The first attempt to sell weapons to Iran through Israeli middlemen failed. Reagan then convened a group of advisors, including Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Both Shultz and Weinberger, as well as White…

During the spring of 1919, a group of anarchists (known as Galleanists because they were followers of Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani) sent a series of mail bombs to U.S. government officials and judges. On June 2, 1919, one of these bombs exploded…

During the World War I era, the U.S. experienced a “Red Scare,” or national hysteria about the dangers of communists and radicals. The Red Scare was influenced by wartime patriotism, immigration from eastern Europe, and the Bolshevik revolution…

In this audio slideshow, New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein discusses shifts in Mexican immigration from the 1920s through the bracero program of the 1940s and 1960s.

This photograph is part of a series of iconic images of the Civilian Conservation Corps taken at an "experimental farm" in Beltsville, Maryland. The photographer, Carl Mydans (1907-2004), worked for the Farm Security Administration and, in 1936,…

During the Great Depression an estimated 250,000 youths left home to search for work, to ease the burden on their families, to escape an abusive home life, or to find adventure. Opportunities for work were rare and never long-term, and most young…

Children were a visible part of San Francisco's Chinatown. Because of the tight-knit community, children moved freely within the neighborhood, often without direct supervision. In this Arnold Genthe photograph, four boys look on as a fifth boy…

This account from the Norfolk (Virginia) Journal and Guide, an African-American newspaper, describes the CCC's response to the dishonorable discharge of an African-American corpsman who refused to fan flies off of a white officer. After a protest by…

These extracts from the report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration were reprinted and circulated by the Immigration Restriction League, a Boston-based organization that favored stronger restrictions on immigration at the turn of the twentieth…

Carl Sandburg's free verse celebrated ordinary people and American landscapes both rural and urban. Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants, was active in Socialist politics and saw himself as the poet of working people.