AIDS emerged as a health crisis in the 1980's and early 1990's. While many Americans initially associated the disease with gay men, ignorance about AIDS contributed to its rapid spread, first to intravenous drug users and then to heterosexuals. The lack of information available to people at risk particularly affected health workers like Lorraine Theibaud, a registered nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. Theibaud and her colleagues, fearful about contracting or spreading the disease, were not given adequate information or training on how to protect themselves or their patients. When she discovered safety methods and technology that were not available at her hospital, Theibaud organized health workers to demand access to new safety techniques. Her campaign worked, winning workers new safety training and a permanent monitoring committee.

In October 1933 Chicana dressmakers in Los Angeles launched a citywide strike against the sweatshop conditions under which they toiled. An interview with Anita Andrade Castro, a young dressmaker who went on to become a longtime union activist, provided glimpses of the experience of the rank-and-file strikers. In two excerpts from a long interview done in 1972 by historian Sherna Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project, Castro described, first, her initiation into the union and, second, her arrest as a striker, her anxieties about the impact on her desire to become a citizen, and her encounter with a prostitute.

Created in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided hope and employment for millions of unemployed workers and studied the human toll of the depression. One such study--a series of WPA-conducted interviews with Dubuque, Iowa families--found that middle-class Americans particularly felt the sting and shame of unemployment caused by the depression. In this interview, the Donners discussed the closing of their family-owned printing business in Chicago during tough times. Returning to live with Mrs. Donner's family in Dubuque in 1934, Mr. Donner remained unemployed for over a year before landing a job as a timekeeper on a WPA project, earning less than one-third his previous income.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. "Modern Marriage," an excerpt from Floyd Dell's Outline of Marriage (1926), set out the ideal of companionship between husband and wife. In this mock dialogue, a savvy young wife instructed a professor in the ways of modern marriage. She frankly endorsed birth control, simplified housekeeping, shared housework, and paid work for childless wives. At the same time, Dell's dialogue affirmed a romantic view of fundamental sexual differences. Generically named "The Young Woman," the female character averred that she chose motherhood as "fulfillment of my nature." Circulated by the American Birth Control League, the tract sought to win support for contraception by portraying its place in respectable, if "modern," marriages.

A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women's suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836.

In February and March 1913, the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" opened at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory. After a tour of the U.S., a half million people had seen the exhibit--one of the most influential in American art history. The self-consciously "modern" Armory show, organized by art patron Arthur B. Davies, challenged the artistic establishment. Two-thirds of the 1,600 works were by Americans, and the Europeans whose works were exhibited--Picasso, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gaughin, and Duchamp among them--were far from the conservatives that Americans were used to. "We want this old show of ours," declared one of the organizers, "to mark the starting point of a new spirit in art, at least as far as America is concerned." The show raised the hackles of many critics (one newspaper offered a reward to any schoolchild who could find the nude in the show's most controversial painting, Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"). But art critic W.D. MacColl praised the Armory Show's avant-garde spirit in this Forum magazine review from July 1913.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine , anchored in Havana harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. Two months later, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine . Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used their many newspapers to stir public opinion over the sinking of the Maine into a frenzy, hastenening U.S. entry into the conflict. This February 17, 1898, front page story from Pulitzer's New York World suggested, on the basis of little evidence, the hand of the enemy in the destruction of the Maine.

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. Many took pains in their presentation to convey an aura of authenticity--contestants chosen from ordinary walks of life pondered fact-based questions inside sound-proof isolation booths that insured they received no outside assistance. To guarantee against tampering prior to airtime, bank executives and armed guards made on-air deliveries of sealed questions and answers said to be verified by authorities from respected encyclopedias or university professors. When the public learned in 1959 that a substantial number of shows had been rigged, a great many were offended. One survey, however, showed that quite a few viewers didn't care. Following the revelations, prime-time quiz shows went off the air, replaced in large part by series telefilms, many of which were Westerns. The industry successfully fended off calls for regulation, and by blaming sponsors and contracted producers, networks minimized damage and increased their control over programming decisions. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, one contestant offered proof that he had been coached, while a second refused to acknowledge "moral qualms" in perpetrating the fraud. A third, a teenager, related how she "goofed" and won a match that she was supposed to tie.

