The annual convention of the Knights of Labor that convened in Richmond, Virginia, on October 4, 1886, took place in a region riven by racial and political conflict. The convention and the Knights, the most powerful labor organization in late 19th century America, were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization's attitudes toward the question of social equality between the races. A major controversy erupted over whether or not Frank J. Ferrell, a black representative of the Knights' powerful District Assembly #49 in New York City, should introduce the governor of Virginia at the opening session. This excerpt from Knights' leader General Master Workman Terence V. Powderly's 1890 autobiography detailed the tense moments leading up to Frank Ferrell's appearance at the podium, where he agreed to introduce Powderly and the Grand Master Workman in turn would introduce the governor.

The founders of the great libraries of the 19th century were often ambivalent about whether their goal was to disseminate or conserve knowledge. They were also uncertain about the intended audience. John Cotton Dana of the Newark Public Library was atypical in his populist stance that "it is a proper function of a library to amuse." He argued that a "shallow mind" was better than an "empty one." Other librarians preferred to see themselves as cultivators of public taste and their buildings as uplifting houses of culture. The stuffiness and remoteness of late nineteenth-century libraries provoked satires such as this imaginary dialogue between a bartender (Mr. Dooley) and customer (Mr. Hennessy) in an Irish pub. Humorist Peter Finley Dunne published the piece in Dissertations by Mr. Dooley in 1906. Dunne's famous dialogues drew upon prevalent ethnic stereotypes that were a staple of late nineteenth-century humor. Dunne set his exchanges in an Irish bar, but other humorists of this era drew on German, Jewish, and black caricatures.

The September 18, 1762 edition of the South Carolina Gazette included notices of stray animals, runaway wives, and escaped slaves. Along with breaking tools, feigning illness, and slowing work, running away, individually or in groups, was a common form of resistance to slavery. Most of those who ran away did so for short periods, often to visit spouses or relatives on other farms, or to escape punishment. Chances were slim for permanent escape, and most of those who ran away were eventually reenslaved. Still, some escaped slaves found refuge with Native American groups or in small, isolated maroon colonies.

From the late 1920s, when the first rival radio broadcasting networks were formed, until the present day, as network television competes for viewers with cable and satellite fare, broadcasters and advertisers have sought ways to quantify information about their audiences. The first ratings system, devised by Archibald Crossley in 1929 for the Association of National Advertisers, relied on random telephone surveys. Interviewers asked what programs and sponsors listeners remembered from the previous day. By the late 1930s, C. E. Hooper successfully challenged this method by surveying only the shows respondents were listening to at the time of the phone interview. Hooper's method dominated until the A. C. Nielsen Company began attaching Audimeters directly to television sets. The following Collier's article from 1954 offered a critique of the four ratings methods in use at that time and discussed adverse consequences caused by the industry's reliance on ratings. This assessment by author Bill Davidson and the men in the industry whom he quoted showed signs of an assumed disparagement of ordinary American housewives, identified implicitly as the predominant audience for mass media consumption. Both the reliability of housewives as part-time interviewers and their ability as viewers to maintain accurate diaries were deemed suspect in this piece.

A master distributed provisions in an illustration from a weekly newspaper report on the operations of a plantation around 1860. The engraving suggested that this planter provided his slaves with a varied and nutritious diet, which was not usually the case. Slaves typically received a weekly ration of only three and a half pounds of salt pork or bacon and a quarter bushel of cornmeal. Although high in calories needed to perform heavy labor, that diet was seriously deficient nutritionally. This engraving did not show that slaves who wished to supplement their meager and boring diet had to rely on the vegetable gardens and hunting privileges some planters allowed them. Because of their unrelenting workday, slaves had to perform these tasks early in the morning or late at night.

Beginning on June 17, 1942, Yank, the weekly magazine published by the U.S. Army, began its unprecedented worldwide publishing effort. Most of its 127-member staff of editors, reporters, photographers, artists, and cartoonists rotated from desk jobs in Yank 's main New York office to cover the war overseas and produce twenty-one separate weekly editions. The New York office published the American edition distributed to army camps in the United States and prepared basic material for Yank 's overseas operations in London, Sydney, Honolulu, Rome, Paris, Cairo, Tehran, Calcutta, Puerto Rico, and Panama. Sold for five cents, Yank reached a combined circulation of two million soldiers. The August 6, 1943, American edition of Yank, excerpted here, appeared twenty months after the United States entered the conflict, when the outcome of the war was still in doubt. It presented Yank 's typical miscellany of news, stories, poetry, cartoons, illustrations, photographs, notices, advice, and gripes about enlisted life in the wartime army.

What many former slaves wanted most, both for themselves and their children, was education. With their own resources and help from northern missionary groups and the government, freedpeople built and maintained schools and hired black teachers all across the South, sometimes in places that symbolized the old oppression, such as the Savannah slave market. Northern reformers prepared textbooks for freedmen and women, which often contained more than practical lessons. Besides instructions on spelling, reading, and pronunciation, this page from The Freedman's Second Reader presented a model" black household that exhibited the gentility of the northern middle-class ideal of the family."

