Economic and social power became concentrated in late seventeenth-century Virginia, leaving laborers and servants with restricted economic independence. Governor William Berkeley feared rebellion: "six parts of Seven at least are Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed." Planter Nathaniel Bacon focused inland colonists' anger at local Indians, who they felt were holding back settlement, and at a distant government unwilling to aid them. In the summer and fall of 1676, Bacon and his supporters rose up and plundered the elite's estates and slaughtered nearby Indians. Bacon's Declaration challenged the economic and political privileges of the governor's circle of favorites, while announcing the principle of the consent of the people. Bacon's death and the arrival of a British fleet quelled this rebellion, but Virginia's planters long remembered the spectacle of white and black acting together to challenge authority.

The Haymarket bombing in 1886 marked a major turning point in the history of nineteenth-century labor. Used by capitalists as an excuse for a crackdown on labor organizations, the bombing also splintered what up had been until then the strongest labor organization in the United States--the Knights of Labor. The anti-labor reaction that followed in the wake of the bombing helped precipitate a rapid decline in membership in the Knights which was eventually supplanted by the American Federation of Labor. In this excerpt from his autobiography, Oscar Ameringer, a Knight himself in 1886, recalled receiving the news about the Haymarket bombing while on strike in Cincinnati.

In 1888 Plains Indians enacted a religious ritual seeking delivery from white domination, which took the form of a five-night dance (dubbed the "Ghost Dance" by whites). Two years later, the U.S. Army extinguished this vision of hope and defiance at the battle at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890. W. H. Prather, an African-American private in the Ninth Cavalry and the regimental poet, wrote "The Indian Ghost Dance and War," which recounted in ballad form the military's perspective on the massacre at Wounded Knee. Prather's song, which became a favorite among the troops, celebrated an event that American Indians would long view as a great tragedy and injustice.

In 1910, an international consortium of banks refinanced Haiti's international debt and took control of the country's treasury. In 1914, the bank refused to issue gold payments to the Haitian government and asked the U.S. military to protect the gold reserves. On December 17, 1914, U.S. marines landed in Haiti and moved the gold to the bank's New York vaults. Eight months later, the marines again landed in Port au Prince, Haiti's capital, this time claiming the need to protect foreign lives and property. They placed Port au Prince under martial law, ruthlessly subdued armed resistance in rural areas, and began training a new Haitian militia. Charlemagne Pralte led a resistance movement. In this "call to arms" and letter to the French minister, Pralte attacked President Wilson as a hypocrite for claiming to respect the sovereignty of small nations of Europe while occupying Haiti and urged Haitians to resist the Americans. (An English translation of the letter follows the French version.)

During the late-18th century, many southerners headed west, leaving older areas such as the Carolinas and Georgia; by 1790 more than 100,000 had moved into Kentucky and Tennessee. David Crockett was born in 1786 in East Tennessee. He fashioned a career as an Indian fighter, politician, and frontier humorist, using his mastery of the vernacular to spin tales on the campaign stump or in print. Crockett had many supposed life stories, but A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, published in 1834, is believed to be Crockett's actual work (edited by Thomas Chilton). These excerpts about bear hunting in Tennessee emphasized Crockett's reputation as a great hunter and contributed to his legendary status even before his death at the Alamo in 1836.

In 1904, socialist writer Upton Sinclair spent two months in Chicago's "Packingtown" observing a bitter stockyard strike. He turned the wealth of material he found there into his best-selling 1905 novel, The Jungle. The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products, and its revelations were an important factor in the 1906 passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act. Yet Sinclair's primary concern was not with the goods that were produced but with the workers who produced them. He described, with great accuracy, the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism. Despite his sympathies, as a middle-class reformer Sinclair was oblivious to the vibrancy of immigrant communities beyond the reach of bosses, where immigrants found solidarity and hope. In the opening chapter of The Jungle, the immigrant hero and heroine, Juris and Ona Rudkus, celebrate their nuptials and the start of their new lives in Chicago.

At the close of the twentieth century, 93 percent of the U.S. population professed to believe in angels, 49 percent were sure that the federal government was hiding information about the existence of unidentified flying objects, and 25 percent thought they could communicate with the dead. Many Americans chose mystical options over the grimmer aspects of millennial life, but popular interest in the fantastic also signaled a love of creative fabrication dating back into U.S. history (linking, for example, the contemporary antics of the more outrageous tabloid press with the mid-nineteenth century showmanship of P. T. Barnum).

A cross-section of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, workforce as presented to the readers of Harper's Weekly in 1868. Winslow Homer sketched women, men, and children as they emerged from the city's textile factories at the end of a workday.

The All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League lasted from 1943 to 1954. During its peak attendance year, the League attracted close to a million fans--three of whom wrote letters, included below, to correct factual misrepresentations about the objects of their affection printed in the following Collier's article. The League inspired a hit motion picture of 1992 (A League of Their Own) and continues to hold interest for many, as demonstrated by numerous websites featuring leading players. Formed during World War II when major league owners feared that the military draft might lead to suspension of play, the All-American League thrived. In the early 1950s, however, it reproduced a pattern found elsewhere in American society: women encouraged to fill jobs (previously open only to men) during the war years faced restrictions as traditional norms were reestablished. The following look at the League from the perspective of its "harried" male managers, however, offers only minimal insight into the reasons for such high ticket sales and the devotion of fans cheering players who challenged the gender barriers of their day.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. Many newspapers presented Spanish culpability as fact, with headlines such as "The War Ship Maine was Split in Two by an Enemy's Secret Infernal Machine." Two months later, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine. In 1911, the Maine was raised in Havana harbor and a new board of inquiry again avoided a definite conclusion. In 1976, however, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Admiral Hyman Rickover conducted a new investigation. Rickover, something of a maverick in the Navy, came to the conclusion that the explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion in the ship's coal bins, a problem that afflicted other ships of the period. But controversy over the sinking of the Maine continues; some recent authors have, for example, rejected Rickover's account and argued that rogue, anti-American Spanish officers used primitive mines to destroy the ship.

