In the second quarter of the nineteenth century numerous reform movements emerged; some people even chose to withdraw from society and form ideal or utopian communities. The Shakers were the oldest of these utopian movements. Founded by Mother Ann Lee in 1774, they abandoned the traditional family in favor of a new fellowship of men and women living as celibate brothers and sisters. Many entered Shaker communities in the 1820s and 1830s, attracted by their equality and simple, but spiritual, lifestyle. This anonymous Lowell mill worker made two visits to a Shaker community in New York State and offered a glimpse into the isolated world within. Her opinions changed over time as she found some interesting similarities to factory life; the Shakers were as industrious as any factory worker, paying close attention to their bell schedule.

In this March 23, 1900, speech before the U.S. Senate, Senator Benjamin R. "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman of South Carolina defended the actions of his white constituents who had murdered several black citizens of his home state. Tillman blamed the violence on the "hot-headedness" of Southern blacks and on the misguided efforts of Republicans during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to "put white necks under black heels." He also defended violence against black men, claiming that southern whites "will not submit to [the black man] gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him"--an evocation of the deeply sexualized racist fantasies of many Southern whites.

Although the 1970's saw an increase of women entering non-traditional and unionized jobs, many skilled and building trades remained effectively closed to women. As a result, in many cities throughout the 1970's and 1980's, private and city bus companies provided important opportunities for women interested in non-traditional jobs. Boasting large numbers of women and lesbians and an atmosphere of social tolerance, these jobs were seen as gay-friendly and provided female workers with a strong voice in union politics and a sense of community and solidarity. Shelley Ettinger took a bus job in the midst of a bus strike in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1977. Encouraged to join by other lesbians, Ettinger remembered an atmosphere of female and lesbian camaraderie that expanded beyond the bus yard into social gatherings and soft-ball games.

The country store was an important crossroads in nineteenth-century rural communities. In the decades after the War for Independence, commercial activity increased in the hinterlands as rural residents brought their farm produce to local storekeepers to exchange for commodities (such as rum) that were not produced locally. With cash scarce, much of the trade was conducted by barter and recorded in the merchant's account books or "daybooks," and traveling peddlers extended market activity beyond the reach of village stores. It was in this commercializing environment that Phineas Taylor Barnum honed his entrepreneurial skills. Barnum, born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810, eventually took his skills to New York City where he achieved fame as a cultural impresario and museum owner. He wrote several autobiographies that became key documents in the substantial nineteenth-century advice literature on how to achieve fame and fortune; this excerpt is drawn from The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself (1855) where he described his early days in greatest detail.

As slavery collapsed at the close of the Civil War, former slaves quickly explored freedom's possibilities by establishing churches that were independent of white control, seeking education in Freedmen's Bureau schools, and even building and maintaining their own schools. Many took to the roads as they sought opportunities to work and to reconstitute their families. Securing their liberty meant finding the means of support to obtain land or otherwise benefit from their own labor, as Jourdon Anderson made clear in this letter to his former owner. He addressed Major Anderson from Ohio, where he had secured good wages for himself and schooling for his children. Many freedpeople argued that they were entitled to land in return for their years of unpaid labor and looked to the federal government to help achieve economic self-sufficiency. Black southerners understood the value of their own labor and looked for economic independence and a free labor market in their battle over the meaning of emancipation in post-Civil War America.

In 1918 the Spanish influenza hit the United States and then the rest of the world with such swiftness that it sometimes went unnoticed until it had already passed. By mid-1919 it had killed more people than any other disease in a similar period in the history of the world. Kentucky coal miner Teamus Bartley was interviewed at ninety-five years of age and vividly recalled the impact of the flu pandemic on his community. With a dearth of healthy laborers, the mines shut down for six weeks in 1918 and miners went from digging coal to digging graves.

