During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by women workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that female employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. The following year, Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment. Many jobs traditionally identified as women's work, however, continued to pay lower salaries than those historically classified as jobs for men. The following studies included in testimony to a 1970 Congressional hearing investigating employment discrimination against women presented a statistical snapshot of women workers. The battle for equal pay for work of comparable worth emerged as the "issue of the eighties," in the words of Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). By the end of the 1980s, the EEOC had initiated lawsuits against more than 40 states for employment discrimination. More than 1,700 localities passed legislation to address pay inequity.

The New Left facilitated the emergence of a new women's movement in the late 1960's. The rebirth of American feminism emerged in part from the New Left's probing of the political dimension of personal life, but also from the discrimination many young women faced within the movement itself. While thousands of young women joined political groups with fervor and dedication, many were dismayed to find that their male comrades did not view them as equals. As SDS activist Cathy Wilkerson remembered, poor treatment from men within the movement sparked heated debates among women as to whether they should create a separate women's movement. Such a movement appeared, with tremendous impact, in the late 1960's and early 1970's. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

World War I introduced the world to killing and destruction on a scale never seen before. During the battle of the Somme, 19,000 men died on the first day alone. By the end of the campaign the British had gained only 125 miles of territory at a terrible cost: casualties on both sides exceeded one million. For many, the senseless slaughter represented the worst expression of European imperialism, militarism, and nationalism. A 1914 cartoon published in the Chicago Daily News uses racial chauvinism to condemn the European war for undermining the moral supremacy of Western Civilization.""

Unions that continued to press beyond the general labor settlements established in the auto and steel industries after World War II found themselves facing an additional and powerful adversary--the federal government. In the spring of 1946, both coal miners and railroad workers staged nationwide strikes. President Harry Truman decided that the unions had gone too far, and after the railroad workers rejected a settlement, he seized control of the railroads. Despite the government takeover, the workers continued with their strike plans. As a result, on May 24, 1946, Truman issued an ultimatum declaring that the government would operate the railroads and use the army as strikebreakers. When the deadline passed, Truman went before Congress to seek the power to deny seniority rights to strikers and to draft strikers into the armed forces. Just as Truman reached the climax of his speech, he received a note saying that the strike was "settled on the terms proposed by the President." After the congressional cheers died down, Truman proceeded with his prepared text.

The South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895 completed the process of disenfranchising African-Americans (and many poor whites). The state's restrictive policies began with the election law of 1882 that used an intricate system of eight ballot boxes to discourage illiterate white and black residents from voting. The 1895 convention added a poll tax and literacy test, thereby ensuring that a coalition of remaining black voters and disaffected whites could not unite to challenge Democratic Party rule in South Carolina. Black delegates to the Convention raised their voices against this disenfranchisement, among them Civil War hero Robert Smalls. Born a slave in South Carolina, Smalls became a Congressman during Reconstruction and the leading political figure in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Although disenfranchisement destroyed his local political machine, he remained a prominent figure through federal patronage, serving as the customs collector for the port of Beaufort for many years.

William Penn's colony of Pennsylvania, founded in 1681, attracted many poor European migrants. Many colonists financed their migration by arriving as indentured servants. Indentured servants were an important source of labor in the colonies; those arriving in the 17th century usually signed contracts (known as indentures) for a fixed term and upon completion received their freedom and a suit of clothes, a similar practice to apprenticeship. However, the Germans whom Gottlieb Mittelberger observed in the mid-18th century had no formal contracts; instead they were auctioned off to he highest bidder upon arrival, a practice that Mittleberger labeled as barbaric, and "a sale in human beings." Mittelberger, an organist and schoolmaster, found much in North America not to his taste, and returned to Germany in a few years where he wrote a book warning Germans of the dangers of emigration to the New World.

