Thousands of free and escaped African Americans played significant roles in the antebellum abolitionist movement. Henry Bibb was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1815. His autobiography recounted his sufferings, escapes, recapture, and efforts to free his family. Upon his final escape he became active in politics. He was a founder of the Liberty Party in 1840 in Michigan and the Free Soil Party in 1848. While attending a political convention, he contacted his former master in Kentucky and began a correspondence, excerpted here. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress in 1850, Bibb fled to Canada and helped form the Refugee's Home colony for escaped slaves.

Religion figured prominently in the 1928 presidential election when Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic to run as the candidate of a major political party. Smith, who ran against the Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, tried to downplay the subject of his religion. In his speech accepting the presidential nomination, Smith sought to reassure voters that he would not favor Catholics, "Wets" (supporters of Prohibition), or Easterners if elected president. While his words may have reassured some, his obvious New York accent reinforced the worries--and prejudices--of others.

The Democratic party arrived at its 1968 convention in Chicago torn apart by the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. As delegates and protestors arrived in Chicago in late August 1968, the Chicago American newspaper published a guide to the cast of characters" converging on the city. Illustrating student supporters of Eugene McCarthy

Davy Crockett was a frontiersmen, soldier, and politician who used his autobiography to help create an image of himself as a larger-than-life American hero. The description of frontier politics presented here is based on his campaign for a seat in the Tennessee legislature in 1821. In the early decades of the 19th century, property qualifications for voting were lifted and more white men gained access to the vote. With this greater access came new and more democratic styles of political activity. To recruit support at elections, office seekers made public meetings and popular entertainments part of political life. Crockett's account reflected these changes, suggesting that humor, hunting skills, and male camaraderie were as important to electoral success as a clear stance on the issues of the day.

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In hundreds of speeches, she apparently never said the one phrase most often associated with her name--the injunction that farmers should "raise less corn and more hell." Regardless of who called explicitly for more hell-raising, Lease was a powerful voice of the agrarian crusade.

Huey Long, a senator and former governor of Louisiana, while initially a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became one of the most important critics of the New Deal during the Great Depression. To curb the power of the rich, Long proposed the Share Our Wealth Plan" that would redistribute wealth from large fortunes to the needy and enable the government to provide every family with "enough for a home

President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to explain the riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission's 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Unless conditions were remedied, the Commission warned, the country faced a "system of 'apartheid'" in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of "white society" for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums--primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing. President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In the following statements to a joint Congressional committee hearing on urban employment problems, two directors of community-based job training programs in Philadelphia and New York City described their efforts. Both emphasized the need for increased federal funding to support practical ways to implement the Commission's recommendations.

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.

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.

In the early 20th century suffragists employed many different tactics in their struggle to win the vote for women. Members of the militant National Woman's Party (NWP), for example, rejected the patient waiting espoused by much of the movement. Some NWP members even chained themselves to the White House gates--an action that led to sentences in the Occoquan Workhouse. In this 1973 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Ernestine Hara Kettler, a young woman of radical immigrant background, recalled her stint in the workhouse.

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, many were disenfranchised, due to poll tax requirements and all-white primaries, and excluded from jury duty. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end such discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In the early 1950s, attorneys for two Mexican-American civil rights groups, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American G.I. Forum, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hernandez v. Texas that exclusion from jury duty based on class constituted discrimination. The state of Texas acknowledged that in the previous 25 years no person with a Spanish surname had served on any juries. The Warren Court ruled unanimously that persons of Mexican American ancestry did constitute a class within the community in which the original trial was held, and that exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries resulted in a denial of the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment for Mexican American defendants. In the following interview, Pete Tijerina, a member of LULAC and the first executive director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), discussed all-Anglo juries and other discriminatory conditions in Texas society in the 1950s and 1960s.

