A nationwide rebellion brought the United States to a standstill in the summer of 1877. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked off the job, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the…

The interwar peace movement was arguably the largest mass movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a mobilization often overlooked in the wake of the broad popular consensus that ultimately supported the U.S. involvement in World War II. The destruction…

In the last months of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman of the Union Army issued Special Field Order Number 15, which set aside more than 400,000 acres of abandoned coastal plantations from South Carolina to Florida for settlement exclusively…

In the speech below, Bayley Wyat, an ex-slave, protests the eviction of blacks from confiscated plantations in Virginia in 1866. Like so many other nineteenth-century Americans, white and black, freed people wanted to work the land as self-sufficient…

Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1858, was the most influential black leader at the turn of the century. He had worked as a laborer and domestic servant after the Civil War, eventually attending Virginia's Hampton Institute. In 1881, he founded…

In 1895, Booker T. Washington gave what later came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise speech before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His address was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history,…

The Black feminist organization, the Combahee River Collective, formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1974. The group's name honors Harriet Tubman and a raid she organized during the Civil War that liberated more than 700 enslaved individuals along the…

Crazy Horse, orTashunka-uitco,led the Lakota resistance to the U.S. Army and the forced movement of his people onto reservations in the 1860s and 1870s. He helped lead a victorious coalition of Native Americans against Custer's soldiers at the Battle…

Fannie Lou Hamer grew up as one of 20 children born to sharecroppers in rural Mississippi. She and her husband were eking out a living as sharecroppers near Ruleville when, at the age of 44, she decided to attend a mass meeting about voting in 1962.…

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave, a leader of the anti-slavery movement in the North, editor of the abolitionist newspaper The North Star and, after the Civil War, a diplomat for the U.S. government. This excerpt is from an address on West…