Many Indian peoples had and still have stories of creation that explain how they came to be and to live in their homelands. These narratives offer a glimpse into the belief systems present before Europeans entered North America. Many northeastern Indian peoples share a legend of how the world was created on the back of a giant sea turtle (some still refer to North America as a "turtle island"). While there are many versions of the tradition, the following selection is from the Iroquois Indians of New York State. Anthropologists collected and transcribed most versions of the Iroquois creation myth in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. However, John Norton, son of Scottish and Cherokee parents and adopted by the Mohawks, recorded this version, one of the earliest, in 1816. Norton traveled widely in the eastern woodlands, playing an important role in the life of the Mohawks in the early-nineteenth century.

Samuel de Champlain was a trader, soldier, explorer, diplomat, and author. The critical figure in French efforts to establish the colony of New France along the St. Lawrence river, he set up a small trading post at Quebec, the capital of the colony, in 1608. Given the small numbers of French colonists and their primary interest in the fur trade, Champlain recognized that success depended on alliances with the native peoples of the northern region. In June 1609, Champlain and nine French soldiers joined a war party of Montganais, Algonkaian, and Hurons to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. They met their foe, probably about 200 Mohawks, along the lake later named Lake Champlain. The French firearms caused death and consternation among the Indians and introduced such weapons to native conflicts. Over the next decades, Champlain chronicled his explorations and observations of New France in several volumes, providing important information on life and warfare in seventeenth-century North America.

Professional psychiatry was only in its infancy at the end of the 19th century, and many physicians disputed its scientific basis. In 1896, psychiatrists--or alienists as they were then called--entered the political arena in a controversy over the sanity of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was heartily disliked by many middle-class urban professionals, precisely the sort of people who became alienists. In a letter to the New York Times of September 27, 1896, a self-identified anonymous "Alienist" declared that Bryan was of a "mind not entirely sound." In this editorial, published the same day, the Times soberly endorsed the psychiatrist's diagnosis. A few days later, it polled nine New York alienists, among them the leaders of the psychiatric profession, on Bryan's sanity: two refused comment; three believed him to be of "sound mind;" and four agreed with the "Alienist's" original diagnosis.

In one of the largest forced migrations in human history, up to 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to Europeans and shipped to the Americas. Most slaves were seized inland and marched to coastal forts, where they were chained below deck in ships for the journey across the Atlantic or "Middle Passage," under conditions designed to ship the largest number of people in the smallest space possible. Olaudah Equiano had been kidnapped from his family when he was 11 years old, carried off first to Barbados and then Virginia. After serving in the British navy, he was sold to a Quaker merchant from whom he purchased his freedom in 1766. His pioneering narrative of the journey from slavery to freedom, a bestseller first published in London in 1789, builds upon the traditions of spiritual narratives and travel literature to help create the slave narrative genre.

Thirty-eight year old Rebecca Burlend and her family left England in 1831 for a new life in Pike County, Illinois. Driven to emigrate by poverty, they hoped to own their own land in the United States and chose Pike County based on the letters of "Mr. B.," a settler who had gone before them. After more than two months at sea, the family landed in New Orleans, where Burlend observed the horrors of the slave trade firsthand. From there they traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi River to Illinois. Many immigrants--then and now--experience the kind of fear and confusion that the Burlends felt on arriving at what looked to them like a deserted wilderness. After the "many difficulties" of the book's title, the family settled successfully in Illinois. Rebecca Burlend wrote this book with the assistance of her son, the author and teacher Edward Burlend, during a return visit to England in 1846.

Jim Vacarella was a student at Kent State University when the National Guard arrived on campus in 1970. Like hundreds of other campuses across the country, Kent State witnessed an upsurge in student activism following the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970. The Guardsmen arrived when students burned down the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) building, and Vacarella remembered that their arrival was met with hostility – along with thrown rocks and bottles – from angered students. Two days later, four students were killed when Guardsmen opened fire during an anti-war demonstration.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. In this 1970 interview with historian Herbert T. Hoover, Amos Owen, Mdewakanton Sioux tribal chairman, gave a mixed verdict on the Indian Reorganization Act.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. But in this 1970 interview, Sioux tribal leader Alfred DuBray argued that the Indian New Deal, on balance, brought positive changes.

The events of the first few months of 1917, from the resumption of unrestricted submarine attacks to the Zimmerman telegram, broke the back of the antiwar movement and substantially increased enthusiasm for American intervention. But some dissident voices remained. Among the firmest congressional opponents was the progressive Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette. On April 4, 1917, two days after President Woodrow Wilson's call for war, La Follette argued in this speech before Congress that the United States had not been even-handed in its treatment of British and German violations of American neutrality. A Republican senator from a state with a large agricultural and German-American population, La Follette worried that the war would divert attention from domestic reform efforts. But even in Wisconsin La Follette met opposition; the state legislature censured him, as did some of his longtime progressive allies. One of them said that he was "of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops."

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, W. M. Mink, mill superintendent at the Homestead steelworks, testified that the cause of the strike was simple--the infection of "the Bolshevik spirit"among "the foreigners."

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed the Indian New Deal in equally positive terms. In this 1968 interview with historian Joseph H. Cash, attorney Ramon Roubideaux, a Brule Sioux, denounced the Indian Reorganization Act as "a white man's idea" of how Indians should live and argued that it "set the Indian people aside from the mainstream of American life and made them a problem."