The 1936 presidential election proved a decisive battle, not only in shaping the nation's political future but for the future of opinion polling. The Literary Digest, the venerable magazine founded in 1890, had correctly predicted the outcomes of the 1916, 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932 elections by conducting polls. These polls were a lucrative venture for the magazine: readers liked them; newspapers played them up; and each "ballot" included a subscription blank. The 1936 postal card poll claimed to have asked one forth of the nation's voters which candidate they intended to vote for. In Literary Digest 's October 31 issue, based on more than 2,000,000 returned post cards, it issued its prediction: Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon would win 57 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes.

In the war for independence, the life of a common soldier was a rough one. Soldiers served relatively short periods in state militias or longer periods in the Continental Army, raised by Congress. About two hundred thousand men enlisted for one period or another. Militias supplied the greatest number of soldiers, comprised of farmers, artisans, and some professionals. The Continental Congress recruited the young and those with fewer resources, such as apprentices or laborers. Some enlisted voluntarily while others were drafted; the more affluent hired paid substitutes. All faced war's hardships of severe food shortages, discomfort, low morale, and danger. Joseph Plumb Martin, born in western Massachusetts, joined the militia in 1776 before his 16th birthday and served in the Continental Army from 1777 to 1783. In 1830, he wrote a colorful portrayal of the life of a common soldier, Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier. In this excerpt, Plumb described the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781.

The rise of mass circulation magazines combined with the reform impulses of the early 20th century to create the form of investigative journalism known as "muckracking" (so named by President Theodore Roosevelt after the muckrake in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who could "look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands"). In the 1890s, changes in printing technology made possible inexpensive magazines that could appeal to a broader and increasingly more literate middle-class audience. In October 1902 McClure's Magazine published what many consider the first muckraking article, Lincoln Steffens' "Tweed Days in St. Louis." The "muckrakers" wrote on many subjects, including child labor, prisons, religion, corporations, and insurance companies. But urban political corruption remained a particularly popular target, perhaps because it was so blatant, and perhaps because the differences between the muckrakers (mostly middle class and of native Protestant stock) and the political bosses (mostly from Catholic and immigrant backgrounds) made the rule of the immigrant machine appear as an alien intrusion, a corruption of American citizenship.

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.

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.

America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. On March 18, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the establishment of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to govern these detention camps. He chose as its first head Milton Eisenhower, a New Deal bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture and brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a 1942 film entitled Japanese Relocation, produced by the Office of War Information, Eisenhower offered the U.S. government's rationale for the relocation of Japanese-American citizens. He claimed that the Japanese "cheerfully" participated in the relocation process, a statement belied by all contemporary and subsequent accounts of the 1942 events.

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson probably received more black votes than any previous Democratic presidential candidate, but his administration proved to be a bitter disappointment to African Americans. Black voters had abandoned William Howard Taft, Wilson's Republican predecessor, in part because he had appointed or retained a mere thirty-one black officeholders. But Wilson made only nine black appointments, and eight of these were Republican carryovers. Worse still, Wilson extended and defended segregation in the federal civil service. Black workers were forced to use inferior and segregated washrooms, and screens were set up to separate black and white workers in the same government offices. African Americans protested Wilson's policies. One of the most famous protest delegations was led in 1914 by Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and Boston newspaper editor. Wilson found Trotter's manner "insulting" and dismissed the delegation. The encounter made front-page news, and subsequent rallies protested Wilson's poor treatment of Trotter. But the segregation of the federal service continued.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number rose to more than 9,000, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits. Banks never have as much in their vaults as people have deposited, and if all depositors claim their money at once, the bank is ruined. Millions of Americans lost their money because they arrived at the bank too late to withdraw their savings. The panics raised troubling questions about credit, value, and the nature of capitalism itself. And they made clear the unpredictable relationship between public perception and general financial health--the extent to which the economy seemed to work as long as everyone believed that it would. To stop the run on banks, many states simply closed their banks the day before Roosevelt's inauguration. Roosevelt himself declared a four-day "bank holiday" almost immediately upon taking office and made a national radio address on Sunday, March 12, 1933, to explain the banking problem. This excerpt from Roosevelt's first "fireside chat" demonstrated the new president's remarkable capacity to project his personal warmth and charm into the nation's living rooms. Audio is an excerpt of the full address.