The American Conversation:From the Centennial through the Millenium, Volume 2is the second in a two-volume anthology of original sources in United States history. The first act explores how peoples from northwestern Europe, western Africa, and eastern North America collided here after 1492, and how they crafted a strange new world from their similaritiesand their differences. The second act begins in 1877, the tumultuous first year of the United States'second century of existence, and concludes as the world's most powerful nation enters a twenty-first century filled with new perils and opportunities. Students get to see the nationrs"s past in a new light, to approach it from a new angle. These centuries were a fascinating place that is in some ways as exotic as any remote land we might visit today. At the same time, the people and texts the reader meets in these pages will resonate powerfully with the contemporary American conversation. Whatever todayrs"s topicrace relations or the battle of the sexes; protest or piety;unumvs.pluribus;the grip of past on present-readers will find its roots in the centuries that precede the present..

James Merrell , editor of Volume 1 of American Conversations, is the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College. He has been studying history for forty years, writing and publishing it for thirty, and teaching it for more than twenty-five –mostly at Vassar, with brief stints at Northwestern University and the College of William and Mary. Though he has taught everything from Machiavelli and Luther to McCarthy and LBJ, his main area of interest is American history from the opening of European colonization to the close of Reconstruction some three centuries later. Born and raised in Minnesota, Professor Merrell earned bachelor’s degrees at Lawrence University and Oxford University before receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to arriving at Vassar in 1984, he was a Fellow at the Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian (now the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies) at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and at the Institute of Early American History and Culture (now the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture) in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Merrell’s research interests are in early American history in general and relations between Natives and newcomers in particular. Co-editor of three volumes (two anthologies by Routledge and one by Syracuse University Press) and author of numerous articles, his first book, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (University of North Carolina Press, 1989; twentieth-anniversary edition, 2009), won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Bancroft Prize. His second book, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (W.W. Norton, 1999), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won Professor Merrell his second Bancroft Prize, making him one among the handful of historians ever to win that prestigious award twice.

 

Jerald Podair , coeditor of Volume 2 of American Conversations, is Professor of History and the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wisconsin. A native of New York City and a former practicing attorney, he received his B.A. from New York University, a J.D. degree from Columbia University Law School, and a Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University. His research interests lie in the areas of American urban history and racial and ethnic relations. He is the author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill- Brownsville Crisis, published by Yale University Press, which was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on the struggle for civil rights in the United States, and an honorable mention for the Urban History Association’s Book Award in North American urban history. Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer, his biography of the civil rights and labor leader, was published in 2009 by Rowman & Littlefield.  His most recent book is a co-edited volume entitled The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional  Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction, published in 2011 by the University of Virginia Press. His articles and reviews have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of  American History, The Journal of Urban History, Reviews in American History, Radical History Review, Labor History, and American Studies. He contributed an essay, “ ‘One City, One Standard’: The Struggle for Equality in Rudolph Giuliani’s New York,” to Civil Rights in New York City: From World War  II to the Giuliani Era, edited by Clarence Taylor, published by Fordham University Press in 2011.  At Lawrence University, he teaches courses on a variety of topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, including the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Great Depression and New Deal, the 1960s, and the Civil Rights Movement. He also teaches Lawrence’s first course in American Studies, which he introduced in 2007. He is the recipient of the Allan Nevins Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians for “literary distinction in the writing of history,” and a Fellow of the New York Academy of History. He was appointed by Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle to the state’s Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, on which he served from 2008 to 2009.  In 2010, he was honored by Lawrence University with its Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and in 2012 with its Faculty Convocation Award.

 

Andrew Kersten , coeditor of Volume 2 of American Conversations, is Frankenthal Professor of History in the Department of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay. He teaches courses in U.S. history–the U.S. history survey, U.S. immigration history, and U.S. labor history–and interdisciplinary courses relating to his department. He researches and writes about American history since Reconstruction.  His books include Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941—46 (University of Illinois Press, 2000), which is an investigation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practice Committee; Labor’s Home Front: The AFL during World War II (New York University Press, 2006), which is a history of the American Federation of Labor during the war; A. Philip Randolph: A Life in the Vanguard (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); and Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011). Currently, he is working on an online digital database of A. Philip Randolph’s writings, as well as an anthology of new historical interpretations about Randolph’s life and legacy. He has two other professional passions. Kersten frequently collaborates with public historians and museums such as the National Railroad Museum and the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Museum. He also enjoys working with K—12 history teachers. From 2003 to 2006, he led a Teaching American History Grant Program of his own design that offered intensive professional development for history teachers, and he continues to collaborate on curricular design and other educational issues.

Introduction1. "...The employer has no right to speculate on starvation..."Workers and Owners Battle During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877TEXTS: A Striker, "Fair Wages," North American Review, September 1877Thomas A. Scott, "The Recent Strikes," North American Review, September 18772. "Today we find collisions between...capital and labor, when there should be combination."Andrew Carnegie Counsels Class CooperationTEXTS: Andrew Carnegie, "An Employer's View of the Labor Question," April 1886"Results of the Labor Struggle," August 18863. "How does it feel to be a problem?" W.E.B. Du Bois Attacks the Color LineTEXTS: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903"Of Our Spiritual Strivings""Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others""The Sorrow Songs"4. "The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means it has only begun."Randolph Bourne Transcends the "Melting-Pot" IdeaTEXT: Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America, "Atlantic Monthly, July 19165. "Women, more than men, succumb to marriage." Crystal Eastman Reimagines the Institution of MarriageTEXTS: Crystal Eastman, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December 1923"Now We Can Begin," The Liberator6. "I am an American individualist." Herbert Hoover Champions Individualist ValuesTEXT: Herbert Hoover, American Individualism, 19237. "They're just working. They don't know what for. They're just in a rut andkeep on in it." Robert and Helen Lynd Search for "Middle" AmericaTEXT: Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown, 19298. "Let us now praise famous men..." Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange Photograph the Great DepressionTEXTS: James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941Walker Evans, three photographs from Let Us Now Praise Famous MenDorothea Lange, photographs9. "They are now at the crossroads." Charles Kikuchi Copes With War RelocationTEXTS: Charles Kikuchi, The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle From an American Concentration Camp Dorothea Lange, American Photographs Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition 10. "Freedom of Speech...Freedom of Worship...Freedom from Want...Freedom from Fear." Norman Rockwell Sees America as It Sees Itself TEXTS: Norman Rockwell, "Freedom of Speech" "Freedom from Want" "Freedom From Fear" "Freedom of Worship." 11. "God or man?" Whittaker Chambers Defends the Anticommunist Impulse TEXT: Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 1952 12. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." Allen Ginsberg Begins the Counterculture TEXTS: Allen Ginsberg, "Howl," from Howl and Other Poems, 1956 "America" "A Supermarket in California," 13. "A big-shouldered youth with sideburns and a full-lipped face wandered slowly on stage..." Elvis Presley Shakes Up America TEXTS: Jean Yothers, "Presley Makes 'Em Shriek, Yell, Jump," Orlando Sentinel Star, August 8, 1956 "Presley Whips 12,000 Into Near-Hysteria,"