After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and the right of self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home 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. As Garvey's influence in the black community grew, so too did the voices of his many critics. Integrationists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Robert Bagnall, both of the NAACP, worried that the UNIA leader was exploiting black disillusionment for personal gain. Moreover, they objected to the UNIA's call for racial separatism, and in this 1923 article Bagnall accused Garvey of "madness."

Even in the late nineteenth-century American West, a notably violent region, the violence directed against Chinese immigrants was shocking. The Union Pacific railroad employed 331 Chinese and 150 whites in their coal mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming. On September 2, 1885, Chinese and white miners, who were paid by the ton, had a dispute over who had the right to work in a particularly desirable area of the mine. White miners, members of the Knights of Labor, beat two Chinese miners and walked off their jobs. That evening the white miners, armed with rifles, rioted and burned down the Chinese quarter. No whites were prosecuted for the murder of twenty-eight Chinese and $150,000 in property damage, even though the identities of those responsible were widely known. Although U.S. Army troops had to provide protection before some of the Chinese could finally return to their burned-out homes in Rock Springs, some defiantly continued to work in the Union Pacific mines into the next century. This jingoistic editorial in the Rock Springs, Wyoming, Independent, mourned the return of Chinese workers to the mining town the day after the riot.

In a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Equality of sacrifice took particularly sharp form in the debate over the no-strike pledge for labor unions. Communists, who had played key roles in the union organizing drives of the 1930s and were well represented among union leaders, were intensely patriotic during the war. Their commitment to defeat fascism and defend the Soviet Union, which was threatened by advancing German armies, made Communists among the strongest advocates of labor sacrifices to win the war. A vigorous expression of this point of view can be found in the ballad "UAW-CIO," composed by Baldwin "Butch" Hawes. Hawes was associated with the Almanac Singers--a group that was sympathetic to the Communist position and included such notable figures as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. Trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes, more than 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, perished in the flames or jumped ten stories to their deaths. One of the worst industrial fires in U.S. history, the Triangle fire became a galvanizing symbol of industrial capitalism's excesses and the pressing need for reform. In its aftermath, a coalition of middle-class reformers and working people secured passage of landmark occupational health and safety laws. For Jewish and Italian immigrant communities of the Lower East Side, the fire was especially tragic. Poet Morris Rosenfeld, known as the "poet laureate of the slum and the sweatshop," penned this memorial to the victims four days after the fire. The Jewish Daily Forward printed the poem down the full length of its front page.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, four spokespersons for housing reform--including social worker Mary K. Simkhovitch, a leading reform advocate since the 1920s--presented views and proposals.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. By the 1920s and 1930s, John and Alan Lomax were recording southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Run, Old Jeremiah," sung by Joe Washington Brown and Austin Coleman in Jennings, Louisiana, in 1934, was a ring-shout, a religious song using a West African dance pattern, where the performers shuffled single file, clapping out a complex counter-rhythm. The ring-shout was common during slavery and remained popular well into the 20th century as a means of emotional and physical release during religious worship. The lyrics of the ring-shout spoke of escape from the travails of the present.

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. An aggressive proponent of the success ideology was Russell Conwell, a former minister who helped found Temple University. His lecture "Acres of Diamonds," parts of which are excerpted here as text, was his own route to riches. He delivered this pep talk on the joys of instant material success on the national lecture circuit more than 6,000 times, most often during the 1890s. By the time of his death in 1925, this speech had reportedly earned him $8 million. (Click here for an audio version of a different portion of the speech.)

Domestic service was the most common category of employment for women before World War II; it was particularly important for black women, who were excluded from most other occupations. By 1920 some 40 percent of all domestic workers were African American--and more than 70 percent of all wage-earning African-American women worked as servants or laundresses. The struggles of domestic workers were sometimes recorded in songs like Hattie Burleson's 1928 "Sadie's Servant Room Blues," a musical version of common complaints of domestic workers about long hours, low pay, and lack of privacy.

