John Collier's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal--in intention if not always in effect--in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a "Red Atlantis"--a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. As Commissioner, Collier proposed a sweeping set of reforms to reverse the previous half century of federal policy. Although he could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. His 1938 report as Commissioner of Indian Affairs combined a frank indictment of the broken promises of the past with an insistence that the Indian Service, since 1933, had made a "concerted effort" to rectify those past mistakes.

Compared to the French, Spanish, and Dutch, the English were slow to develop an interest in North American colonization By the later part of the sixteenth century, however, a group of interested and well-connected Englishmen with experience in Irish colonization began to consider permanent settlements in North America. Bartholomew Gosnold undertook a small prospecting expedition on the vessel Concord in 1602, passing down the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts to explore the northern Virginia coast. Gosnold was the first European to see and set foot on Cape Cod--which received its name for its abundance of cod fish--and built a small fur trading station there. The successful voyage enticed English colonization efforts to turn toward this part of North America. Four years later, Gosnold commanded a voyage to bring the first colonists to Jamestown, Virginia. Several accounts of the 1602 prospecting expedition quickly appeared in print.; this complete one was first published by Samuel Purchas in 1625.

While some planters in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake began to build spacious mansions and rely on the labor of increasing numbers of white and black dependents, most white southerners lived in far humbler circumstances. In Maryland most small farmers were tenants, renting their land from larger landowners. Landless men and women worked as agricultural tenants, laborers, or domestic servants. Elizabeth Sprigs, a servant in a Maryland household, financed her passage from England in exchange for a term as an indentured servant (a frequent practice in the seventeenth century but more rare by the eighteenth). She wrote to her father in 1756 and complained bitterly of the brutal treatment by her master and the harsh privations of daily life, begging him to send clothing.

During the 1960's and 1970's welfare reform movements from the left sought to increase benefits and expand community power, but in 1996 critics from the right passed the federal Welfare Reform Act to limit the program by imposing time-limits and restrictions on welfare benefits. In New York City, the Work Experience Program (WEP), or workfare, initiated in conjunction with the 1996 act, required welfare recipients to "pay off" their welfare benefits by working menial jobs for the city at well below minimum wage. Participants in the program do not receive wages, but simply continue to receive their welfare benefits. In addition, the program confines people who often have skills to do mindless, unskilled work while they are deprived of basic rights such as the right to unionize. Brenda Steward and Sandra White are WEP workers who have been working with WEP Workers Together to demand improvements to the program.

Fountain Hughes was born a slave in 1848 in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1944 (or 1949) he was interviewed in Baltimore by Hermond Norwood, a representative of the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. The Federal Writer's Project, a Depression-era program, had initiated the government's effort to capture the memories of the, by then, very elderly former slaves. Hughes recalled not only life under slavery but also the difficulties many slaves faced in making the transition to freedom in an antagonistic white society that worked hard to impede their efforts. Conditions for the Hughes family under freedom were materially not much better than they had been under slavery. In this interview Hughes recalled how his widowed mother supported her family by binding, or contracting, her children out to work. Still, Hughes asserted, he far preferred freedom to slavery.

The Homestead Act of 1862 opened the Great Plains for Euro-American settlement. The law allowed anyone to claim 160 acres after payment of a nominal fee. Final title to the land followed after five years of occupation and the improvement of the claim. While many of the Act's supporters intended its benefits to go to urban workers, city dwellers found it difficult even to raise the fees much less the capital necessary for farm equipment and supplies. Many Civil War veterans did move West, including Uriah Oblinger and other residents of older farming areas such as Indiana. He and two of his wife's brothers took advantage of the Homestead Act in the fall of 1872. Uriah's letters to his family described the emerging community of young settlers who had migrated to the Nebraska territory to start new lives with their families.

The Chickasaw Indians occupied a key region of northern Mississippi. They held in check the French and Choctaws with their allies and trading partners the British. The American Revolution ended that balance of power. The Chickasaws sought neutrality but also felt allegiance to the British due to their long-held ties. In 1779, the Virginians sent threatening messages warning them of dire consequences if they did not make peace. The Chickasaw chiefs replied in a bold manner. The Mississippi River valley changed signifcantly when the Spanish replaced the British in West Florida. The Chickasaws found themselves without allies and caught in a competitive crossfire between Spain, the new United States government, and the various new states. The once defiant Chickasaw leaders sought to inaugurate a new relationship with the new United States by sending this message to Congress in the spring of 1783. They desired a halt to encroachments on their land and regular access to supplies in order to appease their belligerent young warriors.

With depression looming as a continual threat to the U.S. economy in the late-19th century, Americans debated how the government should respond to hard times--a question still unanswered today. At an 1878 Congressional hearing investigating "the causes of the general depression in labor and business," most witnesses took the position that government should not interfere with the workings of the "free market." But Texas-raised printer, socialist, and labor organizer Albert R. Parsons used his testimony to urge legislative intervention to cure the economic depression gripping the nation. In addition to calling for an eight-hour workday, Parsons challenged the notion that "freedom of contract" was possible "under our system of labor" and argued that the government should aid the people by loaning money to them, because "the people are simply borrowing money from themselves."

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), launched by the federal government in 1933, provided temporary work to three million young men, who lived in semi-military camps, constructed recreation facilities, and carried out conservation projects. This photograph of a young CCC worker epitomizes the agency's emphasis on the morally and physically curative powers of vigorous outdoor life. Building strong bodies is a major CCC objective

This 1866 news engraving showed a chaplain marrying an African-American couple in the offices of the Vicksburg Freedmen's Bureau. Because marriages between slaves before emancipation had no legal standing, many couples rushed to have their marriages officially registered and made solemn during Reconstruction. Marriage was only one way of exercising the new freedom. For many former slaves, freedom meant choosing a new name for themselves, dressing as they pleased, learning to read, or refusing to be deferential towards their former owner.

