One of the principal tragedies of slavery was family separation. In this letter, written in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1852, a woman writes to her husband about the sale of their son, Albert, to a slaver trader. Maria and Richard Perkins, who were owned by different masters, were already separated, but now Maria Perkins was witnessing the complete dissolution of her household, both people and possessions. She attempts to salvage at least her marriage by asking her husband to convince his owner buy her. Most slaves did not know how to read and write and this letter, in Mrs. Perkins' own handwriting, is unusual. This letter first came to light in 1929 when Yale historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published it in his Life and Labor in the Old South, and it remains in his papers.

While white southerners briefly considered the idea of emancipating slaves in the years following the American Revolution, by the early-nineteenth century that sentiment had been replaced by a systematic campaign to restrict possibilities for emancipation. After the Nat Turner rebellion of 1832, whites viewed the presence of free blacks among the slave population as dangerous and began to limit their rights. The growth of the southern free black population slowed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and became concentrated in urban areas where they worked as manual laborers, domestics, and artisans. In this 1863 interview, Washington Spradling, 63, the son of an overseer, described how he purchased his family's freedom yet still faced growing restrictions under Kentucky laws that severely hampered free blacks' movements and efforts to achieve justice. Samuel Gridley Howe, an abolitionist and educator of the blind, interviewed Spradling for the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, a body created to make recommendations about the plight of freedmen after the war.

The Birth of a Nation, which opened in March 1915, was simultaneously a landmark in the history of American cinema and a landmark in American racism. The film depicted the South, following the assassination of President Lincoln, as ruled by rapacious African Americans, who by the film's end were heroically overthrown from power by the Ku Klux Klan. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to mount boycott of the film, but it failed to stir significant white opposition. The NAACP changed its tactics; this April 17, 1915, letter from NAACP national secretary Mary Childs Nerney described the organization's efforts, largely in vain, to get local film censors to remove particularly racist scenes. The NAACP's ongoing national campaign to censor the film produced decidedly mixed results. Despite success in Boston and Chicago in securing several minor cuts in the film's release print, by year's end distributors could show The Birth of a Nation almost anywhere in the country.

In 1831 a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia. A religious leader and self-styled Baptist minister, Turner and a group of followers killed some sixty white men, women, and children on the night of August 21. Turner and 16 of his conspirators were captured and executed, but the incident continued to haunt Southern whites. Blacks were randomly killed all over Southhampton County; many were beheaded and their heads left along the roads to warn others. In the wake of the uprising planters tightened their grip on slaves and slavery. This woodcut was published in an 1831 account of the slave uprising.

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. Baseball commentators and critics expended much ink during the 1920s discussing the exact nature and composition of this new and expanding fan population. Some derided the influx of new fans to urban ballparks, in part because of the growing visibility in the bleachers of the sons and daughters of working-class Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, and in part because the game seemed to be straying from its origins in traditional rural and small-town America. On the other hand, writer Edgar F. Wolfe argued in the 1923 Literary Digest that the urban ballpark was a meeting ground for Americans of all classes and backgrounds.

The anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman's foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. McCarthy's apocalyptic rhetoric--he portrayed the Cold War conflict as "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity"--made critics hesitate before challenging him. His purported lists of Communist conspirators multiplied in subsequent years to include employees in government agencies, the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, the United Nations, and the military. Most of those accused were helpless to defend their ruined reputations and faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. In protest, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith composed the following "Declaration of Conscience," condemning the atmosphere of suspicion and blaming leaders of both parties for their "lack of effective leadership." Although Smith convinced six additional Republican Senators to join her in the Declaration, the seven refused to support a Senate report prepared by Democrats that called McCarthy's charges against State Department personnel fraudulent.