This 1915 cartoon by William Ireland in the Columbus Dispatch relies on racist suppositions to make an ironic antiwar statement. Like their European counterparts, many Americans justified imperial expansion by arguing that it would spread the benefits of Western Civilization" to un-civilized

As the federal government drastically reduced funding for low-income housing during the 1980's and 1990's, homelessness emerged as a new and serious issue in many urban areas. Between one and three million Americans became homeless during the 1980's as the minimum wage fell in value and the creation of affordable housing came to a virtual standstill. By the end of the decade one-third of homeless Americans were children. As the homeless population grew, so did the number of organizations created to serve and organize the men, women, and families living in the streets or in over-crowded shelters. Ted Houghton was an organizer for Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group founded in 1981 and dedicated to the principle that decent shelter, sufficient food, affordable housing, and the chance to work for a living wage are fundamental rights in a civilized society.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals in the early 20th century. The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. Novelist John Dos Passos became deeply involved in the case after he visited Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts prisons. In the fall of 1920 he joined the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. The case and execution were commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. John Dos Passos's "They Are Dead Now-- - " appeared in the New Masses, October 1927. A stark poem that repudiated its own form as inadequate to the subject, it opened "This isn't a poem." In the poem, the executions ended the dreams not only of Sacco and Vanzetti, but those of many others who had followed the trials with disbelief and outrage.

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworker Joseph Fish described conditions in the steel mills as good and maintained that only "one or two" Americans have joined the strike.

The introduction of new technologies has always altered the relationship between managers and workers, often by eliminating the need for skilled laborers. Helen Zalph and her colleagues in the printing division of the New York Daily News discovered this fact for themselves when computers revolutionized the way they put together the paper during the 1970s. What management gained in efficiency, workers lost in terms of their control over the production process, a sense of community and teamwork, and the sense of pride that comes with skilled craft work. They also lost many of their co-workers, who were no longer needed, and the power of their union. Now working largely in isolated cubby-offices, Zalph and many of her colleagues miss the older methods.

Lord Baltimore established the colony of Maryland in the upper part of Chesapeake Bay in the early 1630s as a refuge for his fellow Catholics. Baltimore's plans for a feudal system with labor performed by tenant farmers, along with many of the colonists' other high expectations, proved impossible to establish. The tobacco boom and offers of free land to Protestant and Catholic alike drew thousands of English immigrants to Virginia and Maryland. Over three quarters of the migrants to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake arrived as indentured servants, financing their passage by signing indentures, or contracts, for four to seven years labor. Most had agricultural backgrounds and were also fleeing poverty and unemployment in England. George Alsop was one such indentured servant, probably with experience as an artisan or mechanic. He offered an account that boasted of the favorable situation for servants, especially women, to counter other writers who compared conditions in the Chesapeake to slavery.

Early nineteenth-century cities experienced enormous growth. New York's population tripled after 1810, numbering over 312,000 by 1840. As the population exploded, the gap between rich and poor also deepened. Writing in a British periodical in 1845, "A Working Man" described changes in the urban workplace and also in residential and leisure patterns. Recounting his family's emigration to America in 1825-35, he emphasized emigrants' enormously high expectations and frequently ensuing disappointments. While work was plentiful, the pace was brutal and hours long. With its congested thoroughfares and colorful vistas, the city made a vivid impression upon residents and visitors alike. While residents could boast of an abundance of fruit and other items in the markets, the city's unstructured growth also resulted in rampant disease and filthy streets. "A Working Man" was struck by the city's youthful population, but also by the low esteem reserved for old age.

When the CIO initiated Operation Dixie in 1946 to challenge racial discrimination and organize workers in the largely unorganized South, Jack O'Dell signed up as a volunteer organizer. He was met with a steep resistance to racial integration and a groundswell of Cold War anti-communism that crippled and then killed the CIO's will to radically alter the working conditions of the South. Nationwide, the CIO expelled unions it claimed were influenced by communists – amounting to nearly a million workers. Jack O'Dell was one victim of the anti-communist purge. He lost his membership in the National Maritime Union in 1950, one day after the start of the Korean War.

