agreed with the "Alienist's" original diagnosis.

In one of the largest forced migrations in human history, up to 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to Europeans and shipped to the Americas. Most slaves were seized inland and marched to coastal forts, where they were chained below deck in ships for the journey across the Atlantic or "Middle Passage," under conditions designed to ship the largest number of people in the smallest space possible. Olaudah Equiano had been kidnapped from his family when he was 11 years old, carried off first to Barbados and then Virginia. After serving in the British navy, he was sold to a Quaker merchant from whom he purchased his freedom in 1766. His pioneering narrative of the journey from slavery to freedom, a bestseller first published in London in 1789, builds upon the traditions of spiritual narratives and travel literature to help create the slave narrative genre.

Thirty-eight year old Rebecca Burlend and her family left England in 1831 for a new life in Pike County, Illinois. Driven to emigrate by poverty, they hoped to own their own land in the United States and chose Pike County based on the letters of "Mr. B.," a settler who had gone before them. After more than two months at sea, the family landed in New Orleans, where Burlend observed the horrors of the slave trade firsthand. From there they traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi River to Illinois. Many immigrants--then and now--experience the kind of fear and confusion that the Burlends felt on arriving at what looked to them like a deserted wilderness. After the "many difficulties" of the book's title, the family settled successfully in Illinois. Rebecca Burlend wrote this book with the assistance of her son, the author and teacher Edward Burlend, during a return visit to England in 1846.

Jim Vacarella was a student at Kent State University when the National Guard arrived on campus in 1970. Like hundreds of other campuses across the country, Kent State witnessed an upsurge in student activism following the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970. The Guardsmen arrived when students burned down the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) building, and Vacarella remembered that their arrival was met with hostility – along with thrown rocks and bottles – from angered students. Two days later, four students were killed when Guardsmen opened fire during an anti-war demonstration.

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 events of the first few months of 1917, from the resumption of unrestricted submarine attacks to the Zimmerman telegram, broke the back of the antiwar movement and substantially increased enthusiasm for American intervention. But some dissident voices remained. Among the firmest congressional opponents was the progressive Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette. On April 4, 1917, two days after President Woodrow Wilson's call for war, La Follette argued in this speech before Congress that the United States had not been even-handed in its treatment of British and German violations of American neutrality. A Republican senator from a state with a large agricultural and German-American population, La Follette worried that the war would divert attention from domestic reform efforts. But even in Wisconsin La Follette met opposition; the state legislature censured him, as did some of his longtime progressive allies. One of them said that he was "of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops."

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, W. M. Mink, mill superintendent at the Homestead steelworks, testified that the cause of the strike was simple--the infection of "the Bolshevik spirit"among "the foreigners."