By President Andrew Jackson's election in 1828, the only large concentrations of Indian tribes remaining on the east coast were located in the South. The Cherokee had adopted the settled way of life of the surrounding--and encroaching--white society. They were consequently known, along with the Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes." "Civilization," however, was not enough, and the Jackson administration forced most of these tribes west during the first half of the 1830s, clearing southern territory for the use of whites. Chief John Ross was the principal chief of the Cherokee in Georgia; in this 1836 letter addressed to "the Senate and House of Representatives," Ross protested as fraudulent the Treaty of New Etocha that forced the Cherokee out of Georgia. In 1838, federal troops forcibly displaced the last of the Cherokee from their homes; their trip to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) is known as the "Trail of Tears."

Anti-Asian agitation characterized politics in the American West, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. Labor leaders like Denis Kearney and H. L. Knight of California's Workingmen's Party often resorted to popular racist arguments to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. In this 1878 address, Kearney and Knight described the Chinese as a race of "cheap working slaves" who undercut American living standards and thus should be banished from America's shores. While rare, some in the labor movement challenged the racist appeals of leaders like Kearney and Knight.

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 excerpts from the Kerner Report summary, the Commission analyzed patterns in the riots and offered explanations for the disturbances. In 1998, 30 years after the issuance of the Report, former Senator and Commission member Fred R. Harris co-authored a study that found the racial divide had grown in the ensuing years with inner-city unemployment at crisis levels. Opposing voices argued that the Commission's prediction of separate societies had failed to materialize due to a marked increase in the number of African Americans living in suburbs.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, Representative Margaret M. Heckler argued that passage of the ERA was necessary to halt sex discrimination and present women with the full measure of rights and responsibilities equally attendant to all Americans. Heckler later served the Reagan administration as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Founded in 1948 as an advocacy group for Mexican American veterans of World War II, the American G.I. Forum evolved into one of the leading civil rights organizations of the postwar era. Led by a medical doctor from Corpus Christi, Texas, Dr. Hector P. Garcia (1914-1996), the group attained national recognition in 1949 when they organized protests against a funeral home that would not allow chapel services for a Mexican American soldier, Felix Longoria, who was killed in combat four years earlier in the Philippines. With the intervention of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Longoria was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Patriotic in intent and constituted of locally-run units, the Forum sought to work from the "bottom up" to involve ordinary citizens in public life and to put an end to discriminatory practices that affected veterans and their families. Working in the communities and the courts, the Forum led poll tax drives and campaigned against segregated schools, for adequate health care, and to improve the lot of migrant workers. In 1958, the Forum became a national organization. With an earlier civil rights group that also originated in Texas, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Forum campaigned in 1960 in Viva Kennedy clubs, contributing to the future president's narrow victory in Texas that helped win the national election. Forum members worked with the Johnson administration to implement Great Society programs in Mexican American communities, and in 1967, Vicente Ximenes, a former national chairman, became the head of the Inter-Agency Cabinet Committee on Mexican American Affairs and EEOC commissioner. In the following interview, Ed Idar, a long-time colleague of Dr. Garcia, related the dedicated efforts of group leaders to organize throughout the state.

Planters in early seventeenth-century Virginia had bountiful amounts of land and a profitable crop in tobacco, but they needed labor to till their fields. They faced resistance from the local Indian people and were unable to enslave them, so they recruited poor English adults as servants. These young men and women signed indentures, or contracts, for four to seven year terms of work in exchange for their passage to North America. Richard Frethorne came to Jamestown colony in 1623 as an indentured servant. In this letter dated March 20, 1623, written just three months after his entry into the colony, he described the death and disease all around him. Two thirds of his fellow shipmates had died since their arrival. Those without capital suffered particularly precarious situations with the lack of supplies and loss of leaders. Frethorne pleaded with his parents to redeem (buy out) his indenture.

Socialism, although less important in the African-American community than growing concepts of racial militancy, was one of the many ideologies debated by black Americans in the 1920s. A. Philip Randolph, who in 1925 organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was perhaps the leading black proponent of socialism as the only remedy for the plight of African Americans. In this March 1919 editorial in the Messenger, the radical newspaper that would later become the voice of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph rejected the "leadership" of organizations such as the NAACP. Instead, he urged black and white workers to unite, form unions, and embrace socialism in order to win political gains and economic advancement.

In 1892, Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company's ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907-1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. The resulting six-volume report, written by progressive social reformers, included Margaret Byington's Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. This excerpt from Byington's study depicted work and home life for the immigrant women of Homestead. Byington's account, while sympathetic to the immigrants who comprised the bulk of the steel town's labor force, was written from the perspective of an outsider. She emphasized women's limited participation in the paid labor force in steel mill towns like Homestead, yet she provided repeated testimony regarding the multiple economic and social roles of women in Homestead as managers of family finances and family relationships.

Michael Yantsos contracted AIDS through intravenous drug use while in prison in 1983. Yantsos was one of thousands who became infected before information about the disease or adequate treatment was available. As a result, Yantsos, like most Americans, knew next to nothing about the disease when AIDS struck during the early 1980's. Many associated the disease with gay men, who were its first victims, but the epidemic soon spread to other populations – first to intravenous drug users, and then to heterosexuals. Reagan era cuts in drug treatment programs and the "war" on drugs that pushed thousands of addicts into prison also contributed to the disease's spread.

