In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Clairton worker George Miller called the 1919 strike a quest for "a standard American living"--a phrase that was particularly meaningful to the Serbian-born Miller.

In the era before the U. S. Army conquered the Great Plains Indians the region's giant buffalo herds provided the primary food and clothing source for the Indians who lived there. Indeed, in 19th century America buffalo were more numerous than people. The various Lakota Sioux tribes who lived in the area that became South Dakota and Nebraska depended largely on the buffalo hunt according to Paul Picotte, a Yankton Sioux born in 1880. In this transcript of a 1968 interview with historian Joseph Cash, Picotte recalled the elaborate process used to hunt, dress, and preserve buffalo.

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Youngstown steelworker John J. Martin expressed puzzlement over the grievances of the striking steelworkers and maintains that "the foreigners brought the strike on."

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was one of a constellation of federal agencies that made up President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program to help Americans recover from the Great Depression. Established in 1933 in an effort to spur industrial recovery, the NRA sought to use government power to restrain competition and end the downward cycle of wage cuts and price reductions, without abolishing the free market. The administration asked businesses, labor, and consumers to help write new codes for hour limits, minimum wages, and production standards. To encourage voluntary adoption of these new codes, participating businesses were allowed to display a blue eagle logo, and consumers were urged to spend money only where the symbol was displayed. This photograph captures three unlikely spots for the display of the otherwise ubiquitous NRA eagle.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage. In October 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949, raising the minimum wage to 75 cents hour and extending coverage, but still leaving many workers unprotected. In the following statement to the 1949 Senate subcommittee on FLSA amendments, Shirley Hall, described as a "typical cotton-textile worker," discussed material and psychological concerns over layoffs from her town's main source of employment: a large cotton mill. She also argued that an increased minimum wage would increase consumer spending and boost the economy.

In January, 1863--the month of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the second year of the Civil War--the United States began allowing black soldiers to enlist in the Union army. The army needed more manpower or, as African-American soldier James Henry Gooding put it with bitter eloquence, "more food for its ravenous maw." By 1865 approximately one tenth of all Union soldiers and sailors were African-American, and about eighty percent of these came from the slave states. Black soldiers fought with notable valor. When captured they faced much greater brutality from Confederate soldiers than did their white comrades. Union service, however, was no guarantee of equal treatment. Black soldiers in the Union army served in segregated troops, often faced menial assignments, and received lower pay--$10 per month to white soldiers' $13. In this letter to President Lincoln, Gooding, writing on behalf of himself and his fellow black soldiers, protested these conditions.

Jim Justen was active union member at the American Motor Company plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which later became a Chrysler plant. An active member and leader of the United Auto Workers Local 72, Justen recalled that his local was a "rebel" local, more willing than the International to strike when they found working conditions or contract negotiations unacceptable. During the 1960's and early 1970's, the priorities of many locals, especially in the auto industry, differed from those of the international leadership. While international unions were more interested in wages and job security, many locals were more outspoken about health and safety issues on the job. As Justen recalled, such rank and file militancy often had a more direct and immediate impact on job or plant-specific conditions.

German Americans had a complex response to the attacks on their loyalty that emerged when the United States went to war against Germany in 1917. During and after the war, many German Americans began to conceal their ethnic identity--some changed their names; others stopped speaking German; still others quit German-American organizations. Many, like Frank Brocke, son of a German-American farmer, tried to keep a low profile. In this interview, Frank Brocke discussed his own assimilation (he later became the president of the local bank) which led him to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II--a stance that many Japanese Americans and others would disclaim.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed his programs in equally positive terms. Antonio Luhan, the husband of the wealthy writer Mabel Dodge Luhan and a Taos Pueblo Indian, was a friend and supporter of John Collier. In this letter to Collier, which he dictated to his wife, he reported on his efforts to persuade other Indians that Collier was their friend and that the reorganization act would bring positive change.

Jim Justen grew up gay in Kenosha, Wisconsin during the 1950's, a time when homosexuality was considered a criminal offense that was thought to sap the moral fiber of both the individual and the nation. Gays were subjected to the same hysteria and persecution engendered by anti-communism, and pressured to conform to mainstream cultural and gender norms. During high school, Justen hid his sexuality but ran with a rough gay crowd in his hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin. He dealt with potential problems by learning the basics of boxing and ju jitsu and developing a tough street-fighting reputation. When he finally told his parents that he was gay at the age of 19, Justen was lucky enough to find his family accepting and supportive.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1983 House committee hearing, Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights argued that the ERA was still necessary due to the lack of clear constitutional guidelines for court decisions and enforcement efforts regarding sex discrimination legislation.

