The 1936 presidential election proved a decisive battle, not only in shaping the nation's political future but for the future of opinion polling. The Literary Digest, the venerable magazine founded in 1890, had correctly predicted the outcomes of the 1916, 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932 elections by conducting polls. These polls were a lucrative venture for the magazine: readers liked them; newspapers played them up; and each "ballot" included a subscription blank. The 1936 postal card poll claimed to have asked one forth of the nation's voters which candidate they intended to vote for. In Literary Digest 's October 31 issue, based on more than 2,000,000 returned post cards, it issued its prediction: Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon would win 57 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals. In 1920 the two Italian immigrants were accused of murder and although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. They were executed, despite international protests, on August 23, 1927. Aldino Felicani, printer and publisher of the anarchist paper Controcorrente, was a long-time acquaintance of Sacco and Vanzetti; in 1920 he organized the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. In this interview with Dean Albertson, recorded in 1954, Felicani recalled his relationships with the accused men and his work on the defense committee. His story gave a sense of the emotion of the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage. In October 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949, raising the minimum wage to 75 cents hour and extending coverage, but still leaving many workers unprotected. In the following statement to the 1949 Senate subcommittee on FLSA amendments, an advocacy group representing power laundries warned that such legislation would result in a "ruinous effect" on the industry.

In order to challenge the emphasis on extreme economic individualism espoused by Gilded Age industrialists and laissez-faire theorists, labor writers drew on diverse historical and religious traditions. William Law, writing in the Detroit Labor Leaf in 1886, cited a variety of historical events, starting with the Magna Carta, to argue for collective organization. Law reminded his readers that some of history's most notable changes came about only as a result of organized effort on the part of the masses.

In the war for independence, the life of a common soldier was a rough one. Soldiers served relatively short periods in state militias or longer periods in the Continental Army, raised by Congress. About two hundred thousand men enlisted for one period or another. Militias supplied the greatest number of soldiers, comprised of farmers, artisans, and some professionals. The Continental Congress recruited the young and those with fewer resources, such as apprentices or laborers. Some enlisted voluntarily while others were drafted; the more affluent hired paid substitutes. All faced war's hardships of severe food shortages, discomfort, low morale, and danger. Joseph Plumb Martin, born in western Massachusetts, joined the militia in 1776 before his 16th birthday and served in the Continental Army from 1777 to 1783. In 1830, he wrote a colorful portrayal of the life of a common soldier, Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier. In this excerpt, Plumb described the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781.

The history of American higher education reflects a long struggle between faculty and the business and political interests typically assembled on the governing boards of universities and colleges. By World War I, university and college faculty had become professionalized, governed by organized bodies that set general standards for promotion and tenure as well as for ethical conduct and for accuracy in research and scholarship. Assisted by organizations like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), faculty had acquired a substantial degree of autonomy and authority over the conduct of their own business. But academics remained subject to both economic and political pressures, pressures that exploded during World War I era loyalty crusades. Thorstein Veblen's 1918 essay "The Higher Learning" accused American academics of capitulating to business. Veblen, a noted economist and social critic, argued that the pursuit of knowledge should answer to higher priorities than the pursuit of money, and that it demanded freedom of expression and thought. In American higher learning, Veblen thought, the interests of politics were so like the interests of business that the two had merged, leaving professors doubly vulnerable to intimidation.

With depression looming as a continual threat to the U.S. economy in the late 19th century, Americans debated how the government should respond to hard times--a question still unanswered today. Manufacturers--then as now--usually took the position that government should not interfere with the workings of the "free market." When J. H. Walker, a shoe manufacturer from Worcester, Massachusetts, testified in 1878 before a congressional committee investigating "the causes of the general depression in labor and business," he argued simply that the government should do nothing at all for the vast army of unemployed. "Leave them alone; that is the remedy," he declared.

