"The Land of Liberty" was the ironic title of this cartoon published in an 1847 edition of the British satirical weekly Punch. As the cartoon suggests, Americans faced a number of dilemmas and crises that came to revolve around the institution of slavery and its expansion into the West. As slavery became more entrenched in Southern social and economic life, the war against Mexico, the forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeastern United States, and conflicts between rich and poor whites all highlighted the conflicts within Southern society and between the North and South about the place of slavery in a rapidly expanding republic.

During the second quarter of the 19th century numerous radical movements emerged, and some withdrew from society and formed ideal or utopian communities. The Shakers (or Shaking Quakers) were the oldest and largest of these utopian movements, founded in Great Britain by Mother Ann Lee, who arrived in North America in 1774. Shakers abandoned the traditional family in favor of a new fellowship of men and women who lived as brothers and sisters, worked in agriculture and artisanal crafts, and adopted the practices of cooperation and celibacy. Many were attracted to their communitarian message, especially women like Mary Doolittle of New Lebanon, New York, who joined the local Shakers (the second of what became 19 communities stretching from New England, across New York, to Ohio and Kentucky). Doolittle narrates her initial emotional conflict between family and belief, and the suspicion, even hostility, of local people toward her new "Family," as Shaker units were called.

African-American women held as slaves were particularly vulnerable to abuse at the hands of their white owners. This engraving appeared in abolitionist George Bourne's Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women, published in 1837. It highlighted the connections between the anti-slavery and women's rights movements, as some women abolitionists, such as Sarah and Angelina Grimke, used the anti-slavery cause to address their own plight as women. The connections they drew were highly controversial, and many anti-slavery organizations were split over the issue of women's rights.

An organized movement led by women and dedicated to winning equality took formal shape at the first women's rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Many of the women who took part had been active in other social causes, such as the abolition of slavery, before joining the struggle for women's rights. In this 1859 cartoon published in Harper's Weekly, hecklers disrupted the proceedings of a women's-rights meeting.

The rise of a new Northern middle class brought with it new ideals of family life and gender roles. While men worked outside the home, women were to preside over the domestic sphere, not only by performing household labor but also by setting a moral example for children and creating a haven that was protected from the outside world. This frontispiece and title page came from a popular 1869 guide to the formation and Maintenance of Economical

In July 1839, captive West Africans rebelled and took over the Spanish slaveship Amistad . They ordered the owners to Africa but, instead, the Amistad was taken on a meandering course, finally waylaid by a U.S. Navy brig. The Africans were charged with the murder of the captain and jailed in New Haven, Connecticut. Abolitionists came to their support; ex-President John Quincy Adams represented them in court. After a long legal battle, the Supreme Court freed the "mutineers" in 1841. The following year they returned to Africa.

During the late-18th century, many southerners headed west, leaving older areas such as the Carolinas and Georgia; by 1790 more than 100,000 had moved into Kentucky and Tennessee. David Crockett was born in 1786 in East Tennessee. He fashioned a career as an Indian fighter, politician, and frontier humorist, using his mastery of the vernacular to spin tales on the campaign stump or in print. Crockett had many supposed life stories, but A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, published in 1834, is believed to be Crockett's actual work (edited by Thomas Chilton). These excerpts about bear hunting in Tennessee emphasized Crockett's reputation as a great hunter and contributed to his legendary status even before his death at the Alamo in 1836.

A cross-section of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, workforce as presented to the readers of Harper's Weekly in 1868. Winslow Homer sketched women, men, and children as they emerged from the city's textile factories at the end of a workday.

Black Hawk or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, was born at Saukenuk, a Sauk village at the junction of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers. When the United States took over the area in 1804 after the Louisiana Purchase, several Sauk and other tribal leaders signed a treaty that ceded Indian lands east of the Mississippi River, but allowed the Indians to stay as long as the territory remained the property of the federal government. Fearful of the land hungry Americans, Black Hawk and others joined the British in the War of 1812. Encroaching settlers pushed the Sauks into a confrontation with the American government, and Black Hawk's refusal to abandon his homelands led to the Black Hawk War in 1832. Defeated, the chief was taken East upon orders of President Andrew Jackson. He dictated his life story the following year to a government interpreter. Edited by a local newspaperman, it was the first Indian autobiography published in the United States.

Free African Americans living in the North before the Civil War suffered enormous disadvantages and discriminations. Forced to sit in separate and inferior sections in theaters, public transit, and churches, free blacks were also barred from all but the most menial jobs and denied entrance to white trade unions. This racist cartoon in an 1854 edition of the humor magazine Yankee Notions inadvertently illustrated the everyday harassment and cruelty to which northern African Americans were subjected. At a performance of a play based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, some white members altered a seat reservation card and, to the derisive laughter of the rest of the audience, pinned it on a black woman's shawl.

On Christmas Eve, 1855, patrollers finally caught up with a group of teenaged slaves who had escaped by wagon from Loudon County, Virginia. But the posse was driven off when Ann Wood, leader of the group, brandished weapons and dared the pursuers to fire. The fugitives continued on to Philadelphia. Although proponents of the Fugitive Slave Law hoped it would reduce the number of slaves escaping to the North, the law fueled abolitionist sentiment. Popular opposition in cities like Boston and Philadelphia, which at times led to the emancipation by force of captured slaves, at times made the law unenforceable.

