Free labor provided possibilities for emancipation for some enslaved people. The most industrious and the most skilled of the enslaved could take greater advantage of these opportunities. Venture Smith had been born in the 1720s, the son of a West African prince who named him Broteer Furro. Slave traders captured him at the age of six, spirited him away to the coast, and transported him to a life of enslavement in Long Island and eastern Connecticut. After several changes of ownership, he was able to purchase his freedom by his labors at the age of 31. Those labors, along with his entrepreneurial activities such as fishing, working on a whaler, and agricultural activities, made possible the purchase of his son, daughter, and wife's liberty. Near the end of the 18th century he related his life history to Elisha Niles, a schoolteacher and Revolutionary war veteran. Published in 1798, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself recounted his successful negotiation of the slavery economy and recognition of free labor as the key to a free identity.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. This 1938 article in the Chinese Vanguard reported on the CHLA's anti-Japanese work and efforts to mobilize support for China.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. The CHLA's flyers, which were enclosed in clean laundry packages, detailed Japanese aggression and called on Americans to urge their government to sanction Japan and support China. This 1938 editorial in the Chinese Vanguard praised their organizational energy.

Even in the late nineteenth-century American West, a notably violent region, the violence directed against Chinese immigrants was shocking. The Union Pacific railroad employed 331 Chinese and 150 whites in their coal mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming. On September 2, 1885, Chinese and white miners, who were paid by the ton, had a dispute over who had the right to work in a particularly desirable area of the mine. White miners, members of the Knights of Labor, beat two Chinese miners and walked off their jobs. That evening the white miners, armed with rifles, rioted and burned down the Chinese quarter. No whites were prosecuted for the murder of twenty-eight Chinese and $150,000 in property damage, even though the identities of those responsible were widely known. Although U.S. Army troops had to provide protection before some of the Chinese could finally return to their burned-out homes in Rock Springs, some defiantly continued to work in the Union Pacific mines into the next century. The grim story of the riot was given in the Chinese workers' own words in this "memorial" that they presented to the Chinese Consul at New York.

From smoking to skin care, advertisers rushed to identify their products with the war effort once the United States entered World War II. Using the war to pitch products was not the only way American businesses benefited from their association with the conflict. Although the government managed and regulated the wartime economy, it often did so to the benefit of large companies. The top 100 companies turned out 30 percent of the nation's manufactured goods in 1940; by war's end, those same companies held 70 percent of all civilian and military contracts. Business executives sat in many of the key posts of war production agencies, serving as dollar-a-year-men" while remaining on their company payrolls

This propaganda leaflet was dropped by German airplanes behind American lines during World War I. Nearly 370,000 African Americans were drafted into the U.S. Army starting in the fall of 1917 (they were not allowed to join the Marines, and the Navy took African Americans only as cooks and kitchen help). Although more than half of the black troops were in combat units, they remained segregated from white troops. Subjected to racist harassment (including demeaning insults from white officers), black troops were continually reminded of their second-class citizenship. By stressing racist conditions in the United States, leaflets such as this attempted to destroy morale and encourage desertion among African-American troops.

The massive growth in unemployment during the depression of the 1870s forced many urban workers to wander from town to town, looking for work. These wanderers often used the railroads to travel, which gave rise to the popular image of the rail-riding "tramp." To some Americans, the unemployed who wandered the country in this manner posed a threat to order and safety. The "tramp menace," many argued, required a repressive response--and advertisements like this exploited the pervasive fear.

John Ball was a lawyer, businessman, educator, civic leader, and traveler who was born on the Vermont frontier in 1794. Ball escaped the life of his father's farm to study at Dartmouth College. He then practiced law, taught, and eventually settled in Grand Rapids and became a Michigan state legislator and a founder of the state's school system. Before settling down, however, he led a life of great adventure. In 1832 Ball joined an expedition to Oregon, but tiring of Oregon--and suffering from the "ague"he mentions here--he boarded a Hudson Bay Company ship bound for Hawaii (or the Sandwich Islands, as they were called then). He landed in Honolulu on December 22, 1833. In Hawaii Ball observed the interactions among the native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, and American missionaries, merchants and diplomats. This selection comes from an autobiography Ball wrote at age eighty.

After the Civil War, southern African Americans exercised their new freedom in many ways; one of them was traveling where and when they chose. Thousands of newly freedpeople took to the roads at war's end, most of them trying to reunite with family members sold away or displaced during the war. In some cases, freedmen and women walked hundreds of miles in search of parents, children, siblings, or spouses. This engraving was published in Edward King's The Great South, one of many postwar surveys of southern life that fed northerners' curiosity about the region that they had defeated in war.

After the War for Independence small-scale industrial activity spread throughout the northeastern states. Saw and grist mills had long been features of colonial life, processing local wood and grain for the rural population. In 1790 Samuel Slater, an English immigrant, set up machines for spinning cotton yarn in Pawtucket Falls, Rhode Island. New England's abundant water power drove many small textile mills. Family labor was very important in those early mills as small children often tended the machines while their parents wove the yarn into cloth. Hiram Munger worked in a small cotton factory in Massachusetts. Born into a family with scant means, Munger only worked in a textile mill for a short while, but when he recorded his autobiography forty years later he remembered the experience vividly. Hiram Munger worked at a series of manual occupations most of his life, eventually becoming an itinerant Methodist lay preacher.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. Black cowboy Will Crittendon recounted his experiences as a cowboy in Texas in this interview conducted by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, John Lomax (and other members of his family) recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Trouble So Hard," sung by Dock Reed, Henry Reed, and Vera Hall in Livingston, Alabama, in 1937, was reminiscent in style of the slavery era, when the congregation sang without hymnbooks or musical accompaniment. The style of singing--the lead singer's call and the congregation's increasingly loud and forceful response--had its roots in African religious practice.