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. In this article, published in Common Ground just a few months after the riots, George I. Sanchez examined the social context in which the pachuco movement developed and offered a detailed picture of the racism and discrimination faced by Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many colonists arrived as indentured servants or bondsmen who served a term of service before receiving their freedom. This practice meant that impoverished Germans and other Europeans financed their passage across the Atlantic. Between 1749 and 1754 more than 30,000 Germans came to Pennsylvania, and by mid-century they constituted about one third of the colony's population. Gottlieb Mittelberger arrived in Philadelphia in late 1750 aboard the Osgood, along with 500 of his fellow countrymen. With fortunes better than most, he settled as an organist and schoolmaster in New Providence, a German farming community outside Philadelphia. He found much distasteful about his new home and returned in 1754 to write an expose warning Germans about fraudulent accounts of ideal conditions in America.

In 1913, silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike. Journalist John Reed--one of the artists and intellectuals who made New York City's Greenwich Village a center of bohemian culture--decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden, ending with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the "Internationale," the anthem of international socialism. Neither the pageant nor the strike were triumphant: the pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism. The pageant also focused media attention on the strike, as shown in these June 1913 articles from Current Opinion and Survey.

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks and the occasional supervision of WPA administrators--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. Others lent their talents to community art centers that made art training and appreciation accessible to wider audiences. FAP also sponsored hundreds of murals and sculptures designed for municipal buildings and public spaces. In essays written as part of the New Deal's documentation of its own efforts, artist Louis Guglielmi found the social consciousness of the 1930s and the support of the New Deal a spur to his artistic development. Artist Julius Bloch praised the FAP for bringing art to new audiences, including his African-American subjects.

On September 19, 1873 the nation plunged into the longest and most severe economic depression up to that time. Thousands of businesses, large and small, went bankrupt, and the human toll was immense: fully a million workers were unemployed by 1874, and in some cities, unemployment levels reached 25 percent. The depression delivered a fatal blow to Reconstruction, as northern businessmen shifted their attention away from the rights of African Americans. It also nearly destroyed the labor movement, as pre-depression wage gains were erased and union membership plummeted. Despite the ghastly appearance of the figure representing financial panic, this New York Daily Graphic cover cartoon of September 29, 1873, subscribed to the belief that such financial busts" cleansed the economy

Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such Act since 1875, ostensibly sought to remedy the situation, but in its final weakened form, the legislation served more as a symbol. For example, an amendment allowed officials charged with denying voting rights to be tried by juries, service on which was restricted in the South to whites only. The law, however, also created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent government agency of six commissioners formed to investigate charges of civil rights deprivations, collect information on discrimination, and advise the President and Congress on the topic. In the following 1958 hearing, a taxpaying African American related roadblocks he encountered when trying to register to vote.

In 1913, John Reed (later famous for his firsthand account of the Russian Revolution) met Bill Haywood, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Reed ventured to Paterson, New Jersey, to learn about the Wobbly-led silk workers' strike then in progress and decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden and ended with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the "Internationale," the anthem of international socialism. Unfortunately, neither the pageant nor the strike ended on a triumphant note. The pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." In a campaign sponsored by the Food Administration, Good Housekeeping magazine published a December 1917 editorial seeking recruits for an army of "kitchen soldiers." The editorial portrayed women's domestic work as part of the U.S. military effort and solicited women's direct participation, asking readers to sign a pledge to conserve food.

The New York Herald, more than any other of the penny newspapers, published topical pictures. Most of the time, the pictures were simple maps or crude portraits of people in the news. Occasionally, special events received greater pictorial coverage. But when the Herald published five detailed pictures on its cover showing New York's 1845 funeral procession honoring Andrew Jacksonthe first full-page cover devoted to pictures ever to appear in a U.S. daily newspaperrival newspapers charged that the same engravings had been used to illustrate Queen Victoria's coronation, William Henry Harrison's funeral, and the celebration of the opening of the Croton reservoir. The Herald discontinued illustrating the news after 1850, leaving that task to the weekly illustrated press.

Labor conflicts in Pennsylvania's coal mines and steel mills during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were usually violent. In order to insure that they had the upper hand and to avoid relying on local police (who were sometimes sympathetic to strikers), mine and mill operators set up their own "Coal and Iron Police" as early as the 1870s. Public reaction against these private armies led the Pennsylvania legislature to create a Department of State Police as an ostensibly more neutral and highly-trained law enforcement body. But the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. In the 1910 strike at Bethlehem Steel, the state police proved to be as pro-management as the Coal and Iron Police and even more brutal. The following testimony from workers and labor leaders appearing before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915 underscored the anger and discontent of common laborers with the military mindset of the newly formed Pennsylvania State Police.

Largely at the behest of American bankers, U.S. marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. By 1919, Haitian Charlemagne Péralte had organized more than a thousand cacos, or armed guerrillas, to militarily oppose the marine occupation. The marines responded to the resistance with a counterinsurgency campaign that razed villages, killed thousands of Haitians, and destroyed the livelihoods of even more. The military atrocities and abuse of power during the Caco War of 1919–1920 led to a U.S. Senate investigation into the occupation. In these excerpts from the "Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti," the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo interviewed Haitians about marine conduct in the guerrilla war against the cacos.