The economic impact of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center most immediately affected workers in the airline and tourist industries. The airlines, like much of the U.S. economy, were already experiencing an economic slowdown after the boom years of the late 1990s. Within weeks of the attack, airlines laid off tens of thousands of workers and threatened to lay off more. President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress quickly responded, offering $5 billion in cash grants and promising more. Earlier precedents, such as the $1.5 billion government bailout for the Chrylser Corporation in 1979-80, were based on the need to avoid severe job losses and economic turmoil, yet in the case of Chrysler nearly half of the hourly workers lost their jobs despite the bailout. In this interview, "Joshua DeVries," an airline employee, describes workers' reaction to the lay offs and government response.

A number of states established bureaus of labor during the Gilded Age to investigate working and living conditions among industrial workers. In the first half of the 19th century, some moral reformers had believed that the new Lowell mills would be a place of educational and moral uplift for women workers. But by the late 19th century, many worried that factories were breeding grounds for prostitution and other forms of "degenerate" behavior. As a result, investigations about working women often focused obsessively on the question of morality. This excerpt from the 1884 Fifteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics presented bureau head Carroll Wright's assessment of the working and living conditions of the young working women of Boston. To secure first-hand information, the agency interviewed 1,000 female workers on subjects ranging from their relations with employers to their after-hours activities.

Agnes Nestor's mother was a textile mill worker. Her father was a machinist and a one-time member of the Knights of Labor who became a city alderman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The family migrated to Chicago during the depression of the 1890s, and the teenage Agnes went to work in a glove factory. The sixty-hour work weeks exhausted her. "I have been so tired all day I could hardly work," she regularly noted in her diary. This reminiscence by Nestor described how the oppressive conditions of the glove factory pushed her to take a leading role in a successful strike of female glove workers in 1898. Soon she became president of her glove workers local and later a leader of the International Glove Workers Union. She also took a leading role in the Women's Trade Union League, serving as president of the Chicago branch from 1913 to 1948.

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 is a WEP worker who has been working with WEP Workers Together to demand improvements to the program.

In this oral history interview conducted by historian Joan Morrison, Pauline Newman told of getting a job at the Triangle Company as a child, soon after arriving in the United States from Lithuania in 1901. Newman described her life as an immigrant and factory worker. Like many other young immigrant workers, she chafed at the strict regulations imposed by the garment manufacturers. One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 26, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Although she was not working in the factory at the time of the fire, many of her friends perished. Newman later became an organizer and leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union.

In his essay "Wealth," published in the North American Review in 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were bound by duty to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. (The essay later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth.") But not everyone agreed with Carnegie's perspective. This 1894 "prayer" by "A Workman" (an anonymous contributor to the National Labor Tribune) was a sarcastic critique of Carnegie's paternalism and philanthropy.

Although publicists for late nineteenth-century corporations celebrated their "efficiency" and the "science" of management, their employees did not always join the celebration. What looked like careful and disciplined management from one perspective might be viewed as petty tyranny from below. Some workers directed their anger to the very top of the corporations. An anonymous author, writing in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen's Monthly Magazine in 1878, claimed that these "ten commandments" were "written down in the Statute-Books of Railroad Officials and idle Monopolists, and Jay Gould Aristocrats."

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings in 1947 on Communist activity in Hollywood. Under J. Parnell Thomas, who became chairman after the Republican Party gained control of Congress in 1947, HUAC not only sought to identify so-called "subversives" in the industry, but also to investigate whether the Roosevelt administration had encouraged the production of pro-Soviet films during World War II. In the following testimony, three "friendly" witnesses--studio heads Jack L. Warner of Warner Bros. and Louis B. Mayer of M-G-M, and Russian-born novelist, screenwriter, and ideologue Ayn Rand--commented on specific wartime films. Mission to Moscow (1943), based on a memoir by Joseph E. Davies, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936-1938, had been widely criticized for glorifying Stalin and for offering rationalizations for the Moscow purge trials and the non-aggression pact with Hitler. Song of Russia (1944), with a screenplay by "unfriendly" witnesses Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins, had undergone significant revisions due to complaints that it was too pro-Stalinist. Following the 1947 hearings, ten screenwriters and directors, who refused to cooperate with the Committee, were cited for contempt of Congress. After studio heads blacklisted the ten--who later served prison terms following the Supreme Court's refusal to hear their appeal--HUAC agreed to stop investigating studios and the content of films, and limited their inquiries to personnel. The subject matter of films, however, continued to be affected by the chilled Cold War climate to which HUAC contributed.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 stand out not just for the number of people killed--as many, or more, died in "firebombings" in Germany during the war--but for the strange, alien quality of the atom bomb's effects. The atomic bomb's immense destructive capacity staggered observers, and its effects have haunted the world's imagination ever since. By the time the United States had a usable atomic bomb, the war in Europe was over, but thousands of American soldiers remained in the Pacific fighting the Japanese. Although some historians argue that the war could have been ended without the dropping of the bomb, in the summer of 1945 President Harry Truman made the fateful decision to proceed. In this dramatic radio address, Truman told the nation that a bomb had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. Truman inaccurately described Hiroshima as a "military base." It was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army, but civilians outnumbered army personnel by about six to one.

