With ongoing protests against the Townshend Duties, waterfront jobs scarce due to nonimportation, and poorly-paid, off-duty British troops competing for jobs, clashes between American laborers and British troops became frequent after 1768. In Boston, tensions mounted rapidly in 1770 until a confrontation left five Boston workers dead when panicky troops fired into a crowd. This print issued by Paul Revere three weeks after the incident and widely reproduced depicted his version of what was quickly dubbed the Boston Massacre." Showing the incident as a deliberate act of murder by the British army

The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. The flapper portrayed in cartoons, ads, and nationally circulated journalism, however, was almost always white, with features that denoted Northern European origins. She was also frequently shown with luxury goods or in exclusive settings. But young women of many ethnic groups also took up flapper styles and embraced the spirit of youthful rebellion. A popular song attested to generational conflict among Mexican Americans in San Antonio. In "Las Pelonas"--"The Bobbed Heads," or "Flappers"--the singer lamented the influence of Anglo youth culture on his Mexican-American community. [English version follows original in Spanish.]

From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term "lynching" did not have any racial implications. Starting in the 1880s, however, mob violence was increasingly directed at African Americans. 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.In this 1892 report printed in Philadelphia's Christian Recorder, Reverend E. Malcolm Argyle recounted events in Arkansas and described the efforts of his fellow black ministers to secure passage of anti-lynching legislation. In response to the rising tide of lynchings of African-Americans across the South during the 1890s, Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper editor Ida Wells-Barnett launched a national anti-lynching crusade. Despite decades of determined effort, the anti-lynching movement never succeeded in securing federal passage of an anti-lynching law. Although Congress never passed even a moderate anti-lynching statute brought before it for more than forty years, parts of the 1968 Civil Rights Act provided for federal intervention on behalf of individuals injured in the exercise of their civil rights.

On Christmas Eve, 1855, patrollers finally caught up with a group of teenaged slaves who had escaped by wagon from Loudon County, Virginia. But the posse was driven off when Ann Wood, leader of the group, brandished weapons and dared the pursuers to fire. The fugitives continued on to Philadelphia. Although proponents of the Fugitive Slave Law hoped it would reduce the number of slaves escaping to the North, the law fueled abolitionist sentiment. Popular opposition in cities like Boston and Philadelphia, which at times led to the emancipation by force of captured slaves, at times made the law unenforceable.

For soldiers in World War I, as in other wars, songs provided diversion and expression of common sentiments. Four song lyrics included here recorded soldiers' responses, both to the new horrors of modern warfare and to the more general disillusion of men in combat. "Bombed Last Night" uses gallows humor to tame the dread of poison gas. "A Poor Aviator Lay Dying" uses the same kind of morbid humor to portray an aviator entangled with his plane, gallantly pleading for his comrades to salvage the parts, rebuild the engine, and keep on fighting. The lyrics to "Sittin' in De Cotton" and "Tell Me Now" expressed, in the ostensible dialect of the southern African American, the widely shared sentiment of the soldier--the disillusion with war and will to survive.

On September 18, 1895, African-American spokesman and leader Booker T. Washington spoke before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His "Atlanta Compromise" address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Although the organizers of the exposition worried that "public sentiment was not prepared for such an advanced step," they decided that inviting a black speaker would impress Northern visitors with the evidence of racial progress in the South. Washington soothed his listeners' concerns about "uppity" blacks by claiming that his race would content itself with living "by the productions of our hands."

During the 18th century, American colonists found themselves increasingly involved in wars, often imperial ones, spiraling out of European battlefields onto the North American continent. The Seven Years War between France and Great Britain began along the western frontier and spread in 1754. New Englanders eagerly volunteered for expeditions leading to the invasion of French Canada. British and colonial forces succeeded together in capturing the great French fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758. But as Massachusetts soldier Gibson Clough discovered, the British regular army looked down on the colonial militia. British concepts of discipline and social hierarchy varied significantly from colonial ones, and the war experience began to encourage colonists' conception of themselves as Americans.