The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, symbolized the anti-labor climate of postwar America. The act expanded the power of employers and the government to prevent union organizing and strikes, and made it difficult for unions to take industrial action. The most difficult aspect of the bill for many unions to swallow required labor leaders to declare themselves to be non-Communist if they wanted to participate in NLRB elections. While many union members, like Leon Sverdlove of the Jewelry Workers union in New York, resented having to divulge their political views, they accepted the act's requirement in order to protect what union rights they had left. As Sverdlove found, however, even accepting the act's dictates did not protect unions and their members from accusations of communism, and many unions and workers suspected as communist sympathizers were forced out of organized labor.

Despite major cultural, legal, and medical impediments the use of birth control, including abortion, by American women was widespread at the turn of the century. In their quest to control unwanted pregnancies, American women could be surprisingly resourceful in the methods they used. In this audio excerpt from a 1974 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Miriam Allen deFord described methods of birth control in vogue in the 1910s, including spermicides, douches, the Dutch pessary (an early diaphragm), and the use of ergot pills to induce abortion.

In the years immediately following World War I, tens of thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers flocked to the nation's Northern cities looking for good jobs and a measure of respect and security. Many white Americans, fearful of competition for scarce jobs and housing, responded by attacking black citizens in a spate of urban race riots. In urban African-American enclaves, the 1920s were marked by a flowering of cultural expressions and a proliferation of black self-help organizations that accompanied the era of the "New Negro." Debates raged over the best political and organizational path for black Americans, and the Crisis, the national magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), offered one of the earliest and most powerful endorsements of the "New Negro." In an editorial immediately following the Chicago race riot of 1919, Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois argued in favor of acts of self-defense and armed resistance, despite the editorial's conciliatory title, "Let Us Reason Together."

Student organizers from groups such as Students for Democratic Society (SDS) traveled to college campuses around the country to build student opposition to the Vietnam War. Cathy Wilkerson, who worked in the SDS national office and edited the SDS paper, New Left Notes, described how SDS organizers used campus politics to build the movement. By getting students involved in conflicts over university governance, defense research taking place at their universities, or local civil rights issues, SDS engaged thousands of students who had not previously thought of themselves as political. The ability of SDS organizers to make the issues real to students by getting them to take risks and be confrontational on these local issues was, to Wilkerson, the key to SDS's organizing success.

Over 20,000 migrants from England crossed the Atlantic to the new colony of Massachusetts Bay in the decade of the 1630s. This sudden influx of settlers became known to historians as the "Great Migration." Once in New England, they quickly dispersed to various towns. About forty families followed Sir Richard Saltonstall and the Reverend George Phillips four miles up the Charles River to found the community of Watertown in July 1630. Many had relocated from the East Anglian region of England, where William Pond, the correspondent's father, lived. These families attempted to set up a familiar farm economy based on grain and livestock, but early dreams of an easy trade with the Indians proved elusive. Their concerns focused on feeding themselves and achieving economic sufficiency.

After the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, a group of proprietors received a royal grant to establish the colony of South Carolina. They envisioned an agricultural economy based on mixed farming, cattle raising, and trade in deerskins with the local Indians, diverging from the Chesapeake's tobacco and slave economy to the north. The Carolina proprietors sought settlers from the Caribbean by offering inexpensive land for family farms. But conditions were harsh, work was heavy, and poor nutrition was common, as Oxford University-educated Thomas Newe made clear in this 1682 letter to his father. A small minority of wealthy colonists seized economic and political control of the colony. They concentrated in the town of Charleston, drove out the local Indians, and occupied huge tracts of land. Deviating from the society that had been planned, these planters established rice cultivation, thanks to the African slaves whose experience in West Africa formed the basis for the economy. By 1707 South Carolina had the first black majority population in North America. Thomas Newe died within a year of writing these letters, at the age of 28.

Alan Paton's first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), communicated the tragic dimensions of South Africa's system of apartheid to a world audience. In 1954, Paton was asked by Collier's magazine to observe and interview Americans about this country's system of racial segregation. In the first of two articles, Paton reported on race relations in Washington, D.C. and in the Deep South around the time that the Supreme Court declared that segregated "separate but equal" public schools were unconstitutional in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The following letters to the editor express a range of reactions to the Court' s decision and to Paton' s undisguised support for the ongoing "war against segregation."