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height in the years between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. The Washington Post of May 7, 1919, noted approvingly that a sailor shot a Chicago man merely for failing to rise during the national anthem.

Women participated actively in a variety of ways during the War for Independence; some even traveled with the Patriot army. Sarah Osborn was a servant in a blacksmith's household in Albany, New York, when she met and married Aaron Osborn, a blacksmith and Revolutionary war veteran, in 1780. When he re-enlisted as a commissary sergeant without informing her, Sarah agreed to accompany him. They went first to West Point, and Sarah later traveled with the Continental army for the campaign in the southern colonies, working as a washerwoman and cook. Her vivid description included a meeting with General Washington and memories of the surrender of British forces at Yorktown. This account comes from a deposition she filed in 1837, at the age of eighty-one, as part of a claim under the first pension act for Revolutionary war veterans and their widows.

Sarah Smith Emery, in her nineties when she wrote this memoir, grew up around the turn of the 19th century in the Massachusetts countryside. Her family lived on a farm near the port town of Newburyport, on the Merrimack River. Life on the farm, as she described it, was a series of peaceful routines organized by season, time of day, age, and gender. Emery described the home production of food, such as butter and cheese, and household items, including candles, soap, and clothing. Spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, dressmaking, cooking, preserving food, and housecleaning filled this early nineteenth-century girl's life, while the men in her family farmed, butchered, and chopped wood. Militia training took place twice each year, in spring and fall. At the time that Emery was writing, the United States was rapidly shifting from an agricultural to an urban industrial economy, and nostalgia for rural life thus colored her recollections.

We often like to imagine rural life in the past as timeless, "traditional," and in some way simpler and more authentic. Yet, rural life in the years around World War I, while sometimes recalled as simpler, could often seem very much like life anywhere else. In this interview, conducted by Laurie Mercier in 1982 for the Montana Historical Society, Tom Staff remembers how Montana farmers took other jobs to supplement their incomes. Here he described how the road crew he worked on left camp for dances in town--events which, well after midnight, might turn a little ugly.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals in the early 20th century. The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. Novelist John Dos Passos became deeply involved in the case after he visited Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts prisons. In the fall of 1920 he joined the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. Facing the Chair was the committee's official report. In it Dos Passos dissected the complicated legal case, countering the prosecution account and excoriating the miscarriage of justice. In addition to its rhetorical argument, Facing the Chair appealed to readers' humanity with poignant descriptions of the two men's long imprisonment. Dos Passos's bitterly ironic subtitle--"The Americanization of Two Foreign-born Workingmen"--pointed to the nativist sentiment that colored the prosecution.

As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend overseas. In the spring and summer of 1919, murderous race riots erupted in 22 American cities and towns. Chicago experienced the most severe of these riots. On Sunday, July 27, white bathers attacked several black youths swimming near one of Lake Michigan's white beaches, resulting in the death of an African-American boy. Five days of intense racial violence followed, claiming the lives of 23 black and 15 white Chicagoans, with more than 500 others wounded and thousands of black and white citizens burned out of their homes. A plethora of news reports and editorials offered instant analysis and helped shape local and national attitudes. On July 28, 1919, the Chicago Daily News printed this article by noted poet Carl Sandburg on its front page. Unlike most white reporters, Sandburg relied on black sources in researching his articles. The Chicago Daily News 's reporting on the riot was generally considered the most evenhanded of the city's daily newspapers, yet even it inflamed tensions by printing unsubstantiated stories. For example, the same front page included a "bulletin" that recounted supposed African-American plans to retaliate against white rioters.