The Five Points was a notorious mid-nineteenth century New York City slum. Located just east of the fashionable stores, columned banks, and well-dressed crowds of Broadway, its squalor served to remind New Yorkers of the destitution that so closely underlay the city's surging wealth. The neighborhood included the infamous "Old Brewery," which had once been a real brewery but by mid-century had degenerated into a miserable tenement dwelling for the very poor. In the early 1850s the New York Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church purchased the "Old Brewery," demolished it, and built a mission on the site. The women of the Home Missionary Society made children their first concern, as, increasingly, did many other reformers of this period. While in this selection these Protestant missionary women showcase the children's gratitude, many Irish-Catholic immigrant families resented the missionaries' assumption of superiority and regarded their proselytizing as antagonistic to their own desire to pass on their religious beliefs to their children.

The Boston Massacre became an important symbol for radicals who used the incident to build popular opposition to British rule. For thirteen years after the incident, Boston observed March 5, the anniversary of the incident, as a day of public mourning. Artists continued to redraw, repaint, and reinterpret the Boston Massacre long after it occurred. This engraving based on a painting by Alonzo Chappel was published in 1868. While the artist still omitted Crispus Attucks, a black sailor who was one of those killed in the Massacre, it showed the chaos of the confrontation and captured the horror of soldiers shooting down unarmed citizens.

A 1774 British print depicted the tarring and feathering of Boston Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm. Tarring and feathering was a ritual of humiliation and public warning that stopped just short of serious injury. Victims included British officials such as Malcolm and American merchants who violated non-importation by importing British goods. Other forms of public humiliation included daubing victims' homes with the contents of cesspits, or actual violence against property, such as the burning of stately homes and carriages. This anti-Patriot print showed Customs Commissioner Malcolm being attacked under the Liberty Tree by several Patriots, including a leather-aproned artisan, while the Boston Tea Party occurred in the background. In fact, the Tea Party had taken place four weeks earlier.

During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by female workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that female employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. It did not, however, prevent companies from hiring only men for higher paying jobs. Despite the fact that Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment, African-American women as a class remained "at the bottom of the economic totem pole" because of "their dual victimization by race and sex-based discrimination," in the words of Dr. Pauli Murray, whose testimony to Congress appears below. Dr. Murray, an African-American professor of American studies specializing in law and social change expressed concern that despite previous antidiscrimination legislation, "we are holding on very definitely to the patriarchal aspect of white America." Murray advocated the position that all antidiscrimination legislation should explicitly prohibit sex discrimination

A developing sense of working-class community paved the way for a string of boycotts in the mid-1880s. Boycotts were a way to win concessions from an employer by convincing other workers not to patronize his business. The movement peaked in 1886 with campaigns across the country; that year, there were 150 boycotts in New York State alone. This 1887 cartoon in the satirical weekly Life commented on the ubiquity of the boycott. "Whereas," reads one boy, representing a committee of disgruntled candy-cart customers, "we find we don't git red color enough in our strawberry cream, nor enough yaller in our wanilla, . . . to say nothin' o' the small measure of peanuts we gits for a cent; therefore, be it resolved . . . that all the stands in the city is boycotted until these things is righted."

Alfred C. Kinsey published his pathbreaking research on sexual behavior in 1948 and 1953, reporting that premarital and extramarital sexual activity was not uncommon in American life. In fact, Kinsey argued, it had been part of a long-term shift beginning in the 1910s. Alarmed critics in the popular press attacked the study as a threat to the stability of the American family. In an era during which the family symbolized a retreat from Cold War and atomic age political and social tensions, some in the scientific community joined religious figures and cultural commentators in an ideological battle to strengthen the traditional domestic realm. In the following report in the popular magazine Collier's, a psychology professor characterized his research study as a follow-up to Kinsey that dealt with knowledge and attitudes about sex. Unlike Kinsey's work, however, this report explicitly served as a prescriptive guide--telling Americans how to avoid infidelity, escape divorce, and gain marital happiness through sex education. In attempting to change so-called "incorrect" attitudes, it presented as fact conclusions not warranted by the evidence offered-- that most men wanted wives who were not disinterested in sex but didn't and flaunt it either or that ultimately "the best sex is in marriage." In presenting these beliefs as facts, the report revealed ingrained cultural attitudes at odds with ideals of scientific objectivity. These values, however, conformed with efforts to use potentially disrupting sex research findings to strengthen the one socially approved channel for sexual behavior--marriage.

