Many African-American witnesses subpoenaed to testify at the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings in the 1950s were asked to denounce Paul Robeson (1888-1976) in order to obtain future employment. Robeson, an All-American football player and recipient of a Phi Beta Kappa key at Rutgers, received a law degree at Columbia. He became an internationally acclaimed concert performer and actor as well as a persuasive political speaker. In 1949, Robeson was the subject of controversy after newspapers reports of public statements that African Americans would not fight in "an imperialist war." In 1950, his passport was revoked. Several years later, Robeson refused to sign an affidavit stating that he was not a Communist and initiated an unsuccessful lawsuit. In the following testimony to a HUAC hearing, ostensibly convened to gain information regarding his passport suit, Robeson refused to answer questions concerning his political activities and lectured bigoted Committee members Gordon H. Scherer and Chairman Francis E.Walter about African-American history and civil rights. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that a citizen's right to travel could not be taken away without due process and Robeson' passport was returned.

When the CIO initiated Operation Dixie in 1946 to challenge racial discrimination and organize workers in the largely unorganized South, Jack O'Dell signed up as a volunteer organizer. He was met with a steep resistance to racial integration and a groundswell of Cold War anti-communism that crippled and then killed the CIO's will to radically alter the working conditions of the South. Nationwide, the CIO expelled unions it claimed were influenced by communists – amounting to nearly a million workers. Jack O'Dell was one victim of the anti-communist purge. He lost his membership in the National Maritime Union in 1950, one day after the start of the Korean War.

The arrival of the railroad in the Southwest in the early 1870s transformed the area's economy and the lives of its residents. Long-time Mexican residents of the area were quickly drawn into the region's expanding wage economy. In this selection from his handwritten memoir from 1937 Elfido Lpez recalled his childhood on his family's modest homestead and his father's decision to move the family to a small railroad town, and a life of wages, in southern Colorado in 1876.

When the British colonial administration called a conference in Albany in the summer of 1754, the British Empire was in the midst of great change. Britain's grip on the colonies appeared to have broken down: French troops had occupied the Ohio valley while the Indians in New York had declared the Covenant chain alliance broken. Hendrick, a Mohawk leader among the Iroquois Confederation, sought to renew diplomatic alliances between the Iroquois and the colonists. However, his speech at the meeting also criticized the British officials and colonial politicians for the weakness of their response in the face of French activities. Soon the Seven Year's War would engulf all three parties: British, colonists, and Native Americans.

Frustrated by the elimination of the NRA and other programs, like the Agricultural Adjustment Act ( United States v. Butler, 1936) through the courts, and overconfident after his big win in the 1936 elections, Roosevelt proposed a novel but not entirely unprecedented solution in 1937. He would add one new judge to the federal judicial system for every active judge over the age of seventy. The result would create fifty new judgeships, including up to six new Supreme Court justices. Having established these new positions, the president could then appoint new judges friendly to his administration and tip the balance in his favor. Roosevelt posed the measure as a plan to streamline the Court system and ease its caseload, as he explained in this fireside chat on March 9, 1937. Roosevelt argued that the Court expansion bill would merely restore the balance of power intended by the Constitution's framers, a balance that had been lost to a reactionary, backward-looking, shortsighted group of old men.

In the 1950s, parents, educators, religious leaders, and moralists expressed intense concern over the perceived harmful effects of modern life on the nation's youth. This concern was not new, however. Fears of corrupting influences on youth have periodically flooded the public discourse, from child-rearing tomes of the antebellum period to congressional hearings in the 1950s on media and juvenile delinquency. The following editorial from 1950, in the popular magazine Collier's, offered one perspective on the potential harm of such youthful indiscretions as radio programs, phonograph records, Western movies, and comic books and advocated tolerance for youth-oriented popular culture.

From the start of colonization, Indians and Europeans viewed each other across a wide cultural gulf. Sure about the superiority of their civilization, European missionaries and teachers tried to convert Indians to Christianity and the European way of life. Some Indians did adopt new ways after disease and violence had decimated their communities; others rejected the European entreaties and pointed out the arrogance of these claims of cultural superiority. French priest Chrestian LeClerq traveled among the eastern Algonquian people who lived in what are now the Maritime Provinces of Canada. He recorded a Micmac leader's eloquent response to these attempts at "reform" that pointed out how difficult Europeans found it to live in Indian country. If France was such a terrestrial paradise, he asked, why were colonists making their way across the Atlantic to live in the forests of North America?

At the end of January 1917, the German government--desperate to break the stalemated trench warfare--announced that it would resume unrestricted submarine attacks. The United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany and further events pushed the nation even closer to war. On March 1, newspapers published a telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to the Mexican government, proposing a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. (For attacking the United States, the Mexicans would recoup lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.) Intercepted by the British, the telegram was published widely in American newspapers and inflamed popular opinion against the Germans.

John Brown was a staunch abolitionist and a veteran of guerrilla warfare in Kansas who alarmed even free soilers with his forceful assertions of African-American equality. On October 16, 1859 Brown, three of his sons, and 19 associates raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Planning to seize arms stored at the arsenal and set up a base to encourage and assist further slave insurrections, Brown and his men were trapped by U.S. marines, tried for treason, and hanged. Southerners saw in Brown's raid the violent intentions of northerners, while many in the North mourned Brown's death as a revolutionary martyr. A Harper's Weekly artist sketched Brown and his co-conspirators as they were charged with treason and murder in a Charlestown, Virginia courtroom.

