The Underground Railroad was a network of free African Americans and sympathetic whites that concealed, clothed, and guided fugitive slaves to the North and freedom. The "railroad" comprised a series of stops often tended by local vigilance committees in northern communities. John P. Parker was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, but became a freeman by 1845. He moved to Rowley, Ohio with its active abolitionist community and followed his trade as an iron master by day while rescuing fugitive slaves by night. Free blacks such as Parker supplied most of the needed labor and finances to help escaped slaves. Parker, it is believed, helped hundreds escape to freedom across the Ohio River from Kentucky along the busiest segment of the railroad. He then passed them on to another "conductor," braving significant dangers, as related in this excerpt from a recently published autobiography compiled from newspaper interviews with Parker in 1885.

The Mexican Revolution of 1911 was not well understood in the United States, but it found a place in numerous American novels, short stories, and silent films--albeit a clichéd and stereotypical one in which Mexicans often played the villains vanquished by heroic American cowboys. Such stereotypes of Mexicans dominated U.S. films about Mexico for much of the 20th century. Despite these negative stereotypes, Francisco Villa, leader of the peasant uprisings in northern Mexico, exploited American interest in the revolution for his own ends. A contract with a U.S. newsreel company--he agreed to fight his battles primarily during the day so they could be filmed--earned him money to buy weapons. He also granted interviews to prominent journalists, including the socialist John Reed. Reed's June 1914 article in the Masses, "What About Mexico?," opposed U.S. intervention and countered the negative images of Mexicans by portraying their struggle as brave and heroic.

Baseball's growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games. But baseball's grip on the American popular imagination also was fueled by the emergence in the 1920s of the game's most dominant player, George Herman "Babe" Ruth. Ruth's rise to stardom in these years was an essential part of an era when celebrities came to dominate the various forms of American popular culture: sports, especially baseball; radio; and the movies. In these short articles that appeared in the Literary Digest in 1921 and 1923, two baseball writers described the importance of the Ruthian home run and the majesty of Yankee Stadium, the new temple that Yankee management built in 1923 to accommodate the Babe.

At the Civil War's end, enslaved people responded in a variety of ways to take their freedom. One meaning of freedom can be glimpsed in the following report from Charleston, South Carolina, published in the New York Daily Tribune on April 4, 1865, just a few days before General Robert E. Lee's surrender in Virginia. Charleston boasted one of the largest and most important African-American communities in the antebellum South. Two months after the Confederate Army fled, the city's black men and women organized a parade to celebrate their emancipation. The parade numbered thousands of marchers and included dramatic tableaux, banners, and songs. African Americans used such public celebrations to symbolize their deeply held beliefs and feelings, in a manner that paralleled the public displays of their white working-class counterparts in the decades before the war.

With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent—lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900–1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. In addition, many were disenfranchised, due to poll tax requirements and all-white primaries, and excluded from jury duty. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end such discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In the early 1950s, attorneys for two Mexican-American civil rights groups, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American G.I. Forum, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hernandez v. Texas that exclusion from jury duty based on class constituted discrimination. The state of Texas acknowledged that in the previous 25 years no person with a Spanish surname had served on any juries. The Warren Court ruled unanimously that persons of Mexican American ancestry did constitute a class within the community in which the original trial was held, and that exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries resulted in a denial of the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment for Mexican American defendants. In the following interview, Pete Tijerina, a member of LULAC and the first executive director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), discussed all-Anglo juries and other discriminatory conditions in Texas society in the 1950s and 1960s.

Labor conflicts in Pennsylvania's coal mines and steel mills during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were usually violent. In order to insure that they had the upper hand and to avoid relying on local police (who were sometimes sympathetic to strikers), mine and mill operators set up their own "Coal and Iron Police" as early as the 1870s. Public reaction against these private armies led the Pennsylvania legislature to create a Department of State Police as an ostensibly more neutral and highly-trained law enforcement body. But in the 1910 strike at Bethlehem Steel, the state police proved to be as pro-management as the Coal and Iron Police, and even more brutal. George F. Lumb, deputy superintendent of the newly minted State Police, appeared before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915 to defend the force's reputation against accusations that they tended to side automatically with management in labor disputes.

