Lewis Douglass was a son of Frederick Douglass and a sergeant in the Union army's Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. The Fifty-fourth, led by its white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, scion of a prominent Boston family, was an elite black regiment. On July 18, 1863, the Fifty-fourth mounted a brave but hopeless attack against Fort Wagner, which guarded Charleston Harbor. Shaw and almost half the regiment were killed. African Americans had already proven themselves in Civil War battles, but the battle at Fort Wagner turned the public's attention to the heroism of black soldiers. In this letter to the woman he later married, Douglass, still unaware of the dimensions of his regiment's losses, described the battle.

In this 1970 interview with University of South Dakota historian Herbert Hoover, Henrietta Chief, A Winnebago, talks of her religious conversion at the Tomah School in the first decade of the 20th century. The Tomah school was one of the federal government's off-reservation boarding schools, the linchpin of federal policy after 1887 to Americanize and assimilate Indian youth by removing them from their home environment and culture. Henrietta Chief's conversion made her a fervent apostle of Christianity for the rest of her life.

Born in Forreston, Illinois, in 1868, Sylvie Thygeson taught and worked as a stenographer and typist before her marriage at the age of twenty-three. She and her husband, a lawyer, lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. An activist for women's rights, including suffrage and the legalization of contraception, Thygeson felt that birth control was both a crucial part of egalitarian marriage and a major political commitment. In this interview, conducted in 1972 by her daughter Mary Thygeson Shepardson and historian Sherna Gluck, Thygeson described her and her husband's decision to limit their family, a choice that enabled her to work in the suffrage and birth control movements. Her account offered an intriguing glimpse of how birth control advocates circulated information about contraception at a time when many physicians refused to do so, and when both law and public opinion constrained such practices.

From the rocky soil of Vermont's hill towns, many young men and women in the nineteenth century went looking for new opportunities. Often they made a series of moves between farm, factory, and city. Their leave-taking pitted the responsibilities of maintaining family farms against the new attractions of financial and social independence. Sally Rice, born in 1821 in Dover, Vermont, was typical. In 1838 she found work as a domestic servant in New York, not far over the border from her family's hardscrabble farm, securing for herself much valued wages and independence. Several years later she worked as a weaver in one of the many cotton mills that lined the Blackstone Valley of central Massachusetts and Connecticut. Her letters home to her mother and father in Vermont carefully weighed issues of family and independence, farm and factory life.

Jack O'Dell was a union organizer, a civil rights leader, and a member of the Communist Party. His political consciousness formed in the 1940's, when the African-American community became more assertive in their efforts to improve conditions and expand civil rights. Like many blacks, including one of his role models, Paul Robeson, O'Dell was drawn to the Communist Party because of their staunch stand against racism and segregation. During the 1940's, O'Dell found a welcoming environment in the National Maritime Union. Later, he worked for the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Counsel (SCLC) office in New York, before becoming SCLC's voter registration director in seven southern states.

The American soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp had powerful reactions to what they saw, often shaped by their own backgrounds. Leon Bass was a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant serving in a segregated army unit when he encountered the "walking dead" of Buchenwald. Like many others, he tried to repress his memories of the horrors that he saw there and "never talked about it all." But in the 1960s, while involved in the Civil Rights movement and teaching, he met a Holocaust survivor and felt moved to declare to his students that "I was there, I saw." In this interview with Pam Sporn and her students, he linked the oppression of the Jews and other Nazi victims with the segregation and discrimination faced by African Americans.

One of the famous, albeit not the most important of the old-time political bosses, was George Washington Plunkitt. Although he was well known in New York City political circles in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, his enduring fame came from a very short book with a very long subtitle: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, Delivered by Ex-Senator George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Philosopher, from his Rostrum--the New York County Courthouse Bootblack Stand. Journalist William Riordan listened to Plunkitt's talks and published them as interviews in various local newspapers. In 1905, he published them in a book, which became a classic on American urban politics, one still widely read today. Amidst political cynicism, Plunkitt also preached the virtues of hard work, sobriety, and even (as in this talk on "honest graft") honesty.

The brutal southern Colorado coal strike reached its nadir on Easter night, 1914, with the horrendous deaths by fire of three women and eleven children at the hands of the Colorado state militia. Mary Thomas, whose husband was on strike, was interviewed at age eighty eight by historian Sherna Gluck in 1974 for the Feminist History Research Project. Thomas vividly recalled the horror of the infamous Ludlow Massacre, described her efforts to save the lives of women and children by hiding them in a dry well, and her jailing in the aftermath the massacre. She was the only woman strike supporter to be jailed during the strike.

Libraries in the late 19th century were seen by their founders as instruments of social and cultural uplift, meant to raise the working class out their ignorance and teach them how to be middle class. But men like Oscar Ameringer, who immigrated to the United States from Germany when he was 15 and later became a socialist organizer, humorist, and editor, took away different lessons. In this selection from his 1940 autobiography, Ameringer described his discovery of American history books, translated into German, at the local public library.

Thousands of free and escaped African Americans played significant roles in the antebellum abolitionist movement. Henry Bibb was born into slavery in Kentucky in 1815. His autobiography recounted his sufferings, escapes, recapture, and efforts to free his family. Upon his final escape he became active in politics. He was a founder of the Liberty Party in 1840 in Michigan and the Free Soil Party in 1848. While attending a political convention, he contacted his former master in Kentucky and began a correspondence, excerpted here. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress in 1850, Bibb fled to Canada and helped form the Refugee's Home colony for escaped slaves.