When nine young black males, one as young as 12, were falsely accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, their case became an international cause celebre largely due to the activism of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Here, the Daily Worker, the CPUSA's newspaper, announces one of the many demonstrations sponsored by the Party in support of the Scottsboro defendants. Despite the efforts of first the CPUSA and later the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a more mainstream civil rights organization, eight of the so called Scottsboro Boys" were convicted and sentenced to death following a trial based on questionable evidence and riddled with prejudice and procedural error. Eventually the death sentences were overturned

By the time Abraham Lincoln took office as president, seven southern states had seceded. Although Lincoln promised not to attack slavery where it existed, he did promise to halt its expansion. For southerners who viewed expansion necessary for the survival of slavery, this was unacceptable. The crisis came to a head at Fort Sumter, a U.S. post in Charleston Harbor. When Lincoln chose to reinforce the garrison in April 1861, Confederate forces demanded the fort's surrender, and opened fire when their demand was refused. Residents of Charleston watched the bombardment of Fort Sumter from the city's rooftops on April 12, 1861, knowing the attack meant war.

Father Charles Coughlin occupied both a strange and a familiar place in American politics during the 1930s. Politically radical, a passionate democrat, he nevertheless was a bigot who freely vented angry, irrational charges and assertions. A Catholic priest, he broadcast weekly radio sermons that by 1930 drew as many as forty-five million listeners. By the mid-1930s, Coughlin's growing extremism, his increasing determination to cast political problems in terms of free-floating conspiracy, and his persistent attacks on a popular president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made many of his fellow Catholics nervous. John Ryan, a fellow Catholic priest, had long been active as a social reformer and university educator. In a September 1936 radio speech, he denounced Coughlin for his attacks on FDR. Ryan's address provoked a host of letters; these three typical letters to Ryan reflected the character of Coughlin's devoted support and the capitulation to hatred that characterized Coughlin's movement in the late 1930s.

Department stores not only became a major source of employment for young urban white women beginning in the late 19th century; they also offered a new focus for stories and novels about life in America's burgeoning cities. Writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and O. Henry often used the world of department stores and the shop girls who worked there to create a modern fiction (including a brand new form--the short story) that allowed readers to feel the texture of urban life. In "The Trimmed Lamp" (1906), O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) offered a sentimental and moralistic portrait of the after-hours lives of young New York working women. While Porter's stories often focused on shop girls' predicaments (he was considered, in the words of fellow writer Vachel Lindsay, "the little shop girls' knight"), they were typically bathed in a sentimental glow.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 sought to restore tribal self-determination. In the early 1950s, Congress passed legislation to limit this Act, terminating some American Indian reservations and cutting economic support for others. From 1950 to 1970, more than 100 American Indian tribes lost reservation lands, and the percentage of American Indians living on reservations dropped from 87% to 45%. These changes forced young American Indians to look for work in urban areas. In 1968, young urban-based American Indians in Minnesota formed the American Indian Movement (AIM) to fight mistreatment of American Indians by police and to improve prospects for jobs, education, and housing. In the early 1970s, AIM pressured the Federal government to honor 19th-century treaties that had established Indian peoples as sovereign entities. In 1972, AIM initiated "The Trail of Broken Treaties," an intertribal caravan to reservations and subsequent march to Washington. In 1973, more than 2,000 American Indians came to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, following a courthouse disturbance. At this historic site where a massacre of Indians by U.S. cavalry soldiers in 1890 ended years of armed conflict, the demand for hearings on sovereignty rights was met with a siege by FBI forces, Federal marshals, and BIA police. The 71-day stand-off ended with assurances that the White House would seriously review the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that had recognized sovereignty of the Lakota nation and their rights to valuable lands. That promise failed to materialize, and in the next few years more than 60 AIM members were killed at Pine Ridge. By the end of the decade, plagued by repression and internal disputes, AIM declined as a leading militant organization, although one faction remains. The following foundational documents were submitted to a Congressional committee by undercover FBI informant Doug Durham, who served for a time as AIM's Director of Security.

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. One of its most famous proponents was the author Horatio Alger, whose novels showed how poor boys could move from "rags to respectability" through "pluck and luck." Between the late 1860s and his death in 1899, Alger published more than 100 of these formulaic stories about poor boys who made good more often because of fortunate accidents than because of hard work and denial. Not all Americans, however, bought into this ideology of success. This 1884 editorial in the Firemen's Magazine, the journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, challenged the equation of success with wealth and raised broader questions about the meaning of success.