In the post-Reconstruction era, Southern states mobilized a vast campaign of suffrage restriction--fraud, registration laws, and literary tests--in an effort to disempower African Americans and maintain Democratic party dominance. Although these restrictions were most often directed at black voters, those that barred voting on the basis of literacy or ownership of property also affected poor whites. Many northerners supported suffrage restriction as well. Between 1889 and 1913, nine states outside the South added restrictions requiring voters to read English, and ostensible reforms like the secret ballot were often directed at pushing out foreign-born and illiterate voters. One form of voting restriction aimed specifically at African Americans was the Grandfather clause that allowed men to register to vote only if they could have voted in 1867 (before African Americans were allowed to vote in the South) or descended from an 1867 voter. This excerpt from the Louisiana law of 1898 was typical of many such restrictions. The cumulative effect of the different restriction efforts was to reduce overall voting levels by more than a third and black voting rates by almost two thirds.

Urban reformers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had long pointed with horror to the unsanitary and inadequate conditions in which millions of Americans lived, particularly in large cities. But it took the severe economic crisis of the Great Depression to force the federal government to intervene directly in the housing market, and even then the response was often only half-hearted. In the 1930s, access to public housing was highly desirable, and early residents preferred their new homes, which offered bright and well-appointed alternatives to their previous substandard residences. The sharpest criticisms of public housing, however, came from builders and realtors who feared competition and argued that public housing was too appealing and would decrease home ownership. The most influential of the anti-public housing lobbies was the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). In this 1935 report to the board, NAREB president Walter S. Schmidt argued against public housing on economic and ideological grounds.

The Senecas, members of the Iroquois Confederacy, fought on the side of the British in the American Revolution. Red Jacket, also known as Sagoyewatha, was a chief and orator born in eastern New York; he derived his English name from his habit of wearing many red coats provided to him by his British allies. After the hostilities, as the British ceded their territories to the Americans, the Senecas and many other Indian peoples faced enormous pressure on their homelands. Red Jacket was a critical mediator in relations between the new U.S. government and the Senecas; he led a delegation that met with George Washington in 1792, when he received a peace medal that appeared in subsequent portraits of the Indian leader. In 1805 a Boston missionary society requested Red Jacket's permission to proselytize among the Iroquois settlements in northern New York State. Red Jacket's forceful defense of native religion, below, caused the representative to refuse the Indian's handshake and announce that no fellowship could exist between the religion of God and the works of the Devil.

The Birth of a Nation, which opened in March 1915, was simultaneously a landmark in the history of American cinema and a landmark in American racism. The film depicted the South, following the assassination of President Lincoln, as ruled by rapacious African Americans, who by the film's end were heroically overthrown from power by the Ku Klux Klan. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to mount boycott of the film, but it failed to stir significant white opposition. Ten days after Birth opened in New York City, noted reformer and NAACP board member Jane Addams (founder of Hull House, the Chicago settlement house) was interviewed by the New York Post about the film. Though Addams abhorred the film's portrayal of African Americans, she nonetheless conceded--perhaps intimidated by director D.W. Griffith's unrelenting efforts to cloak the film in the mantle of historical "accuracy"--that "some of the elements of the plot are based on actual events." This statement suggested how deeply the pro-Southern interpretation of Reconstruction had permeated popular understanding of that history, and Griffith was able to cite contemporary academic historians to support this view.

The 1841 issue of the Crockett Almanac, named after the Tennessee backwoodsman, Davey Crockett, made famous by his self-serving tall tales, portrayed a rough rural sport." The inexpensive comic almanacs combined illustrated jokes on topical subjects with astrological and weather predictions. While presented here as a rllicking free-for-all

In the decades following the Revolution, a vast variety of choices appeared on the American religious landscape as an anti-authoritarian climate encouraged the formation of new democratic religious sects. The Baptists and Methodists were most adept in preaching to the new populist audience during these years of camp meeting revivalism. Peter Cartwright greatly contributed to the Methodists' success at introducing evangelical Protestantism to the new settlements of the West. Born in Virginia in 1785 and raised in Kentucky, Cartwright served as an itinerant minister bringing his version of enthusiastic religion to Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Ohio. This account of his conversion in the camp meeting of 1801 and his later career as a circuit rider comes from his autobiography, which was published in 1856.

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt announced a "Good Neighbor Policy" that promised a more friendly and less interventionist policy toward Latin America. The policy was prompted as much by Latin American resistance to U.S. intervention as by the U.S. government's benevolence. In 1937, the policy was put to the test when Bolivia charged that Standard Oil of New Jersey had defrauded the Bolivian government; Bolivia canceled the company's oil drilling rights and confiscated its facilities. True to its new policy, the United States avoided military intervention and instead pressured Bolivia by withholding loans and technical assistance. The following year, a war of words erupted between the government of Mexico and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey over who owned the rights to exploit a portion of Mexico's oil reserves. After U.S. oil companies refused to accept the arbitration terms of the Mexican labor board, Mexican President Lzaro Crdenas expropriated oil company properties worth an estimated half billion dollars. In The Reply to Mexico, Standard Oil offered a vigorous response to the Mexican expropriation of its property in 1938.

