This December 1969 drawing by political cartoonist Eugene Payne was published in The Charlotte Observer. The cartoon shows a man holding items labeled "Defense," "War," "Foreign Aid," and "Space," representing the spending priorities of the American…

In 1966, youth from the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, urban ministers, anti-poverty activists, and homophile activists helped organize Vanguard, the earliest known queer youth organization in the United States. In June of 1966, Vanguard…

Please use the following bibliography for additional information on these topics. Many of the books contain analysis of the primary sources included in this collection.

This 2021 graph, created by the United States Federal Reserve, depicts the changing wealth of American families from the 1980s-2010s. The Federal Reserve (also known as The Fed) monitors U.S. financial policies, manages the country's money supply,…

After the Civil War, many former enslavers in the South were desperate to not lose laborers and attempted to maintain control over formerly enslaved people. One such former enslaver, P.H. Anderson, contacted a formerly enslaved man named Jourdon…

Gil Scott-Heron, a singer, poet, and author, wrote many spoken-word poems and songs about social, political, and economic issues in the United States. In this 1970 spoken-word poem, titled “Whitey on the Moon,” Scott-Heron commented on racial…

After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan set his sights on the American economy, including issues like interest rates, inflation, unemployment, and wages. In his first address to the nation in February 1981, Reagan outlined his intentions…

Jaime Cruz immigrated to the United States in 1987 from Lima, Peru. In Peru, Cruz earned a mechanical engineering degree and worked as a merchant marine. When he arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada, Cruz found it difficult to secure an engineering job,…

In January 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the Economic Security Act to Congress. Congress held committee hearings on the bill. Charles H. Houston, a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)…

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans worried about the social and economic consequences of the visibly growing numbers of women employed in U.S. factories. The American Federationist, a publication of the American Federation of…