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."

Many of those who took part in the student movement of the 1960's drew their inspiration from the African-American struggle for freedom. That was true for Cathy Wilkerson, who became involved in the civil rights movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963 while at Swarthmore College. She described her experience as a college student listening to Civil Rights leader Gloria Richardson as the event that changed her life. Wilkerson went on to work in the SDS national office and edited the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. In 1968, she moved to Washington DC to open a SDS regional office, and later became a Weatherman. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

Ragtime music, with its syncopated, polyrhythmic style, was born, according to cultural historian Robert Snyder, in the 1890s in the black saloons and brothels of southern and Midwestern cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. By the end of the 19th century ragtime had assumed a place at the center of American popular music and remained there until the 1920s. Ragtime meant a tinkling piano and no one played the ragtime piano any better or longer than Eubie Blake, born in Baltimore in 1887. In this selection from an interview performance conducted in 1970 for public television by musician Max Morath, Blake recalled how he began playing ragtime as a young man at the turn of the century.

Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in 1962 to address issues of poverty, as well as feelings of helplessness, alienation, and indifference in African-American and working class communities. The group, which focused initially on community organizing, quickly became a leader of the anti-war movement when President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965. A graduate student in 1965 at the University of Michigan, Carl Oglesby worked as a writer for a defense contractor. He was horrified at what he began to learn about Vietnam, and when SDS members found him he quickly joined the group. Oglesby quit his job, spoke at the first teach-in against the Vietnam War at Michigan, and was elected president of SDS in 1965. He then spent years traveling around the country speaking against the war.

During World War II, the U.S. collaborated with the resistance group the Vietminh and their leader, Ho Chi Minh, in their fight against Japan. In the postwar period, however, the U.S. feared Communist expansion into Southeast Asia. In 1954, as France withdrew its forces in defeat, the Geneva Accords established the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam was partitioned into north and south sectors until elections to be held by 1956. Fearing a victory by Ho Chi Minh, the Eisenhower administration collaborated with the South Vietnam leadership to prevent elections and subsequently sent military aid and advisors. Under President John F. Kennedy, the number of "advisors" increased to more than 16,000, some of whom engaged in counterinsurgency efforts and actual combat. Although Kennedy opposed large scale U.S. involvement, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, began regular bombings and escalated troops to more than 500,000 by 1967. Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, scaled back to 39,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by September 1972, but initiated bombing raids into Cambodia in 1969 and sent ground troops there in 1970. The U.S. and North Vietnam reached a cease-fire agreement in January 1973, and the South Vietnamese regime fell in April 1975. More than one million people died during the war, including an estimated 925,000 North Vietnamese, 184,000 South Vietnamese, and 57,000 American soldiers. In the following excerpt, Leslie Gelb, a State Department official during the Vietnam War and Defense Department official afterward, offered an insider's appraisal to a Senate committee of the reasons for the U.S. involvement.

The slave auction was one of the most barbaric practices of the harsh system of slavery. The slave trade within the United States destroyed families and tore apart communities, especially after 1840 when slavery was extended into the newer lands of the lower South and Southwest. Planters in the older settled areas of the upper South could realize substantial profits selling enslaved people, and New Orleans became the center of the trade. The resulting forced migration involved hundreds of thousands of African Americans. Some moved with their masters, but the migration also tore apart slave families residing on different plantations. Others were sold on the block, as Solomon Northrup described in his Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841.

Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Governments, including that of the United States, had long been important patrons of the arts, but New Deal support for art was unprecedented in American political life. Like the other New Deal arts projects, the FTP treated creative endeavors as work; it used government funds to hire unemployed actors, stage hands, and playwrights Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. Its productions included classics of the dramatic repertoire by such playwrights as Euripides and Shakespeare; foreign-language plays; and contemporary dramas. In an interview done in 1978 by Elizabeth C. Stevens, Milton Meltzer remembered the vibrant, creative energy along with the political controversies that he witnessed during his stint as a publicist for the New York unit of the FTP.

Charles Woodmason, a newly ordained Anglican minister, left the comforts of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1761 to travel for six years in the Carolina backcountry as an itinerant minister, seeking to bring the established church to areas where it had not taken hold. He also became a fierce partisan of the Regulator movement, a frontier rebellion attempting to obtain a greater voice and fairer claims for backcountry residents who resented the monopolization of power by the coastal leaders. Although Woodmason was hostile toward the colony's elite for their lack of concern over the political and especially religious life of the frontier, the British migrant held traditional beliefs about morality and social order. He was appalled by the immoral and irreligious behavior rampant on the frontier, as he made clear in this selection from his journal of 1768.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, President Bush, whose popularity at home was flagging, opted to respond with massive military force even though many Americans, including Congressional leaders, believed economic sanctions would be effective. Bush initiated a massive, deadly air assault on January 15, 1991, and a brief ground assault followed four weeks later. The Gulf War killed thousands of Iraqi civilians and devastated most of the country's infrastructure, including hospitals and water systems. Many Americans who had previously questioned military action supported the war effort once it began, but many did not. In a break with their stance during previous wars, including World War II and Vietnam, many unions opposed military action in Kuwait. The union members recorded here articulated their reasons for opposing the war at an anti-war protest.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded "Long John," a work song, sung by a man identified as "Lightning" and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. "Long John" mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners.

