In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fraternal organizations were ubiquitous. Their structure and rituals influenced a wide range of other groups, from the Knights of Labor to the Grange, from the American Protective Association to the Ku Klux Klan. In the last two decades of the 19th century, Americans created almost 500 national beneficiary orders and thousands of local lodges. The enormous membership of fraternal organizations attracted the attention of early sociologists. In this excerpt from an article published in the March 1901 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, B. H. Meyer surveyed "Fraternal Beneficiary Societies in the United States." Although fraternal organizations like the Masons sometimes crossed class, ethnic, and religious (but almost never racial) lines, they more often reinforced those divisions. African Americans, immigrants, and the working class thus created their own complex of social and fraternal orders.

Department stores not only became a major source of employment for young urban white women beginning in the late 19th century; they also offered a new focus for stories and novels about life in America's burgeoning cities. Writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and O. Henry often used the world of department stores and the shop girls who worked there to create a modern fiction (including a brand new form--the short story) that allowed readers to feel the texture of urban life. Ferber's shop-girl heroines were strong-willed, and though they expressed vulnerability and desire for male companionship, they valued their careers. In this 1912 Ferber short story, titled "One of the Old Girls," the head of the corset department in Spiegel's department store is faced with a hard decision when her longtime swain "pops the question."

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. 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, a producer described one program's system of control over the seemingly spontaneous on-air contests. Several congressmen then aired their views on the ethics and effects of such deceptive television practices.

Engraver Thomas Woodcock was born in Manchester, England in 1805 and emigrated to the United States in 1830. In 1836 he took a trip to Niagara Falls, traveling north from Manhattan up the Hudson river and west on the Erie Canal. Niagara Falls was a favorite destination for tourists in the 1830s, made possible in part by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. The trip was popularized by authors like Basil Hall, whose 1829 Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and '28 Woodcock mentions several times here. Woodcock's narrative is noteworthy less for his appreciation of the natural wonders of the falls than for his shrewd appraisal of business practices in western New York. This selection from his private journal begins on the Erie Canal with his trip from Schenectady to Utica by packet boat.

Many young men and women coming of age in the early-nineteenth century began to think about possibilities beyond the farm economy. The founding of new institutions of higher education and the expansion of older ones in New England beyond the handful of colonial colleges provided opportunities to farm boys from a wider range of social backgrounds. One such man was Elias Nason, born into a large family and poor. He wrote to his parents about the prospects for his brothers and sisters in this 1835 letter, the year that he was graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Like many, he was going to school intermittently at the same time that he was teaching school to stay afloat. Nason expressed a common prejudice of the time against work in the mills or factory labor when he warned: "Factories are talked about as schools of vice in all circles here."

The productive capacity of the United States during World War II surpassed all expectations. To boost that production and maintain supply levels for troops abroad, Americans at home were asked to conserve materials and to accept ration coupons or stamps that limited the purchase of certain products. Gasoline, rubber, sugar, butter, and some kinds of cloth were among the many items rationed. American responses to rationing varied from cheerful compliance to resigned grumbling to instances of black market subversion and profiteering. The drive to increase wartime production extended beyond rationing. Government-sponsored posters, ads, radio shows, and pamphlet campaigns urged Americans to contribute to scrap drives and accept rationing without complaint. A segment of the popular radio series Fibber McGee and Molly had Fibber shouldering his patriotic duty.

To build broad public support for its New Deal relief programs, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged documentation of the human suffering caused by the Depression. From 1935 to 1943, photographers working for several federal government agencies, principally the Farm Security Administration (FSA), traveled the country and produced the most enduring images of the Great Depression. This Walker Evans picture of a poor rural family was part of that massive documentation effort. Wishing to convey both suffering and dignity, FSA photographers searingly presented conditions to the American public, selecting effective compositions and poses influenced by advertising and mass-market magazine formats. These photographic icons of the era were widely circulated in the popular press, including Time, Look, and Life magazines, and they appeared in major museum exhibits and best-selling books.

The issue of protective legislation for women and mothers has divided reformers, labor unionists, legislators, courts, the military, and feminists since the end of the 19th century when a number of states passed statutes to limit women's work hours. At issue--equal treatment versus biological difference. During the Cold War era, this question informed the debate on the role of women in the military. Although the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 established a permanent presence for women in all branches of the armed forces, a new Army regulation in October 1949 required the discharge of female servicewomen with children under the age of 18. To guarantee passage of the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952, during the Korean War, a provision was dropped that would have reversed this regulation. Thus mothers of dependent children were ineligible to enlist in reserve units and were discharged after childbirth or adoption. In the following Congressional session, the Senate passed S. 1492, allowing the reinstatement of women with dependent children. The bill, however, died in the House Committee on Armed Services and failed to become law. In the following testimony to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, Mrs. Anna Gordon, a Reserve officer in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service--U.S. Navy Women's Reserve), emphasized that many mothers successfully combined motherhood and careers. She further argued that skilled, experienced women dedicated to military careers were too valuable for the nation to discard at a time of Cold War uncertainty. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

During World War I, the United States fought a war of ideas with unprecedented ingenuity and organization. President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to manage news and solicit widespread support for the war at home and abroad. Under the energetic direction of Mississippi newspaper editor George Creel, the CPI churned out national propaganda through diverse media. Creel organized the "Four Minute Men," a virtual army of volunteers who gave brief speeches wherever they could get an audience--in movie theaters, churches, synagogues, and labor union, lodge, and grange halls. Creel claimed that his 75,000 amateur orators had delivered over 7.5 million speeches to more than 314 million people. CPI publications from the Four Minute Man crusade offered tips on developing and delivering a brief, effective speech--the predecessor to today's "sound bite." They also recognized diverse audiences, with reports of Yiddish speakers in theaters and workplaces, a Sioux Four Minute Man, and a speech called "The Meaning of America" delivered in seven languages.