The southern textile mills, which had expanded dramatically during World War I, faced serious decline in the 1920s. New tariffs, the growth of textile manufacturing in other parts of the world and the shorter skirt lengths of the 1920s, which required less fabric, exacerbated the problems brought on by wartime overexpansion. Textile manufacturers responded by trying to cut wages and increase workloads. Nevertheless, textile workers often look back at the 1920s with genuine affection and nostalgia. In this 1979 interview with historian James Leloudis, Edna Y. Hargett, a former textile worker, described the closeness of the mill village and the "love offering": a collection for sick workers to replace lost wages in an era when there was no sick leave.

Some may think of farmers as conservative, but that view ignores a long tradition of rural radicalism in the United States. In the early years of the Great Depression, that radicalism found powerful expression in the subverting of farm foreclosures and tax sales. The technique was simple--when a farm was foreclosed for overdue taxes or failure to meet mortgage payments, neighbors would show up at the auction and intimidate any potential buyers. Then the farm and equipment would be purchased at a token price and returned to the original owner. Nation magazine reporter Ferner Nuhn witnessed such an auction sale in Iowa and described this practice in March 1933. These efforts saved the livelihood of many South Dakota and Iowa farmers who were devastated by the depression, but they were not enough. Between 1930 and 1935, about 750,000 farms were lost through foreclosure and bankruptcy sales.

The rise of mass circulation magazines combined with the reform impulses of the early 20th century to create the form of investigative journalism known as "muckracking" (so named by President Theodore Roosevelt after the muckrake in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who could "look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands"). In the 1890s, changes in printing technology made possible inexpensive magazines that could appeal to a broader and increasingly more literate middle-class audience. In October 1902 McClure's Magazine published what many consider the first muckraking article, Lincoln Steffens' "Tweed Days in St. Louis." The "muckrakers" wrote on many subjects, including child labor, prisons, religion, corporations, and insurance companies. But urban political corruption remained a particularly popular target, perhaps because it was so blatant, and perhaps because the differences between the muckrakers (mostly middle class and of native Protestant stock) and the political bosses (mostly from Catholic and immigrant backgrounds) made the rule of the immigrant machine appear as an alien intrusion, a corruption of American citizenship.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 brought an enormous chunk of Mexico to the United States. This added to the territory obtained by the annexation of Texas in 1845, but more than just territory was added. More than 75,000 Spanish-speaking residents became U.S. citizens, but the struggle to achieve that citizenship was long and often unsuccessful. Mexican-Americans lost political power and civil liberties quickly in Texas. Justice was hard to secure and the ranching country of South Texas became a landless borderland for Anglo and Hispano alike. Cattle thieves were rampant. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans also had to endure a terror campaign by the Texas Rangers, the state's leading law enforcement officers. One of those Rangers, N. A. Jennys described a complex pattern of ethnic conflict along the border in 1875 in his A Texas Ranger. The Rangers were founded in 1835 to fight Indians, formed a special corps in the Mexican War, and were re-established after the Civil War.

In his essay "Wealth," published in the North American Review in 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were bound by duty to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. (The essay later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth.") But not everyone agreed with Carnegie's perspective. As shown by this newspaper article from 1901, the philanthropic gestures of such captains of industry as Andrew Carnegie were not always greeted with enthusiasm by the workers whose low-paid toil effectively underwrote such extravagant "gifts."

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. Others lent their talents to community art centers that made art training and appreciation accessible to wider audiences. FAP also sponsored the Index of American Design, which set out to discover what was "American" in decorative arts: several hundred artists produced illustrations of thousands of objects in museums and private collections, a source that remains invaluable for historians of American art, society, and culture. In essays written as part of the New Deal's documentation of its own efforts, two editors of the Index of American Design explained the exhaustive search for a distinctive American art in the artifacts of everyday use and decoration.