The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook, published from 1936 to 1966, that listed businesses, hotels and gas stations where African American travellers would be served during the Jim Crow era. Its founder, Victor Hugo Green, was a New York postal worker who created it because black drivers faced refusals of food, lodging and repairs, and some were killed on the road with little investigation. The first edition covered New York, and it later expanded across most of the United States and parts of Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda. It was called the bible of black travel. It ended after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed the discrimination it had been created to help travellers avoid.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.