This description of a Washington D.C. Knights of Labor assembly hall in the late 1880s appeared in T. Fulton Gantt's novel, Breaking the Chains: A Story of the Present Industrial Struggle,. It was was first published in 1887, in serial form, in The Lance, a labor newspaper in Salem, Oregon. Many other novels from this period addressed the problems of labor conflict and inequality, but Gantt was one of the very few to see unionization as the answer to the problems of working people. Although the Knights officially prohibited lawyers ("non-producers") from membership, Gantt was both a member of the bar and the Knights. Gantt's description, which presumably drew from his own experience in District Assembly 66 in Washington, D.C., conveyed a sense of the diverse social, political, and intellectual functions that the meeting hall played for its members, as well as the issues that animated their debates.

On September 18, 1895 Booker T. Washington, the noted African-American educator who was born a slave in 1858, spoke before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His Atlanta Compromise address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Acutely conscious of the narrow limitations whites placed on African Americans' economic aspirations, Washington stressed that blacks must accommodate white people's--and especially southern whites'--refusal to tolerate blacks as anything more than sophisticated menials. In this excerpt from his best-selling autobiography Up From Slavery (1901) Washington explained some of the circumstances surrounding the unprecedented invitation for him to speak before a biracial audience.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany in order that the world "be made safe for democracy." Four days later, Congress voted to declare war, with six senators and fifty congressmen dissenting. "It is a fearful thing," he told Congress in his speech, "to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance." Wilson did not exaggerate; in 1917 the war in Europe had already lasted two-and-a-half bloody years and had become one of the most murderous conflicts in human history. By the time the war ended a year and a half later, an entire generation was decimated--France alone lost half its men between the ages of twenty and thirty-two. The maimed bodies of millions of European men who survived bore mute testimony to the war's savagery.

When members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) decided to strike the "Little Steel" companies in May 1937, they could hardly have expected it to result in a massacre. On the afternoon of Memorial Day, a flag-waving, ethnically diverse group set out for the company's Republic Steel's main gate but were stopped by a large contingent of policemen. When one of the policemen suddenly and inexplicably fired his revolver into the front of the crowd the march turned into a massacre. In the end, Chicago's police killed ten fleeing workers, wounded thirty more and beat fifty-five so badly they required hospitalization. Lupe Marshall, a housewife and volunteer social worker in South Chicago was among those beaten. She gave this testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, known informally as the La Follette Committee for its chair, Senator Robert La Follette, and charged with investigating the incident.

Large factories such as the Lowell textile mills, with their thousands of employees and imposing structures, were the exception in the United States' early industrial development. More commonly, small manufactories sprang up throughout the northeastern United States wherever a fast moving stream was available to provide water power. N. B. Gordon was the general manager as well as the chief mechanic and mill agent at the Union Cotton and Woolen Manufactory, a small textile company in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Mansfield. His work diary chronicled the everyday difficulties he faced in keeping the mill operating, including such problems as broken machines and too little water to power the mill. Highly independent employees caused him headaches, too.

