In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act (also known as the Immigration Act of 1924), which restricted immigration from many European nations and denied even a token quota to most Asians. The law barred all immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship, and all south and east Asians (including Indians, Japanese, and Chinese) had been deemed ineligible on racial grounds by a 1922 Supreme Court decision. Japan reacted particularly strongly to what it regarded as the insulting treatment of the Japanese under the new law. The Japanese organized consumer boycotts against American goods and demonstrated against American cultural practices like dancing. This Japan Times & Mail editorial, entitled "The Senate's Declaration of War," denounced the 1924 immigration law and speculated on the reasons for the decision. The paper suggested that the Senate "deliberately" sought to "insult" the Japanese.

Many ordinary Americans entered into political debates in the revolutionary era and its republican aftermath. While the innovative political ideas that appeared during the constitutional debates in Philadelphia are well known, creative thinking at the grassroots level is harder to locate. William Manning, a farmer, revolutionary foot soldier, and political theorist, became agitated during the postwar political debates and economic crisis. In 1798, he completed a treatise called "The Key of Liberty." Manning hoped to take advantage of the growing availability of newspapers and pamphlets during the post-revolutionary period to distribute his ideas. "The Key of Liberty" outlined a plan for a national association of American laboring men and their political allies, and also offered a broader historical commentary on the social origins of American politics. The Billerica, Massachusetts, farmer wrote several drafts but failed in his efforts at publication. Family members later deposited his papers in the Harvard University library.

In 1887, Florida passed the first law requiring railways to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races," and Mississippi, Texas, and other states soon followed suit. When Louisiana passed such a law in 1890, African Americans in New Orleans resisted in several ways, including mounting a legal challenge to it. In 1892 they arranged for Homer Adolph Plessy (who was one-eighth black and could have readily "passed" for white) 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 New Orleans Criminal District Court Judge who first ruled against Plessy). The Plessy decision, excerpted below, was written by Justice Henry Billings Brown. Brown 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. All of the justices but one (John Marshall Hylan) agreed with Brown's arguments. The Plessy ruling provided legal justification for segregation in transportation, public accommodations, and schools until the Supreme Court effectively overruled it in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), established in 1903 by reformers seeking to combine the forces of trade unionism and feminism, faced particular obstacles when organizing women into unions. In this 1915 essay, published in The Trade Union Woman, WTUL leader Alice Henry discussed some of those problems and advocated separate women's locals as a possible solution. Another important organizing problem, which Henry did not discuss, was the tension between the middle-class reformers of the WTUL and the working-class women they wanted to organize but sometimes viewed with condescension. Henry was an Australian journalist of pro-labor and anti-imperialist sympathies. In 1906, she immigrated to the U.S., joined the fight for suffrage, and became a leader of the WTUL. Although she started out sharing the racist views of many Australians (where a "White Australia" policy was widely accepted), her time in America led her to adopt more favorable views of African Americans and immigrants.

Jonathon Lowe of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper sketched coalminers and their families harassing a scab during a strike in the Cherry Valley region of Ohio in 1874.

In the 1960s, lottery-like contests designed to publicize products through sweepstakes competitions spread rapidly. In the 19th century, every state banned lotteries--defined as competitions in which chances to win prizes were sold--to protect citizens. In 1868, Congress prohibited the distribution of lottery materials through the mail. The mid-20th century sweepstakes, however, did not require contestants to purchase tickets or products to win prizes and were thus considered legal. In 1966, the number of national sweepstakes exceeded 600 and an FTC investigation in 1968 found evidence of deception. In the following statements by Representatives John D. Dingell and Silvio O. Conte that opened a Congressional investigation in 1969, the congressmen charged that small businesses were threatened by the spread of big business-run sweepstakes and condemned deceptive practices in 'preselected winners' promotions. Their compiled data revealed that only a small fraction of advertised prizes had actually been awarded. Congress failed to pass a regulatory bill that year, and by 1998, the FTC estimated that more than 400 million sweepstakes flooded the mail annually and that consumers lost more than $40 billion each year through sweepstakes and telemarketing scams. In 1999, Congress passed the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act. Among other consumer protections, this Act required sweepstakes materials to clearly state odds of winning, value of prizes, and rules.

