By the early 20th century, U.S. companies dominated the economies of the Central American republics, including Nicaragua, and controlled 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. From 1927 to 1933 Sandino waged a successful guerrilla war against the United States with support from Mexican and other Latin American anti-imperialists. Inter-American solidarity was critical to Sandino's success and a major fear of the United States. One non-Nicaraguan supporter of Sandino was Colombian journalist Alfonso Alexander Moncayo. This memoir by Moncayo described how Sandino deeply admired the Latin American independence leader Simn Bolvar. (An English translation follows the original text in Spanish.)

Although by 1919 radical and labor movements had been seriously weakened by the government's repression and persecution during World War I, loyalty" organizations and the U.S. Department of Justice used fears spawned by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to prosecute a crusade against radicals

This undocumented worker was left without work when the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001. The hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who staff low paying jobs in the service industries are often invisible, despite their important contributions to the nation's economy. Largely unprotected by labor laws and ineligible for social security and unemployment insurance, these immigrants struggle to support themselves as well as, in many cases, family and relatives in their countries of origin. Their suffering in the wake of the World Trade Center attack was similarly invisible, although the tragedy hit the undocumented workers who worked in the center particularly hard. Undocumented workers could not gain government-sponsored economic assistance or other forms of relief available to citizens who lost work.

Recommendations by the National War Labor Board during World War II to pay male and female workers equal wages yielded few changes in the gender wage gap. Women continued to receive less money for comparable work, and into the 1960s want ads characterized jobs as "male" or "female" with resulting salary differences based on gender. The Equal Pay Act (EPA) made it illegal to pay men and women differently for similar work. Although the EPA was passed in 1963, it was debated in workplaces and courtrooms for decades thereafter. In this passionately argued Senate hearing testimony, Caroline Davis, Director of the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) Women's Department declared wage discrimination immoral and inefficient. She rebutted EPA's critics who claimed that women were more expensive to employ than men and compared unequal pay based on gender to workplace discrimination against immigrants, African Americans, industrial workers, and workers in colonial societies.

While many assume that workers in the nineteenth-century American West enjoyed easily available land and a fluid social structure, the region's history of radical unionism at the turn of the century suggests otherwise. In 1902, corporate mining interests in Colorado decided to crush the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). By the following year, civil war erupted in Cripple Creek, Colorado, as state and local officials and local businessmen joined with the large corporations against the miners. Before it was over, thirty men had been killed in numerous gun battles. Documents gathered as part of a 1905 federal investigation included a "yellow dog" (anti-union) contract that prospective mining employees were required to sign. The documents also included a letter from mine owners asking landlords not to lease property to union sympathizers; a resolution by the Denver Citizen's Alliance attacking the WFM; orders directing Colorado National Guard troops to deport 73 striking miners and their leaders to Kansas; and finally a plea by a Colorado union official to the Red Cross for the organization's aid.

In late 1932, the United Mine Workers of America was an organization struggling to survive. Yet by the fall of 1933, with the signing of an agreement with coal operators, it was strong. The miners' union had finally won a contract that guaranteed it recognition and stability in the hitherto nonunion southern Appalachian coalfields. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act set off the spark of unionization in coal and other industries and many coal miners felt that they owed a debt of gratitude to the man who had become president of the United States in March--Franklin D. Roosevelt. For coal miners, one way of expressing that gratitude was in song. "Union Dues," collected in the 1940s by folklorist George Korson, used the blues, a musical idiom that had become popular in southern black communities in the 1920s, to explain what President Roosevelt had given coal miners.

House building came to a virtual standstill during the depression and war years, a lull that gave way to a massive construction boom that reached far into the postwar period. By that time, however, the nature of the construction industry was undergoing rapid changes. The introduction of new technologies and building materials meant that buildings could be built faster and cheaper. The benefits of this rise in productivity were shared unequally by bosses and workers. While workers saw a rise in wages, many homebuilders and contractors made fortunes in the millions. Al Filardo, a carpenter who worked in the construction industry in New York, remembered that workers still faced the uncertainty of not knowing when they would find or lose work, and opposition to construction unions.