After long accepting low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions, Polish oil refinery workers in Bayonne, New Jersey, walked off the job in 1915. Virtually the entire Polish immigrant community supported them, and only police violence and hired thugs succeeded in breaking the strike. In this photograph, striking workers confront company guards outside the Standard Oil Works moments before the private police opened fire. Five strikers were killed by gunfire, but workers elected to strike again the next year.

In her autobiographical essay, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," which was first published in Socialist Woman in October 1908, Socialist Party organizer Kate Richards O'Hare credited her career as a "Socialist agitator" to her youthful exposure to poverty and "sordid suffering." As she explained in this essay, her disillusionment with the church and a talk by labor organizer "Mother"Jones further pushed her toward socialism.

Although Coxey's Army was only one of more than forty different armies of the unemployed that headed for Washington, D.C., in 1894 to seek relief from their plight, it was by far the best known. Its leader was the colorful Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Populist who owned a sand quarry, bred horses, and wore hand-tailored suits. The publicity that preceded the arrival of the "armies" apparently frightened authorities. Fifteen hundred soldiers were stationed in Washington to meet the army; thousands more were available in Baltimore, Annapolis, and Philadelphia in anticipation of further trouble. But the army that arrived on May 1, 1894, numbered only 500. When Coxey tried to speak at the U.S. Capitol, police arrested him for walking on the grass. Fifty years to the day later, in 1944, Coxey finally delivered this speech from the steps of the U.S. Congress.

As eighteenth-century colonists eyed the lands across the Appalachian Mountains for further settlement, they needed explorers and promoters. Daniel Boone was both. Born in Pennsylvania in 1734, he settled his family along the Yadkin River in North Carolina in 1757. A decade later he traveled across the Appalachians to explore and hunt in the rich area around the Kentucky River. Boone and his hunting partners actually shared many values with the local Indians, but the goals of natives and newcomers diverged when permanent settlement occurred. By 1775, Boone was leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap along the Wilderness Road to the stockaded settlement of Boonesborough. He described his most significant trip, which took place between 1769 and 1771, in this selection from his 1784 "autobiography." John Filson, a land speculator and author of Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, created Boone's legend as a frontier hero by appending a ghostwritten first person narrative by Boone to his promotional tract. Soon after, Boone abandoned Kentucky because of disputed land claims; he eventually died in Missouri in 1820.

The rising tide of lynchings of African Americans across the South launched a national anti-lynching crusade, led by Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper editor Ida Wells-Barnett, an outspoken advocate for the area's African-American citizens. As the leader of the national anti-lynching movement, Wells-Barnett joined a group of Illinois congressmen who visited the White House in March, 1898, to protest the murder of the newly-appointed Lake City, South Carolina Postmaster Baker, who was black. Wells-Barnett penned this petition to President William McKinley to urge punishment of those responsible for shooting.

Beginning in 1887, the federal government attempted to "Americanize" Native Americans, largely through the education of Native youth. By 1900 thousands of Native Americans were studying at almost 150 boarding schools around the United States. The U.S. Training and Industrial School founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, was the model for most of these schools. Boarding schools like Carlisle provided vocational and manual training and sought to systematically strip away tribal culture. They insisted that students drop their Indian names, forbade the speaking of native languages, and cut off their long hair. Not surprisingly, such schools often met fierce resistance from Native American parents and youth. But some Indian young people responded positively, or at least ambivalently, to the boarding schools, and the schools also fostered a sense of shared Indian identity that transcended tribal boundaries. The following excerpt (from a paper read by Carlisle founder Capt. Richard C. Pratt at an 1892 convention) spotlights Pratt's pragmatic and frequently brutal methods for "civilizing" the "savages," including his analogies to the education and "civilizing" of African Americans.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this motion picture autobiography, a high school "girl" talked about what the movies of the 1920s meant to her.

