Between 1910 and 1920, 500,000 African Americans left the South for northern cities, pulled by the promise of jobs in booming wartime industries and pushed by disfranchisement, poverty, racial violence, and lack of educational opportunities. The Great Migration" placed a strain on cities like Chicago

The best-known image of the Spanish-American War is that of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback charging with his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba. But not only was the role of the Rough Riders exaggerated, it also displaced attention from the black soldiers who made up almost 25 percent of the U. S. force in Cuba. Indeed, the Spanish troops, who called the black soldiers "smoked Yankees," were often more respectful of the black troops than were the white officers who commanded them. Here Sergeant-Major Frank W. Pullen, Jr. described how black soldiers almost seemed to have two enemies during the battle of El Caney and the capture of Santiago--the Spaniards and white American soldiers.

Many travelers made their way to Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic colonies in the eighteenth century in search of economic opportunity, but not all experienced the fabulous success of Benjamin Franklin. William Moraley, born in 1699 into a modest artisanal family, was more typical. Economic cycles were often critical in determining migration patterns; approximately 73,000 people left for the British colonies in the1730s, twice the average of earlier in the century (17,000 arrived in Philadelphia). Like half of all European emigrants to North America in the eighteenth-century, Moraley faced grim conditions at home. After the death of his father, a journeyman clockmaker, Moraley possessed scarce resources and was imprisoned for debt. The thirty-year-old Moraley bound himself for five years as a servant in the British North American colonies. He titled his picaresque account of life in Britain and America The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant.

On May 4, 1886, in Chicago's Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded during a labor demonstration protesting the police shootings of four striking workers. In response, the government and business groups nationwide strengthened the police and the military in an effort to curb labor militancy and public disorder. As part of its coverage of the Haymarket incident, one newspaper displayed this scene from Chicago's police headquarters, showing the construction of a criminal identification system based on photographs. The Rogues' Gallery" served as an archive to identify individual criminals (including political dissenters and labor activists) and to discern

Press photographers are shown here taking pictures of President Ronald Reagan during a photo-opportunity." These formal photography sessions scheduled by the White House staff dated back to the 1930s

Illustrator Harry Grant Dart's vision of the increasingly aggressive and intrusive character of advertising in turn-of-the-century America appeared in a 1909 issue of Life. During this period, the growth of mass production and mass marketing changed the way consumer goods were bought and sold. Information about products now came not from those who made or sold them, but from persuasive advertisements trying to create brand recognition and brand loyalty. Advertisements moved out of separate sections in the back of magazines, as the newest periodicals featured full-page ads and depended upon advertising, rather than subscriptions, for their revenue. Coordinated advertising campaigns using billboards, store displays, and electric signs, became common.

In order to challenge the emphasis on extreme economic individualism espoused by Gilded Age industrialists and laissez-faire theorists in the late 19th century, labor writers drew on diverse historical and religious traditions. Massachusetts labor reformer George McNeill, for example, found in early Pilgrim life and thought the roots of a rejected American tradition of commonwealth and cooperative activity that he thought should be rekindled. In this 1884 piece published in the Cigar Makers' Official Journal, McNeill invoked the tradition of cooperative living that sustained the Pilgrims in the 1600s in New England as a role model for modern relations between labor and capital.

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was preceded by two other significant speeches. The subject under debate was currency, a central issue in the 1896 presidential election. The issue was whether to endorse the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina supported the measure, but misjudged his audience by framing the silver issue as a sectional one. Tillman's fiery and strange appearance only reinforced the belief of some delegates that he was a madman. His disastrous performance dashed his hopes to be the silverite candidate for the U.S. presidency.

When the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was first organized in Minnesota in December 1867, its goals were primarily social and educational. The organization spread rapidly throughout the agricultural Midwest, attracting more than 850,000 members by 1875. The Grange's purpose also expanded--it experimented (unsuccessfully) with cooperatives, and, angered by hard times, tight money, and high railroad shipping rates, moved into politics. Members elected sympathetic state legislators who passed laws (most of them later declared unconstitutional) regulating railroad and grain elevator charges. In 1868, the newly created Grange issued the following circular to explain the objectives and services of the infant organization and its local societies.

While many assume that workers in the nineteenth-century American West enjoyed easily available land and a fluid social structure, the region's history of radical unionism at the turn of the century suggests otherwise. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, for example, violent conflict broke out in 1903 between members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and corporate mining interests determined to crush the union. Before it was over, thirty men were dead and the union was defeated. But the battles of Cripple Creek were fought not only with bullets and dynamite--they were fought with words waged in the press. Telegrams between the New York World, the pro-mine owner governor of Colorado, and WFM Secretary William Haywood underscored how the national press served as a public outlet in which both management and labor explained their motives and actions.

Although Franklin D. Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation and condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs, he still won the hearts and the votes of many African. Yet this support and even veneration for Roosevelt did not blind black Americans to the continuing discrimination that they faced. Indeed, the two views were often combined when they wrote letters to the president asking him to do something about discrimination that they confronted in their daily lives. Three letters are included here from the thousands that poured in to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt from black Americans during the 1930s.

