The most influential public critique of Booker T. Washington's policy of racial accommodation and gradualism came in 1903 when black leader and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois published an essay in his collection The Souls of Black Folk with the title "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others." DuBois rejected Washington's willingness to avoid rocking the racial boat, calling instead for political power, insistence on civil rights, and the higher education of Negro youth.

The Wagner Bill was the most radical and far-reaching piece of legislation passed in Roosevelt's second "hundred days." Following on the heels of intense industrial unrest, large-scale strikes, and social turmoil, the act guaranteed workers the right to organize unions, and to strike, boycott and picket their employers. It also outlawed "unfair" labor practices by employers, including blacklisting union activists or intimidating workers who sought to join an independent union, and ensured workers the right to collective bargaining. This leaflet distributed by the United Automobile Workers captures the impact of the Wagner Act on union organizing, as it provided a spur for industrial unionism.

The massive strike of 1877 shook the very foundations of the political and economic order. Begun with a spontaneous railroad strike in West Virginia, the "Great Uprising" spread rapidly across the country, as the entire working populations of many cities went out on strike. Workers across the country along with sympathizers in their communities were galvanized by official violence, as state and federal troops fired on protesters in several cities. As this 1878 cartoon from the New York Daily Graphic indicated, in the aftermath of the strike Indians, trade unionists, immigrants, and tramps were increasingly grouped together in the press as symbols of disorder and opposition to the nation's progress.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. African Americans who supported left-wing parties, however, were more likely to be critical. Langston Hughes, a playwright, poet, and novelist, became a socialist in the 1930s. Although he did not join the Communist Party, he spent a year in the Soviet Union and published his works in magazines sympathetic to liberal, socialist, and Communist causes. In Hughes's "Ballad of Roosevelt," which appeared in the New Republic in 1934, the poet criticized the unfulfilled promises that FDR had made to the poor. Hughes's style in this poem showed his distinctive merging of traditional verse with black artistic forms like blues and jazz.

In 1917, voices were raised outside Congress on both sides of the issue of American involvement in the European war. Shortly before President Woodrow Wilson's call for war on April 2, 1917, the editors of a conservative magazine, the North American Review, laid out the basic arguments for U.S. participation. Fundamentally, they saw the war as a struggle between democracy and barbarism. Similar statements and speeches--as well as more coercive measures--gradually captured the public discourse. Fairly quickly, those who rejected the rationales for United States participation in the war found themselves increasingly isolated. Liberals, intellectuals, and even many socialists soon lined up behind American intervention.

The War Labor Board (WLB) and its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board, had a profound impact on relations between employers and unions during World War II. The WLB--made up of representatives from government, labor, and management--provided protection for unions from hostile bosses, increased the wages of the lowest-paid workers, helped set industry-wide wage patterns, and established methods of resolving shop floor disputes. Although the WLB operated in routinized and bureaucratic ways, its decisions could also carry powerful ideological messages. That became clear in the following document, which insisted upon the policy of equal pay for equal work--a seemingly self-evident principle that was not standard practice in American industry. This board decision mandated equal pay for African-American workers.

Pro-war statements and speeches--as well as more coercive measures--gradually captured American public discourse in 1917. Fairly quickly, those who rejected the rationales for United States participation in the war found themselves increasingly isolated. Liberals, intellectuals, and even many socialists soon supported American intervention. A youthful critic in his twenties, Randolph Bourne wrote a bitter essay in the intellectual magazine Seven Arts, lambasting his fellow intellectuals for lining up so readily behind the war effort.

The American Revolution divided Indian communities as well as Euro-American ones. Captured at the age of fifteen along the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted and integrated into a Seneca community, Mary Jemison watched the war through the eyes of a wife and mother. The Iroquois attempted to remain neutral in the conflict, and Jemison watched tribal leaders return from a meeting with Patriot colonists at German Flats, secure in their belief that Indian neutrality would be respected. Instead, the British sought to attract Iroquois support and four of the six Iroquois nations declared their allegiance to the crown. Soon, Seneca lands became a battleground and their fields were laid waste by the colonists' scorched earth tactics. Jemison described the ensuing destruction and disease in 1823 when she related her life story to James Seaver, a local doctor near her home among the Iroquois of western New York.

