The most visible signs of industrialization in mid nineteenth-century America occurred in mushrooming factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, but changes in manufacturing also took place in metropolises like New York City. Waves of immigrants entered the port cities 'small workshops, sites of intense craft activity. Cabinetmaking resisted mechanization and unskilled labor because the trade required intricate work on complex pieces of furniture. In his unpublished memoir German immigrant Ernst Hagen recalled that many of the leading names in nineteenth-century furniture, well represented today in museum collections, presided over large shops of toiling workers. Some employed over two hundred hands. The post-Civil War rise of western factories disrupted this urban system; skilled workers either found other employment or were relegated to margins of the trade such as repair work.

Although historians often speak of a "Populist movement" in the 1880s, it wasn't until 1892 that the People's or Populist Party was formally organized. The Omaha Platform, adopted by the founding convention of the party on July 4, 1892, set out the basic tenets of the Populist movement. The movement had emerged out of the cooperative crusade organized by the Farmer's Alliance in the 1880s. The preamble was written by Minnesota lawyer, farmer, politician, and novelist Ignatius Donnelly. Delegates to the convention embraced the platform with great enthusiasm. Many of the specific proposals urged by the Omaha Platform--the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the direct election of Senators, the eight-hour day--won enactment in the progressive and New Deal eras of the next century. Yet at least one historian has argued that the fundamental cooperative and democratic spirit of the agrarian radicals was lost along the way.

In the decades following the Civil War, many white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and journalists campaigned for the creation of a "New South" economy that would emphasize modern industrial development. With the plantation system no longer dominating the southern economy, the South could build its own factories to turn raw materials into finished products: cotton into cloth, tobacco into cigarettes, coal and iron ore into steel. White southern leaders were not the only ones who argued that industrialization was the key to future Southern progress. A small group of black businessmen and landowners, who had taken advantage of the opportunities open to African Americans during Reconstruction, also supported the ideal of a New South based on industrial growth. In the following 1896 statement, Warren C. Coleman, a black North Carolina businessman, called on his fellow black Southerners to support his plan to build a cotton mill that would be operated by black workers.

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. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick was consulting household editor for Ladies Home Journal from 1912 to 1919 and the author of numerous books and pamphlets on scientific management in the home. Frederick's pamphlet, You and Your Laundry (1922), instructed women in the daunting complexities of washing clothes--a process comprising fifteen different steps. You and Your Laundry also illustrated the close alliance between scientific housework and consumption. Written under the sponsorship of the Hurley Machine Company, Frederick's pamphlet frequently invoked its brand name and products. The pamphlet ended with a pitch for buying on installment, a payment plan that helped to spur consumption.

Most people assume that the pledge of allegiance is as old as the Republic. In fact, it was invented in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, director of youth activities for the magazine Youth's Companion. Bellamy drew up the "pledge to the flag" (as it was then called) and publicized it as part of the activities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in America. On Columbus Day in 1892, ten million children recited Bellamy's pledge and it soon became a daily ritual in American schoolrooms. Its widespread adoption reflected both the anxieties about insuring an "American" identity in the midst of a renewed wave of European immigration and a growing nationalistic feeling that would soon help foster American expansionism overseas. The salute to the flag, described below, was dropped in 1942 because of its similarity to Hitler's fascist salute, and replaced with the "modern" salute (right hand over heart). In 1954--in the midst of another wave of American anxiety (this time about domestic and foreign Communism)--the words "under God" were added to the pledge in an effort to distinguish true Americans from "Godless Communists."

While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation's children. Although Congress held its first hearing on the subject in 1952, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. In 1954 and 1955, Congress conducted additional hearings to investigate whether television--along with other mass media products that appealed to children, such as comic books and motion pictures--had anything to do with the documented rise in incidents of juvenile crime. As the renowned media researcher Paul Lazarsfeld testified, studies showed that the hearings, which themselves were televised, only led to worry among viewers rather than to practical measures to correct any perceived problem. In the following testimony from the 1955 hearings, child psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby discussed her research findings, while Lazarsfeld advocated the funding of long-term projects. Both stressed the limitations of research for providing reliable evidence that would definitively link juvenile delinquency to television viewing.