In 1831 Rebecca Burlend, her husband John, and their five youngest surviving children left England for Pike County, Illinois. Resentful of the high rent they paid for their Yorkshire farm, the Burlends looked forward to owning their own farm in the United States. Once arrived, however, they learned that land ownership on the American frontier presented its own difficulties and dangers. In Illinois, government land offices either sold sections of land to settlers or provided them with certificates of preemption. "Preemption" was a process through which a settler could stake a claim to a piece of land for up to four years without paying for it as long as he (or she) cultivated it, built on it, or otherwise "improved" it. The government's goal was to encourage settlement of the wilderness. Settlers, however, sometimes illegally exploited the process, as Burlend describes here.

In the decades after the American Revolution, improvements in transportation facilitated the growth of internal commerce in the United States. State and local governments planned turnpikes, roads, and canals, and New York State built the grandest one of the era: the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal was constructed at public expense by thousands of laborers between 1817 and 1825. The canal stretched 364 miles from Albany to Buffalo and linked the new nation's heartlands in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley with New York City and the Atlantic coastal trade. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his travels along the waterway in this 1835 sketch, noting the traffic in goods and people along with the rise in commercial activity along its path. The canal and other improvements, however, also threatened farmers 'abilities to withstand the market's fluctuations and maintain local sufficiency.

In 1753, fifteen year old Mary Jemison was captured by Indians along the Pennsylvania frontier during the Seven Years War between the French, English, and Indian peoples of North America. She was adopted and incorporated into the Senecas, a familiar practice among Iroquois and other Indian peoples seeking to replace a lost sibling or spouse. Mary married and raised a family in the decades before and after the American Revolution; many captives, once adopted and integrated into an Indian community, refused the opportunity to return home, finding life in Indian society more rewarding. In 1823 Mary Jemison related her life story to James Seaver, a doctor who lived near her home in western New York. Seaver's story of "the white woman of the Genessee," as she became known, sold over 100,000 copies in 1824.

The author of this letter, who used the pseudonym "Dame Shirley," was Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819-1906). The letter was written to Clapp's sister, Molly, in Massachusetts, but was subsequently published as one of a series of twenty-three in the Pioneer, a California literary magazine. Clapp's subject in the "Shirley letters," as they are called, was life at the gold mining camps of mid-19th-century California. Clapp knew about life in the world of California gold mining from first-hand experience. With her husband, a doctor, Clapp left the East Coast for California in 1849. At first the couple settled in San Francisco, but in 1851 they left for the Sierra Nevada mountains so that Dr. Clapp could regain his health in the mountain air. In the Sierra Nevadas, they spent more than a year at two gold mining camps, Rich Bar and Indian Bar, on the Feather River. As the self-conscious tone of these letters suggests, Clapp aspired to be a literary writer. As a woman, her perspective on life in the nearly all-male camps was unique. The letters allegedly provided material for Bret Harte's stories. Today we can appreciate them for their historical value as observations of life during the California gold rush.

Traditional craft production centered around an independent master artisan, his journeymen, and the apprentice helpers who worked together in small shops. Apprentices worked alongside masters and received training in the "mysteries of the craft" in exchange for their labor. Journeymen looked forward to becoming proprietors when they accumulated sufficient capital and skill. In his Sketches of Lynn (1880), David Johnson recalled the masculine work culture and small-scale setting of the shoe industry in early-19th century Lynn, Massachusetts. With transportation improvements and growing commercial activity, manufacturing moved from small shops engaged in custom work to larger-scale production of ready-made goods. No area experienced greater dislocation than Lynn, where shops multiplied, the division of labor increased, and some masters opened larger central shops. Less skilled workers, including women and children, replaced journeymen, apprenticeship declined, and the world that Johnson described faded.

Mid-nineteenth century immigrants inhabited a social world far removed from that of native born, middle class Americans, one often marked by economic hardship. With no government relief and only limited private efforts, poor New Yorkers often searched everywhere for means to survive. This engraving showed people scavenging on garbage barges, searching for coal, rags, and other discarded items that might be used or sold to junk dealers. The picture, according to a Harper's Weekly editor, showed how some people in New York were forced to live upon the refuse of respectable folk.""

After the War for Independence, the northern states slowly abolished slavery. However, the rising population of northern free blacks still faced significant obstacles in their struggle to achieve economic and social liberty. African Americans in New England remained concentrated in the seaport cities, often clustered in low-paying jobs. Successful entrepreneurs and skilled traders still faced discrimination as well as opposition from white wageworkers. William J. Brown had been born in 1814 into a free black family in Providence, Rhode Island. His father was a sailor and laborer and his mother was the daughter of an African-American slave and Narragansett Indian woman. William became an artisan and leader in Providence's African-American community. But he described his uphill struggle to find work and obtain respect from his fellow New Englanders in his autobiography Life of William J. Brown of Providence (1883).

In 1849, New York's chief of police, George W. Matsell, chose to devote most of his semi-annual report to the problem of vagrant and delinquent children. By mid-century New York was crowded with immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Adult immigrants took jobs once occupied by child apprentices and, despite Matsell's reference to the city's public schools, schooling was not compulsory in New York State until 1874. The result was an excess of poor children on the streets earning money however they could, sometimes, Matsell suggests, in unsavory occupations. Matsell's anxiety about the city's street children cut two ways: he was concerned about the harm these children were doing to themselves, but he also worried that they would grow up to join a "dangerous class" of criminals that would terrorize the city. In these sentiments he was joined by Charles Loring Brace. In 1853 Brace formed the Children's Aid Society that initiated the "orphan trains." These trains transported poor children out of the city to farms in the west.