Democratic Presidential candidate Al Smith faced a vicious campaign of anti-Catholic innuendos and slurs--both covert and overt--in the 1928 election. A widely distributed periodical called the Fellowship Forum declared that "The real issue in this campaign is PROTESTANT AMERICANISM VERSUS RUM AND ROMANISM." Anti-Catholicism was not confined to fringe groups. One of the most vocal opponents of a Catholic presence in American politics was Thomas J. Heflin, the junior senator from Alabama, who delivered some of his most vicious speeches on the floor of the Senate. Heflin's January 18, 1928, speech before his Senate colleagues blamed the defeat of 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis on Roman Catholics ("Al Smith's crowd") who demanded--to Heflin's outrage--that the party denounce the Klan.

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. In this 1897 essay in the Railway Times, titled "Christ," Murphy O'Hea suggested that Jesus Christ's early career as a "poor humble carpenter" proved "that the cause of Labor is holy."

The struggle against Great Britain in the years leading up to the War for Independence promoted an expansion of popular participation in politics. Popular pamphlets,urban demonstrations, and voluntary associations such as the Sons of Liberty gave voice to the sentiments of ordinary men and women. In May 1770 an anonymous author named "Brutus"--believed to be the New York City merchant and Son of Liberty Alexander McDougall--addressed his fellow citizens and urged them to reject the claims of leading merchants or "Mercantile Dons," as he labeled them, to decide unilaterally issues of great political and economic concern. Two years earlier, some merchants had organized boycotts against certain products imported from Great Britain (a strategy known as nonimportation) to resist British taxation measures aimed at the rebellious Americans. And these merchants regarded the decision to resume trade as their decision alone to make. But Brutus disagreed, and responded with this single-sheet broadside.

Although many historians have emphasized the conservative dimensions of this language of Americanism--the ways that it reinforced rather than challenged the status quo--historian Gary Gerstle shows that it was considerably more complex and contradictory. He argues that it was "flexible enough to express both the social democratic and ethnic communalist visions that inspired political activism among the nation's workers during the Great Depression. As in other communities, this working-class Americanism infused the organizing campaign of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in Homestead, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1936. Four thousand steelworkers endorsed a declaration of their "inalienable rights to organize into a great industrial union, banded together with all our fellow steel workers." It was surely not an accident that they worded that declaration in conscious imitation of the Declaration of Independence.

In folklore the black nursemaid was seen as a dutiful, self-sacrificing black woman who loved her white family and its children every bit as much as her own. Yet the popular images of the loyal, contented black nursemaid, or "mammy," were unfortunately far from the reality for the African-American women who worked in these homes. In 1912 the Independent printed this quasi-autobiographical account of servant life, as related by an African-American domestic worker, which dispelled the comforting "mammy" myth.

Protests against party leadership and policies during the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention, held in Chicago, exploded into violent street confrontations. The 10,000 protesters faced more than 20,000 army troops and police officers. The Walker Report, a federal investigation of the incident, characterized the conflict as "a police riot" and blamed Mayor Richard J. Daley in part for the "unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence." While only seven police officers faced dismissal proceedings, eight leaders of protesting organizations were indicted for conspiring to violate the 1968 Anti-Riot Act. Documents from the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (or Mobe) and the Youth International Party (or "Yippies,")-- two groups central in organizing the protest--appeared in the following testimony of activist Tom Hayden at a House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing to investigate "subversive involvement" in the disruption. Hayden co-authored the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading New Left coalition, in 1962. Despite outrage at the current "state of anarchy," he remained devoted to participatory democracy. Although Hayden and four others were convicted of various charges in the sensationalist Chicago Conspiracy trial, an appeals court reversed the verdicts.

Moving to the Great Plains meant building a home on broad, flat, and treeless prairies. Borrowing from the Plains Indians and earlier pioneers in Kansas, Mattie Oblinger and other homesteaders built sod houses. They cut the prairie sod deep and wide, laid it up like giant bricks, and fit the bricks together snugly without mortar. Mattie and her husband Uriah obtained their land through the Homestead Act of 1862, claiming and improving their 160 acres over five years. Other lands for farmers became available from the vast acreages of public land given to the railroad companies as subsidies. The Oblingers and other settlers formed communities of young families with a rough social equality and common concerns about crops, religion, and social isolation. They faced a series of hardships on the land in the 1870s: blizzards, droughts, and grasshoppers, as well as low crop prices. Mattie died in childbirth at the age of thirty-six.

