Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. This seventeen-year-old African American used his motion picture autobiography to describe how films not only led to dreams of fast cars but also made him "feel the injustice done the Negro race."

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, sought to organize all workers into one big union" to abolish the wage system

In 1960, following student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the South, George E. McMillan, a reporter from Knoxville, Tennessee, traveled the region and analyzed its "current raw, ugly temper." Six years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and five years after the Court declared that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed," only a small percentage of Southern schools had been affected. African Americans faced disenfranchisement, severely limited economic opportunities, prejudicial treatment in the criminal justice system, and attacks from mobs and police. McMillan contrasted black outrage at the philosophy of "gradual" change with white insistence on retaining the status quo, and also looked at the role of the military and business communities in fostering change. The Raleigh, North Carolina, meeting McMillan mentioned in passing marked the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent activist group intent on achieving racial equality.

As the principles of scientific management came to play a more significant role in the workplace, some reformers sought to apply these principles to any aspects of daily life that might be improved by standardization and routine. Perhaps no one applied the principles of scientific management to the home with as much passion as Christine Frederick, the household editor of Ladies Home Journal as well as the National Secretary of the Associated Clubs of Domestic Science. In 1912, she published a four-part series in the Ladies Home Journal that promised less housework. Each article opened with a box recounting Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management. "Taylorization" made it possible for (compelled, really) steelworkers to quadruple their usual output, and Frederick implied that Taylor's principles would also result in a four-fold increase in home productivity. Frederick's articles were enormously popular. Although Frederick posed as an impartial efficiency expert, she had very close ties to appliance and kitchen-equipment manufacturers and helped lend scientific legitimacy to new products. In this excerpt from the first article in this series, Frederick described how to wash dishes correctly and efficiently.

Americans keenly followed the events of the French Revolution. Reactions to the growing violence and social upheaval split along emerging party lines--Federalists expressed horror while Democratic Republicans were more sympathetic. Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was a journalist, the founder of the Philadelphia General Advertiser, and supporter of Jefferson's Republican party. In these two pieces he sympathetically summarized the situation in France during the period when Louis XVI was put on trial and executed. He defended the actions of the revolutionaries on the grounds that they were merely responding to the provocations of nobles and other "traitors." Newspapers in the 1790s quickly became party organs and contributors to the fierce polemics of this factious era. Bache was no exception. He attacked the Federalists mercilessly and was arrested under the Sedition Act, an act of Congress passed by Federalists to prosecute government critics for seditious speech or writings.

This 1903 police department arrest record reflects the faith in data and science espoused by some Progressives. The reputedly scientific measurements instituted by French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon claimed to detect innate criminality and other character flaws, many associated with particular ethnic and racial groups, through physical evidence. Although it bore the stamp of scientific approval, this and other contemporary techniques for differentiating people based on race or physical characteristics incorporated widely held beliefs that Southern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were inherently and biological different from and inferior to white Anglo Saxons. These beliefs, in turn, lent credence to the rise of Jim Crow and immigrant exclusion.

Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker Thomas O'Donnell (who had immigrated to the U.S. from England eleven years earlier) appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor on October 18, 1883, to answer the panel's questions about working-class economic conditions. An unemployed mule spinner for more than half of the year, he described the introduction of new production methods at the Fall River, Massachusetts, textile factory where he worked as a mule spinner (a worker who tended the large yarn-making machines). These changes allowed the mill's owners to employ children, and they also left the mule spinner unemployed for much of the year. O'Donnell described the sharp decline in his family's living standards that followed and the ways they struggled to make ends meet.

From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term "lynching" did not have any racial implications. Targets included Tories, horse thieves, gamblers, and abolitionists. But starting in the 1880s, mob violence was increasingly directed at African Americans. Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. Lynchings, which were often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. In April 1898, the Cleveland Gazette, a black newspaper, reported on the lynching of the black postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, who was burned out of his home and shot by a white mob incensed by his appointment to a federal post. The murder of Postmaster Baker galvanized the anti-lynching movement to seek federal intervention.

Pete Seeger, folksinger, songwriter, and activist, provides a remarkable link between the radical culture of the 1930's and the protest culture of the 1960's. In 1940 Seeger met Woody Guthrie and the two formed the Almanac Singers, a leftist singing group that recorded pacifist and pro-union songs. After the war, Seeger formed the Weavers, a popular folk music group, but his successful career was hurt by Cold War red-baiting. While he lived and worked under siege for his political views during the 1950's, Seeger had a large impact on the protest culture of the 1960's, penning some of the era's most important songs, including a variation on a spiritual that became the anthem "We Shall Overcome." In the 1970's and 1980's, Seeger focused on environmentalism, but he continued to appear at benefit concerts and rallies, and his musical legacy of protest singing continues to influence the way Americans speak out.

Workers sang during strikes not only to state their beliefs and goals, but because singing helped bind workers together. The Homestead strike of 1892 even had its own Homestead Strike Songster, and the story of the strike can be traced in the lyrics of the following four songs. "The Homestead Strike" explained that Carnegie's efforts to "lower our wages" was the basic cause of the strike. "The Fort That Frick Built" described Homestead manager Henry Frick's transformation of the mill on the eve of the strike into a fortress with barbed-wire fences. The death of nine strikers was chronicled in "Father Was Killed by the Pinkerton Men." And "Song of a Strike," written by George Swetnam, retrospectively commemorated the Homestead strikers' courage in defending their homes and their jobs against the overwhelming might of the Carnegie Steel Company and their hired "bum detectives."

Radio and other popular entertainments, like movies, created a truly national popular culture during the 1920s. Pausing to tune in to his favorite program, this farmer represents an extreme example of radio's broad popularity during the 1920s. For rural Americans, radios not only delivered music and sports but also vital information on commodity prices and weather reports. While they linked rural residents to the rest of the country, radio broadcasts and movie theaters also provided a vehicle for advertising and a spur for consumer culture.

This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history. Lesson includes objectives and standards, sample lyrics, lesson plan, assessment and extension activities.

Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite—became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. In 1938 the federal government declared silicosis America's number one industrial health problem and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a National Silicosis Conference in Washington, D.C. Despite such attempts to deal with the silicosis crisis, workers continued to complain of their plight. Hundreds of letters were sent to federal officials from across the country. The three letters included here (sent to Secretary Perkins) attested to workers' desperation and to their confidence that the government would agree to investigate.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a new democratic and individualistic Protestantism appealed to the emerging middle class of the northeastern United States. The chief spokesperson for that revivalist movement was Charles Grandison Finney. Born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, and transplanted like many others to western New York, Finney found the practice of law unsatisfying. The conversion experience that he narrates in this selection from his Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (1876) altered the course of his life. For the next decade he focused his energies on preaching in western New York, the region known as the "Burned Over District" for its reputation as a hotbed of revivalism. Middle-class Americans were attracted to his doctrine, which emphasized the individual's need to assume moral responsibility, and rejected older beliefs about divine providence as the only route to salvation. His Lectures on Revivals (1835) became a handbook for American revivalists and Finney became a professor at, and later president of, Oberlin College.

The end of the War of 1812 promoted a surge of migration to the territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1790, 95 percent of the population lived in the states along the Atlantic Ocean; by 1812 one-quarter lived west of the Appalachians. Farmers looking for new lands found these vast areas attractive after the War for Independence had forced many Indian peoples into land cessation and removal in the Michigan territory and other northwestern areas. Low land prices also enticed families from overpopulated eastern regions. Harriet Noble and her family took the northernmost of the major migration routes west, crossing upstate New York and Lake Erie to reach Detroit. She found multiethnic Detroit "the most filthy, irregular place I had ever seen." While her husband faced sickness and other hazards on their isolated farm, Harriet voiced complaints familiar from many women's narratives of the frontier: the absence of society and social institutions.

One of the principal tragedies of slavery was family separation. In this letter, written in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1852, a woman writes to her husband about the sale of their son, Albert, to a slaver trader. Maria and Richard Perkins, who were owned by different masters, were already separated, but now Maria Perkins was witnessing the complete dissolution of her household, both people and possessions. She attempts to salvage at least her marriage by asking her husband to convince his owner buy her. Most slaves did not know how to read and write and this letter, in Mrs. Perkins' own handwriting, is unusual. This letter first came to light in 1929 when Yale historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published it in his Life and Labor in the Old South, and it remains in his papers.

While white southerners briefly considered the idea of emancipating slaves in the years following the American Revolution, by the early-nineteenth century that sentiment had been replaced by a systematic campaign to restrict possibilities for emancipation. After the Nat Turner rebellion of 1832, whites viewed the presence of free blacks among the slave population as dangerous and began to limit their rights. The growth of the southern free black population slowed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and became concentrated in urban areas where they worked as manual laborers, domestics, and artisans. In this 1863 interview, Washington Spradling, 63, the son of an overseer, described how he purchased his family's freedom yet still faced growing restrictions under Kentucky laws that severely hampered free blacks' movements and efforts to achieve justice. Samuel Gridley Howe, an abolitionist and educator of the blind, interviewed Spradling for the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, a body created to make recommendations about the plight of freedmen after the war.

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. The NAACP changed its tactics; this April 17, 1915, letter from NAACP national secretary Mary Childs Nerney described the organization's efforts, largely in vain, to get local film censors to remove particularly racist scenes. The NAACP's ongoing national campaign to censor the film produced decidedly mixed results. Despite success in Boston and Chicago in securing several minor cuts in the film's release print, by year's end distributors could show The Birth of a Nation almost anywhere in the country.

In 1831 a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia. A religious leader and self-styled Baptist minister, Turner and a group of followers killed some sixty white men, women, and children on the night of August 21. Turner and 16 of his conspirators were captured and executed, but the incident continued to haunt Southern whites. Blacks were randomly killed all over Southhampton County; many were beheaded and their heads left along the roads to warn others. In the wake of the uprising planters tightened their grip on slaves and slavery. This woodcut was published in an 1831 account of the slave uprising.