Life in the armed services had a long-lasting impact on America's homosexual population. Far from home, many gay men and lesbian women felt less social pressure to conform to heterosexual social norms, and the need for manpower made the military somewhat more tolerant of homosexual men and women in its ranks (although it still purged many gay and lesbian soldiers). Many who first expressed their sexual orientation during the war later became pioneers in the gay and lesbian rights movement. This towel advertisement was one of a series published during 1943-44 that framed its sales-pitch in homoerotic imagery inspired by purported testimony from G.I.s overseas. The ads, which are sexually ambiguous, suggest how the same-sex environment in the military afforded young men, both gay and straight, with opportunities for sexual self-discovery.

At the turn of the 20th century, the number of business mergers skyrocketed. Among manufacturing companies, mergers jumped from three in 1896 to sixty-three only three years later. Just as quickly the wave of mergers subsided--by 1904, there were only three mergers. This unprecedented wave of mergers was marked by horizontal consolidation--the simultaneous merger of many or all competitors in an industry into a single, giant enterprise. Many of the consolidated firms created in this period--DuPont, U.S. Steel, and International Harvester--remained major corporations throughout the 20th century. Contemporaries reacted to the great merger movement with alarm. Some used satire to express their concern. In this poem published in the New York Journal, George V. Hobart lampooned the wide range of trusts created by merger mania.

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. As a result of his appearances as a triumphant contestant on one of the genre's most popular programs, Twenty-one, Charles Van Doren, an instructor in the English department of Columbia University and son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, tried to use his newfound celebrity to promote values of "true education" to the television-viewing public. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, Van Doren dramatically confessed a long-suppressed secret: Twenty-one had been rigged and he had willingly, though with pained ambivalence, participated in the deception. Prior to airtime he had been told the questions he would be asked and instructed on how to be more "entertaining" as he answered. Van Doren, along with seventeen other contestants, subsequently received a suspended sentence for lying to a grand jury. In later years, he wrote numerous books that dealt with world history and the history of knowledge and served for 20 years as an editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

U.S. marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. By 1919, Haitian Charlemagne Pralte had organized more than a thousand cacos, or armed guerrillas, to militarily oppose the marine occupation. The marines responded to the resistance with a counterinsurgency campaign that razed villages, killed thousands of Haitians, and destroyed the livelihoods of even more. American organizations such as the NAACP opposed the U.S. occupation of Haiti. They sent delegations that investigated conditions and protested the blatant racism and imperialism of U.S. policy in Haiti in the early 20th century. An article from 1920, by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, countered the standard justifications for U.S. occupation of Haiti.

Over the course of two days in August 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led a massacre of white families in Southampton County, Virginia. By the time Turner and his confederates were stopped by local militias they had murdered fifty-nine men, women, and children. Turner managed to hide in a nearby cave for almost two months, but on October 30 he was captured. He made this confession in jail. He was subsequently tried and hanged. Nat Turner's insurrection was only the most dramatic of a series that alarmed white Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Others included the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739; the so-called Negro Plot in New York in 1741; Gabriel's rebellion near Richmond, Virginia in1800; the 1792-1804 revolution on St. Domingue that resulted in the creation of the Haitian republic; and the revolt planned by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822. In each case the plotters sought to free themselves while wreaking violence on those who had enslaved them. In response, southern whites, alarmed by the possibility of further revolts, turned away from thoughts of abolition and toughened laws that restricted the movements of blacks.

The often violent labor struggles of the early 20th century engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations, including the federal Commission on Industrial Relations, appointed in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike broke out in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. The United Mine Workers of America, the union that represented the striking Colorado miners, quickly printed and sold (for 25 cents) thousands of copies of a pamphlet (excerpted here) entitled The Ludlow Massacre by Walter Fink, director of publicity of UMWA District 15. In addition to providing a dramatic retelling of the events leading up to the tragedy, the title of the pamphlet became the commonly accepted term for the event.

By the early 20th century, U.S. companies dominated the economies of the five Central American republics, controlling most of the banana production, railroads, port facilities, mines, and banking institutions. This export-based economy also maintained a social hierarchy of a small number of large landowners and millions of landless peasants. Nicaragua offers a case study of both American domination of the region and local and international resistance to that domination. During the 19th century Nicaragua was among the main contenders for an interoceanic canal and thus drew major railroad and steamship investors from both Britain and the United States. The United States intervened in Nicaragua four times during the 1890s to protect U.S. economic interests during periods of political unrest. In 1912 U.S. marines landed once again to maintain a pro-American government; this occupation lasted until 1925. As this January 1927 memorandum submitted to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg justified U.S. occupation of Nicaragua on the basis of communist threats from Mexico and the Soviet Union. The United States brokered a peace treaty between Nicaraguan liberals and conservatives that allowed the two parties to share political power, but U.S. influence and economic power remained intact.

At the turn of the 20th century, unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States aroused public support for restrictive immigration laws. After World War I, which temporarily slowed immigration levels, anti-immigration sentiment rose again. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality's presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels. Even more restrictive was the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that shaped American immigration policy until the 1960s. While it passed with only six dissenting votes, congressional debates over the Johnson-Reed Act revealed arguments on both sides of this question of American policy and national identity. For example, on April 8, 1924, Robert H. Clancy, a Republican congressman from Detroit with a large immigrant constituency, defended the "Americanism" of Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants and attacked the quota provisions of the bill as racially discriminatory and "un-American."