John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America, was instrumental in the organizing drive that transformed the coal fields in 1933. He had planned his campaign before the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) became law and even before President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. (The National Industrial Recovery Act included a provision, section 7(a), that protected workers' right to organize.) In February 1933 (prior to the passage of the NRA), Lewis spoke passionately to the Senate Finance Committee about the need for action to protect workers. In his Senate testimony, Lewis called for emergency action, including allowing workers to unionize and replacing corporate autocracy with union democracy. He warned that if action was not forthcoming, the nation might face grave consequences and promoted unionization as the answer.

In the late 19th century, William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned academic sociologist, brought a distinctly conservative perspective to the new "science" of sociology. Some of his ideas about the economic survival of the fittest and opposition to government intervention in the economy were applications of Darwin's scientific ideas of evolution to the social sphere. He also drew upon the doctrines of laissez-faire British economists like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo to argue that government intervention would disturb the "natural" and self-regulating market. Sumner's writings justified government inaction in the face of vast social dislocations caused by rapid industrialization and the periodic economic depressions that accompanied it. Not surprisingly, his work had a broad influence beyond the academy. In this excerpt from his 1883 essay, "What the Social Classes Owe To Each Other," Sumner portrayed the wealthy elite as a put-upon class whose misunderstood ambitions and intentions would benefit everyone.

John L. Lewis' dramatic walkout from the October 1935 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention and the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) that soon followed marked a new stage in labor's drive to organize industrial unions in depression-era America. Here Alice Dodge Wolfson, who was working as a stenographer in 1935, recalled her own contribution to the Lewis walkout and the creation of the CIO. Attending the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City as a delegate from her stenographers local of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (a left-wing New York union aligned with the supporters of industrial unionism around Lewis), Wolfson played a small but decisive role in helping launch the CIO when she rose to challenge an AFL official from the convention floor.

Organized temperance movements have been part of the American political landscape since the early 19th century. Reform groups, dominated at various times by clergy, social elites, workingmen, and clubwomen, tried alternately to convince individuals to take a pledge against drinking alcohol, to promote drinking only in moderation, and to enact laws prohibiting the production and sale of liquor. Prior to the ratification in 1919 of the 18th Amendment banning liquor nationwide, two-thirds of the states had passed similar legislation. After rampant noncompliance with the Amendment led to its repeal in 1933, anti-liquor advocates focused protests against liquor advertising on the radio. While the Federal Communications Commission did not have the authority to ban liquor ads, their threats to hold license renewal hearings for offending stations induced broadcasters to self-impose a ban. Similarly, in 1948, the television industry voluntarily decided to restrict alcoholic beverage advertising to beer and wine commercials. Congress, nevertheless, proposed legislation in the 1950s to prohibit all liquor ads from radio, TV, and in interstate commerce. In the following testimony, an attorney for an advertising association argued that a proposed House bill would interfere with the "right to sell," while a police sergeant and member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union contended in a Senate hearing that children should be protected from televised liquor ads in their homes. No legislation was enacted, and in November 1996 due to a sharp decrease in sales of hard liquor, the Distilled Spirits Council voted to allow advertising of its products on TV. In December 2001, NBC became the first network since 1948 to broadcast hard liquor ads.

In a message to Congress in February 1948, President Harry S. Truman asked for Federal civil rights legislation, including antilynching laws. The last such bill to be signed into law, the 1875 Civil Rights Act, had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883, during a period in which the number of lynchings of African Americans in the South increased sharply. The history of failed attempts to pass Federal antilyching legislation goes back to 1894, when a House bill to create a committee to investigate lynchings failed. In 1922, the House passed a bill by a two-to-one margin to make lynching a Federal crime, but despite President Warren G. Harding's support, Southern senators filibustered and defeated it. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to support an antilynching bill proposed by the NAACP, fearing that key Southern lawmakers would retaliate and interfere with his New Deal agenda. In the following testimony to a House subcommittee in 1949, representatives of a Japanese American antidiscrimination league and the NAACP argued the need for Federal civil rights action. None of the bills under consideration by the subcommittee passed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction in 1957, but only the 1964 Civil Rights Act began to implement Federal laws and enforcement powers.

The New Deal Public Works Administration, created in 1933, built public institutions, but failed to ease the severe housing shortage by constructing homes. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure home mortgages and loans for home repairs at low-interest, long-term rates. While the FHA helped middle-income homeowners, it refused to insure mortgages in poorer inner-city areas where the risks of default were seen as greater than in the suburbs. FHA guidelines also by supporting racial covenants that prevented African Americans from moving into "white" neighborhoods. The following statement by a Newark, New Jersey, African-American newspaper to a joint Congressional committee on housing—created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall passage of a public housing bill—charged that policies of racial discrimination denied access to people of color for housing in both private and public facilities. The Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive covenants were not legally enforceable and FHA subsequently banned restrictive covenant clauses in contracts. Racial discrimination in housing continued, however, in sales of existing houses and through unwritten "gentlemen's agreements" between realtors and buyers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in public accommodations, but de facto segregation continued in many parts of the U.S.