In 1918 and 1919 the Spanish influenza killed more humans than any other disease in a similar period in the history of the world. In the United States a quarter of the population (25 million people or more) contracted the flu; 550,000 died. In the early 1980s, when historian Charles Hardy did interviews for the Philadelphia radio program "The Influenza Pandemic of 1918," he was struck by the painful memories as many older Philadelphians recalled the inability of the city to care for the dead and dying. In these excerpts from Hardy's radio program, Clifford Adams, an African American from the South; Anna Lavin, a Jewish immigrant; Anne Van Dyke and Elizabeth Struchesky; and Louise Abruchezze, an Italian immigrant, discussed their shared experience in Philadelphia--shocked by the scale of the influenza outbreak, none could fathom the lack of respect shown for those who had died.

When the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was first organized in Minnesota in December 1867, its goals were primarily social and educational. The organization spread rapidly throughout the agricultural Midwest, attracting more than 850,000 members by 1875. The Grange's purpose also expanded--it experimented (unsuccessfully) with cooperatives, and, angered by hard times, tight money, and high railroad shipping rates, moved into politics. Members elected sympathetic state legislators who passed laws (most of them later declared unconstitutional) regulating railroad and grain elevator charges. When agricultural conditions in the Midwest improved in the 1880s, the Grange's membership dropped to 150,000. The Farmers Alliance (or Populists) soon replaced the Grange as the primary voice of radical agrarianism. Still, the Grange continued as a nationwide social organization. Like other fraternal organizations, its members took part in elaborate rituals and ceremonies, as reflected in the following excerpt from the 1895 Grange Manual.

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law compelling railways to "provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races," joining several southern states that had already passed similar laws. African Americans in New Orleans fought the new law in several ways, including a legal challenge. In 1892, they arranged for Homer Adolph Plessy to be arrested on an East Louisiana Railway train for refusing to move to the car designated for "colored passengers." The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 as Plessy v. Ferguson (named for the judge who first ruled against Plessy). The Supreme Court decision argued that as long as racially separate facilities were equal, they did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantees of equal protection of the law. The lone dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan, himself a former slaveholder from Kentucky. While Harlan had opposed the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery), the experience of seeing brutal attacks on African Americans in the immediate post-Civil War years apparently changed him. In his Plessy dissent, he insisted that "all citizens are equal before the law" and correctly predicted that upholding the Louisiana law would lead to the passage of even more laws segregating African Americans. Not until 1954 did the Supreme Court accept Harlan's arguments, when it reversed Plessy v. Ferguson with its Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In the earliest years of the 20th century, employers mounted organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions. The employers had a broad array of tactics, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. From 1900 to 1920, 775 injunctions were issued against labor activities. Between 1880 and 1900, there had been only 150. Although early twentieth-century employers had reliable allies in state police forces and tightly controlled local police, 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. F. J. Heine, general manager of the Employers' Information Service in Cleveland, Ohio, explained his strike-breaking services to prospective clients in this 1911 letter.

The reform-minded journalists of the early 20th century were the ancestors of today's investigative reporters. Known as "muckrakers" (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"), these journalists published their sensational articles in the inexpensive mass circulation magazines that became possible and popular in the 1890s. The "muckrakers" wrote on many subjects, such as child labor, prisons, religion, corporations, and insurance companies, but urban political corruption remained a particularly popular target. Lincoln Steffens was famous for his investigations of urban politics. In 1904 he collected his writings on St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York into The Shame of the Cities. New York political boss George Washington Plunkitt offered his own skeptical and humorous view of Steffens' book as one chapter in a series of "Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics," published in 1905.

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including visual artists who were commissioned to paint murals in federal buildings around the country. Some of these painters found that their expressions clashed with local tastes, particularly when murals portrayed American society, past and present, in a critical light. In the case of this mural for Richmond's Parcel Post Building by Paul Cadmus, titled Pocahontas Rescuing Captain John Smith

Baseball's growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games. Baseball commentators and critics expended much ink during the 1920s discussing the exact nature and composition of this new and expanding fan population. Some derided the influx of new fans to urban ballparks, in part because of the growing visibility in the bleachers of the sons and daughters of working-class Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, and in part because the game seemed to be straying from its origins in traditional rural and small-town America. Poet William Carlos Williams evoked the growing diversity of baseball's fans and their impact on the game in "The Crowd at the Ball Park," published in the Dial in 1923.

Nineteenth-century laborers faced a variety of work-related ailments: from rheumatism and pneumonia to lead palsy and carbon monoxide poisoning. Yet governments rarely regulated workplace conditions and the United States lagged far behind industrialized European nations in such regulation. In the Progressive era, however, a movement to regulate dangerous industrial working conditions arose, and one of its most prominent leaders was a physician named Alice Hamilton. In this selection from her 1943 autobiography, Hamilton described her residency at Jane Addams's Hull House in the late 1890s and her participation in the Illinois Occupational Disease Commission.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 placed the full weight of the federal government behind the apprehension of runaway slaves. This fact was best illustrated by the arrest of Thomas Sims, who escaped slavery in Georgia. Sims was arrested in Boston in April 1851 and, under the Fugitive Slave Law, returned to his owner. The city's abolitionist movement agitated for his release and large crowds surrounded the courthouse in which Sims was incarcerated. But these efforts, which included plans to forcibly free the prisoner, did not succeed. This picture from a Boston illustrated weekly shows how Sims was conducted by three hundred armed police and marshals to a navy ship that carried him back to slavery. Upon his return south, Sims was sold to a new master in Mississippi. He escaped in 1863.