In August 1919, a settlement house worker in Columbus, Ohio, filed a complaint in juvenile court against a seven-year-old girl whom I will call “Marie.” The complaint read, “Marie runs the streets continually. She is very irregular in her attendance at school, and is as dirty as a pig. She has been found in a lumber yard with a negro, and it was alleged by her associates that he raped her there. She goes into stores and begs.” According to the surviving records, Marie's “truancies from home” alerted settlement workers to the case. As a young child she reportedly began staying out late at night and loitering in the company of men and boys, and was threatened with being put out of the house when she was found alone with the African American man. By 1928, after Marie became an unwed mother at the age of sixteen, and had spent nine years in and out of child welfare institutions, a summary report contained the interesting typographical error that Marie's young life had strayed a distance of “six blacks from home.” As incidental as slipping “blocks” into “blacks” may have been in one sense, it captured a powerful truth. Marie violated key boundaries of sexual, gender, and racial purity that made a woman a candidate for respectable motherhood, and she paid dearly for these transgressions.

State criminal disenfranchisement provisions have recently attracted much scholarly attention. Some scholars have examined the consequences of these policies, such as the number of individuals they have disenfranchised (particularly the high percentage of African Americans), the way in which they have altered election outcomes, and their effect on voter turnout. Other scholars have assessed the persuasiveness of various justifications for these policies. Still other scholars have analyzed legal strategies that might be used to repeal these policies.

The 1940s were heady times for the American labor movement. The tight wartime labor market and the backing of the federal government in defense industries facilitated impressive membership gains for both AFL and CIO unions. By 1945, labor unions represented almost 35 percent of the workforce—a more than fivefold increase from the early 1930s. What is more, union membership gains penetrated previously unorganized and resistant regions like the South. Unions indeed appeared on the verge of recruiting millions of new members and establishing a truly national social movement. Critics and supporters alike viewed unions as the most powerful institutions of the day. Following the war, Fortune Magazine foresaw little resistance to unionism and to the postwar southern labor organizing drives, while sympathetic scholars like C. Wright Mills viewed labor leaders as the “new men of power.”

Since the late 1970s, the historiography of State socialist regimes in Central Europe has been largely structured by an opposition between a “top-down” political history and a more “bottom-up” social history, leaving the analysis of public policy in a sort of no-man's land between politics and society. Without competitive elections, freedom of expression, or interest-group mobilization or participation, most determinants of policy routinely studied in Western democracies are inoperative. Furthermore, given that State socialist regimes and centralized economic planning appear to be historical dead ends, what can be learned today from the study of this political experiment? In this article on housing policy in the GDR, I will argue that the question of knowledge, its construction, its circulation, and its uses are at least as essential to the intelligibility of these regimes as the study of ideology and repression.