Little Rosebud's Lovers was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a popular author of popular fiction. Between 1882 and 1902, she wrote more than 50 different serials for the story papers. She was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots. In this selection, the first chapter of Little Rosebud's Lovers, the heroine finds herself the unwitting object of desire of a wealthy Bostonian. The selection ends on a note of foreboding--in subsequent chapters Little Rosebud becomes homeless and impoverished before her inevitable redemption. What did women workers take away from their reading of the novels of Libbey and others? Historian Michael Denning has speculated that these stories were "an interruption in the present, a magical fairy tale transformation of familiar landscapes and characters, a death and rebirth that turned the social world upside down, making proud ladies [into] villains, and working-girls [into] ladies."

Frenchman Louis Daguerre's improvements in photography reached America in the 1840s. Personal portraits were soon the craze, and daguerreotype' studios sprang up in every city, while traveling daguerreotypists served the countryside. This picture presents the controlled environment of the early studios. It took so long to properly expose a photographic plate that the subject needed a head brace to hold a pose.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this autobiography, a twenty-year-old college "boy" from an immigrant Jewish family described his changing tastes in movies.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this excerpt from Blumer's study, the sociologist collected together comments from young people describing how the movies led to dissatisfaction with their lives and conflicts with their parents.

Between 1820 and 1860, 1,500,000 immigrants arrived in America from Germany. Many of the new arrivals who settled in cities such as New York worked as shopkeepers and skilled tradesmen, although many more worked as employees in construction, brewing, and manufacturing. Although German immigrants did not mix politics and liquor, reformers were disconcerted by the atmosphere of their social establishments. Unlike the bars in Irish neighborhoods, the beer gardens catered to whole families. As this 1859 engraving shows, public drinking was only one attraction at a beer garden; but to reformers the presence of women and children suggested immorality.

Department stores became a major source of employment for young, urban white women beginning in the late 19th century. They also offered a new focus for stories and novels about life in America's burgeoning cities. Writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and O. Henry often used the world of department stores and the shop girls who worked there to create a modern fiction (including a brand new form--the short story) that allowed readers to feel the texture of urban life. Ferber's shop-girl heroines were strong-willed, and though they expressed vulnerability and desire for male companionship, they valued their careers. In this 1912 short story, titled "The Frog and the Puddle," Ferber described the lonely life of a young sales girl in a Chicago department store and the attentions of a male neighbor, whom she meets unexpectedly one night in the boarding house in which both reside.

In the 1890s, Charles Dana Gibson's magazine illustrations of fashionable young women gained wide popularity. The physical type he portrayed became the standard of beauty, a romantic ideal that suggested a new female independence while also celebrating the privileges and glamour of elite society. Within a few years, women who viewed Gibson's illustrations in magazines were more likely to work for wages. Growing opportunities for white collar work in stores and offices attracted white women who spoke English, although they were paid roughly half of what their male counterparts received and were often subjected to discrimination and harassment.

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. One of its most famous proponents was the author Horatio Alger, whose novels showed how poor boys could move from "rags to respectability" through "pluck and luck." Between the late 1860s and his death in 1899, Alger published more than 100 of these formulaic stories about poor boys who made good more often because of fortunate accidents than because of hard work and denial. Not all Americans, however, bought into this ideology of success. Mark Twain's 1879 short story, "Poor Little Stephen Girard," took satirical aim at the poor-boy-done-good theme that permeated dozens of Alger stories.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. Many black Americans not only voted for Roosevelt; they made him into a hero. "Franklin," "Eleanor," "Delano," and even "Roosevelt" became popular first names for black children in the 1930s. And many African Americans hung the president's picture on their walls beside those of Christ and Lincoln. Another indication of the powerful impression that Roosevelt made in the black community was Big Joe Williams' recording of a blues tribute on the occasion of Roosevelt's death in 1945, "His Spirit Lives On."

Religious leaders, civic groups, educators, the press, and government officials have voiced concern since the 19th century over supposed deleterious effects on children of popular culture, from dime novels and motion pictures to comic books, and television. Anxiety over comic books grew as the pulp fiction crime and horror genre developed at the end of World War II. In 1948, psychologist Fredric Wertham advocated the prohibition of comic books to children under the age of 16, claiming that all of the delinquent children he studied had read them. Although the industry's trade organization devised a Code that year to regulate content, only one-third of the publishers subscribed to it. During the next few years many states debated, but did not adopt, bills to ban or regulate comic books, in part because of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that overturned a state statute banning the sale or distribution of crime literature. In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency conducted hearings on comic books and warned the industry that if self-regulation did not prove to be effective, "other ways and means" would be found to protect children. The industry formed a new trade association and formulated a new Code to self-censor content. The Code symbol subsequently appeared on approved comic books, curtailing the crime and horror genre. The Code, refined in 1971 and 1989, remains a regulatory instrument for association members.

As United States foreign investments increased during the 1920s, so did the frequency of American military interventions. The 1928 Havana Pan-American Conference found President Calvin Coolidge defending U.S. intervention in Nicaraguawhich lasted from 1912 to 1933from attacks by Latin American delegates. U.S. press coverage largely ignored the controversy, preferring to herald trans-Atlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh's arrival in Havana with a message of goodwill." "How sweet it sounds in the ears of the Pan-American delegates