The urban workplace changed dramatically in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The American Revolution, with its rampant egalitarianism, dissolved much of the paternalistic control once wielded by fathers, masters and other authority figures, as the anonymous author "Old Apprentice" made clear in his set of three letters to the New York Observer in 1826. But significant blame for this erosion rested with the manufacturers themselves. Eager to seize upon new markets with expanded production, they divided up tasks to produce cheaper clothing or shoes. Semiskilled and unskilled women and children performed this labor rather than apprentices or other workingmen of the traditional artisanal system. These changes also dissolved the traditional residential patterns, pushing working men out into the housing market. A loss of reciprocity and responsibility occurred on both sides.

The colonists 'revolutionary struggle against British political authority also raised issues about equality and human rights at home. Enslaved people throughout the colonies seized upon the rhetoric of liberty and equality to point out the contradiction of fighting Great Britain over principles not fully followed by the colonies themselves; they also appealed to Christian precepts. Scores of petitions flooded the newly established state legislatures. This one, submitted to the Massachusetts General Court in 1777, linked the cause of American freedom with the struggle of African Americans for liberty. Several lawsuits seeking freedom were successful. When Quok Walker sued for his freedom and back wages in 1781, the Massachusetts Chief Justice ruled that his enslavement violated the new state constitution's statement that "men are born free and Equal." His case effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts and other New England states.

Many artists working in the decades after the American Revolution came from the ranks of artisans and mechanics. In a republic that dispensed with aristocratic patrons and royal academies, art came to be supported by a middling populace more interested in portraits than grand history painting. Sculpture in marble, time consuming and expensive, was even more remote than paints, and the new nation lacked grand palaces or mansions for display. John Frazee, born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1790, lacked the benefit of formal instruction but still progressed from carving lettering on gravestones to fashioning busts of the rich and famous. Without formal knowledge or the constraints of European customs, American-born and trained artist-artisans such as Frazee resorted to indigenous and ingenious solutions to the problems they faced in a commercializing society, such as Frazee's mechanical invention to transfer an image from painting to a marble bust.

Whether attempting to escape or simply traveling at night to visit friends or family in neighboring plantations, African-American slaves were threatened by the slave patrols. These squads, often including non-slaveholders who were required to serve under state law, were notorious for their brutality. Most feared were the dogs the pattyrollers" used to track down fugitive slaves. This 1856 advertisement promoted the sale of dogs trained expressly to hunt human beings."

Journalist Theodore H. White received widespread acclaim for his "The Making of the President" series that analyzed election campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. As White points out in the following Collier's article, African-American migration to Northern cities from the South made the black voter an important player in national politics by the mid-1950s. From 1910 to 1970, more than 6.5 million African Americans came North, with 3 million arriving in cities between 1940 and 1960. During the 1956 presidential campaign, Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson attempted to win this black vote by voicing support for the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing segregated schools, a ruling incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower had refused to approve. Stevenson's appeal to black voters, however, was muted by his opposition to using Federal funds or troops to enforce desegregation, a position he adopted to avoid alienating southern voters. In addition, in the 1952 race, Stevenson had selected as his running mate a segregationist Senator from Alabama, John Sparkman. In October, African-American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., announced his support of the President, and on election day, more than 60 percent of black voters also chose Eisenhower. This marked a shift in party allegiance by blacks who had voted overwhelmingly Democratic since the 1930s, when many changed from the party of Lincoln to support Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although Eisenhower's rout of Stevenson was attributed more to foreign affairs than domestic, the black vote continued to be a major factor in national politics.

World War I wartime production demanded the mobilization of thousands of workers to make steel and rubber, work in petrochemical industries, and build ships. Few immigrants left Europe for the United States, and workers were desperately needed to replace those who had left for military service. The following excerpts from African-American newspapers described the new opportunities and continuing struggles that black workers confronted, noting both interracial conflict and cooperation during wartime. "Organized Labor Not Friendly?" exemplified a widely held suspicion of unions among African Americans, who had previously been excluded from organized labor's ranks. "Negro Workers Are Organizing" described one response: the formation of alternative unions organized for black workers on a city-wide basis. "Big Labor Day Celebration" reported on a parade and baseball game that included black and white unionists. In "The Negro and the War," the writer found reason for optimism that President Woodrow Wilson's war aims--"to make the world safe for democracy"--might also find expression in the realization of democratic ideals at home.

