It made for a great photograph. Icons of the feminist movement, stars of women's sport, and amateur athletes joined in a show of solidarity, rallied around the torch that would inaugurate the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas (Figure 1). It was the first federally funded meeting of its kind, and 20,000 people cheered the arrival of the flame and the illustrious if motley crew that bore it aloft. The moment was, according to the official proceedings, “one of the most dramatic features of the Conference.”

At the beginning of the 1970s, college sports were on turbulent ground. “Colleges prepare for the impact of rising costs and more campus unrest,” warned the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was a bit blunter in its prognosis, reporting that “like housewives everywhere, athletic directors of the nation's colleges [were] having budget trouble.” National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Executive Director, Walter Byers, warned of “cadres of disgruntled athletes,” demanding rights, money, and control. Byers was also troubled by Title IX, the new educational amendment mandating gender equity in federally funded schools, including in athletic departments. “The possible doom of our collegiate sports is near,” Byers proclaimed. “There is not an athletic department in the country where officials are optimistic,” University of Michigan's Athletic Director (AD), Don Canham, lamented. Norv Richey, University of Oregon's AD concurred, declaring, “The future of intercollegiate athletics are in peril.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fans assembled at stadiums and arenas across the country to witness a recurring spectacular event. They headed toward the local ballpark or arena, not to watch their favorite teams and entertainers perform inside, but rather to witness the implosion of the facilities themselves. As the United States was in the midst of its latest stadium construction boom, a new community ritual took shape: the ceremonial demolition of stadiums that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Facilities that were once celebrated for their modern designs and conveniences were deemed ugly and obsolete seemingly overnight. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, among dozens of other professional stadiums, were demolished in this spectacular fashion (Figure 1). Explosives were strategically placed throughout the abandoned facilities, and fans gathered yards away to watch the buildings burst into gigantic clouds of dust and smoke, the environmental consequences of sending pollutants into the air notwithstanding. Television networks covered the detonations while fans donned team colors, cheered, and shed tears as their beloved community gathering places were blown into oblivion.

In 1975, New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte published SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, a critical examination of how the values of American sports had become corrupted and distorted by power brokers who pulled the purse strings. “SportsWorld” was an infrastructure first built in the late nineteenth century by industrialists, educators, politicians, promoters, journalists, and military leaders who believed in the potency of sports and American exceptionalism. For the faithful, SportsWorld represented a positive cultural force that unified the nation, strengthened vigorous manhood, and advanced the country's democratic ideals of equal opportunity and fair play. “In sports,” Lipsyte reflected, Americans believed “children will learn courage and self-control, old people will find blissful nostalgia, and families will discover new ways to communicate among themselves. Immigrants will find shortcuts to recognition as Americans. Rich and poor, black and white, educated and unskilled, we will all find a unifying language. The melting pot may be a myth, but we will all come together in the ballpark.”

On a winter's night in 1968, in a yellow sedan barreling down a dark New Hampshire highway, Richard M. Nixon talked football with Hunter S. Thompson. Nixon would soon win the state's Republican primary—an important kickoff for his deliberate, disciplined campaign. Thompson was an unlikely choice for an intimate audience with the buttoned-down candidate. The outlaw writer in shabby jeans, a chronicler of hippies and Hell's Angels, cast Nixon as a “foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.”1

In April 1970, the African American defensive end Houston Ridge's $1.25 million lawsuit put the issue of drug use in professional football in the public eye. It also raised questions about the league's exploitation of athletes for the sake of profits, at any cost. Plagued by a hip injury sustained during a game in October 1969, the twenty-five-year-old former San Diego Charger's suit charged conspiracy and malpractice, naming team personnel and both the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) as defendants. Ridge's suit claimed that he was permanently disabled, in part, because of the mix of amphetamines, barbiturates, and methandrostenlone given to him by the Chargers, “not for the purpose of care,” but for the purpose of performance enhancement. And they had done so “without warning him of the consequences.” An X-ray later revealed that he had broken his hip, but the drugs had so dulled his sensation of pain that he had continued to play, exacerbating the injury. A married father of four who now had to walk with the help of crutches, Ridge also filed a worker's compensation claim, accusing the Chargers with willful misconduct.

This article explores responses in the Black press to the rapidly expanding U.S. deportation regime during the interwar period. While their perspectives have been largely absent from scholarship on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators have historically been highly engaged with the issue. Black periodicals provided extensive coverage of the expulsion of Black immigrants, as well as of non-Black immigrants who violated the racial structures of American society (either through antiracist political advocacy or through interracial relationships). In doing so, the Black press insisted that deportation was a Black issue, and that antiblackness was central to the functioning of the early-twentieth-century immigration control system. By surveying roughly 1,100 articles on deportation in the Black press, I highlight how Black writers construed deportation as a powerful tool of white supremacy and a threat to Black immigrants and African Americans alike.