In 1911, Mexicans overthrew a long-standing dictator and brought Francisco I. Madero to power. Two years later, a new repressive dictator, General Victoriano Huerta, deposed and murdered Madero. The Constitutionalists, led in part by liberal reformer Venustiano Carranza, undertook an armed revolt against Huerta's rule. When President Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, he refused to recognize Huerta's counterrevolutionary government. Moreover, using the slim pretext of a minor insult to the U.S. Navy, Wilson sent troops into Vera Cruz, Mexico, in April 1914. Wilson's strategy—to force Huerta out and gain the support of Venustiano Carranza—backfired, however, and anti-U.S. sentiment erupted throughout Mexico. Carranza wrote the following letters, printed in major Mexican newspapers, to the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile congratulating them for their solidarity with Mexico and warning of the dangers of U.S. intervention. (An English translation follows the original letters in Spanish.)

Just as the question of race divided the Southern Populist movement, so has it divided historians. Some scholars point to the uniquely interracial qualities of the Populist movement, while others emphasize the ways that racial divisions limited the success of southern agrarian radicals. Part of the difficulty in resolving the dispute is the complexity and ambiguity of race relations in Southern Populism. In his famous essay on "The Negro Question in the South," published in 1892, Tom Watson, a Southern Populist who was elected to the U.S. Congress from Georgia in 1890, made one of the strongest cases for an alliance of black and white farmers. Yet Watson was calling for a strategic political alliance, not a fully integrated society, and his commitment to interracialism did not survive the defeat of the Populist movement. After the turn of the century, Watson led efforts to disfranchise African Americans, publishing demagogic attacks on them as well as on Catholics and Jews.

The quest for efficiency touched nearly every aspect of American life during World War I, including the nation's clocks. Daylight saving first appeared during the war years as an experiment to save fuel. Theoretically, people would use less artificial light in the evenings thanks to the extra hour of daylight. Urban dwellers, and those working regular hours in factories and offices, generally delighted in the "extra hour," but protests by farmers and other rural citizens brought the experiment to an end after only a year. For most of the 20th century, however, the push for or against daylight saving came from businesses. The makers of sporting goods, charcoal briquettes, and mosquito repellents continued to fund a "National Daylight Saving Coalition" to lobby for an extended period of "fast time." The movie industry, however, long resisted daylight saving. In this 1930 letter to E. B. Duerr of Path Studios, the president of Fox West Coast Theaters warned of dire economic consequences for the motion picture industry if California adopted daylight saving.

The work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict did much to popularize the notion that accepted American standards of behavior were not found universally in other cultures. Traditional gender norms therefore were culturally and historically determined rather than derived from nature. In the following Collier's article from 1952, Dr. Judson T. and Mary G. Landis invoked Mead's work to investigate contradictory assessments of the "typical" American male as either dominant and aggressive or blundering and dependent. The authors examined findings of social scientists that compared male and female survival rates, achievement, and sexual performance. They argued that while men were, in fact, the "weaker" sex biologically, their struggle to conform to cultural ideals of superiority and dominance often led to failure and difficulties in relationships. Their conclusion--that "in most families the man is, and has to be, the 'stronger,' he has to be the bulwark for the family" because of greater fluctuations in "endocrinological functioning" of women than in men--shows the power that ideas of biological determinism held even in the social science community.

The passage and enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law meant that no escaped slave was safe, since even those living in the free North could be arrested and reenslaved. After passage of the Law, escaped slave women living in the North sometimes wore veils when they appeared in public to avoid identification by slave-catchers.

Women's magazines published between the Civil War and World War II frequently featured articles on "the servant problem" for their middle-class readers. For mistresses, the "problem" was the inadequate supply of "competent" household help. Over the years, the solution to the problem changed. Whereas in the 19th century women were counseled to follow the ideals of Christian maternal benevolence, in the 20th century women were advised to follow principles of scientific management. As this 1912 article by Christine Frederick, an advocate of scientific management for housewives, makes clear, none of these reforms touched the heart of the real problem: servants were poorly paid (eight cents an hour in this "enlightened" household) and treated with little respect. Even so, scientific management did have some potential benefits for domestic servants. Many household workers complained about the lack of a regular schedule, constantly changing orders, and conflicting demands. If household work were truly rationalized, it might free them of some of the arbitrary, demeaning, and disorderly conditions of their work lives.

