In 1981, the U.S. medical community noticed a significant number of gay men living in urban areas with rare forms of pneumonia, cancer, and lymph disorders. The cluster of ailments was initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Disease (GRID), but when similar illnesses increased in other groups, the name changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The mid-1980s saw a number of advances toward understanding and treating the disease, but no vaccine or cure was forthcoming. Gay advocacy and community-based organizations began providing services and pressuring government to increase funding for finding a cure and helping victims. Despite further drug therapy breakthroughs and prevention campaigns, in 1995 AIDS became the leading cause of death for Americans aged 25 to 44. By 2002, while the annual rate of new HIV cases dropped in the U.S. to 40,000 (from a 1980s high of 150,000), more than 20 million people worldwide had died from the disease, and 40 million were living with HIV. In the following 1983 testimony before a congressional committee, three AIDS patients described their personal experiences during the early years of the disease.

The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was practically defunct, yet by the fall of 1933 it was in the strongest position in its history. Perhaps the best historical narrative of the revival of UMWA was penned in lyrical form by an African-American former coal miner called "Uncle George" Jones. Jones had started working as a miner in 1889 at age seventeen but in 1914 blindness forced him out of the Alabama mines. Long known for his singing in church choirs, down in the mines, and on the picket line. Jones' "This Is What the Union Done" not only expressed the miners' sense of the role that Roosevelt and Lewis played in the union revival; it also beautifully captures a sense of the transformation when miners "got the union back again!"

Strikes affect an entire community, and in the end they need that community's support to succeed. This is especially true in the case of a sit-down strike like the legendary sit-down strike at Flint, Michigan, in 1936, when the strikers occupied the GM plants. The strikers, isolated at first inside the Fisher Body Plant Number One, needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women's Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped found the Women's Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike's key leaders. In this interview, conducted by historian Sherna Gluck in 1976, Genora Johnson Dollinger described first how the strike affected her family.

Mary Ballou and her husband ran a boarding house in the gold mining town of Negro Bar, California. While most of the "Forty-niners" who rushed to California went to pan gold, others, like Ballou and her husband, went to reap high profits by providing services to the miners. Ballou's letter to her son, written in 1852, evoked the rough housing, violence, and high prices (from which the Ballous profited) in California during the gold rush. She also described the limited number of women among the flood of male miners, and how important they were to each other for companionship and consolation. Ballou's references to "the States" are an expression of how far from home California must have felt since California was a state÷it had been admitted to the union in 1850.

The "locomotives," "conductors," "depots," and "roads" Levi Coffin mentioned in this segment of his Reminiscences (published in 1876) are all metaphorical. The Underground Railroad was not composed of steel rails and puffing locomotives but was instead a system of routes, guides, and safe houses used by escaped slaves as they traveled to the freedom of the northern states and Canada. Because of the necessary secrecy of their journeys, it is impossible to know exactly how many slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad during the antebellum years. Historians estimate that the number ranged from several hundred to 1,000 per year. Even with the help of the Underground Railroad, the trip was difficult and dangerous. Escaped slaves typically traveled at night and hid during the day, always on the lookout for slave catchers. Levi Coffin, a Quaker shopkeeper who lived in Newport (now Fountain City), Indiana, worked on the Underground Railroad for many years. After emancipation, he devoted himself to assisting the freedmen.

During World War I, laws restricting freedom of speech and the arrest and prosecution of those who opposed the war created an atmosphere of repression, hysteria, and vigilantism. While President Woodrow Wilson called for 100 percent Americanism

During the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was faced with both the rising popularity of the People's Party in rural areas and attempts by the Populist movement to create a farmer-labor alliance. At the same time, socialist trade unionists lobbied for greater political involvement and adoption of several key socialist positions by the AFL. One of those socialist trade unionists was J. Mahlon Barnes, a Philadelphia cigar maker, member of the Cigarmakers' International Union, and member of the Socialist Labor Party. Barnes was a sharp critic of longtime AFL leader Samuel Gompers. In 1894 he played a key role in the only defeat that Gompers suffered in election to the AFL presidency. In this 1896 speech in Boston, Barnes chided Gompers and like-minded mainstream labor leaders for refusing to endorse socialism and, more generally, any form of direct political action.

Henry George's 1886 mayoral campaign generated tremendous enthusiasm among New York City's working people, particularly trade union members. George, author of the 1879 book Progress and Poverty, considered private land ownership to be the cause of inequality and advocated a "single tax" to remedy it. Although George campaigned for less than a month, he spoke more than one hundred times, sometimes addressing five or more labor unions and church groups in a single evening. His acceptance speech for the nomination of the United Labor Party, delivered at Cooper Union on October 5, 1886, conveyed George's identification with organized labor and his desire to channel the ground swell of working-class activism of the mid-1880s toward electoral politics. Some sense of George's rapport with his working-class supporters can be glimpsed in the audience reactions of "laughter" and "vociferous cheers" that a reporter for the New York World recorded in this account of George's acceptance speech.