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 interviewed students, government officials, NAACP members, church leaders, and soldiers in Washington, D.C., and in the Deep South around the time that the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruled segregated "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional. Like earlier visitors from abroad--such as St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Gunnar Myrdal--Paton offered a uniquely comparative perspective as he searched for answers on the current state of segregation and future prospects for the integration of American institutions.

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. For this second of two articles, Paton, a co-founder and president of the Liberal Party of South Africa, traveled to urban areas in the West and North in order to relate personal stories behind practices such as the restrictive covenant in housing markets, mob violence against blacks in housing projects, and discrimination in employment. Despite the widespread racial injustice he found, Paton predicted that "segregation is dying" in the U.S. due in large part to the struggles of blacks themselves. He concluded that Americans could find hope in the "advance of the Negro" and the recent Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

As immigration dropped sharply during World War I and many native-born women left domestic service for wartime jobs, middle-class women lamented the shortage of domestic workers. This spurred efforts to reorganize housework and a fostered a new breed of home economists who argued for "scientific" housekeeping. By applying the methods and theory of scientific management to the home, these experts argued, housework could be rendered less arduous and time-consuming. The "new housekeeping" often relied solely on the unpaid work of the middle-class wives. A leading proponent of household scientific management, Christine Frederick answered common criticisms of domestic workers by turning a critical eye on their employers. The "servant problem," she argued, was a problem of bad management--middle-class women needed to abandon unsystematic methods and arbitrary supervision for the new principles of scientific management. She expressed unusual empathy for women in domestic service, perhaps because she herself had cleaned houses to help pay her expenses as a college student at Northwestern University.

As immigration dropped sharply during World War I and many native-born women left domestic service for wartime jobs, middle-class women lamented the shortage of domestic workers. New experts offered their advice to the middle-class woman who decided to tackle housework without the assistance of paid help. Gladys Hutton Chase, writing in Good Housekeeping in 1918, explained the new middle-class housekeeping. Chase celebrated her newfound freedom from the "work and worry" of employing domestic workers. Notably, her solution was doing her own work with the help of a professional home economics course, rather than getting other household members to pitch in. And even as she enthused about the efficiency of her new methods, Chase revealed the escalating standards that expanded and complicated middle-class housekeeping.

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." Many black leaders, including religious figures, embraced racial pride and militancy. This 1921 article by Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, captured well what was "new" in the New Negro: an aggressive willingness to defend black communities against white racist attacks and a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of African-American communities in the North.

The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: "To Bob or Not to Bob?" The short, sculpted hair of the "bob" marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as "America's Sweetheart"), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

The human cost of World War I was enormous. The prolonged trench warfare ended the lives of 1.8 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.4 million French, 1.2 million Austro-Hungarians, and over 900,000 British. 112,000 American troops also died, mostly from disease. Many of those who didn't die were left with horrible wounds. Here, plaster casts of the mutilated faces of soldiers wounded in battle are shown next to their reconstructions, carried out with the aid of new prosthetic devices. They represent one legacy of the First World War and the imperfect attempts to contend with its gruesome effects.

During the 1980's and 1990's international free trade agreements encouraged by the United States government increased the power and global reach of multinational corporations. The most controversial of these agreements, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), made it easier for U.S. companies to buy low cost goods from Mexico, which were often produced by U.S. subsidiaries that migrated to take advantage of low-cost labor. Organized labor and most liberal Democrats opposed NAFTA because they feared the loss of American jobs and the increased bargaining power of corporations who could easily transfer production overseas. As Nikos Valence, head of the Fair Trade Campaign, explained, these agreements also stimulated international labor solidarity, as workers in different countries struggled against the free reign of capital and in many cases against the same corporations.