In April 1940 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a conference in Missouri concerning the silicosis crisis that had emerged in the late 1930s. The differing perspectives on the disease and workers' health are apparent in these excerpts from the Tristate Silicosis Conference. Evan Just, representing industry, claimed that silicosis is a social, not an industrial, problem. Ex-miner Tony McTeer disputed Just's analysis, arguing that he, himself, contracted silicosis even though he had worked only in mines that employed the improved "wet drilling" method. The legendary public health advocate Dr. Alice Hamilton, representing the Public Health Service, spoke on the medical aspects of industrial hygiene and showed that, despite industry's claims, little had improved over the past twenty-five years.

In the late 19th century, William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned academic sociologist, applied Darwin's scientific ideas of evolution to the social sphere to produce his theory of the economic survival of the fittest. Sumner's writings justified government inaction in the face of vast social dislocations caused by rapid industrialization and the periodic economic depressions that accompanied it. Critics of the new industrial order rejected the rigid "laws" propounded by Sumner and other conservative social scientists. They countered with their own laws of social development based on alternative readings of nature and science. Some labor thinkers proposed a sort of working-class social Darwinism, which turned the ideas of conservatives on their head. This 1893 piece from the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine offered a sharp retort to those who preached a hands-off, Darwinian approach to "helping" the laboring masses cope with economic dislocations caused by industrialization.

Frances Willard (1839-1898), leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), was a complex and energetic figure in American feminism and social reform. Willard and the WCTU upheld traditional notions of gender and Victorian ideals of the "true woman," but she was also willing to use these notions as part of a larger demand for female citizenship. Although Willard proclaimed the virtues of traditional domesticity for women, she was not bound by those conventional ideas in her own private life. After an unhappy engagement to Charles Henry Fowler, she never married. For many years, she lived with Anna Gordon, who served as her secretary as well as her aide and confidante. Willard's spirit of personal adventure and liberation led her to take up bicycle riding in her fifties, the last decade of her life. As she described in her enthusiastic book about the experience, A Wheel within a Wheel; How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, she viewed the "conquest" of the bicycle as similar to the mastery that women needed to achieve over the "wider world."

Racism remained potent in the 1920s, but ideas about race were changing, particularly among intellectuals. Almost without exception, social scientists and scholars in the 1890s assumed that race was one of the central ways of understanding human beings. But a profound change in American thinking occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century. A new philosophy, that today might be termed "cultural relativism," began to influence American intellectuals and their students. The emergence of this philosophy in the U.S. owes a great deal to Franz Boas, a German-Jewish anthropologist who taught at Columbia University from 1896 through the 1930s. In this essay, "The Instability of Human Types," delivered at an academic conference on race in 1911, Boas boldly argued against assumptions of innate racial inferiority; insisting that culture, not nature, explained differences among the people of the world. Boas's students included the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

In some ways, emancipation and Reconstruction broke the power of white southern planters over their labor force. Freedpeople negotiated with planters over how the land would be cultivated and how they would be compensated. African-American families worked small plots independently, sometimes obtaining land for cash or, more commonly, for a fixed share of the year's crop; this latter practice was known as sharecropping. By 1870, sharecropping was the dominant means by which African Americans could gain access to land in the South. Still, freedpeople desired independent proprietorship. In this interview, African-American farmer Henry Blake recalls how black land ownership became an elusive goal as unequal power relations between white and black hardened and the Ku Klux Klan's terrorist campaigns increased. Blake's narrative and many others were recorded during an ambitious New Deal (1936-38) program of interviews with ex-slaves. Despite unfamiliar interviewers and distant memories, these first person accounts are an unparalleled resource.

In August 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th amendment to the U.S. constitution, assuring that it became law in time for women to vote in the presidential election, many feminists predicted great advances for women. "We are no longer petitioners," declared suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, "we are not wards of the nation, but free and equal citizens." The promised gains proved elusive, however, especially in the crucial realm of employment. Among working women, all but a tiny number of well-paid professionals faced the burdens of a double shift of both paid jobs and unpaid household labor. In a 1929 story for the Nation, Paul Blanshard recorded the daily routine of a South Carolina cotton mill worker. Her narrative intertwined her home duties with her work in the mill, as her long day at the mill was punctuated by equally burdensome domestic chores.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Published in the February, 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, the poem coincided with the beginning of the Philippine-American War and U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty that placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines under American control. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. The racialized notion of the "White Man's burden" became a euphemism for imperialism, and many anti-imperialists couched their opposition in reaction to the phrase.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from a 1969 Senate hearing, two migrant African-American farmworkers from North Carolina presented their version of a strike. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

Following the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, which forced Plains Indians to give up communal ways of life for individual family farms, many American Indians struggled to adapt to the new ways of life being dictated to them. But while many suffered under the federal government's attempt to exorcise Indian customs and beliefs some, like Edward Goodbird, a member of the Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota, embraced the new order. In this excerpt from his autobiography, Goodbird described the often subtle ways in which Indians managed to retain small aspects of their culture.