In June 1966, the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael, first voiced the slogan "Black Power" during a march in Mississippi. James Meredith initiated the march to protest white resistance, in defiance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to black voter registration. Meredith was shot and wounded, but other black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Carmichael, continued the march. In conflict with King's nonviolent philosophy, Carmichael told marchers in Greenwood, Mississippi, "We have got to get us some black power." He later explained that the slogan was "a call for black people in this country to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations." Carmichael's rhetoric, influenced by Malcolm X, signified a growing divide in the civil rights movement between those who encouraged interracial collaboration and those who advocated black separatism. Carmichael himself left SNCC in 1967 and joined the Black Panther Party. The following testimony by Carmichael before a Senate subcommittee investigating internal security includes an interview Carmichael recorded during a visit to Cuba in 1967. Although he advocated an international struggle to end capitalism, the following year Carmichael announced that "Communism is not an ideology suited for black people." Carmichael moved to Guinea in 1969, where he changed his name to Kwame Ture and formed the Pan-Africanist All-African People's Party. He died in 1998.

During the 1930s, the dominant labor union in Hollywood, the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Union (IATSE), was led by men with ties to organized crime. Studio heads also supported union leaders financially in order to inhibit strikes and keep labor cost increases low. After IATSE leaders were sentenced to prison terms for extortion, organizing drives by opposition labor groups began to surge. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a craft union coalition headed by Herbert K. Sorrell, was founded in 1941 following a divisive, but successful strike against Walt Disney Productions by cartoonists aligned with Sorrell. During an eight-month CSU-led industry-wide strike in 1945, IATSE, aided by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Values (MPA), a right-wing anticommunist industry group, launched a campaign to brand their rival as communistic. A further strike marked by police violence occurred the following year, and in 1947, with the cooperation of Screen Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan, the studio heads, MPA, and IATSE emerged victorious in the jurisdictional battle. In the following testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)--which the MPA had repeatedly urged to investigate subversives in the industry--Reagan and Disney portrayed the labor struggles solely in terms of a battle between forces for and against Communism.

The Pacific theater was the most inhospitable environment in all of World War II, with all-out assaults that were unparalleled in their barbarity. The ferocity of the battles and the atrocities committed by both sides were further encouraged by the pervasive anti-Asian racism expressed by Americans toward the Japanese enemy. Fighting the war in the Pacific left indelible impressions on the men who served there. Because employees at the Library of Congress thought marines might have time to do ethnographic recordings of the music and culture of the native peoples they encountered in the South Pacific, several marine units were given metal disc recording machines to carry with them. Though they never managed to use the recorders for their intended purpose, several marines did have the presence of mind to record what happened during major battles at sea and on the islands. In one such recording, made on the island of Guam in 1944, an unidentified marine described his foxhole.

A slew of international financial crises in the early 1990's, including collapses in Mexico, Southeast Asia, and Russia, highlighted the important influence international lending organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had over economic decisions in the developing world. Often in cooperation with local elites, these bodies have forced countries to respond to debt crises by privatizing public industries and utilities, in many cases selling these public resources to foreign companies. Workers and citizens of developing countries often view these policies as a new form of colonialism. In this excerpt, Donna Koons Kingsley, a public relations officer of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union, describes workers' reactions to the process of privatization in Trinidad and Tobago.

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Hungarian-born Frank Smith, a Clairton worker, used his support for the war effort as evidence of his Americanism. "This is the United States," he argued, "and we ought to have the right to belong to the union."

The advent of "talkies"in the early 20th century had an impact felt far from Hollywood. Immigrants made up a significant portion of the movie-going audience during the silent film era because the lack of (English) speech beckoned immigrants unable to comprehend the many facets of American life: a picture that didn't talk was particularly appealing to people who didn't speak or read English. In this oral history, recorded by Roy Rosenzweig in 1978, Italian immigrant Fred Fedeli recalled his experiences owning and operating a movie theater in an immigrant working-class neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Among the social movements joined and led by women in the late 19th century, including unionization and women's suffrage, none had either the widespread fervor or success enjoyed by the temperance movement. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1873, drew widespread support from labor movements such as the Knights of Labor by linking the fight against liquor with the desire to protect home and family against the ravages of the new industrial order. Frances Willard was one of the leaders of the WCTU who vocally sought the alliance of the temperance movement with Labor. In this selection from her autobiography Glimpses of Fifty Years, Willard described the WCTU's most widely known tactic, the praying-in-saloons crusade.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals. The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. Novelist John Dos Passos became deeply involved in the case after he visited Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts prisons. The case and executions were commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. Dos Passos returned to the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti in his epic three-volume work of fiction, U.S.A. In this excerpt, cops beat up the fictional character Mary French outside the Charlestown jail where Sacco and Vanzetti awaited their executions. "Newsreel LXVI" followed with a collage of contemporary headlines. Finally, "The Camera Eye (50)," a stream-of-consciousness montage, was Dos Passos's impassioned personal response.

During the Great Migration, which peaked between 1916 and 1921, some 5 percent of all southern African Americans headed north. What were their experiences like in their new homes? Beginning in 1917, Charles Johnson, research investigator for the Chicago Urban League, began interviewing migrants in Chicago and Mississippi. Going door to door, Johnson questioned recent southern black migrants to Chicago about their histories and current thoughts about their experiences. Johnson's summaries of his interviews conveyed a sense of migrants' diverse response to life in Chicago.