The history of settlement around the Mississippi River is often depicted as a struggle of humankind against Nature. Yet the very richness and fertility of the soil in the Midwest and South is the direct result of the regular flooding of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. In April 1927, after more than a month of rain, the river overflowed its banks in a flood which inundated more than 16 million acres of land in seven states, destroyed 40,000 buildings, washed away over $100 million in crops, and claimed between 250 and 500 lives. For his book about the flood Deep'n as it Come, historian Pete Daniel interviewed Herman Caillouet, an Army Corps of Engineers employee who used his twenty-two-foot boat to rescue 175 people stranded by the rising waters. Here Caillouet told of his futile attempt to rescue a family of seven.

Metacom, or King Philip as he was called by the English, led a confederation of Indian groups in 1675 in a military effort to roll back the encroaching English settlements of southern New England. For several months the Indians led raids and secured victories against the English, who found it difficult to combat the Indian style of warfare. Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife, was captured along with several of her children in one of those raids on the frontier outpost of Lancaster, Massachusetts. For eleven weeks she traveled with the Wampanoags and Nipmucs in central Massachusetts. Her account provided great insight into the relationship of English and Indian cultures at this critical point. While Rowlandson relied heavily upon her faith to see her through her troubles, she also came to understand some of the workings of Indian society, as in her account of Weetamoo. Mary was ransomed in 1676, the same year that the English, with their greater numbers and the support of their Indian allies, achieved Philip's defeat and the scattering of the region's remaining Indian settlements.

While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation's children. Although Congress held its first hearing on the subject in 1952, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. The Senate report held hearings in 1954 and 1955 on the possible influence of television on juvenile delinquency. The resulting report summarized standards included in the Television Code pertaining to the portrayal of crime, horror, sex, and law enforcement, and to the industry's responsibility to provide "wholesome entertainment" for children. The report also presented testimony from a television executive who cited the motion picture industry's history of successful self-regulation to ward off government censorship. The Senate report--excerpts of which are included below--also presented the preamble to the Code and detailed the Code's review mechanism.

Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. Preaching tradition and timeless value, American evangelicals adopted innovative techniques for spreading the word. Aimee Semple McPherson, pastor of the enormous Angelus Temple in the booming city of Los Angeles, preached to a vast radio audience and pioneered the novel technique of faith healing over the airwaves. In this audio clip from a 1924 sermon, McPherson described a loving, kind, and rewarding God instead of the severe, wrathful God of Old Testament tradition. Her youthful persona and cheery good humor helped make her radio presence highly effective. Following a well-publicized scandal involving a mysterious lover, McPherson and other fundamentalists began to lose the prominence they enjoyed in the 1920s.

Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. "Liberal” Protestants sought to reconcile faith and science and to slow what they saw as the reactionary tendencies of fundamentalism. Harry Emerson Fosdick's influential 1922 sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” called for an open-minded, intellectual, and tolerant "Christian fellowship.” Though the sermon cost him his post at New York's First Presbyterian Church, his views represented those of an influential Protestant minority, and Fosdick enjoyed a long career at Riverside Church, built for him by John D. Rockefeller. Following the Scopes trial and a well-publicized scandal involving well-known pastor Aimee Semple McPherson and a mysterious lover, fundamentalists began to lose the prominence they enjoyed in the 1920s. But religious fundamentalism would remain a vital political force in American life.

Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, published in 1791, was the first American bestseller. The author, Susanna Haswell Rowson, was born in England circa 1762, and died in Massachusetts, where she spent most of her life, in 1824. Charlotte Temple tells the story of a young English girl who is lured away from her school by an army officer, Montraville. On board ship to his posting in revolutionary-era New York, Montraville seduces Charlotte. Once in New York, Montraville gradually abandons the "ruined" Charlotte who, after a downward spiral into remorse, illness, poverty, and the birth of a child, dies. Seduction novels were popular in the 18th century, and the widely read Charlotte Temple went through more than two hundred editions. But Rowson, who despite her childhood as the daughter of an English revenue officer became a committed republican, used her novel to protest the sexual double standard that ruined the lives of women like Charlotte.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. 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. Many historians have focused on the role of the "yellow press" (sensationalist newspapers so named because they waged cutthroat circulation battles over comic strips like the popular "Yellow Kid") in stirring up sentiment that propelled the U.S. into its first imperialist war. This editorial in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, from February 17, 1898, pointedly blamed Spain for the sinking of the Maine, providing an example of how the "yellow press" covered the incident.