On George Washington's birthday, 1860, the largest industrial strike to date in the United States started in Lynn, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston. The efforts of the Lynn strikers encouraged shoe and textile workers--including many women--in the nearby town of Marblehead. In Marblehead, as in Lynn, workers invoked the republican values of the American revolution to press their cause. Carrying banners proclaiming "we are not slaves," they referred both to the rhetorical slavery employed by revolutionary leaders and to the real slave system that would collapse in the imminent Civil War. The New York Times reporter who wrote this article, however, was less interested in the historical resonance of the events he witnessed than he was in the loss of revenue to Lynn merchants, the novelty of women gathering in public, and having a good time with his Boston colleagues.

California had a few thousand Chinese immigrants in 1850. By 1852, the number swelled to 20,000, constituting almost a quarter of California's work force. Chinese who toiled in mines and worked as shopkeepers were welcomed, even recruited, at first. But nativist sentiment to curtail Chinese immigration grew as the number of immigrants increased. John Bigler, the state's first Governor, called for immigration restriction in 1852, citing Chinese immigrants' inability to assimilate as European immigrants had. Norman Asing, a restaurant owner and leader in San Francisco's Chinese community, assailed the governor for his anti-Chinese stance and utilized the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution against Bigler's claims of the danger of Chinese immigration. But Asing's argument also embraced some of the era's racist assumptions about African Americans and Native Americans.

The burgeoning textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, brought increasing competition among the owners and declining conditions for the workers. In the 1830s the women working in the mills turned to economic protests and collective action; their "turn outs" or strikes proved unsuccessful in combating the wage cuts. In the 1840s mill workers turned to political organization as they mounted annual petition campaigns calling on the state legislature to limit the hours of labor within the mills. These campaigns reached their height in 1845 and 1846, when 2,000 and 5,000 operatives respectively signed petitions. to reduce the hours of labor in the mills. Women operatives organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1845. An important part of the campaign was their periodical The Voice of Industry. Another publication, Factory Tracts, was part of their effort to expose conditions in the mills and advocate a ten hour day. Male mechanics and other workers in industrial communities joined the Lowell women operatives' campaign.

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. Lynchings, often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. The history of failed attempts to pass federal antilyching legislation goes back to 1894, when a House bill to set up a committee to investigate lynchings failed. In 1922, the House passed a bill to make lynching a Federal crime, but despite President Warren G. Harding's support, Southern senators filibustered and defeated it. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to support an antilynching bill proposed by the NAACP, fearing that key Southerners lawmakers would retaliate and interfere with his New Deal agenda. In February 1948, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress for federal antilynching legislation. In the following testimony to a House subcommittee, four Southern Congressmen discussed their reasons for opposing what they deemed federal interference in state judicial responsibilities and defend segregation and the "peaceful relations now existing between white man and Negro" in the South. Congressman Charles E. Bennett (Florida) also offered his historical explanation for lynching. None of the bills under consideration by the subcommittee passed.

Nineteenth-century officials and businessmen eager for cheap labor for California's manufacturing, mining, and agricultural industries encouraged Chinese migrants to voyage to the United States. In the 1850s, however, as the Chinese population grew, an anti-Chinese movement mounted. The California legislature and courts restricted the rights of Chinese immigrants with the Foreign Miners Tax of 1852 and a California Supreme Court decision-- People v. Hall (1854) --that excluded Chinese testimony from the courts, further sanctioning violence against Chinese residents. Pun Chi, a young Chinese merchant, wrote this appeal to Congress, sometime between 1856 and 1868, seeking help against growing anti-Chinese sentiments in the West. Reminding Congress that Chinese migration had been encouraged and that migrants deserved legal protection once in the United States, he gave graphic accounts of the mining tax collectors' abuses and the murder of Chinese miners. William Speer, a Presbyterian minister and missionary in San Francisco's Chinatown, translated Pun Chi's appeal from Chinese and published it in 1870.