Around 1903, employers began to mount organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions, particularly in the metal trades. Employers had a broad array of weapons in their arsenal, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. In the first two decades of the 20th century, 775 injunctions were issued against labor activities. During the previous two decades, only 150 injunctions were issued. Although early twentieth-century employers had reliable allies in state police forces and tightly controlled local police, they continued to hire their own private police--detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. This 1903 letter promoted the services of the Corporations' Auxiliary Company of Cleveland, Ohio, to prospective clients.

After their arrival, the Puritan migrants to Massachusetts Bay quickly dispersed into a series of settlements around Boston and then moved inland. Colonists formed clustered towns where they could secure land for their families and churches for their worship. One such community was Concord, Massachusetts, founded by Simon Willard, a fur trader with the local Indians. In his history of New England, entitled The Wonder-Working Providence, woodworker and local historian Edward Johnson recorded an account "of the manner how they placed downe their dwellings in this Desart Wildernesse." Johnson emphasized the providential (God-given) nature of the Puritan mission, one that saw the eastern woodlands, a region that the English and Indians shared in the first decades of settlement, as a wilderness.

In 1981, the U.S. medical community noticed a significant number of gay men living in urban areas with rare forms of pneumonia, cancer, and lymph disorders. The cluster of ailments was initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Disease (GRID), but when similar illnesses increased in other groups, the name changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The mid-1980s saw a number of advances toward understanding and treating the disease, but no vaccine or cure was forthcoming. Gay advocacy and community-based organizations began providing services and pressuring government to increase funding for finding a cure and helping victims. In the following 1983 testimony before a congressional committee, three representatives of social service organizations sharply criticized the Reagan administration's limited response to the AIDS crisis, advocated increased federal funding, and warned that AIDS was a societal "time bomb" likely to have grave consequences beyond the gay community. In 1995 AIDS became the leading cause of death for Americans aged 25 to 44. By mid-2002, while the annual rate of new HIV cases dropped in the U.S. to 40,000 (from a 1980s high of 150,000), more than 20 million people worldwide had died from the disease, and 40 million were living with HIV.

Charles Ball was born a slave around 1785 in Calvert County, Maryland. When he was four years old, his family was broken up by the sale of his mother. As a young man he was separated from his wife and children and sold to a slave trader. The journey described here occurred after that sale. Ball carefully observed his route and later used that knowledge to escape from a South Carolina cotton plantation and return to his family in Maryland. After his escape, Ball lived as a free man in Maryland and Washington, D.C. When his wife died, he remarried, established a new family, and farmed his own property near Baltimore. This period of happiness, however, did not last. Ball and his family were captured, separated, and dragged back into slavery. Although Ball managed to escape again, his family did not. He dictated this memoir while living in Philadelphia, free, but still fearful of recapture.

The movement between 1916 and 1921 of a half million African Americans from the South to cities in the North and West was known as the Great Migration. Black migrants told their stories in many forms from letters to poems to paintings. Music offered one of the most original forms in which the migration narrative was told."Times Is Gettin Harder" (a 1940 recording of an older blues tune by Lucious Curtis) described various incidents from racial injustice to economic hardship that prompted one man's journey away from the land of "cotton and corn."

The 1883 adoption of four standard time zones did not come easily. Many Americans, particularly those who continued to mark the passage of time by the natural rhythms of the sun, resisted the efforts of railroad officials and scientists to impose standard time on the nation. William F. Allen, the first secretary of the railroad companies' General Time Convention (GTC), wrote and spoke tirelessly in his efforts to secure time standardization. To minimize opposition, the GTC's proposed new time zones deviated very little from existing norms: most changes were kept to half an hour or less. Sunday, November 18, 1883--known as the "day of two noons" because people were required to stop what they were doing and reset their clocks anywhere from two to thirty minutes--was remarkably orderly. This New York Times article described the scene in the nation's largest city. Local and state laws soon ratified the new standard, but as late as 1915, citizen challenges to the time standard were still being considered by the courts.