Slavery and a society based on slave labor were well established in the Chesapeake region by the third decade of the 18th century. Hugh Jones described the beginnings of African-American culture as slavery spread in the Chesapeake. Virginia's slave population grew from 3,000 in 1680 to 13,000 in 1700. It further expanded to 27,000 by 1720. Despite Jones's rosy picture, he effectively depicted the enslaved population's contact with whites, the growth of a smaller group that spoke English, and the emergence of strong kinship bonds facilitated by a naturally increasing population, a first in the New World. Hugh Jones arrived from England and served as a minister in Jamestown and professor of mathematics at William and Mary. He authored The Present State of Virginia (1724) where he described the distinctive form of society emerging in Virginia of large and small landowners, poor white laborers, and enslaved Africans.

Playwright and screenwriter John Howard Lawson, the president and organizing force of the Screen Writers' Guild and acknowledged leader of the Communist Party in Hollywood in the late 1930s, became the first "unfriendly" witness subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on October 27, 1947. This followed a week-long session during which numerous studio heads, stars, and others spoke at length about purported Communist activity in the industry. During that first week, film critic and former screenwriter John Charles Moffitt detailed Lawson's supposed instructions to writers on how to get propaganda into films. When his turn came, Lawson attempted unsuccessfully to read a statement into the record warning that the investigation threatened basic American rights and liberties. That statement appears below following the testimonies of Moffitt and Lawson. With nine other "unfriendly" witnesses, Lawson gambled that the Committee would issue contempt citations for their refusal to answer questions about their political associations and beliefs, and that after a court case and appeal, the Supreme Court would rule that such questioning violated their First Amendment rights. Further HUAC interrogations would thus be stopped. In 1949, however, before the appeal reach the high court, two liberal justices died, and the next year, the newly constituted Court refused to hear their appeal. The Ten were sent to prison as a result, and in 1951, HUAC continued its Hollywood probe.

Ellen N. La Motte was one of the first American nurses to serve in a French field hospital during World War I. The Backwash of War, a series of fourteen vignettes of a French field hospital, recounting her 1915 service in Belgium, was first published in fall 1916, before American entry into the world war. Once the United States had entered the war, La Motte's unsparing view of the devastation of war was suppressed by the pervasive national propaganda effort of the home front, and the publishers withdrew the book. Republished in 1934, the book found a new audience among Americans determined to avoid involvement in foreign wars. Included here is her introduction to the 1934 republication, which gave the book's publishing history, and one of the sketches.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the U.S. military. American intelligence, with the benefit of intercepted Japanese messages, had known for some time that Japan was planning an assault, but military leaders had no idea precisely when and where. Hawaii, they assumed, was so far away from Japan that the Japanese navy could never mount an effective attack. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. A radio broadcast from station KTU in Honolulu the day of the attack captured the events as they unfolded over several hours. From the roof of a Honolulu office building, the radio reporter described significant damage. Apparently, he was calling New York City on the phone, while the New York station broadcast his call to the nation at large.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people during World War II, the U.S. government viewed its popular performers--singers, dancers, and actors--as a crucial weapon. Even before Pearl Harbor, Treasury Department officials began making plans to raise money to finance the war by selling bonds to the public, which would be repaid with interest after the war was over. During the war, private citizens and organizations bought $190 billion worth of war bonds at the low interest rate of 1.8 percent. Hollywood stars became central to war bond drives. The glamorous actress Dorothy Lamour alone was credited with selling $350 million in war bonds. A September 1942 "bond blitz" enlisted more than three hundred actors who worked eighteen-hour days and sold more than $800 million in bonds. As the war dragged on, the Hollywood bond salespeople continued to motivate purchases even when allied victory seemed secure. This 1945 recording by Bing Crosby exhorted people to participate in the seventh war loan.

When the United States invaded Cambodia in 1970, college campuses around the country erupted in the most violent, disruptive set of antiwar demonstrations of the entire Vietnam period. The FBI listed 1,785 student demonstrations and 313 building occupations during the 1969-1970 school year. At Kent State University in Ohio, four undergraduates were killed on May 4, 1970 when the National Guard opened fire at an antiwar rally. Carol Mirman was a senior at Kent State in 1970, preparing to graduate with a degree in Fine Arts. Like other students, she was outraged that National Guard troops were stationed on campus. She took part in the rally on May 4, and witnessed, to her horror, the shooting deaths of her fellow students.