In this photograph, battle flags captured by northern troops during the Civil War are returned to aged Confederate veterans in a 1927 ceremony in front of the Capitol supervised by President Calvin Coolidge. Such rites of reconciliation between the Blue and the Gray represented a rapprochement between whites and ignored the central importance of slavery to the war, as well as the contribution of black troops. More damaging, this attitude of reconciliation obscured the repressive state of race relations in the South during the 1920s.

Recommendations by the National War Labor Board during World War II to pay male and female workers equal wages yielded few changes in the gender wage gap. Women continued to receive less money for comparable work, and into the 1960s want ads characterized jobs as "male" or "female" with resulting salary differences based on gender. The Equal Pay Act (EPA) made it illegal to pay men and women differently for similar work. Although the EPA was passed in 1963, it was debated in workplaces and courtrooms for decades thereafter. In this Senate hearing testimony, union leader Murray Plopper argued that the "race against the Communist bloc of nations" demanded an end to gender discrimination. Plopper used specific examples of retail clerks' working conditions and earnings to argue for passage of the law. He also noted that "women work because they must" and challenged the provisions of the law that would exempt small stores.

An 1867 Harper's Weekly illustration features three figures symbolizing black political leadership: a skilled craftsman, a sophisticated city dweller, and a Union Army veteran.

Photographers covered the Civil War, following the Union Army in wagons that served as traveling darkrooms. Their equipment was bulky and the exposures had to be long, so they could not take action photographs during battle. But photography was graphic; this picture taken on the morning of July 4th, 1863 after three days of heavy fighting during the Battle of Gettysburg, showed the northern public that dying in battle lacked the gallantry often represented in paintings and prints.

Labor activism during the 1930s had an impact on U.S. popular culture, especially film--both on screen and behind the camera. The Screen Actors Guild was formed in 1933 and In 1941 trade union organizing reached the workplace where some of the nation's favorite fantasies were produced. After Walt Disney fired union organizers on his art staff, his studio cartoonists went on strike. This cartoon from a newspaper report indicates how Disney strikers brought new skills to labor organizing. "There are mighty few labor disputes," the caption states, "in which just about every striker can make his own picket signs. Consequently, the signs are bright and lively . . . attracting the passerby and winning friends for the Screen Cartoon Guild."

Not surprisingly, labor editors like John Swinton put great store in the liberating powers of the written word. Swinton had been an abolitionist before the Civil War; in the 1870s, he was an editor for the New York Times and Sun ; and in the mid-1880s, he published John Swinton's Paper. Swinton's Paper was one of hundreds of labor newspapers that flourished in Gilded Age America. In this essay, Swinton argued that reading was the key to the prosperity and progress of the working classes. The essay, which appeared in The Carpenter in 1901, was itself a testimony to the extent of working-class literacy in this period. Swinton assumed that his readers would understand his references to Caliban (the slave in Shakespeare's The Tempest) and Cadmus (the figure in Greek mythology who brought the alphabet).

In the 1820s, operatives in the Lowell cotton mills, mostly women, worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Holidays were few and short: July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and the first day of spring. In the 1830s, with increased competition, conditions worsened as owners cut wages, raised boarding house rents, or increased workloads. To protest these changes, women went out on strike in 1834 and 1836. This promotional engraving showed a mill woman standing in unlikely repose beside a Fale and Jenks spinning frame. The benign relationship of the figure to the machine may have served to reassure nineteenth-century observers that factory work would not debase virtuous womanhood.""

The back of a Louisiana slave named Gordon, photographed in 1863 after he escaped to the Union forces. Whipping was the most common form of punishment on plantations, and slaveowners and overseers whipped slaves with frightening regularity. Slaves could be whipped for almost any pretext: for "not picking cotton," "or not picking as well as he can," for picking "very trashy cotton," and so forth. One overseer gave twelve lashes to eight women for "hoeing bad corn." While punishments were often work related, whipping was also used to humiliate slaves and instill deference, obedience, and servility. Slaves could be whipped for answering back to overseers or appearing in any way "insolent."

During the mid- and late-nineteenth century, reform organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) sought to bring Protestantism and wholesome" activities to the urban working class. An active YMCA member

In 1919, Americans ratified the 18th amendment to the Constitution, making it illegal to manufacture, sell, transport, import, or export drinking alcohol. Prohibition, as it was popularly known, proved impossible to enforce, as tens of millions of normally law-abiding Americans either broke the law or abetted those who did. Although the consumption of alcohol did decline, opponents of Prohibition argued that it engendered crime, corruption, and a disregard for law. Organized crime flourished around the profits to be made from selling illegal alcohol, and politicians and police were bought off wholesale. Bribery and corruption, although not always alcohol related, reached into President Harding's cabinetand then onto the front page. This 1926 cartoon by Clive Weed in the satirical weekly Judge comments on the escalation of governmental corruption during Prohibition.

Planters romanticized life on the plantation, often representing themselves as stern but loving parents who had to look after their slaves, who were depicted as childlike and in need of disciplined guidance. The plantation as the perfect extended family was a common theme of pro-slavery prints both before and after the Civil War. This postwar lithograph by the popular firm of Currier and Ives portrayed the slave quarters as a carefree world, basking in the glow of the planter's benevolence. In reality, of course, the harsh life of a slave bore little resemblance to this romanticized image.