The canteen girl stood as symbol of American volunteerism and femininity in World War I. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. In Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl, Kathleen Morse described the challenges of dispensing hot chocolate and planning entertainments with sparse supplies. At the same time, her letters revealed the less tangible work of the canteen girls: to boost morale by providing reminders of the comforts of home and by representing the sweethearts, sisters, and mothers left behind.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." Women's magazines also took up the home conservation crusade, some employing military analogies to promote the recommendations of the Food Administration. Presenting domestic work as patriotic effort, this U.S. Food Administration campaign in Good Housekeeping offered women a membership shield and even provided instructions for sewing a "patriotic" housekeeping uniform.

In this article, written 24 years after the war for the children's magazine St. Nicholas, former Harper's Weekly sketch-artist Theodore R. Davis recollects the hazardous and inventive ways that pictorial journalists reported the Civil War. While photography was still in its infancy--unable yet to capture action or to be cheaply reproduced in periodicals or books--artists' battlefront sketches were the public's primary source of visual news of the war's people, places and events. Davis, who was 21 at the start of the war, was typical of this new type of reporter, recording direct observations or collected stories in rough sketches and notes that were dispatched to newspaper offices in New York where they were made into wood engravings and printed as illustrations in publications such as Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and the New York Illustrated News (the South had no comparable pictorial news resource).

The Appeal to Reason was the most popular radical publication in American history. This socialist newspaper, whose founding in 1895 predated the creation of the Socialist Party in 1901, reached a paid circulation of more than three-quarters of a million people by 1913. During political campaigns and crises, it often sold more than four million individual copies. From its headquarters in Girard, Kansas, the Appeal published an eclectic mix of news (particularly of strikes and political campaigns), essays, poetry, fiction, humor, and cartoons. During and after World War I, the paper declined in circulation because of the deaths and departures of key editorial figures, the declining fortunes of the Socialist Party, and the repression of U.S. radicalism. It ceased publishication in November 1922. These snippets of working-class humor and human drama were compiled for the December 23, 1911, issue.

When AIDS struck the gay community during the early 1980's, many who had not previously consider themselves activists, like Bruce Priebe, became politically active. Militancy, political action, and demands for rights and recognition within the gay and lesbian community had been building throughout the post-war period. While many homosexual men and women first expressed their sexuality during World War II, a period of relative, albeit silent, tolerance, the movement for gay rights became more assertive following the 1969 Stonewall Riot, when New York City police raided a gay club. The burst of community health activism in response to the AIDS epidemic built on these earlier expressions of "gay pride" and activism.

Four million workers—one fifth of the nation's workforce—went out on strike in 1919, seeking to consolidate and expand the gains they had achieved during World War I and to make real the war's rhetoric of democracy. The most important of these strikes began in September, when 350,000 steel workers walked off the job. Steel companies responded with a reign of terror, aided by local governments. Strikers were beaten, arrested, shot, and driven out of steel towns. Management brought in African-American and Mexican-American strikebreakers to split workers along racial and ethnic lines and tried to portray the conflict as an attempted revolution by foreign-born radicals. Eventually, the strike was broken. This strike ballot distributed by the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers—printed in English, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Polish—indicated the range of nationalities composing the industry's workforce in 1919.

During World War II, Chinese Americans, who had often been lumped together with other Asians and even called Japs

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Hudson River School. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

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.

The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, China during September 1995. The conference, which called for gender equality, development, and peace, grew out of the international women's movement and marked the end of the official United Nations decade of Women. For women like May Chen, Vice President of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), the conference was an opportunity to share their activist experiences and learn about issues confronting women around the world, including political and domestic violence against women and families, economic and cultural marginalization, and unfair labor practices. Chen, a long-time activist in the Asian-American community, relished the opportunity to meet and learn from well-prepared women who insisted that women's rights – and worker's rights – were human rights.

In the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans were eager to acquire the Mexican land of California and New Mexico, enough to provoke a war with Mexico. In 1845 U.S. President James K. Polk sent envoys who offered to buy Mexican territory and stationed federal troops in the border areas. Naval forces patrolled the Gulf coast and American consuls in California stirred up annexation fever. When the presence of those troops brought an anti-American government to power in Mexico in 1846, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor and his troops to the Rio Grande and declared war. Taylor pursued retreating Mexican forces 100 miles into Mexico to the heavily fortified city of Monterrey. New Englander Samuel Chamberlain was eager to do battle against the Mexicans and expand the American empire. This excerpt from his illustrated manuscript, "My Confessions: Recollections of a Rogue," described his participation in the fierce house-to-house battle for Monterrey in September 1846.