Around 1903, employers began to mount organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions. Employers had a broad array of tactics at their disposal, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. Although employers had reliable allies in state and local police forces, they continued to hire their own private police--detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. Most employers did not, however, need to resort to either spies or state police to break unions. The simplest expedient was to simply fire employees who were perceived as potential troublemakers. Former department store worker Sylvia Schulman testified in 1914 before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations about her experience being fired from her job at A. I. Mann & Sons in Brooklyn merely for joining the retail clerks' union.

Although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt neither came from the working and lower classes nor always acted in their interests, he did, at significant moments, speak for and to the "forgotten man." One of those key moments came in January 1937 when he was inaugurated for his second term--the first time that the presidential inauguration was held on January 20 rather than March 4 (a change brought about by the twentieth amendment). Roosevelt's stirring words help explain why that one-third of the nation went to the polls in November 1936 and reelected him in one of the great landslides in American political history.

Thomas Minor was born in England and came to New England in 1630. By 1668, when this selection from his journal was written, Minor, his wife Grace, and their children were living in what is now Stonington, a town on the Connecticut coast. Indians lived nearby, and the journal shows Minor and his family interacting with them. Minor was a farmer, and he also had a number of public responsibilities. These included town treasurer, leader of the militia, selectman, and brander of horses. He also participated in church and in town meetings. This selection records one year in Minor's life. He began the year in March, as people in England and New England did until the mid-eighteenth century. While his spelling is idiosyncratic and therefore difficult to read, the journal is a valuable record of how written English looked at that time--and probably also of how Minor pronounced his words.

Farming was not the only occupation in early nineteenth-century rural America. Many young entrepreneurs were able to take advantage of the countryside's increasing commercial activity and growing consumer desires by taking to the road to work. Chester Harding, born in Conway, Massachusetts, survived by working in a variety of country crafts as he related in his 1866 autobiography My Egotistigraphy. His early skill in painting signs led to his painting faces, and he grew more expert in portraiture as he practiced on his business patrons, providing them with a rare likeness to display in their homes. Initially far more artisan than artist, Harding, unlike most of his fellow itinerant and self-taught colleagues, ended up one of the most renowned academic artists in antebellum America.

In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, taking their identifying symbol from an earlier all-black voting rights group in Alabama, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Two years later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States." Created, in Newton's words, "to serve the needs of the oppressed people in our communities and defend them against their oppressors," the Panthers patrolled black areas of Oakland with visible, loaded firearms--at the time in accordance with the law--to monitor police actions involving blacks. The organization spread throughout Northern California in the form of small neighborhood groups. They came to national prominence in May 1967 when they arrived armed at the California State legislature in Sacramento to protest a bill banning loaded guns in public places. In October 1967, Newton was wounded in a gun battle with police and charged with killing an officer. His three-year incarceration became a cause célèbre for many young African Americans and chapters of the Party rapidly opened throughout the country. The Panthers initiated community social programs, such as free breakfasts for children, issued a newspaper, and trained recruits with guns, lawbooks, and texts advocating world revolution. In the following years, police and FBI agents arrested more than 2,000 members in raids on Panther offices that resulted in a number of deaths. Although the Panthers became involved in electoral politics in the 1970s, the Party died out by the end of the decade due to repression and internal strife. In the following testimony before Congress, a former managing editor of the Party's newspaper discussed the group and debated the meaning of a slogan and a gruesome cartoon.

In campaign speeches, he favored a buoyant, optimistic, gently paternal tone spiced with humor. But his first inaugural address took on an unusually solemn, religious quality. And for good reason--by 1933 the depression had reached its depth. Roosevelt's first inaugural address outlined in broad terms how he hoped to govern and reminded Americans that the nation's "common difficulties" concerned "only material things." Please note that the audio is an excerpt from the full address.

In spring 1927 it started raining in the Upper Midwest and, according to one observer, "it just never did stop." Torrential rains quickly filled the Mississippi's dozens of tributaries. On April 21, the supposedly impregnable levee system, maintained since 1879 by the Mississippi River Commission, sprang two leaks, or "crevasses" as they are known. Within days the Mississippi River levee system sustained forty more major crevasses in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, unleashing a natural disaster that had no precedent in the long history of human interaction with the Mississippi River. William Cobb, who, in 1927 was a young boy living on his family's farm near Pendleton, Arkansas, recalled for historian Pete Daniel the crevasse that opened on April 21 in the levee near his family's house, a few miles from the Arkansas River.