Although many Northerners, including Abraham Lincoln, initially hoped to prosecute the war without interfering with slavery as it existed, pressure from slaves who fled to Union lines, abolitionist sentiment in the North, and a deteriorating military situation pushed Lincoln to consider abolishing slavery. In September 1862 Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He signed the final edict on January 1, 1863. In this caricature by Baltimore pro-South Democrat Adalbert Johann Volck, an inebriated Lincoln, surrounded by symbols of Satanism and paintings honoring John Brown and slave rebellions, trod on the Constitution as he drafted the proclamation.

When the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was first organized in Minnesota in December 1867, its goals were primarily social and educational. The organization spread rapidly throughout the agricultural Midwest, attracting more than 850,000 members by 1875. The Grange's purpose also expanded--it experimented (unsuccessfully) with cooperatives, and, angered by hard times, tight money, and high railroad shipping rates, moved into politics. Members elected sympathetic state legislators who passed laws (most of them later declared unconstitutional) regulating railroad and grain elevator charges. Some of the anger of the Grangers was reflected in "The Ten Commandments of the Grange," an 1874 manifesto that revealed their antipathy to railroads, monopolies, lawyers, and merchants. Like many other late nineteenth-century Americans, Grangers particularly blamed stereotypical "Jewish middlemen" for their troubles, when, in fact, few of the financiers and merchants who shaped their fate were Jewish. When agricultural conditions in the Midwest improved in the 1880s, the Grange's membership dropped to 150,000. The Farmers Alliance (or Populists) soon replaced the Grange as the primary voice of radical agrarianism.

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. Manufacturers--then as now--usually took the position that government should not interfere with the workings of the "free market." Manufacturers found support for their laissez-faire positions in the speeches and writings of the leading academic experts of the day. On August 22, 1878, Yale faculty member William Graham Sumner testified before a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives charged with investigating the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business. Sumner preached a strict "hands-off" approach to ameliorating the widespread economic dislocations then plaguing the country.

The harsh brutality of race relations in the late nineteenth-century South was sometimes best expressed through small incidents. For William Robinson, the story that best encapsulated his own experience growing up African-American in rural Georgia in the 1880s involved three peaches. He was interviewed by oral historian Charles Hardy in 1983 when Robinson was 103 years old. Apparently, some ninety-five years earlier when he was eight years old, three black boys sneaked into a peach orchard on the way home from church and stole some peaches, three of which they gave to young Robinson. The white orchard owner caught Robinson and threatened him with the chain gang. He forced Robinson's father to pay $21 for the three peaches--a sum that could well have been a year's cash income for a sharecropping family in this period.

"The theater must grow up," declared Hallie Flanagan, director of the New Deal-era Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which provided employment for actors, directors, and technicians during the Depression. By the 1930s, theater was rapidly losing its audiences to movies, and Flanagan sought to win audiences back by revitalizing drama with the excitement and conflict of contemporary life and politics. Her energy and sense of urgency came through in this talk on theater as social action, entitled "First Federal Summer Theatre: A Report." She borrowed the rhetoric of the militant labor movement as she summarized the work of a 1937 summer project that gathered FTP workers from around the country.