Angered by the effect of the British naval blockade on cotton prices and British support for Indian attacks against white frontier settlers, farmers in the South and West strongly supported the War of 1812. The war ended two years later with few issues settled between the two nations. The most significant battle took place after the peace treaty was signed in 1814, when General Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder, decisively defeated the British forces at New Orleans. This resounding victory made him a national hero and symbol of frontier fighters and earned him the nickname "Old Hickory." Although he secured victory using regular troops armed with artillery power, ten years later Samuel Woodward celebrated the role of sharpshooters armed with Kentucky long rifles in his song "The Hunters of Kentucky." This immensely popular song, filled with images of Old Hickory and his men overwhelming the well-trained army of John Bull (a symbol of Britain), became an effective element in Jackson's successful 1828 campaign for president.

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.

Improved birth control was one crucial element in women's exercise of sexual freedom. Though people had practiced methods of fertility control for hundreds of years, the 20th century saw the advent of more reliable technologies that allowed a sharper separation between sex and reproduction. Before World War I, birth control advocates confronted a large and often hostile audience of opponents. By the 1920s, though, changing sexual ideologies made such ideas more widely acceptable. The major figure in the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, began her crusade as a militant radical whose birth control agitation grew out of her nursing experience in working-class communities. Sanger received 250,000 letters from women asking for advice about birth control. In 1928 Sanger published a selection of the letters in her book Motherhood in Bondage. The letters remain a powerful testament to the vulnerability of women without access to reliable contraception.

In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act making it illegal to support the overthrow of state or national governments. In 1949, 11 Communist Party leaders were convicted under this Act. The attorneys for the accused were themselves convicted of contempt of court and half served prison terms. Subsequently, most lawyers refused to represent suspected Communists unless they themselves were members of the Communist Party. In the following testimony before a House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearing investigating Communist activities in the San Francisco area, radical attorney Robert E. Treuhaft (1912-2001) described his unsuccessful attempts to hire respected lawyers--who privately disapproved of HUAC--to represent him. Treuhaft, an Oakland-based lawyer who had represented labor unions and African-Americans deprived of civil rights, had joined the Communist Party in the 1940s. Subsequently, he became the unpaid counsel for the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a trust fund that supplied bail money for Communists arrested under the Smith Act. The Justice Department included the CRC on their official list of subversive organizations, and following his appearance before HUAC, the Committee listed Treuhaft among the 39 most dangerous subversive lawyers in their pamphlet, "Communist Legal Subversives: The Role of the Communist Lawyer." Jessica Mitford, Treihaft's wife, wrote in her memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, that the San Francisco HUAC hearing targeted did serious damage "in destroying livelihoods and muzzling political dissent at the grass-roots level."

The reasons immigrants had for leaving their homelands and coming to America were as diverse as the backgrounds of the immigrants themselves. Although most immigrants came to the United States for economic reasons some sought a new home because of persecution based on their politics, religious beliefs, or even their sexual orientation. In this 1882 letter sent to medical writer and sexologist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a thirty-eight-year-old German-born merchant explained how a homosexual arrest in his homeland forced him to emigrate to the United States.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. Machines offered salvation through technology; scientific housework promised satisfaction through systematic and efficient methods. But middle-class wives themselves voiced a discontent that could not be addressed through new purchases or better systems. In 1923, Woman's Home Companion solicited readers' letters for a series that offered the magazine as a clearinghouse for women's household problems and solutions. In response, nearly two thousand women wrote letters to the magazine. Skeptical of the solutions afforded by washing machines and efficiency methods, many of them called for cooperative housekeeping, paid work, help from children and husbands, and equality in marriage--solutions not contemplated by the enthusiasts of either scientific housekeeping or the new household technology.

The Chicago radicals convicted of the infamous May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in which one policeman was killed remained openly defiant to the end. Unlike the other seven men convicted of the bombing, Oscar Neebe, a New York-born labor organizer who had been raised in Germany, received not death, but a fifteen-year jail sentence. Although Neebe insisted (accurately) that "there is no evidence"that he had connection with the bombing, he maintained, in this brief address, his solidarity with his comrades. "Your honor," he told the judge, "I am sorry I am not to be hung with the rest of them."

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was preceded by two other significant speeches. The subject under debate was the currency plank in the Democratic platform. The majority of members of the resolutions committee had endorsed the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) In the ensuing debate, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina spoke for the majority, framing the silver issue as a sectional one. His disastrous performance dashed his hopes to be the silverite candidate for the U.S. presidency. The speakers for the minority position, including Senator David Bennett Hill of New York--whose speech is excerpted here--defended President Cleveland and the gold standard.