The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Fears of the "tramp menace" were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. The 1878 work Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives, written by the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, presented a somewhat more mixed portrait of the tramp. In this chapter on "Tramp Printers and Tramp Encampments," Pinkerton expressed some sympathy for the plight of people thrown out of work by the depression, grudgingly admired the audacity of the tramping printers, and argued against treating all tramps as criminals. Still, like other middle-class observers before and since, Pinkerton wanted to separate those he saw as the "deserving" poor from poor people he viewed as undeserving and possibly dangerous.

Their worldly possessions piled on two rundown vehicles, a migrant family paused en route to California in February, 1936. They joined 400,000 people who left western and southwestern agricultural areas for California during the Great Depression, fleeing drought, dust storms, and a dramatic drop in agricultural prices. From 1929 to 1932, wheat prices dropped 50 percent and cotton fell more than two-thirds. The income of many farm families was too low to meet mortgage payments, repay loans, or pay taxes. Hundreds of thousands of families lost their farms. Drought made a bad situation worse, as dust storms tore across the Great Plains, carrying walls of dirt 8,000 feet high and destroying crops, livestock, and a whole way of life.

In 1954, the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education dramatically changed American society. The Court reversed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that racially segregated public facilities were not inherently discriminatory. After the 1954 ruling, states could no longer apply "separate but equal" to public schools, in part because of segregation's psychological effects on children. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Court's decision that the separation of Negro children "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." In 1955, the Court ordained that desegregation of public schools should proceed "with all deliberate speed." The following investigative report tells the story of one adolescent's ordeal to persevere in the face of mob rioting as his family was forced to comply with consequences of the Court rulings.

The Communist-led Unemployed Councils were the first and the most active of the radical movements that sought to mobilize the jobless during the Great Depression. In this interview, which is taken from the radio series "Grandma Was an Activist," relief worker Mary Gale, who was sympathetic to radicals and the jobless, described how she worked behind the scenes to encourage her clients to organize and demand better treatment. The jobless and the poor had few advocates for them, and radicals like Gale not only became their champions but also pushed them to organize themselves.

In the early 20th century, German Americans remained the largest immigrant group, as well as one of the most highly regarded. Thus the vicious nativist attack on the loyalty of German Americans that emerged before and during World War I was particularly remarkable. When the German government began submarine warfare, resulting in American deaths, the intensity of attacks increased. Bishop William A. Quayle, a prominent Methodist clergyman, did not directly attack German Americans but insisted that America's fight was directly with the German people and not just their leaders. In an essay in the Northwestern Christian Advocate, Quale provided lurid (and vastly exaggerated) stories of German atrocities. Such stories heightened the suspicion directed at German Americans.

In 1898 the United States acquired Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island 1,000 miles southeast of Miami, after victory in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. After an initial military occupation, the United States granted Puerto Rico limited local autonomy. In 1917, the U.S. responded to local pressure for independence by declaring Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States--a "gift" that many Puerto Ricans resented. Large, corporate-financed sugar plantations transformed Puerto Rico's agricultural economy and displaced thousands of subsistence farmers from their own land, forcing them into the rural wage labor force. These dramatic changes in the rural economy in the years before World War I pushed unemployment levels in Puerto Rico to crisis proportions. At the same time, American entry into the war created labor shortages in many industries on the mainland. This Labor Department bulletin from May 1918 set out plans for bringing more than 10,000 Puerto Rican laborers to the U.S. to work on war-related projects.

With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900-1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. In addition, Texas joined the other former Confederate states in 1902, legislating a poll tax requirement that, with the implementation of all-white primaries in 1904, effectively disenfranchised African Americans and many Tejano citizens. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In 1948, the American G.I. Forum was formed as an advocacy group by Mexican American veterans. In 1949 and 1950, they began local "pay your poll tax" drives to register Tejano voters. Although they failed in repeated efforts to repeal the tax, a 1955-56 drive in the Rio Grande Valley resulted in the first majority Mexican American electorate in the area. In 1960, Viva Kennedy Clubs, administered by the Forum and others, contributed to the future president's narrow victory in Texas that helped win the national election. Ratification of the 24th Amendment finally abolished the poll tax requirement for Federal elections in 1964. In 1966, the tax was eliminated in all state and local elections by a Supreme Court ruling. In the following interview, Ed Idar, of the Forum, related incidents in the persistent drive by the organization and its leader, Dr. Hector P. Garcia, to increase the number of registered Mexican American voters.