The American Railway Union's unsuccessful strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894 left many workers without jobs. Not only did the company take on hundreds of new workers in place of the strikers, but total employment in the shops dropped. On August 17, 1894, the desperate and destitute strikers appealed to Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld. The sympathetic governor wrote George Pullman a total of three times, asking him to do something about the "great distress" among his former workers. Typically, Pullman blamed the workers for their problems, arguing that if they had not struck they would not be suffering. He rejected the solutions proposed by Altgeld. The strikers' appeal to Altgeld and the governor's three letters to Pullman are included here. The public was more sympathetic with the plight of the Pullman workers. Contributions of food eased the distress and many Pullman residents eventually moved to find work elsewhere.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. Trade unionist William D. Mahon chastised organized religion for ignoring its "true mission" to "establish the brotherhood of man" in this 1899 speech espousing a strong church role in helping the labor movement.

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The issue was whether to endorse the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) After speeches on the subject by several U.S. Senators, Bryan rose to speak. The thirty-six-year-old former Congressman from Nebraska aspired to be the Democratic nominee for president, and he had been skillfully, but quietly, building support for himself among the delegates. His dramatic speaking style and rhetoric roused the crowd to a frenzy. The response, wrote one reporter, "came like one great burst of artillery." Men and women screamed and waved their hats and canes. "Some," wrote another reporter, "like demented things, divested themselves of their coats and flung them high in the air." The next day the convention nominated Bryan for President on the fifth ballot. The full text of William Jenning Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech appears below. The audio portion is an excerpt. [Note on the recording: In 1896 recording technology was in its infancy, and recording a political convention would have been impossible. But in the early 20th century, the fame of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech led him to repeat it numerous times on the Chautauqua lecture circuit where he was an enormously popular speaker. In 1921 (25 years after the original speech), he recorded portions of the speech for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana. Although the recording does not capture the power and drama of the original address, it does allow us to hear Bryan delivering this famous speech.]

Professional psychiatry was only in its infancy at the end of the 19th century and many physicians disputed its scientific basis. In 1892, the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane was reorganzied as the American Medico-Pyschological Association. Four years later, psychiatrists--or alienists as they were then called--hurled their opinions into the political arena in a controversy over the sanity of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was heartily disliked by many middle-class urban professionals, precisely the sort of people who became alienists. In this letter to the New York Times of September 27, 1896, a self-identified anonymous "Alienist" declared that Bryan was of a "mind not entirely sound." While it seems unlikely that this attack had much impact on the outcome of the election (the paper's readers were already unlikely to vote for Bryan), this would not be the last time that elites would seek to discredit radical opponents of the status quo by branding them "crazy."

Middle-class observers reacted to hoboes and tramps of the Great Depression with an array of responses, viewing them with suspicion, empathy, concern, fear, sometimes even a twinge of envy. For some, stolidly holding onto traditional values of work and success, the "bum" was suspect, potentially a con artist. Tom Kromer's "Pity the Poor Panhandler: $2 An Hour Is All He Gets" exemplified this stance, urging readers to resist the appeals of panhandlers and refer them to relief agencies, where professionals could help the deserving and get rid of the rest. Ironically, the young journalist who went undercover to write this piece would find himself unemployed and on the road within a year of the publication of his condescending article.

In 1831 Rebecca Burlend, her husband John, and their five youngest surviving children left England for Pike County, Illinois. Resentful of the high rent they paid for their Yorkshire farm, the Burlends looked forward to owning their own farm in the United States. Once arrived, however, they learned that land ownership on the American frontier presented its own difficulties and dangers. In Illinois, government land offices either sold sections of land to settlers or provided them with certificates of preemption. "Preemption" was a process through which a settler could stake a claim to a piece of land for up to four years without paying for it as long as he (or she) cultivated it, built on it, or otherwise "improved" it. The government's goal was to encourage settlement of the wilderness. Settlers, however, sometimes illegally exploited the process, as Burlend describes here.

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. In early 1893, a white reporter, writing in the New York Sun, offered a grisly account of the burning at the stake in Paris, Texas, of a black man accused of molesting a white girl.As press accounts like this make clear, to witness a lynching--or even just glimpse its aftermath--could be a searing experience for those who were the most likely victims of the lynch mob--young African-American males. That, indeed, was the intention--the threat of lynching was a powerful mechanism for keeping black Southerners in line. In response to the rising tide of lynchings of African-Americans across the South during the 1890s, Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper editor Ida Wells-Barnett launched a national anti-lynching crusade.