Amid the inflation crisis of the 1970s, the Austrian School economist F. A. Hayek presented a radical proposal to solve inflation: the denationalization of currency and the introduction of competing currencies into the monetary system. While Hayek's proposal proved too radical for mainstream economists, Hayek found support within the American libertarian movement. Libertarians realized that Hayek's radical proposal would limit state control over the monetary system and allow for the free exchange of gold. Even though libertarians were not immediately successful in bringing Hayek's plan to fruition, their continued activism paved the way for the creation of cryptocurrency in 2009. This article demonstrates how Hayek and his libertarian supporters opened a new chapter in the history of the “money question” in the United States by advocating for the elimination of the government monopoly over money and the abolition of monetary politics itself.

As the American Left finds itself increasingly alienated from Israel, this article supplements the rich historical narrative regarding U.S.–Israel relations by highlighting the important—albeit mostly forgotten—contribution of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to forging the so-called “special relationship” from the onset. This transnational study transcends prevailing focus on Jewish-American and Christian-Zionist lobbying operations by weaving together the history of U.S.–Israel relations with that of organized labor in the United States and demonstrating how they mutually reinforced each other. The article makes a two-part argument: first, that the AFL-CIO's embrace of Israel and Histadrut, Israel's general federation of labor, proved instrumental in establishing American popular support for Israel in the 1950s and cementing it as a leading liberal cause; second, that such support was not merely rooted in Cold War exigencies, but also served domestic purposes by offering American labor officials an inspiring—yet romanticized—model for social democracy onto which they could project their own aspirations and grievances.

“Normalization of relations” is a phrase of recent origin, widely used by scholars, politicians, and journalists. Defining normalization, however, is remarkably difficult. While we know a great deal about specific instances of normalization, we lack a sustained study of normalization itself, a gap this article begins to address. Using case studies of U.S. relations with China, Vietnam, and Cuba, this article examines the idea of normalization, its history, and its consequences. Focusing on pivotal moments in which “normalization” was at stake, we argue that in the American rendering, normalization was a process that unfolded in three phases. In turn, normalizing relations became a key nonmilitary means through which U.S. officials escalated and then deescalated the Cold War. Like other facets of U.S. diplomacy of the postwar period, normalization policies were premised on many of the assumptions and institutions of the “liberal international order” and have endured into the twenty-first century.

During the night of January 17–18, 1955, the rain-swollen Rhine and Neckar rivers crested. At their confluence, inhabitants of the German city of Mannheim scrambled to protect their homes and property. Residents of the small islands on the outskirts of the city faced imminent disaster.

In the twenty-first century, providing humanitarian assistance to other nations forms an essential part of the U.S. military's mission. Designed to “relieve or reduce endemic conditions such as human suffering, disease, hunger, [and] privation,” the military's humanitarian tasks include such activities as assisting refugees, delivering food and medical equipment to partner nations, and removing unexploded landmines.1 But among the most recognized—and best publicized—of the U.S. Armed Forces’ humanitarian activities are its foreign disaster relief operations. In response to such recent catastrophes as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2011 tsunami in Japan, 2019's Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, and the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, the Department of Defense launched extensive humanitarian operations. Taking advantage of the U.S. military's vast global footprint, military leaders dispatched ships and aircraft, service personnel, relief supplies, equipment, and other material and logistical aid to the scene of these crises and to many others like them globally.2 Carried out for the humanitarian goals of saving lives and reducing suffering, each of these foreign disaster aid operations also shared a critical diplomatic objective: “generating goodwill” for the United States and creating a “favorable impression” of its armed forces.3 Never purely altruistic, the U.S. military's responses to global disasters also function as a valuable instrument of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

While the United Nations (U.N.) is typically seen as a major humanitarian actor—that is, an organization committed to alleviating human suffering and improving human welfare, it is not often thought of as a military power. But that is one of the many functions that the U.N. has adopted since its origin in 1945. For over seventy years, the U.N. Secretariat—the international bureaucracy responsible for the U.N. organization's executive and administrative functions—has conducted long-term expeditionary military operations across the globe in the form of peacekeeping and observer missions. The military wing of U.N. operations has only continued to grow in the twenty-first century. As of July 2023, 87,544 peacekeepers were deployed on active operations. And that number is lower than in the recent past, down from a height of 107,805 in April 2015.1 During that time, only the United States has regularly maintained more foreign-deployed forces than the U.N.

The U.S. military is not usually identified as a humanitarian force, and indeed the very concept of military humanitarianism strikes one as a paradox. According to conventional wisdom, at least, modern humanitarianism emerged as a direct response and even an antidote to military violence. As the story goes, Geneva businessman Henri Dunant's efforts to redress the horrors of war after seeing the terrible aftermath of the Battle of Solferino (1859) eventually gave rise to the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross movement. The two world wars reinforced this violence-breeds-care logic, as the vast scale of wartime suffering generated ever greater humanitarian counter-efforts. By the 1940s, an array of national, international, and supranational organizations increasingly aspired to provide neutral and impartial relief to the victims of war, thereby counteracting, or so they hoped, the violence and partisanship of armed conflict. Even if, on closer inspection, humanitarianism and warfare have always had a more symbiotic relationship—after all, in an era of citizen armies it was only the relative humanization of warfare that guaranteed its survival as an instrument of statecraft—the conceptual divide between the military and the humanitarian remains strong.1

Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. military has been among the most important providers of humanitarian assistance, particularly in the wake of natural disasters and conflict. Yet, aid organizations rarely consider the U.S. military a humanitarian actor, and military personnel do not identify primarily as humanitarians. Nevertheless, the logistics and manpower capacities of the U.S. military have often pushed it into humanitarian spheres. Once involved, however, the traditional humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence do not drive the military provision of humanitarian assistance. Instead, military personnel approach humanitarian assistance through their training, namely, moving items, building things, and managing people. They often pair a training-based framework with a general sense of helping those in need. The U.S. military is a humanitarian actor, but coming to grips with that requires reimaging humanitarianism. To explore the military as humanitarian, this essay first examines how the demands of logistics pushed the U.S. military into becoming a provider of refugee assistance in Albania during the 1999 Kosovo crisis. It then uses the 2021 evacuation and resettlement of Afghans to explore how the U.S. military's ready pool of manpower led it to become more deeply involved in humanitarian responses. Humanitarian crises are almost invariably complex and messy. The moral imperative to help those in need interacts with political and security priorities in often uncomfortable ways. That confluence helps explain why the U.S. military assists with some, but not other, crises.

Typically understood only within the cultural history of the post–World War II folk music revival, documentarian Alan Lomax's “Cantometrics” research and artist Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of American Music also deserve to be positioned within the broader Cold War–era rise of the digital computer and tactics of computation in American society. Linking what Ross Cole describes as the “folkloric imagination” to what we might call the Cold War “computational imagination,” Lomax and Smith each examined folk music not through conventional ethnographic or musicological modes, but rather through computational lenses of data analysis, systems theory, informatics, and cybernetics. Both sought to expand cultural democracy by doing so, carrying Popular Front ideals into the postwar milieu while also presaging dilemmas found in today's fraught context of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the application of digital technologies to almost all aspects of human culture.

On August 27, 1992, the General Motors (GM) auto plant in Van Nuys closed after a half-century serving the Northeast San Fernando Valley. Its closure undercut the livelihoods of auto workers like Raymond Álvarez and his father Ramón. Today, the father and son duo look at “The Plant,” an outdoor shopping mall, and wonder whether the In-N-Out fast-food restaurant or T-Mobile store marks where they once stood on the assembly line. The departure of the GM plant and other long-standing manufacturing firms propelled the area into economic distress as Los Angeles was reeling from another crisis, the 1992 Uprising. In the wake of these events, elected officials clamored to revitalize the city. Six years later, “revitalization” came in the form of the shopping center, The Plant. By tracing the historical trajectory of one shuttered auto plant, from factory to shopping mall, this article demonstrates how neoliberal ideology gained legitimacy over the last several decades.

This article considers the role of national spaces in the creation of interwar-era internationalism. Specifically, it explores how the future editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, the mouthpiece of what would become the American Foreign Relations Establishment, found his way to internationalism not in the corridors of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference, but rather through treading through the corners of the newly made Yugoslavia. During the 1920s and 1930s, internationally minded thinkers from across the political spectrum shared at least one commonality: they rooted their dreams for an international world in particular, and expressly national, spaces. This article explores how and why international thinkers became invested in foreign national movements during the interwar, suggesting that to some, these new states both represented and contributed to an idealized vision of an international world that could promote unity while protecting particularities.

This article uses Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) as a case study to examine the intertwining of the feminist movement against sexual violence and state crime control agencies during the 1970s “war on crime.” Law Enforcement Assistant Administration (LEAA) officials expected the anti-rape organizers they subsidized to promote police reporting to the victims they served. This sharply contracted the terrain of feminist anti-rape activism, particularly for women of color who declined police reporting. Lynn Moncrief, a self-described “Black radical feminist” hired by Philadelphia WOAR using LEAA funds, rejected the mandate to increase police reporting rates. Instead, she devoted her energies to remaking WOAR's praxis with Black women and girls at the center. While LEAA funding tethered the anti-rape movement to the rapidly expanding carceral state of the late twentieth century, the example of Lynn Moncrief and the Third World Caucus of Philadelphia WOAR shows that cooptation was never total.

In 1900, news of U.S. postal officials committing fraud in Cuba became a scandal that influenced the political, legal, and governmental trajectory of U.S. imperialism. Anti-imperialist Democrats used the frauds to undermine Republican pro-imperialists on the eve of the 1900 election. Prominent Republicans hoped to contain the scandal through swift punishment, but when the accused refused extradition, the resulting Supreme Court case, though rarely discussed, became the first of the Insular Cases. In 1900, it was not yet clear whether the U.S. empire would be run by self-interested actors or self-proclaimed progressive reformers. The commitment to progressive imperialism observed later in other colonies was, at least in part, worked out in this postal frauds case, as individuals chose how to respond to the scandal. Their actions were guided as much by scandal and the pursuit of self-interest as they were by lofty ideals about good government.