Not all Progressive-era crusades involved the regulation of economic and political practices. One of the oddest early twentieth-century reform movements was the effort to simplify the way words were spelled. Seemingly peripheral, spelling reform, with its emphasis on "order" and "rationality," actually typified the Progressive era. The lack of standardization in American spelling was viewed as chaotic, inefficient, and irrational. This quest for order and efficiency helped foster a growing faith in the technical expert and the professional, while equally fostering a distrust of political parties. Like spelling reform, many Progressive reforms took place outside the traditional channels of the political party. In this 1907 article (titled "Simplified Language of Socialism") from the radical newspaper Appeal to Reason, author Jack London and fellow socialist Arthur George took aim at the "simplified spelling" movement--and at the inequalities of early twentieth-century industrial capitalism--with a humorous list of suggested deletions from the English language.

Jacob Riis--a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant--exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. He also presented slide shows to reform-minded, middle-class audiences. Despite his own immigrant background, Riis' attitudes mirrored the prejudices of the dominant culture toward "foreigners," as revealed in this stereotyped description of an immigrant neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side. Riis' reports on immigrant life--and his equally famous photographs--were important documents of urban conditions in late nineteenth-century urban America. But they were equally revealing as documents that showed how outsiders often reacted in horror to the lives of "the other half."

In the early 20th century suffragists employed many different tactics in their struggle to win the vote for women. Members of the militant National Woman's Party (NWP), for example, rejected the patient waiting espoused by much of the movement. Some NWP members even chained themselves to the White House gates--an action that led to sentences in the Occoquan Workhouse. In this 1973 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Ernestine Hara Kettler, a young woman of radical immigrant background, recalled her stint in the workhouse.

As the Civil Rights movement began to dismantle formal racial segregation, African-American union activists such as James Houghton sought to integrate the workplace by challenging racial segregation in industrial unions. Houghton was active in the Negro American Labor Council, founded in 1960, before Cold War fears of communist infiltration disbanded the organization. Frustrated by what he saw as a lack of militancy to combat discrimination within the labor movement, Houghton founded the Harlem Unemployment Center, which later became Harlem Fight Back, to challenge racial discrimination in the skilled building trades. The organization played an important role in creating equal employment opportunity programs, increasing minority hiring at construction sites, and forcing unions to open their membership rolls.

James Justen worked for 30 years as an autoworker in Kenosha, Wisconsin, first for American Motor Corporation and then for Chrysler, before becoming active in the struggle for equal rights and benefits for gay and lesbian employees. After paying out of pocket for his domestic partner's health insurance, Justen, who was an active member and shop steward for United Auto Workers Local 72, decided after his retirement to fight for health benefit coverage for the domestic partners of gay and lesbian workers. Although Justen, unlike many gay auto workers, did not face serious harassment while on the job, he found the struggle for equal health benefits an uphill battle. Chrysler denied his claim for equal rights, but Justen hoped to challenge their policy by encouraging another workers to challenge the unequal treatment.

The surprise attack on December 7, 1941, on U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by the Japanese air force was quickly followed by a string of dazzling Japanese military forays. This Japanese "blitzkrieg" captured tens of thousands of Allied military personnel and civilians. Many were subjected to extraordinarily cruel treatment at the hands of the Japanese victors. One of the first and most important of these battles took place at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, which U.S. marines invaded in August 1942. The Japanese forces on Guadalcanal managed to hold on to the island for five months, despite savage battles with the marines and a withering U.S. naval bombardment and blockade. Finally, as a simple poem by noncommissioned officer Yoshida Kashichi expressed, the Japanese forces were starved into submission, retreating from Guadalcanal in disarray on December 31, 1942.

Union troops captured the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, in May 1865. Whether Davis, who had eluded arrest for over a month, was actually wearing his wife's dress when he was caught is open to question. Nonetheless, the depiction of the captured Davis in woman's clothes was featured in many illustrations and cartoons in the northern press. These images—like earlier pictures of southern women sending their men to war and rioting—questioned the South's claims of courage and chivalry by showing its men and women reversing traditional sex roles.

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 25, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. The victims had been trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes. One of the worst industrial fires in U.S. history, the Triangle fire became a galvanizing symbol of industrial capitalism's excesses and the pressing need for reform. In its aftermath, a coalition of middle-class reformers and working people secured passage of landmark occupational health and safety laws. The Triangle fire received sensational coverage in all the New York newspapers. This article from the Jewish Daily Forward, printed the day after the fire, emphasized the tragic loss to the Jewish community.

For young men like Jim Vacarella, the draft stood as the prime symbol of the war in Vietnam. Millions of young men tried to evade the draft: some fled to Canada; many feigned physical or mental illness, others used family connections to gain safe positions in the National Guard. For some, resisting the draft became an important way of protesting the war, and a few thousand men took public stands as draft resistors, burning their draft cards and challenging the government to imprison them. Jim Vacarella was one of those who burned his draft card, although he was lucky enough to avoid prison.

Between 1800 and 1840, improved transportation networks and larger markets altered the way goods were produced, as workshops and factories became larger and fewer goods were produced by household labor. Another effect of growing industrialization was social stratification, as some master craftsmen became businessmen while their journeymen lost their independence and became wage workers. This illustration from the 1841 novel The Career of Puffer Hopkins caricatured the growing distinction between masters and journeymen. The master tailor's prosperous outfit, stance, and fancy business address (New York's Broadway) sharply contrasted with the journeyman's wretched appearance and workshop-home.