Since Reconstruction there has always been an antipornography movement in the United States. From the heyday of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1880s, to the debates over the Hays code in Hollywood in the 1930s, to the founding of Women Against Pornography in 1979, our society has consistently struggled to resolve two crucial and interrelated questions: First, does pornography incite people to behave in “antisocial” ways or to commit crimes against individuals and society? Second, should the state regulate or censor materials it regards as obscene or pornographic? These debates have always been compelling, drawing authorities from just about everywhere in our culture. Many participants in this running controversy have devoted their lives to its resolution. None has come even remotely close to settling the matter. Today the courts and legislatures continue to argue the pornography question much as they did in the 1860s, when jurists first established that the test of obscenity lay in whether a book has depraved and corrupted the minds of the vulnerable.

The cultural fission created by the controversy over birth control and abortion, as Juvenal's satiric comment above indicates, has a long and bitter history. The emergence of the modern state, however, transformed cultural differences into political acrimony as reproduction rights became public policy. In the United States, reproductive rights in the post-World War II period became a matter of political controversy when the federal government began to fund family planning programs domestically and abroad in the 1960s.

Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley are two deceased members of Congress the world loves to hate. Their principal legislative achievement, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, continues to evoke such disapproving adjectives as “infamous” and “notorious.” To most Americans, that act, which incidentally remains the fundamental tariff law of the U.S., conjures up images of rising tariff barriers, beggar-thy-neighbor nationalism, and ruinous trade wars.

On 28 July 1994 President Bill Clinton called his $30.2 billion anticrime bill “the toughest, largest, smartest Federal attack on crime in the history of our country.” If Clinton could have turned the clock back sixty years to 18 May 1934, he would have heard President Franklin Delano Roosevelt making similar claims about the nation's first federal anticrime package. In the intervening decades, the federal government's role in crime fighting has become an accepted reality, but in 1934 it was still novel. For most of U.S. history, politicians believed that crime was a local matter. That changed dramatically during the New Deal, when crime became a national obsession, and the Roosevelt Administration developed a sweeping anticrime program that challenged accepted notions of federalism.

In 1966, at the end of almost two decades of civil rights agitation, men and women of color redressed one significant historical injustice—the legislative exemption of tens of thousands of farmworkers from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which guaranteed a minimum wage and maximum hours of work for covered workers. In 1974, after almost a decade of feminist agitation, domestic workers convinced the Congress that even private household service fell within the act's minimum-wage coverage of workers engaged in interstate commerce. The two occupations in which most African Americans and a large number of other nonwhite Americans worked in 1938, and in which significant numbers remained in the 1960s and 1970s, joined the roster of jobs covered by this fundamental legislation. Coverage of the country's least powerful workers and its least valued jobs finally overturned central racial and gender inequalities encoded in the nation's basic labor standards law and awarded workers and jobs long-sought recognition and respect.

On 3 June 1977, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) denied an immigrant visa to a Filipino woman, Zenaida Porte Rebultan, when she acknowledged that she was a lesbian. Rebultan qualified as a second-preference alien for purposes of immigration because every other member of her immediate family had already moved permanently to the United States. The INS declared her excludable, however, under section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to which “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, or sexual deviation, or a mental defect” were “ineligible to receive visas and shall be excluded from admission into the United States.”

In January 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt submitted an ambitious plan for administrative reform of the national government to Congress. Roosevelt's reorganization bill was based on a report produced by the President's Committee on Administrative Management–a panel of three “specialists in public administration” appointed by Roosevelt in March 1936 and led by Louis Brownlow, who was perhaps the best-known expert in the field. The Brownlow recommendations produced intense debate in Congress; and the reorganization proposals were ultimately defeated in March 1938 in what historian William Leuchtenburg has described as “the worst rebuff Roosevelt was ever to suffer” in his twelve years as president. The public aspects of the battle over the Brownlow proposals have already received extensive scholarly attention. Some of the most important skirmishes in this battle, however, were not fought in public, and even after half a century they remain largely obscured from public view. One such skirmish was the contest within the academic community about the recommendations on administrative reform that were to be put before Congress.

Beginning in the 1970s, historians and social scientists published a great deal on the birth-control movement in the United States, a subject that had been neglected. They were seeking perspective on the issues raised by profound changes in society that rendered problematic the gender system and family values of previous generations. It is no fluke that these scholars began to write the history of the effort to promote the separation of sex from procreation during the same decade that Congress removed contraception from the practices and information prohibited by the national obscenity laws (1971), and the Supreme Court ruled that married couples had a constitutionally protected right to practice contraception (1965), that the unmarried had a similar right of “privacy” (1972), and that pregnant women had the right to induced abortions performed by physicians during the first trimester of their pregnancies (1973). The Court's affirmation of a limited right to “abortion on demand” in Roe v. Wade followed a decade of intense political struggle and judicial action at the state level, and Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, was self-consciously attempting to forge a consensus in areas of human behavior and public policy where conflicts were literally lethal and threatened the social order. In turn, much of the vitality of the scholarship on reproductive history that coincides with changes in the law sprang from the self-consciousness of women.

One of the United States' most enduring social policy conflicts in the nineteenth century concerned the controversy over the provision of municipal outdoor relief. J In the last third of the century, New York City, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia abolished the program. The actual political struggles over outdoor relief, however, have not been closely studied. Most accounts assume that the fierce opposition of the charity reformers to outdoor relief caused this long-standing social provision to be abolished. Instead of a story of “reform success,” this study of the outdoor relief conflicts in New York City between 1874 and 1898 documents the reformers' long years of frustration and ineffectiveness in the city's relief politics.

The Supreme Court changed abortion laws across the United States on 22 January 1973. Abortion had been illegal in many states, and in others a closely regulated medical procedure. In only four states did the law provide a broad right to terminate a pregnancy in the early months. Roe v. Wade declared that this right in the context of the doctor-patient relationship was protected by the Constitution's “right to privacy.” In practice, abortion became a matter of personal choice.

The broad objective of this study is to ask whether there have been basic continuities in Russian state industrial administration across the Revolutionary divide. The question takes as generally agreed that the state's role in the national economy after 1917 was larger than previously. Given the expanding state role in economic operations during World War I, the period of War Communism and the Five-Year-Plan (Stalin) era, the main question addressed by this study necessarily focuses on the state and its organizations as initiators and controllers of industrial development before 1917. Did the war, the Revolution of 1917, and the political programs that followed establish a new trajectory for the role of the state or were they characteristic of and predictable from the behavior of state organizations before 1917?

The U.S. government position on world population growth as it emerged in the early 1960s was a fundamental departure in both content and commitment. We embraced the idea that one of the goals of American foreign policy should be the simultaneous reduction of both mortality and fertility across the Third World. It was not simply rhetoric. As the years passed, we committed a growing portion of our foreign aid to that end. The decision to link U.S. foreign-policy objectives with the subsidy of family planning and population control was truly exceptional in that it explicitly aimed at altering the demographic structure of foreign countries through long-term intervention. No nation had ever set in motion a foreign-policy initiative of such magnitude. Its ultimate goal was no less than to alter the basic fertility behavior of the entire Third World! Whether one views this goal as idealistic and naive or as arrogant and self-serving, the project was truly of herculean proportions.