In this journalistic sketch, a group of African American soldiers liberates a plantation in eastern North Carolina. The troops were the so-called "African Brigade" composed of black recruits from Massachusetts and newly freed contraband slaves from…

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…

The Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog dates back to 1888, when Richard Sears first used a mailer to sell watches and jewelry. The U.S. Post Office provided a boon to the mail order business by allowing mail order publications to be classified as…

Between 1942 and 1964, 4.6 million Mexicans came to the United States to perform the much needed but incredibly difficult "stoop work" of planting, tending, and harvesting crops. These men, called braceros, were initially invited by the United…

In the 1890s, most African Americans labored in the southern cotton economy. Some owned their own farms, but many worked in a system called sharecropping. Landlords provided sharecroppers with land, a cabin, farm tools, and cotton seed; in return,…

Another Soviet poster from shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 is this work by A. Kokorekina, in which a Red Army soldier pierces a serpent cleverly coiled into the shape of a swastika. The caption, which translates as…

Both the author and original date of "Deep River" are unknown, as is usually the case with slave songs. It was first published in a collection entitled Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867). The compilers of this…

This poster, issued in 1943 or 1944, was intended to perpetuate the Nazi myth of "the Jew" as "inciter of war, prolonger of war." As German fortunes in the war begin to decline, myths of a "Jewish conspiracy" made a convenient scapegoat for failing…

This photograph, made for the Office of War Information, is part of a larger series documenting racial conflict surrounding the construction of the Sojourner Truth homes in Detroit, Michigan. White neighbors and tenants of the new federal housing…

The Philippine Village exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair included over one thousand Filipino men and women, many from indigenous tribes who were displayed in several “villages.” The Philippine Reservation promoters…