Founded in 1915 and inspired by the Reconstruction-era organization of the same name, the second Ku Klux Klan shared with its nineteenth-century namesake a deep racism, a fascination with mystical regalia, and a willingness to use violence to silence its foes. It also professed anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism as strongly as it affirmed racism. The secret" society had 3 million members during its heyday in the early 1920s; roughly half its members lived in metropolitan areas

In response to growing public opinion against the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the years following World War I, Congress passed first the Quota Act of 1921 then the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act). Initially, the 1924 law imposed a total quota on immigration of 165,000--less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average. It based ceilings on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census--a blatant effort to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which mostly occurred after that date. In the first decade of the 20th century, an average of 200,000 Italians had entered the United States each year. With the 1924 Act, the annual quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000. This table shows the annual immigration quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act.

Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) began life as a vivacious girl with a "wild and airy" temperament and ended it as a sober Quaker. Born in England, Ashbridge eloped at fourteen and was widowed five months later. After rejection by her family and a three-year sojourn with relatives in Ireland, she sailed for America as an indentured servant, arriving in New York in July, 1732. This selection from her autobiography begins as Ashbridge sets out from her home in Long Island to visit relatives in Philadelphia. By then she had undergone an intensely felt spiritual search and had married her second husband, a teacher with a penchant for violence and drink. Ashbridge's dispute with her second husband over her Quakerism ended only with his enlistment in the army and subsequent death. She married a third time, to a Quaker named Aaron Ashbridge, and died while visiting Quakers in England and Ireland.

The founders of the great libraries of the 19th century were often ambivalent about whether their goal was to disseminate or conserve knowledge. They were also uncertain about the intended audience. John Cotton Dana of the Newark Public Library was atypical in his populist stance that "it is a proper function of a library to amuse." He argued that a "shallow mind" was better than an "empty one." Other librarians preferred to see themselves as cultivators of public taste and their buildings as uplifting houses of culture. The stuffiness and remoteness of late nineteenth-century libraries provoked this humorous sketch, published in Life magazine in 1884, which satirized the closed-door practices of the theoretically "public" library donated by wealthy James Lenox to New York City.

Those who built the atomic bomb at the secret Los Alamos, New Mexico, facility understood very well the potential for destruction and death they had created, though individual reactions of the scientists varied widely. Some argued that America needed to develop nuclear weapons before the Germans did. Others argued that a war against fascism demanded the most lethal measures. Still others, as they witnessed the blast on July 16, 1945, were appalled at what they had unleashed. In this excerpt from a 1980 interview, Bernard Feld recalled his work as a graduate student at Los Alamos. While he had few reservations about the bomb's development and its first use at Hiroshima, he had profound reservations about using the second bomb against Nagasaki.

The end of the War of Independence in 1783 curtailed wartime loss of life and destruction of property. However, peace also brought economic distress through cycles of depression and glut. These cycles were exacerbated when Massachusetts authorities pursued strict policies on money and debt and British creditors called in their debts during the post-Revolutionary depression. When merchants turned to already pressured farmers and rural traders who had no cash to pay their debts or taxes, courts and jails filled with debtors. In protest, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the revolutionary militia, led an uprising in western and central Massachusetts to close the courts and prevent the seizure of property for unpaid debts. Massachusetts Governor Bowdoin sent a military force that scattered the rebels. In his 1799 treatise to his fellow working men and women, William Manning offered a history of Shay's Rebellion along with his prescription for avoiding such insurrections in the future by an organization of working people.

Slaveholders went to great extremes to expand slavery, turning to Mexico, western territories, and even Central America. Supported by fifty-eight mercenaries, the Tennessee-born William Walker "invaded" Nicaragua in May 1855. Within six months he succeeded in exploiting civil unrest in the country and declared himself president. Walker's government, which opened the country to slavery, was recognized by the United States in 1856. But he was overthrown a year later by forces financed by his former sponsor, the railroad entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Law and custom in seventeenth-century New England gave male property owners authority over the women, children, and other dependents of their families. Women who spoke up or stood out merited suspicion, and many were accused, prosecuted, and occasionally executed for the crime of witchcraft. Women could be excommunicated, as Ann Hibben was in 1641, for usurping" her husband's role

In an interview, conducted by oral historian Allyson Knoth for the Feminist History Research Project, Elizabeth Anderson, born in Germany in the late 1880s, described the twelve abortions she endured as a young married woman living in New York City with a husband who refused to use birth control devices such as condoms. Anderson detailed a series of painful and dangerous procedures, including the use of ergot pills, and pricking the cervix with a hat pin. Anderson also suggested that abortion was used by working-class women as well as those better off; the typical abortionist charged $25 (a decent week's wage) to perform the illegal procedure.

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In this speech before the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1890, Lease championed the power of women in late-19th century grassroots political movements.

Writing about gender roles of the 1950s, Betty Friedan once defined the "suburban housewife" as "the dream image of the young American woman." Just as prescriptive literature of the 19th century geared to the middling classes emphasized women's "true" place in society as mother and wife, the 1950s saw an ideal perpetuated in books, magazines, movies, television, songs, and ads that depicted the white, middle-class woman fulfilled only by a happy marriage. The following article from a popular magazine of 1960 offered a sociological survey of the more than one-third of adult American women whose lives did not fit this domestic norm. Based on interviews with single, divorced, and widowed women, and a host of "experts", the author detailed the "frenzied" mating efforts of women who tried, but failed, to marry as well as the adverse psychological effects of being single. Despite the evidence presented that unmarried women could be happy--sometimes even happier than their married counterparts--the article's rhetorical emphasis on "frantic hordes of unwed women" relentlessly searching for husbands perpetrated a stereotypical depiction at odds with some of the statistics and testimonies quoted.