Many of those who took part in the student movement of the 1960's drew their inspiration from the African-American struggle for freedom. That was true for Cathy Wilkerson, who became involved in the civil rights movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963 while at Swarthmore College. She described her experience as a college student listening to Civil Rights leader Gloria Richardson as the event that changed her life. Wilkerson went on to work in the SDS national office and edited the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. In 1968, she moved to Washington DC to open a SDS regional office, and later became a Weatherman. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

Ragtime music, with its syncopated, polyrhythmic style, was born, according to cultural historian Robert Snyder, in the 1890s in the black saloons and brothels of southern and Midwestern cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. By the end of the 19th century ragtime had assumed a place at the center of American popular music and remained there until the 1920s. Ragtime meant a tinkling piano and no one played the ragtime piano any better or longer than Eubie Blake, born in Baltimore in 1887. In this selection from an interview performance conducted in 1970 for public television by musician Max Morath, Blake recalled how he began playing ragtime as a young man at the turn of the century.

Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was formed in 1962 to address issues of poverty, as well as feelings of helplessness, alienation, and indifference in African-American and working class communities. The group, which focused initially on community organizing, quickly became a leader of the anti-war movement when President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965. A graduate student in 1965 at the University of Michigan, Carl Oglesby worked as a writer for a defense contractor. He was horrified at what he began to learn about Vietnam, and when SDS members found him he quickly joined the group. Oglesby quit his job, spoke at the first teach-in against the Vietnam War at Michigan, and was elected president of SDS in 1965. He then spent years traveling around the country speaking against the war.

During World War II, the U.S. collaborated with the resistance group the Vietminh and their leader, Ho Chi Minh, in their fight against Japan. In the postwar period, however, the U.S. feared Communist expansion into Southeast Asia. In 1954, as France withdrew its forces in defeat, the Geneva Accords established the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam was partitioned into north and south sectors until elections to be held by 1956. Fearing a victory by Ho Chi Minh, the Eisenhower administration collaborated with the South Vietnam leadership to prevent elections and subsequently sent military aid and advisors. Under President John F. Kennedy, the number of "advisors" increased to more than 16,000, some of whom engaged in counterinsurgency efforts and actual combat. Although Kennedy opposed large scale U.S. involvement, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, began regular bombings and escalated troops to more than 500,000 by 1967. Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, scaled back to 39,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by September 1972, but initiated bombing raids into Cambodia in 1969 and sent ground troops there in 1970. The U.S. and North Vietnam reached a cease-fire agreement in January 1973, and the South Vietnamese regime fell in April 1975. More than one million people died during the war, including an estimated 925,000 North Vietnamese, 184,000 South Vietnamese, and 57,000 American soldiers. In the following excerpt, Leslie Gelb, a State Department official during the Vietnam War and Defense Department official afterward, offered an insider's appraisal to a Senate committee of the reasons for the U.S. involvement.

The slave auction was one of the most barbaric practices of the harsh system of slavery. The slave trade within the United States destroyed families and tore apart communities, especially after 1840 when slavery was extended into the newer lands of the lower South and Southwest. Planters in the older settled areas of the upper South could realize substantial profits selling enslaved people, and New Orleans became the center of the trade. The resulting forced migration involved hundreds of thousands of African Americans. Some moved with their masters, but the migration also tore apart slave families residing on different plantations. Others were sold on the block, as Solomon Northrup described in his Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841.

Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Governments, including that of the United States, had long been important patrons of the arts, but New Deal support for art was unprecedented in American political life. Like the other New Deal arts projects, the FTP treated creative endeavors as work; it used government funds to hire unemployed actors, stage hands, and playwrights Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. Its productions included classics of the dramatic repertoire by such playwrights as Euripides and Shakespeare; foreign-language plays; and contemporary dramas. In an interview done in 1978 by Elizabeth C. Stevens, Milton Meltzer remembered the vibrant, creative energy along with the political controversies that he witnessed during his stint as a publicist for the New York unit of the FTP.

Charles Woodmason, a newly ordained Anglican minister, left the comforts of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1761 to travel for six years in the Carolina backcountry as an itinerant minister, seeking to bring the established church to areas where it had not taken hold. He also became a fierce partisan of the Regulator movement, a frontier rebellion attempting to obtain a greater voice and fairer claims for backcountry residents who resented the monopolization of power by the coastal leaders. Although Woodmason was hostile toward the colony's elite for their lack of concern over the political and especially religious life of the frontier, the British migrant held traditional beliefs about morality and social order. He was appalled by the immoral and irreligious behavior rampant on the frontier, as he made clear in this selection from his journal of 1768.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, President Bush, whose popularity at home was flagging, opted to respond with massive military force even though many Americans, including Congressional leaders, believed economic sanctions would be effective. Bush initiated a massive, deadly air assault on January 15, 1991, and a brief ground assault followed four weeks later. The Gulf War killed thousands of Iraqi civilians and devastated most of the country's infrastructure, including hospitals and water systems. Many Americans who had previously questioned military action supported the war effort once it began, but many did not. In a break with their stance during previous wars, including World War II and Vietnam, many unions opposed military action in Kuwait. The union members recorded here articulated their reasons for opposing the war at an anti-war protest.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded "Long John," a work song, sung by a man identified as "Lightning" and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. "Long John" mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners.