The northern Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper presented an unflattering portrait of southern white womanhood in a May 1863 illustration. The depiction contrasted sharply with the view promoted by plantation elites of virtuous southern white mothers and wives who obeyed and deferred to men. The panel on the left showed southern women hounding their men on to Rebellion." The panel on the right depicted them "feeling the effects of Rebellion and creating Bread Riots." The latter panel referred to the Richmond bread riot

The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, a brilliant orator and black nationalist leader, turned his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into the most important black organization in the United States in the early 1920s. Garvey's speeches often drew huge audiences, and stories of Garvey's stubborn resistance in the face of white hostility proliferated among his supporters. In an oral history interview, devotee Audley Moore remembered the Jamaican's defiant behavior at a rally in New Orleans caused "the [white] police [to] file out . . . like little puppy dogs with their tails behind them." She proudly recalled the crowd intimidating the police by raising their guns and chanting "speak, Garvey, speak."

By the early 1890s, the 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the standing army of the United States. In the 1880s, the Pinkertons provided services for management in 70 different labor disputes. The agency's success depended on both armed guards and the clandestine efforts of secret operatives like James McParlan, who had infiltrated Irish anthracite miners' organizations in the mid 1870s. McParlan's testimony (which historians have largely dismissed as fabricated) at the sensational "Molly Maguire" trial of 1876 helped send ten men to the gallows and broke the miners' union for a generation. This advertisement from the 1890s touted the prowess of the Pinkerton detective agency in maintaining law and order and played on corporate fears of "dissatisfaction among the laboring classes" to build business.

To raise commodity prices during the Great Depression, some midwestern farmers enforced Farm Holidays

In a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, the labor movement made an "unconditional no-strike pledge" to help win the war. In turn, labor won some important concessions from the federal government. Some who believed that labor had given up too much responded with "wildcat" (unauthorized) strikes. Others moved to reconsider the no-strike pledge. In 1942 members of the Michigan CIO endorsed the no-strike pledge, but employer attacks on wages the following year caused them to reevaluate. At the 1943 annual meeting, CIO delegates debated and passed a resolution recommending that "unless the assurances that were made to labor at the time we gave up our right to strike" were honored, the pledge should be nullified. This debate provided a sense of the varying positions that workers took on this difficult issue, including the intensity of feeling that the no-strike pledge aroused.

In addition to providing the public with an abundance of affordable consumer goods during the 20th century, the service sector of corporate America also began to invade and interfere with the private lives of many of its customers. Not content to advertise in print, radio, and television outlets, corporations and their investigative subsidiaries collected information in order to more efficiently target their products to interested buyers. (With the advent of the Internet, corporate consumer information gathering has grown even more sophisticated.) Just how much of an annoyance this could be to the average consumer was documented in the following article about maternity and baby products in the 1950s, the peak years of the "baby boom." During this period, the nation's birthrate rose substantially as economic security became more widespread and Americans on average got married earlier and had healthier children than before. The report described how friends, neighbors, delivery personnel, and laboratory technicians were all suspected of selling the names, addresses, and other vital statistics of prospective parents of "boomers" to marketers. By including men as advertising targets along with women, the author acknowledged a changing role for fathers in the "modern" family.

During the 1820s, large scale production of fabric centered in New England. Perhaps the best known of such cotton mill towns was Lowell, Massachusetts. The Lowell mills mechanized each stage of cloth production, and most mill workers were young, single women from rural New England families struggling to make ends meet. This illustration from T. S. Arthur's reform tract Illustrated Temperance Tales (1850) presented a young woman leaving her farm family to work in a cotton mill. This picture was accurate in showing that New England farm families often had to rely on income from factory labor. But reformers blamed economic hardship on personal weaknesses--in the case of Arthur's story, the father's alcoholism.

The organizers of the first English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 had visions of easy wealth and abundant plunder. The colonists, a group with little agricultural experience and weighted with gentry, instead found a swampy and disease-ridden site. The local Indians were unwilling to labor for them. Few survived the first difficult winters. Captain John Smith had been a soldier, explorer, and adventurer. With the colony in near chaos, he took over the government of the colony in 1608 and instituted a policy of rigid discipline and agricultural cultivation. When a gunpowder accident forced his return to England in 1608, the colonists faced a disastrous winter known as "starving time."

Members of the National Woman's Party (NWP) took some of the most militant actions in the struggle for suffrage in the early 20th century. NWP members who had been imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse went on a hunger strike to draw international attention to their cause. Prison authorities responded with brutal force feedings. The excerpt included here, from the clandestine prison diary of NWP member Rose Winslow, described the rigors of that experience. Born in Poland, Rose Winslow (her given name was Ruza Wenclawska) started working in a Pennsylvania textile mill at age eleven, quitting eight years later when she developed tuberculosis.

Research and development scientists at Bell Laboratories introduced a device in 1947 that heralded a technological revolution with widespread consequences for consumers, industry, and the armed forces: the tiny transistor. Replacing the vacuum tube as the basic component for a host of electronic products, this semi-conductor solid-state device and such later developments in electronics as the integrated circuit, lasers, fiber optics, and digitization techniques, allowed the miniaturization of conveniences as with radios and computers, and made possible many aspects of present-day life and work--from telecommunications to automated factory operations. The following Collier's article from 1954, by renowned World War II reporter and novelist Cornelius Ryan, dubbed the new science "Stereatronics" and predicted revolutionary changes in the offing. Though the name did not survive the times in which it was coined, the electronics industry it described would soon become the largest manufacturing industry in the United States.