In 1899 Americans divided sharply over whether to annex the Philippines. Annexationists and anti-annexationists, despite their differences, generally agreed that the U.S. needed opportunities for commercial expansion but disagreed over how to achieve that goal. Few believed that the Philippines themselves offered a crucial commercial advantage to the U.S., but many saw them as a crucial way station to Asia. "Had we no interests in China," noted one advocate of annexation, "the possession of the Philippines would be meaningless." In the Paris Peace negotiations, President William McKinley demanded the Philippines to avoid giving them back to Spain or allowing a third power to take them. One explanation of his reasoning came from this report of a delegation of Methodist church leaders. The emphasis on McKinley's religious inspiration for his imperialist commitments may have been colored by the religious beliefs of General James Rusling. But Rusling's account of the islands, falling unbidden on the U.S., and the arguments for taking the islands reflect McKinley's official correspondence on the topic. McKinley disingenuously disavowed the U.S. military action that brought the Philippines under U.S. control, and acknowledged, directly and indirectly, the equally powerful forces of racism, nationalism, and especially commercialism, that shaped American actions.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the United States military. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. President Franklin Roosevelt quickly addressed Congress to ask for a declaration of war. In the wake of the attack and Roosevelt's speech, folklorists employed by the Library of Congress rushed out to the streets of Washington, D. C., to record public reaction. The selection of "man on the street" interviews showed a wide range of public responses to the attack and to FDR's speech. Young servicemen seemed most concerned about canceled furloughs, while a Polish immigrant swore his undying loyalty to the United States. African Americans in a poolhall insisted on their people's contribution to American history.

President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even while it concealed some of the wrenching cultural changes required to accommodate a commercial civilization. An even more forceful publicist for the view that business and spirituality were compatible was Bruce Barton. The son of a Congregational minister, Barton cofounded one of the nation's largest and best-known advertising agencies. Barton's greatest fame, however, came from the best-selling book that he published in 1925, The Man Nobody Knows, in which he crafted a new vision of Christ and Christianity that was not simply compatible with, but organically connected to, the business-oriented 1920s. Barton's aggressive efforts to merge business and Christianity may seem comical in the late 20th century, but his exertions were sincerely felt by him and sincerely received by many Americans. The Jaqua Way, a business publication, offered on its first page the hymn, "A Man's Thanksgiving," in the which author thanked the "God of business men" for "my customers and for the power to serve them faithfully."

Migration across the Atlantic often involved a series of stages, drawing people to London before they embarked on their journey. John Harrower, a 40-year-old shopkeeper and tradesman, lived in the far north of the British Isles. Like many of the 40,000 residents of the Scottish Highlands who left after 1760, he faced poverty and little opportunity. Harrower initially planned to travel to the Netherlands but ended up in London. The great metropolis, the largest in the western world, swelled as thousands looked unsuccessfully for employment. After several weeks, Harrower signed an indenture to travel to Virginia as a schoolmaster. He sailed with 71 other male indentees, some from London, but many others from across England and Ireland. With his relatively privileged training, Harrower was fortunate and found a new life on a tidewater plantation. These excerpts from his journal tell of his time in London, journey across the Atlantic, and arrival in Virginia.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals in the early 20th century. The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. The case was commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. On the first anniversary of the execution, the Nation published Malcolm Cowley's "For St. Bartholomew's Day." The poem ended in defiance and resolve, when Cowley invoked Sacco and Vanzetti as saints martyred to the cause of freedom. In an ironic gesture, he used images of Catholicism to commemorate the two devout anarchists (and thus atheists) and to proclaim them as spiritual leaders.

"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ," declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of intelligence testing. The army's use of intelligence tests lent new credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. Some contemporaries expressed skepticism about the broad claims of army intelligence testing. In this lighthearted, anonymous commentary, from the April 1918 issue of the army post newspaper Camplife Chickamauga, a would-be poet mocked psychologists with gentle humor.

Alexander Graham Bell first exhibited his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, but many people were initially dubious about the utility of Bell's invention. Nevertheless, by the mid-1890s, about 300,000 phones were in use and by World War I, the number reached 10.5 million. Learning to use this new device, Americans wondered what to say to start a telephone conversation. Bell's choice for an initial greeting was "Ahoy." Others argued for more formal greetings like "What is wanted?" or "Are you there?" In 1877, Thomas Alva Edison, the famous inventor who developed the first practical telephone transmitter, solved the problem by introducing "Hello!" as the standard English telephone greeting. The word had been around for a little while--Twain had even used it in Tom Sawyer --but why Edison chose to use it is not known. Whatever the derivation, "hello" had become standard by 1880 when Mark Twain used it in this comic sketch, "A Telephonic Conversation."