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. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. Suffragists also reached large audiences through newspapers. In Alice Duer Miller's "Unauthorized Interviews," originally published as newspaper columns in the New York Tribune, the pro-suffrage writer spoofed male legislators with clever reversals of gender stereotypes: the men were petulant and irrational, while the women suffragists remained cool and logical.

In 1909, the predominantly immigrant and female workers in New York City's garment industry staged a series of job walkouts that led to a massive general strike involving more than 20,000 workers. Fifteen-year-old shirtwaist worker Clara Lemlich, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, emerged as a key organizer and speaker. An unprovoked attack on Lemlich and her fellow female strikers by anti-union thugs was recorded by New York Sun correspondent McAlister Coleman. He retold the story years later in his article, "All of Which I Saw," published in the Progressive in 1950.

Rising immigration and increasing social stratification affected the development of American cities during the mid-nineteenth century. City guides, delineating the mysteries of the metropolis, as well as newspapers, magazines, and novels presented the East's industrializing cities New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as fractured societies. According to these publications, each was really two cities: one orderly, prosperous, and bathed in sunlight

The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" laws when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana statute requiring "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment clause guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the laws. (Jim Crow, the colloquial term for segregation, referred to a blackface character popular on the minstrel stage.) Jim Crow legislation extended throughout the South to schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theaters, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, the following testimony in 1954 by former Air Force lieutenant Thomas Williams revealed that Jim Crow travel laws remained in effect in the South and that seats for blacks were unequal to those available to whites. Although Williams stressed the need for federal legislation, the bills under consideration by the committee never made it to the House floor for a vote. In 1956, following a boycott by the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, against the city's segregated bus system, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

During the "Gilded Age" of the 1880s and 1890s, the influence of large-scale corporations dominated not just the U.S. Congress but also the courts. Nowhere was this more evident than in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the 1886 Wabash case, excerpted below. With Wabash, the Court overturned its 1879 decision ( Munn v. Illinois ) allowing states to regulate railroads. Perverting the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court decreed that corporations were legally "persons" entitled to the Amendment's protections. (Just three years earlier, the Court had ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment was binding only on states, not individuals, thereby severely jeopardizing the very rights--of freed slaves--the amendment was explicitly designed to protect.) The Wabash case barred states from regulating interstate commerce, asserting that only the federal government could do so. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which railroad barons found more appealing than the more restrictive state laws.

Susie King Taylor was born a slave in Savannah, Georgia, in 1848. In the summer of 1862, only 14 years old, she taught school to liberated slaves on St. Simon's Island, Georgia, behind Union lines. As this section of her Reminiscences began, King met Captain C.T. Trowbridge who, along with fellow Union officers, arrived on the island to gather black troops for what would become the First South Carolina Volunteers, the 33rd Regiment. When Trowbridge and the Volunteers left St. Simon's Island, King accompanied them. Initially taken as a laundress, her duties expanded to include clerical work and nursing. For the next few years, King assisted as the troops traveled and battled through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Taylor met her husband, Edward Taylor, a sergeant in the 33rd Regiment, on St. Simon's Island. After the war, the Taylors settled in Savannah. Later, after her husband died in an accident, King moved to Boston, where she remarried. She died in 1912.

In 1939, a federal Women's Bureau survey revealed that only one in fifteen union members was female. But the same observers also noted the truism that women workers, once organized, often became tenacious and militant unionists. Unionists saw women as temporary members of the work force (as indeed most were before 1940, when the average worker was a young single woman). They mistakenly assumed that such workers would not be dedicated union members. Some saw women as unwelcome competitors for "men's jobs" and worked to keep women out of better paid union jobs rather than recruiting them to join the union. Even the United Office and Professional Workers Association (UOPWA), a progressive union that focused its efforts on clerical workers, shared some of these demeaning views of women. A regular column in the UOPWA's publication, the Ledger, featured "Susie Steno," a condescending caricature of a clerical worker as a frivolous and naive young woman, albeit one who becomes a good unionist.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, anchored in Havana harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. By April, 1898, 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. Most historians have focused on the role of sensationalist newspapers in fomenting public support for U.S. entry into war with Spain, and perhaps even causing it by deliberately misleading the American public about the Maine explosion. But not all newspapers engaged in sensationalist coverage of the incident. This New York Times editorial, dated February 17, 1898, sounded a note of caution about blaming the Spanish government for the explosion.

Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. But the FTP's mandate proved fragile. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in May 1938, one of its first targets was the FTP, which it labeled a subversive organization. When FTP director Hallie Flanagan testified before HUAC in December 1938, she fought back against these attacks. But the FTP still fell victim to the Congressional cuts.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Asian and Latino immigrants flocked to the United States, rivaling in sheer numbers the trans-Atlantic immigration of a century earlier. Many came because even minimum wage work in the United States paid five to ten times more than they could earn in their homelands. These Asian workers, photographed in 1991 as they labored in a garment shop in lower Manhattan, typified the work experience of many immigrants: monotonous, low wage work in conditions reminiscent of clothing industry sweatshops from earlier in the twentieth century.

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 consumer groups accused them of deceptive practices. An FTC investigation in 1968 into sweepstakes from oil companies and supermarket chains found evidence of deception. In the following testimony to Congress in 1969, two executives representing firms that conducted large promotional sweepstakes defended them as fair and beneficial to consumers. 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.