This 1921 cartoon from the Chicago Tribune newspaper prescribes good old fashioned hard work" as the cure for the 1920-21 economic depression. While this artist attributed unemployment to lack of motivation

The "Monroe Doctrine" of 1823 warned European powers to stay out of Latin America, including Central America, which had a particular importance to the United States because of its proximity. By the early 20th century, U.S. companies dominated the economies of Central American republics, including Nicaragua, controlling most of the banana production, railroads, port facilities, mines, and banking institutions. The United States intervened in Nicaragua repeatedly to protect U.S. economic interests. In 1912 U.S. marines landed once again to maintain a pro-American government; this occupation lasted until 1925. Augusto Csar Sandino, a nationalist and leader of Nicaraguan peasants and workers, refused to accept the U.S.-sponsored peace treaty that kept U.S. influence and economic power intact. He organized an army of peasants, workers, and Indians to resist thousands of U.S. marines and the U.S.-trained Nicaraguan National Guard. Sandino's 1933 proclamation called upon all the nations of Central America to oppose U.S. imperialism. From 1927 to 1933 Sandino waged a successful guerrilla war against the United States with support from Mexican and other Latin American anti-imperialists.

In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, taking their identifying symbol from an earlier all-black voting rights group in Alabama, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Two years later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States." Created, in Newton's words, "to serve the needs of the oppressed people in our communities and defend them against their oppressors," the Panthers patrolled black areas of Oakland with visible, loaded firearms--at the time in accordance with the law--to monitor police actions involving blacks. The organization spread throughout Northern California in the form of small neighborhood groups. They came to national prominence in May 1967, when they arrived armed at the California State legislature in Sacramento to protest a bill banning loaded guns in public places. In October 1967, Newton was wounded in a gun battle with police and charged with killing an officer. His three-year incarceration became a cause celebre for many young African Americans, and chapters of the Party rapidly opened throughout the country. The Panthers initiated community social programs, such as free breakfasts for children, issued a newspaper, and trained recruits with guns, lawbooks, and texts advocating world revolution. In the following years, police and FBI agents arrested more than 2,000 members in raids on Panther offices that resulted in a number of deaths. Although the Panthers became involved in electoral politics in the 1970s, the Party died out by the end of the decade due to repression and internal strife. The following 10-Point Platform and Program, culminating with the opening paragraphs of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was issued in October 1966.

The issue of protective legislation for women and mothers has divided reformers, labor unionists, legislators, courts, the military, and feminists since the end of the 19th century when a number of states passed statutes to limit women's work hours. At issue--equal treatment versus biological difference. During the Cold War era, this question informed the debate on the role of women in the military. Although the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 established a permanent presence for women in all branches of the armed forces, a new Army regulation in October 1949 required the discharge of female servicewomen with children under the age of 18. To guarantee passage of the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952, during the Korean War, a provision was dropped that would have reversed this regulation. Thus mothers of dependent children were ineligible to enlist in reserve units and were discharged after childbirth or adoption. In the following Congressional session, the Senate passed S. 1492, allowing the reinstatement of women with dependent children. The bill, however, died in the House Committee on Armed Services and failed to become law. In the following testimony to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, Alba C. Thompson, a former servicewoman, pointed out that the present policy discriminated unjustly against women with children and entailed a squandering of valuable resources. Furthermore, she argued, the army had no right "to dictate the terms of motherhood." In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

In the following interview, Pete Tijerina, the first executive director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), discussed the origins of the organization. A trial lawyer with experience handling discrimination cases and encouraging organized political participation among Mexican Americans, Tijerina had been a State Civil Rights Chairman for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), an organization he joined in 1946. Because his efforts with LULAC were limited by funding and the demand for aid to individuals in localized cases, Tijerina and others realized the need for broad legal precedents to successfully erase widespread discriminatory practices and implement social and economic changes. MALDEF, with a $2.2 million grant in 1968 from the Ford Foundation (including $250,000 for the education of Mexican American lawyers), was set up initially in five southwestern states. It was patterned after the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), formed in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall to pursue initiatives in the courts to gain opportunities long denied to African Americans. MALDEF successfully argued in court for inclusion of Mexican Americans on Texas juries, integration of schools, bilingual and bicultural educational programs, equal opportunity in employment, and amendments to the Voting Rights Act.

In 1937, the Supreme Court reversed a position taken in 1923 that a state minimum wage law was unconstitutional. The following year, the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law outlawing child labor and guaranteeing covered workers a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum 40-hour work week. Although more than 22 million workers benefited, conservative forces in Congress saw to it that the Act exempted many others from its provisions. Due to the persistence of low wages during the Depression, the Federal government charged three agencies, including the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, to recommend procedures to determine cost-of-living budgets so that adequate minimum wage legislation could be written. In the following document, the Women's Bureau devised budgets for self-supporting women without dependents living in a variety of states and defined a "minimum-adequate standard of living" distinct from a subsistence or luxury standard. In doing so they took into consideration specific cultural, sociological, and psychological factors. They reasoned that wage standards should enable "conformity with group-approved habits or behavior patterns" in the area in which an individual lives so that persons affected can feel that they "belong" to their group. The document was included in the record of Senate hearings in 1949 to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act.