Rather than call for the creation of federal relief programs, this 1931 advertisement placed by the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief opts for local voluntary charity as a response to the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover firmly believed that relief was a local responsibility, although even this step, which proved inadequate, went further than pre-World War I presidents, who stood by passively during financial panics. Few Americans expected the government to take drastic action when the Depression struck. Many turned instead to their employers, merchants, churches, landlords, and local banks, as well as to family networks, for assistance. As the Depression and unemployment deepened, however, it became clear that the moral capitalism" of marketplace institutions was drastically inadequate and aggressive government action was needed."

The emergence of the sharecropping system in the South in the last three decades of the 19th century rested on an uneasy compromise between black farming families and the white landowners on whose land they labored. Sharecropping was an oppressive system but the experience of sharecropping families varied. In this interview done by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, Minnie Whitney, born in 1902, described the determined efforts of more progressive farmers like her father, who along with her mother struggled to maintain some self-sufficiency in the face of white determination to enforce African-American dependence on the sharecropping system.

Starting in the mid-19th century, industrial methods of producing goods began to overtake the small-scale methods of artisans and apprentices. The artisanal ideal of independence was eroded by the replacement of craft work by machine work, strict new work rules, and the growth of child labor. For miners and some other workers, the prevalence of store pay (wages paid only as credit), scrip wages (money redeemable only by the company), and company stores intensified their dependence on employers. If company stores lacked the items that miners wanted, they had no alternative but to do without. In these three excerpts from the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics First Annual Report in 1878, miners complained about the stranglehold that company-owned stores, scrip wages, and store pay had on the welfare and independence of coal and iron ore workers in the Buckeye State.

To supply labor for the plantation economies of the Americas, Europeans forcibly removed roughly 12 million people from Africa between the 15th and the 19th centuries. These men, women, and children were marched from their homes to the coast and placed on "slavers" like the one pictured in this diagram from an 1808 report on the African slave trade. Designed to carry the largest number of people in the smallest possible space, these ships provided an indescribably horrible experience for the humans chained below decks. Roughly one in six slaves died at sea from disease, malnutrition, and suicide.

Although middle- and upper-class observers viewed the leisure habits of working-class women with condescension, few of them actually knew much about what working women did with their spare time. One exception was Dorothy Richardson, a woman from a middle-class Iowa family who had to work in a factory to support herself. In 1905, she published a fictionalized version of her experiences under the title, The Long Day . In this excerpt, she described a discussion among her fellow workers about their favorite novels and music. Despite her disdainful view of their interest in "ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal . . . cheap story books," her account demonstrated the importance of popular culture in the everyday lives of women factory workers. The novel that the women discussed, Little Rosebud's Lovers, was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a bestselling author of popular fiction. Libbey was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots.

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right for women to vote joined forces to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Florence Kelley, a Chicago-born labor reformer, socialist, and woman suffrage advocate, employed pragmatic arguments in support of women's right to vote. In this selection from a speech to the 1898 NAWSA convention, Kelly argued that working women, particularly factory workers, needed the ballot to protect themselves from exploitation at the hands of their powerful employers. She also argued that working men needed their feminine counterparts to vote in order to strengthen labor's presence at the polls.

In 1917 the United States declared the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, a U.S. possession since 1898, to be citizens of the United States--a "gift" that many Puerto Ricans resented. Seeing an untapped source of inexpensive labor, the U.S. Labor Department worked with industry to facilitate the migration of Puerto Rican workers to America. During the First World War the War Department agreed to transport Puerto Rican workers to labor camps in the United States where they would be housed and fed while working on government construction contracts at defense plants and military bases, many of which subjected the new migrants to harsh conditions and even forced labor. Rafael Marchn was one of a group of Puerto Rican workers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina who protested to the commissioner of Puerto Rico over the intolerable conditions in the work camp. He gave this deposition in Washington, D.C., in October 1918.

The Wampanoag Indians of New England began Metacom's War (also known as King Philip's War) in 1675 in an attempt to expel the English from the region. Metacom, leader of the Wampanoag, fashioned an alliance of many different groups, but Christian Indians and Iroquois who allied with the English proved to be a significant factor in the eventual colonial victory. In August 1676 colonial troops captured and killed Metacom, ending hostilities in southern New England. However, other Indians continued their attacks for another two years along the northern New England coast. In particular, they targeted fishing ketches operated out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Mariner Robert Roules narrated one such incident in July 1677 when his boat was captured by Indians, then recaptured by the settlers. When the settlers sailed Roules' boat into Marblehead harbor, the women of Marblehead took bloody revenge upon the Indian captives.

In the years after the Revolution many immigrants to the United States were political radicals, including John Doyle's father, who participated in the Irish Republican revolt against Great Britain in 1798 and later emigrated to Philadelphia. Like John Doyle, the author of this letter, many migrants brought craft skills and looked for work in the workshops and manufacturies of the new nation. When Doyle crossed the Atlantic in 1818 he quickly learned that small-scale entrepreneurship was more lucrative than sticking with his printing trade. Later immigration swelled as some two million Irish came to the United States between 1820 and 1860. The catastrophic Irish Potato Famine of 1845-49 sent hundreds of thousands (250,000 in 1851 alone) to disembark in cities where they faced economic hardships and ethnic discrimination.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Drawing on domestic traditions of parlor plays and dramatic tableaux, suffragists used brief plays and monologues to enliven their own meetings and to enlist new members through performances at women's clubs and community theaters. Marie Jenney Howe wrote this Antisuffrage Monologue for the drama group of the New York Woman's Suffrage Party and other suffrage organizations. In it, she parodied anti-suffragist arguments that relied on stereotypes of female dependence, irrationality, and delicacy even as they also warned that women voters would exert too much power. Howe, a Unitarian minister, later founded Heterodoxy, a group of women intellectuals and radicals in New York City's Greenwich Village.