During World War I, government at all levels subjected the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union, to repression in the name of wartime security. IWW organizers were repeatedly arrested, and strikers were beaten or shot by police and hired thugs. In September, 1917, federal agents raided every IWW office in the country, arresting some 300 leaders on charges of espionage and sedition. Within six months, two thousand IWW members, known as Wobblies, were in jail and awaiting trial. Most were eventually convicted of violating wartime statutes and sentenced to long prison terms. The organization never recovered from these wartime setbacks. This 1917 cartoon from the New York Globe newspaper uses the acronym IWW" in place of the features of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany

The Women's Emergency Brigade, which Genora Johnson Dollinger helped organize, saved the 1936 sit down strike at Flint, Michigan more than once. In this 1976 interview with Sherna Gluck, Dollinger recalls the famous "Battle of the Running Bulls" when police--bulls--tried to regain control of the GM plant by force. Dollinger and the other organizers of the Women's Emergency Brigade faced constant sexist attitudes in their efforts to win the strike, even as they demonstrated their determination to put their bodies and their families' well-being on the line. Sometimes this sexism took the form of an unwillingness to allow women to speak, sometimes it took gentler forms: Dollinger recalls how, in the heat of battle, a passing striker tipped his hat to her. In a key moment, Dollinger took a loudspeaker and persuaded women in the crowd to join the group in front of the plant. Overwhelmed, and afraid to shoot at women, the police abandoned their assault.

We generally think of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. mainland as largely a post-World War II phenomenon, since more than 800,000 Puerto Ricans came to the United States between 1940 and 1969. But immigration actually started much earlier in the century; between 1915 and 1930 more than 50,000 Puerto Rican migrants headed for the United States--especially New York City. The new immigrants faced a mixed reception, particularly from immigrants from other countries. In this interview for the radio program "Nosotros Trabajamos en la Costura"(We Work in the Garment Industry), garment worker Luisa Lopez told how she faced discrimination from European immigrant workers when she went to work in garment factories in the 1920s. Yet sometimes alliances crossed ethnic lines: Lopez found an ally in an Italian-American socialist.

Employers had many ways to retaliate against their workers who tried to organize, ranging from allies in state and local police forces to detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. But the simplest expedient available was to simply fire employees who were perceived as potential troublemakers. In 1914, a former department store worker named Sylvia Schulman testified before the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations. In the excerpt included here she described how she was fired simply for joining the retail clerk's union.

In colonial America, apprenticeship was the usual means by which young men entered a trade and master craftsmen obtained the labor necessary to staff their workshops. A young man's guardian signed an indenture (contract) for a period of time and the apprentice in turn was to receive food, lodging, and knowledge of "the mysteries of the trade," or traditional craft practices. For young John Fitch of Connecticut in the 1760s, anxious "to learn a trade" and "subsist myself in a genteel way when I came for myself," that exchange was no simple matter. The Cheney brothers, Connecticut clockmakers who were innovated in making moving wooden clocks that were far cheaper than the usual brass ones, were not eager to share either their dinner or their knowledge of clockmaking with Fitch. He found himself caught between his father's and his master's patriarchal expectations of receiving his labor, while he had to worry about how he would support himself when he came of age.

Urban artisans experienced dramatic changes in the second quarter of the 19th century. New York and other cities were destinations of choice for many rural mechanics as well as those coming from overseas. Upon arrival they found workshops in great flux as traditional social relations among master, journeyman, and apprentice were being transformed into an employer-employee relationship. In some crafts, such as cabinetmaking, change came more slowly because of the complexities of fashioning large case furniture. In other trades, such as tailoring, tiny sweatshops started to dot the city streets. A new working class was coming into being, often with a variety of religions and backgrounds, and they organized to contest these and other changes in work conditions and compensation. This anonymous account from a British periodical in 1845 related the experience of a British cabinetmaker in New York in the 1830s; he eventually returned home.

While most working-class autobiographers followed the example of Benjamin Franklin and portrayed the "industrious apprentice," William Otter showed another side of plebian life. Otter took his readers into the world of heavy drinking and nativist violence of antebellum urban life. Cities increasingly became unruly places to govern in the decades before the Civil War with their rapid population growth and jostling of immigrant and native born. Competition for jobs and just plain scapegoating led to brawls between native-born, foreign, and African-Americans workers. Otter participated in the urban diversions made possible by the new commercial culture such as boxing, baseball and other sports, or games at local taverns, along with the competitions between rival militia companies and neighborhood street gangs. All of these boisterous activities could turn violent. Otter was born in England and impressed into the British navy. He jumped ship and came to New York in 1831. While apprenticed as a plasterer, he entered a world of masculine culture that he colorfully displayed in his History of My Own Times (1835).

Jack O'Dell was one of many young black servicemen who returned from World War II determined to change conditions for African Americans at home. Along with veterans, African Americans who had participated in wartime industries and union organizing, and who had experienced improvements in pay and education, became more assertive in their demands for equality. As a member of the National Maritime Union, O'Dell participated in union organizing and challenging racial discrimination. Later, he used his job as an insurance agent to speak with African Americans in their homes, encouraging them to register to vote. These activities formed a basis for his participation in the Civil Rights Movement, during which he directed the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, was demonized by labor for his role in the violent Homestead strike in 1892 in which a pitched battle was fought between strikers and company-hired Pinkerton detectives. Known for his uncompromising and cruel tactics, Frick became an obvious target for labor activists looking to make a statement during the protracted strike. In this excerpt from her autobiography, Living my Life, radical Emma Goldman described how fellow radical Alexander Berkman decided to murder Frick during the Homestead strike.

Religion figured prominently in the 1928 presidential election when Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic to run as the candidate of a major political party. Smith, who ran against the Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, tried to downplay the subject of his religion. In his speech accepting the presidential nomination, Smith sought to reassure voters that he would not favor Catholics, "Wets" (supporters of Prohibition), or Easterners if elected president. While his words may have reassured some, his obvious New York accent reinforced the worries--and prejudices--of others.