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor convened in Richmond, Virginia, a region divided by racial and political conflict, on October 4, 1886. In the 1880s, Southern politics was split between southern Democrats who sought to "redeem" the old order and a progressive (and in some places interracial) political movement that sought to extend the gains won by ordinary black and white southerners during the Reconstruction era. As more than one thousand delegates gathered from across the country in the former capital of the Confederacy, the labor and political reform movements hoped the convention would be a launching pad for their message of racial peace and political reform. But the convention and the Knights of Labor were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization's attitude toward the question of social equality between the races. Black Knight Frank J. Ferrell faced an uproar when he was invited to socialize with fellow white Knights at the convention. The attitude of an anonymous Knight of Labor, interviewed here, typified the not-in-my-neighborhood reaction of many white Knights to Ferrell's crossing of the color line.

America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. One of the most important of the legal challenges to the internment policy was Korematsu v. United States, a case brought by Fred T. Korematsu, a Nisei (an American-born person whose parents were born in Japan). Korematsu had been arrested by the FBI for failing to report for relocation and was convicted in federal court in September 1942. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a sharply divided 6-3 decision, upheld Korematsu's conviction in late 1944. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, rejected the plaintiff's discrimination argument and upheld the government's right to relocate citizens in the face of wartime emergency.

Following the Civil War, the federal government brought newly freed people into the political and economic sphere through a variety of efforts known as Radical Reconstruction. But planters, unwilling to lose control over African-American laborers, attempted to rule the South through violence and legal and economic intimidation. The secret terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan was part of the violent white reaction to Reconstruction. Founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1866, Klan nightriders targeted black veterans and freedmen who had left their employers and those who had succeeded in breaking out of the plantation system. African Americans who transgressed local norms of white supremacy were in particular danger as the testimony from Maria Carter and others at these 1871 Congressional hearings about the Klan made clear. Klan leaders often were prominent planters and their family members while poorer men made up the rank and file.

The power, global reach, and flexibility of multi-national corporations increased dramatically during the 1980's and 1990's as a revolution in communications technology and the increasing adoption of free trade agreements between countries allowed companies to shift production easily from one part of the globe to another. Many companies could now pressure labor unions by negotiating favorable contracts wherever labor costs and local tax laws suited them. However, the increasingly interwoven global economy, along with the technology that facilitated it, also gave rise to international labor organizing. As David Abdulah, education director of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, relates, union organizing and activism has become global, as workers in different countries develop networks across borders to keep up with and combat the unfair labor practices of the multi-nationals.

One of the prime frustrations of labor organizers in the late 1800s was the powerful myth that every American could attain untold riches if sufficiently hardworking and ambitious. The faith that some workers had in this mythology of the "self-made man" inhibited unionization and the spread of radical ideology. The anonymous writer of this 1877 editorial in the Labor Standard took aim at the national obsession with making money at any cost.

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. The aftermath of the catastrophe brought grief and recriminations. Protest rallies and memorial meetings were held throughout the city. During one meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, tension broke out between the working-class Lower East Siders who filled the galleries (and saw class solidarity as the ultimate solution to the problems of industrial safety) and the middle- and upper-class women in the boxes who sought reforms like creation of a bureau of fire prevention. The meeting would have broken up in disorder if not for a stirring speech by Rose Schneiderman, a Polish-born former hat worker who had once led a strike at the Triangle factory. Although she barely spoke above a whisper, Schneiderman held the audience spellbound.

Although absent from Hollywood portrayals of the old West, homosexuality was surely a feature of life on the frontier. "The West," observe John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman in their history of sexuality, "provided extensive opportunities for male-male intimacy. Some men were drawn to the frontier because of their attractions to men." Badger Clark was born in 1883 and grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota. His collection of western poems, Sun and Saddle Leather, was not published until the second decade of the 20th century. But the following verse about "The Lost Pardner" suggests a continuing--but largely forgotten--gay presence in the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.