In 1904, in the midst of a bitter stockyard strike, socialist writer Upton Sinclair's two-month visit to Chicago's "Packingtown" area provided him with a wealth of material that he turned into his best-selling novel, The Jungle. The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products. Yet Sinclair's primary concern was not with the goods that were produced, but with the workers who produced them. Throughout the book, as in this chapter, he described with great accuracy the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism. Despite his sympathies, as a middle-class reformer Sinclair was oblivious to the vibrancy of immigrant communities beyond the reach of bosses, where immigrants found solidarity and hope. Sinclair's graphic descriptions of how meat products were manufactured were an important factor in the subsequent passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act in 1906. Sinclair later commented about the effect of his novel: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach."

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, known informally as the McMahon Act, established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as a federal institution to have total control of developments in the field of atomic energy. To replace the predominate image of atomic weapons as destructive, the AEC began a public relations campaign to show the atom's positive side. Hopes for a utopian society with atomic-powered cars and airplanes had died down by the late 1940s. But the promise of atomic energy for medical research, diagnosis, and treatment and for preventing starvation through duplicating photosynthesis remained. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a revision to the McMahon Act opening development to private industry. In the following article from the popular magazine Look published a year later, David O. Woodbury reprised the "utopian promise" rhetoric of the late 1940s, as he discussed the potential of radioisotopes for health, food production, and industry, as well as the production of electric power through atomic energy. The first nuclear power plant began operation in 1957 and facilities proliferated during the next two decades. Due to a drop in demand for electricity, a strong grassroots antinuclear movement concerned about safety and the disposal of nuclear waste, and national anxiety after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, no new facilities were built after 1979 and many have been shut down.

Vagrancy was one of the most troubling signs of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, as now, those who had food and shelter were confronted by the sight and appeals of those who did not. Shabby men sought food or work on the doorsteps of private homes while men, women, and children stood in the breadlines of municipal relief agencies. Vagrants gathered in "hobo jungles" on the outskirts of town as beggars on the streets appealed to more prosperous passersby. Middle-class observers viewed vagrants with suspicion, empathy, concern, fear, and sometimes even a twinge of envy. For some stolidly holding on to traditional values of work and success, the "bum" was suspect, potentially a con artist. In a very different response, novelist John Dos Passos made the vagrant a symbol of the derailed promise of the American dream in this vignette "Vag," which ended his monumental U.S.A. trilogy.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." Women's magazines also took up the home conservation crusade. Good Housekeeping printed menus, offering housewives directions for preparing tasty meals that met conservation standards. Contributed by readers, this "month's worth of recipes" printed in August 1917 demonstrated conservation in action, as well as women's ingenuity in redesigning menus to observe rationing guidelines.

Religious leaders, civic groups, educators, the press, and government officials have voiced concern since the 19th century over supposed deleterious effects on children of popular culture, from dime novels and motion pictures to comic books, and television. Anxiety over comic books grew as the pulp fiction crime and horror genre developed at the end of World War II. In 1948, psychologist Fredric Wertham advocated the prohibition of comic books to children under the age of 16, claiming that all of the delinquent children he studied had read them. Although the industry's trade organization devised a Code that year to regulate content, only one-third of the publishers subscribed to it. During the next few years many states debated, but did not adopt, bills to ban or regulate comic books, in part because of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that overturned a state statute banning the sale or distribution of crime literature. After the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency conducted hearings on comic books in 1954, the industry formed a new trade association and formulated a new Code to self-censor content. The Code symbol subsequently appeared on approved comic books, curtailing the crime and horror genre. In the following excerpts from the Subcommittee's report, Congress warned the industry that if self-regulation did not prove to be effective, "other ways and means" would be found to protect children. The Code, refined in 1971 and 1989, remains a regulatory instrument for association members.

In 1913, an "International Exhibition of Modern Art," eventually seen by a half million people, rocked the American art world. First mounted at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, it became known as the Armory Show, and its self-consciously "modern" approach challenged the dominance of conservative, staid styles of European art. Two-thirds of the 1,600 works were by Americans, and the Europeans whose works were exhibited--Picasso, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gaughin, and Duchamp among them--were far from the conservatives that Americans were used to. Most critics took extreme positions, either praising or damning the show. In his "A Layman's View of an Art Exhibition," published in the March 29, 1913, issue of Outlook, Theodore Roosevelt took a moderate approach, lauding the unconventional spirit of the Armory Show while casually dismissing the work of such "European extremists" as the Cubists and the Futurists.

During the 1840s and 1850s, anti-immigrant feelings grew amongst many native born whites. These nativists" argued that immigrants caused many of the nation's ills by rejecting "American" work habits