In this autobiographical account of the life that awaited new nursing recruits in 1893, former nurse Mary Roberts Rinehart painted a vivid portrait of the daily obstacles that stood between nurses and the professional status they hoped to attain. Rinehart described the "simple, plain hell" faced by the young nurse, a description that challenged conventional expectations about professional work.

On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike's most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as "War in San Francisco!" On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described "rank-and-file journalist," offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath.

Student radicalism and the New Left contributed to the rise of a "counterculture" during the 1960's, as millions of Americans questioned traditional forms of monogamy and family, suburban life, materialism, and scientific rationality and emotional repression. Outwardly, this cultural shift was marked by the rise of rock music, the growing use of marijuana and other drugs, and the end of many sexual taboos. For some, like SDS organizer Cathy Wilkerson, drugs represented a distraction from more serious cultural and political questioning and activism. Wilkerson edited the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes, and opened a regional SDS office in Washington, DC in 1968. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

John Collier's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal--in intention if not always in effect--in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a "Red Atlantis"--a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. Although Collier could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. Collier set out his vision for what became known as the "Indian New Deal" in this 1934 article from the Literary Digest. Although he was sympathetic to Indians, he depicted them in a stereotypical manner.

In 1898, the United States took control of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, intending to use it as a base for strategic naval operations. Most of the island's 900,000 inhabitants welcomed the end of Spanish rule. But they were divided about the U.S. presence. Some hoped links with the United States would lead to increased trade and prosperity; others wanted total independence. Some who initially welcomed the United States quickly became disillusioned. Severo Tulier, a small farmer from Vega Baja, had to sell his farm in 1899; he worked first as a field laborer, and then moved to San Juan to learn a trade. He described the conditions of life among farm workers to Henry K. Carroll, the special commissioner for the United States to Puerto Rico, who interviewed hundreds of Puerto Ricans as part of his effort to formulate U.S. policy for governing the island.

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor convened in Richmond, Virginia, a region divided by racial and political conflict, on October 4, 1886. In the 1880s, Southern politics was split between southern Democrats who sought to "redeem" the old order and a progressive (and in some places interracial) political movement that sought to extend the gains won by ordinary black and white southerners during the Reconstruction era. As more than one thousand delegates gathered from across the country in the former capital of the Confederacy, the labor and political reform movements hoped the convention would be a launching pad for their message of racial peace and political reform. But the convention and the Knights of Labor were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization's attitude toward the question of social equality between the races. The white citizens of Richmond and elsewhere in the country were fascinated and horrified by repeated reports of "race mixing" in press accounts about the Knights of Labor convention, typified by these three items from the Richmond Dispatch of October 6, 1886.

Black Hawk or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, was born at Saukenuk, a Sauk village at the junction of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers. When the United States took over the area in 1804 after the Louisiana Purchase, several Sauk and other tribal leaders signed a treaty that ceded Indian lands east of the Mississippi River, but allowed the Indians to stay as long as the territory remained the property of the federal government. Fearful of the land hungry Americans, Black Hawk and others joined the British in the War of 1812. Encroaching settlers pushed the Sauks into a confrontation with the American government, and Black Hawk's refusal to abandon his homelands led to the Black Hawk War in 1832. Defeated, the chief was taken East upon orders of President Andrew Jackson. He dictated his life story the following year to a government interpreter. Edited by a local newspaperman, it was the first Indian autobiography published in the United States.

Free African Americans living in the North before the Civil War suffered enormous disadvantages and discriminations. Forced to sit in separate and inferior sections in theaters, public transit, and churches, free blacks were also barred from all but the most menial jobs and denied entrance to white trade unions. This racist cartoon in an 1854 edition of the humor magazine Yankee Notions inadvertently illustrated the everyday harassment and cruelty to which northern African Americans were subjected. At a performance of a play based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, some white members altered a seat reservation card and, to the derisive laughter of the rest of the audience, pinned it on a black woman's shawl.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. African Americans, among many others, objected to the notion of the "white man's burden." Among the dozens of replies to Kipling's poem was "The Black Man's Burden," written by African-American clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson and published in April 1899. A "Black Man's Burden Association" was even organized with the goal of demonstrating that mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of black Americans at home.

African-American soldiers returned from World War I to face intensified discrimination, segregation, and racial violence. Drawing on this frustration, Marcus Garvey attracted thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. By the mid-1920s, the UNIA boasted more than 700 branches in 38 states and more than 200 offices outside the United States. The Black Star Line, an all-black shipping company chartered by the UNIA, was the movement's boldest and most important project. To many of Garvey's supporters, it represented the promise of economic autonomy and escape from prejudice and discrimination in America. The UNIA vigorously promoted the sale of Black Star Line stock with advertisements and colorful stock certificates in Garvey's popular newspaper, the Negro World. It also celebrated the shipping line in poems and songs, such as "The Black Star Line."