In October 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight set off on what would be a five month journey, by herself, from her home in Boston to New York and back again. Madam Knight, as she was called, was an unusually independent woman for her time. During her husband's lifetime she supported herself and her family by running a shop, teaching handwriting to children, copying legal documents, and taking in boarders. After his death she continued to do very well for herself, buying and selling land and keeping an inn. In this section of the journal she kept of her trip, Knight described what it was like to travel on horseback, accompanied by a mail carrier and other travelers, from Kingston, Rhode Island, to New London, Connecticut. Her frank humor and often bigoted descriptions of people she met, anxiety about river crossings, displeasure with the rough inns she stayed in, and habit of turning experience into poetry were all expressed here.

During World War II, housing construction came to a virtual standstill. The return of millions of servicemen to civilian life in 1945 set off a national housing crisis, followed by a construction boom. Although other New Deal and wartime housing programs emphasized rental apartments in close proximity to workplaces, the post-war building boom focused on single residence suburban development. Prodded by builders like William Levitt, the government underwrote low-interest loans that made it possible for working people to own their own homes in the suburbs, once a domain reserved for the well-to-do. Those Federal Housing Authority loans, however, deepened racial and class divisions across metropolitan America, since the FHA refused to write mortgage loans in cities and allowed its loan holders to enforce restrictive covenants barring Jews and African Americans from buying homes in certain areas.

When 25-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh set down his monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris on May 21, 1927, he instantly became the leading hero of a decade of American heroes and celebrities. Lindbergh had not expected any welcome in France, but word of his arrival spread through Paris, and twenty-five thousand people surrounded the plane even before he stopped taxiing. The frenzy continued when Lindbergh returned to the United States on June 11, 1927, where President Calvin Coolidge and his wife welcomed him at a Washington Monument stand specially built for the occasion. Coolidge's welcome and Lindbergh's brief response were broadcast nationwide. Coolidge lavished praise on the aviator in a very serious voice, and Lindbergh responded humorously. Beneath the joking about a battleship being sent for him, however, was perhaps a serious concern about becoming a prisoner of his sudden fame.

A 1929 installment of J. R. Williams's popular comic strip Out Our Way poked fun at the illusions held by some of the workers who bought stocks in the companies that employed them. High wages, good benefits, and employee welfare programs became means for large employers to maintain stable labor relations. Besides stock-purchase plans, some companies offered pensions, subsidized housing and mortgages, insurance, and sports programs. In many cases, these employee welfare programs were distributed through company unions

The New Deal tried to end the Depression by spending government money to employ the jobless. One of its most ambitious efforts, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943, mostly on projects that required manual labor, but also on projects for artists, writers, actors, and musicians. At its peak, the Federal Writers Project employed about 6,500 men and women, some of whom later became famous. In the late 1930s the project's writers began a series of "life histories," recording the experiences of diverse Americans from Florida to Alaska. Sometimes they recorded people's words verbatim; other times they rewrote them into narratives. In this example, Berta Ballard Manning recalled meeting the famous outlaw "Billy the Kid" as a child in New Mexico. He was unassuming and gentle, with good manners, but she also remembered him as a bandit and killer who kept their county in turmoil

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. One exception was this description by Al Waxman, editor of the Eastside Journal, an East Los Angeles community newspaper.

Despite the presence of unions in construction trades, and a postwar construction boom, workers during the 1950s had to struggle and organize to win seemingly small benefits like vacation and paid holidays. Al Filardo, a carpenter who worked in the construction industry in New York, recalled how difficult it was to win any concessions from employers during the union-hostile 1950s, when bosses could initiate FBI investigations of union activity. His wife Anne recalled that workers and their families had a difficult and emotionally draining experience, despite high hourly wages, because of the uncertainty of not knowing when they would find or lose work.

Captain John Smith was a soldier and adventurer in Europe and Asia before he became involved in the Virginia Company's plan to establish a settlement in North America. He was aboard one of the three ships that reached Virginia in April 1607. The first settlers, ill prepared for life in the harsh environment, had few useful skills but great expectations of easy profits. They suffered from disease, malnutrition, and frequent attacks by Indians in the early years; over one half died the first winter. Smith took over Jamestown's government amid this chaos and death; he explored the region and traded for desperately needed supplies with the Indians. Smith recognized the need to establish peaceful relations with the powerful Powhatan Indians of the coastal region, and he traded English manufactured goods for much needed Indian corn. Smith recounted this exchange with the Indian leader Powhatan in his 1624 Historyie.

Father Charles Coughlin attracted an enormous audience for his radio sermons in the 1930s. Although he initially supported President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, his speeches turned increasingly strident, conspiratorial, and anti-Semitic over the course of the decade. After 1936, his talks combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Mussolini and Hitler. The now bitter and delusional tone of his sermons alienated his larger audience and made many of his fellow Catholics nervous. John Ryan, a Catholic priest himself, had long been active as a social reformer and university educator, and became a vocal critic of Coughlin. Ryan published the following missive in the Catholic journal Commonweal in October, 1936.

In 1954, the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education dramatically changed American society. The Court reversed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that racially segregated public facilities were not inherently discriminatory. After the 1954 ruling, states could no longer apply "separate but equal" to public schools, in part because of segregation's psychological effects on children. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Court's decision that the separation of Negro children "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." In 1955, the Court ordained that desegregation of public schools should proceed "with all deliberate speed." As the South reacted to these rulings, two Atlanta fathers, both professionals, related for a popular magazine their experiences discussing race relations with their young sons.