In the 1890s, changes in printing technology made possible inexpensive magazines that could appeal to a broader and increasingly more literate middle-class audience. Given the reform impulses popular in the early 20th century, many of these magazines featured reform-oriented investigative reporting that became known as "muckraking" (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"). In October 1902 McClure's Magazine published what many consider the first muckraking article, Lincoln Steffens' "Tweed Days in St. Louis." 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, and in 1904 Steffens collected and published his writings on St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York as The Shame of the Cities. The Introduction, below, suggested his overall conclusions about political corruption.

The U.S. government rarely used the word propaganda during World War II when referring to its extensive use of radio, film, newspapers, posters, and leaflets to bolster public support for the war effort. It preferred, instead, terms like "education and information," "psychological warfare," or "morale building." Under whatever rubric, U.S. government media production during World War II was a massive and expensive undertaking. Politicians, public relations experts, and social scientists increasingly heralded film as the ideal medium for domestic propaganda, especially because of the increasing number of sixteen-millimeter projectors in schools, civic centers, and military training facilities. In a 1942 memo on film and propaganda, Eric Knight, a writer in the U.S. army's Morale Branch, argued that "shaping the mental and moral forces on the home front" was as important as, if not more important than, influencing either enemy or neutral nations.

Huey Long first came to national attention as governor of Louisiana in 1928 and U.S. Senator in 1930. He ruled Louisiana as a virtual dictator, but he also initiated massive public works programs, improved public education and public health, and even established some restrictions on corporate power in the state. While Long was an early supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, by the fall of 1933 the Long-Roosevelt alliance had ruptured, in part over Long's growing interest in running for president. In 1934 Long organized his own, alternative political organization, the Share-Our-Wealth Society, through which he advocated a populist program for redistributing wealth through sharply graduated income and inheritance taxes. As his national recognition (and ambitions) grew, he spoke with increasing frequency to national radio audiences. No politician in this era--except Roosevelt himself and Long's sometime ally, Father Charles Coughlin--used radio as frequently and effectively. In this April 1935 radio address, Long sharply criticized FDR and the New Deal and then sketched out his alternative program.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, settlers spilling into new inland settlements created increased social conflict along with economic opportunity. Those living in the backcountry demanded better political representation in the colonial government, as well as government action to remove Indians from those inland areas. The North Carolina Regulator movement of farmers, tenants, and laborers challenged the government in the 1760s; they accused the coastal elite of corruption and monopolization of government offices. Often settlers found land speculators had already claimed the best lands. Herman Husband, the author of this tract, was the most prominent agitator in the regulator movement. A man of great contradictions, he held land grants of over 8000 acres yet also advanced new democratic ideas in his writings. In this pamphlet he challenged the undemocratic basis of Carolina's government and urged his fellow backcountry residents to vote out their corrupt representatives.

In the late 1940s, large labor unions and major corporations worked out an accord that guided labor-management relations for the next quarter century. During this period, unions benefited from high wages and relative stability, while relegating company decision-making to management. Many workers in certain geographic areas and sectors of employment, however, were not affected by the accord. In "union-free" Gainesville, Georgia, union representatives had started to organize a predominately female workforce in a large poultry plant. In the following statement to a House subcommittee on labor-management relations, these representatives related a violent mob attack led by company officials. They called for legislation to repeal a clause in the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a Republican-led Congress over President Harry S. Truman's veto. The clause, the union representatives argued, encouraged employers threatened with union organizing to encourage citizens groups and local authorities to undertake vigilante actions against union organizers. In September 1951, one month after this hearing, a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board held the Jewell Company liable for instigating the riot described in the statement.

George Robert Twelve Hewes, a Boston shoemaker, participated in many of the key events of the Revolutionary crisis. Over half a century later, Hewes described his experiences to James Hawkes. When Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, colonists refused to allow cargoes of tea to be unloaded. In the evening of December 16, with Hewes leading one group, the colonists dressed in "the costume of a Indian." They boarded the ships in Boston harbor and dropped the tea overboard. Hewes' account shed light on how resistance became revolution. The"Boston Tea Party," as it became known in the 19th century, became a powerful symbol of the Revolution. And Hewes, artisan and ordinary citizen, was celebrated as a venerable veteran of the struggle for Independence.

Like many other industries, shoe manufacturing changed in the early 19th century. Previously, most shoemakers worked in their homes or small workshops (called ten-footers")