To many in the labor movement, the year 1892 brought only a string of defeats, as labor editor John Swinton said in this speech to the December 1892 convention of the American Federation of Labor. But Swinton managed to rally union members with an optimistic message. Although defeated, the workers who struck at Homestead and elsewhere prevented further attacks on labor in other places. Swinton, a former abolitionist, drew an analogy from the North's ultimate victory in the Civil War.

Lumberjacks often worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, faced incredible dangers on the job, and lived under horrendous conditions. They were one of the most abused groups of workers in the early 20th century. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was the only labor organization to pay any attention to workers in the lumber camps of the South and the Pacific Northwest. Although humorous in tone, the poem "The Lumberjack's Prayer" captured the grueling conditions that most lumbermen faced on and off the job. "The Lumberjack's Prayer" was written by T-Bone Slim and circulated on small colored cards that the IWW (also known as the "Wobblies") sold to raise money. T-Bone Slim (born Matt Valentine Huhta) was a popular Wobbly writer. The nickname "Slim" was often used by hoboes, perhaps because they tended to be skinny from lack of food. In Wobbly publications, Christ was sometimes called "Jerusalem Slim."

The fundamental appeal of the saloon to its working-class customers was social and recreational. The saloonkeeper presided over and fostered an atmosphere of good-hearted, informal socializing, in part by supplying jokes and stories. For those whose own supply of humor ran low, the A. V. Newton's Saloon Keeper's Companion provided bar owners with about fifty pages of assorted jokes and stories with which to amuse their customers. The jokes most often ridiculed hypocritical temperance advocates, dishonest police and politicians, unsophisticated and easily fooled clergy and church-goers, and stupid or pompous judges. Included here are two brief excerpts from The Saloon Keeper's Companion. The first, "The Use of Slander," expressed a cynical view of politicians that seems remarkably contemporary. The second, "Farmer and the Crow," wryly satirized the bartender's own profession. It also seems likely that bawdier, masculine humor circulated through nineteenth-century saloons, but genteel conventions probably prevented authors like A. V. Newton from publishing such jokes and stories.

The slinky style of the flapper" was celebrated in the popular press during the 1920s

With 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves, the forces of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the nation's standing army in the late-19th century. The Pinkertons provided services for management in labor disputes, including armed guards and secret operatives like Charles A. Siringo. A Texas native and former cowboy, Siringo moved to Chicago in 1886, where first-hand observation of the city's labor conflict (which he attributed to foreign anarchism) moved him to join the Pinkertons. Angry with the agency after it sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs, Siringo published Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism, a revealing chronicle of Pinkerton methods and deception. Guarding its reputation, the Pinkerton Agency succeeded in suppressing the book. Operatives bought up all copies available at newsstands and a court order confiscated the book's plates. In the following passage from Two Evil Isms, Siringo (who, even when alienated from the Pinkertons, never displayed any sympathy for the labor movement) described how he infiltrated and undermined miners' unions in northern Idaho during the 1892 Coeur d'Alene strike.

Homestead, Pennsylvania, was in many ways the prototypical early twentieth-century mill town. Located seven miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, the first steel mill was built in Homestead in 1881. In 1892, Homestead was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company's ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907-1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. Written by progressive social reformers, the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the devastating impact of industrial life on those who labored in the nation's factories. The following excerpt is from Margaret Byington's Pittsburgh Survey volume, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. In the spirit of the Progressive-era effort to scientifically document conditions, the book also included photographs (by the famous documentary photographer Lewis Hine) and detailed family budgets.

By the mid-twentieth century, the movement of African Americans from farms to cities, along with their participation in World War II industries and union organizing, spawned the origins of the modern civil rights movement. Although conflict between white and black workers continued, many African Americans faced continued discrimination with a new sense of self-confidence and militancy, based on their identities as equal workers, soldiers, and citizens. This frame from Brotherhood of Man, an animated short produced by United Productions of America, a studio created by former Walt Disney animators, for the United Automobile Workers' 1946 interracial organizing drive.

Tensions among industrial workers of different ethnic backgrounds often proved a barrier to unionization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, for example, a key factor in the defeat of the 1919 steel strike. In the 1930s, however, that began to change, particularly under the auspices of the CIO. In this 1974 interview done by historian Peter Gotlieb in 1974, Polish-American steelworker Joe Rudiak recalled how ethnic hostility declined in the "CIO days," particularly among the "young folks." This decrease in suspicion between people of different nationalities fostered unionization in the 1930s.

European observers generally commented critically upon the leading role of Indian women in work. Roger Williams proved an exception. The minister, once head of the Salem church, was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635 for questioning the Puritan leadership. He helped found the colony of Rhode Island around Narragansett Bay on land purchased from the Narragansett people to the south, with whom he and the colony maintained generally good relations. He spent much of his life trying to understand the Indians 'customs and language, and published some of his sympathetic observations in his 1643 book Key into the Language of America where he offered a glossary of Algonquian words that revealed much about Indian life. Williams also criticized certain colonial practices, such as the occupation of Indian lands by Europeans, and advocated the separation of church and state and individual freedom in other writings.