Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants’ everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past.

In 1905, Boston immigration officials detained four Chinese students of the King family, inciting protest from Euro-American elites and sparking an international controversy that gave momentum to the American Boycott movement in Shanghai. A prominent family, the Kings successfully rallied business leaders to take their cause to President Theodore Roosevelt and effectively used the press to articulate Chinese grievances. Bringing to a head the tension between race-based and class-based interpretations of exclusion that troubled the legislation from its inception, the case prompted key reforms in the administration of Chinese exclusion and helped promote a pivot away from the movement for a wholesale “Chinese ban.” An examination of this incident and its role in struggles over immigration law illuminates the conflicted position of Chinese elites—disempowered by race yet empowered by class status—under exclusion. It also provides insights into the agency of Chinese elites in mobilizing resources to combat immigration abuses.

The media outlets usually identified as building blocks of New Right are niche ideological journals (such as National Review) and radio broadcasts. As crucial as these outlets were, other mainstream publications propagating similar ideas had a far greater reach—foremost among them the New York Daily News, the highest-circulation newspaper in the country. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Daily News espoused a conservative populism further right than National Review, binding its readers into a community based on anti-elitism and white working-class identity.

Management of labor was central to articulating and constructing U.S. colonialism in the southern Philippines. Governed by American military officers for fifteen years (1899–1914), the major island of Mindanao and those of the Sulu Archipelago became sites of intensive race management efforts. Colonial officials identified racialized Muslim and Lumad societies as out of step with the modern world of work and developed myriad programs to address this “problem,” including mandatory service on public works projects, carceral labor, industrial education, and directed markets. Unevenly applied and frequently contested, these initiatives generated a range of responses from local actors. The drive to create disciplined laborers through incentive, coercion, and violence shaped state building in the region and linked it to preoccupations with work and racial reform in other U.S. imperial possessions and the wider colonized world.

What prompted New York City teachers to form a union in the Progressive Era? The founding of the journal American Teacher in 1912 led to creation of the Teachers’ League in 1913 and then the Teachers Union in 1916, facilitating formation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Despite historiographical claims that teacher union drives needed a focus on bread-and-butter issues to succeed, ideals of educational democracy and opposition to managerial autocracy motivated the Teachers’ League. Contrary to claims that early New York City teacher unionism was unrepresentative because dominated by radical male Jewish high-school instructors, heterogeneous majorities of women and elementary school teachers formed the Teachers’ League and Teachers Union leaderships. Board of Education representation, maternity leave, free speech, and pensions were aims of this radically democratic movement led by socialists and feminists, which received demonstrably greater mass teacher support than the conservative feminism of a rival association.

The twentieth century saw unprecedented efforts to measure, analyze, and control the world's population. Particularly after World War II, population control and demography—the social science of human population dynamics—developed in tandem and largely through the impetus of U.S.-based philanthropies. This article explains how U.S. actors exercised power over population in sovereign nations throughout the Global South and how demographic theory came to shape population policy worldwide. It contends that U.S.-based philanthropies gained global traction for their population control projects by developing demography as an ally and then leveraging its scientific authority to put population control on the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government and on the nation-building and economic development agendas of countries in the Global South.

World War II transformed policing in the United States. Many police enlisted in the military during the war, and in turn many veterans joined police forces following the victories of 1945. As wartime labor shortages depleted their ranks, police chiefs turned to new initiatives to strengthen and professionalize their forces, redoubling those efforts as growing fears of crime and internal security threats outlasted the global conflict. This article investigates the rapid growth of the military police, how African Americans responded to changes in policing due to the war, and these wartime experiences’ lingering impacts. Based on research in obscure and difficult-to-find police professional literature, and closely examining New York City, it argues that the war's effects on policing did not amount to “militarization” as currently understood, but did inspire more standardized and nationally coordinated approaches to recruitment as well as military-style approaches to discipline, training, and tactical operations.

In early twentieth-century New York City, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. These early female entrants to the New York Police Department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with Progressive Era vice reform; they tended to be working class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. The NYPD instrumentalized policewomen's bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. But plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. Their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood.

The 1983 Chicago mayoral election, which polarized Black and white voters, left the nascent Latino electorate in an uncertain position. A reevaluation of this election clarifies the impact of Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, whose candidacy laid bare significant political divisions and anti-Black sentiment among Latinos as they grappled with their relationship to whiteness. Divisions aside, Washington's effort to court the Latino vote helped legitimate a monolithic, panethnic label in Chicago politics, as evidenced by organizational records, campaign advertising, electoral data, and bilingual media coverage. Reframing the 1983 election as a dual process of race making and panethnic labeling bridges scholarship on Black mayors, Latino politics, and urban history, and questions an enduring political memory of 1983 that has obscured both Latino anti-Blackness and the fragility of Latino unity.

The history of the Social Security Amendments of 1967 illuminates the contours of fiscal citizenship. This watershed law created both work requirements for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients and new policy instruments, including federal child support enforcement, to compel poor men to fulfill their financial obligations to their families. Welfare reformers claimed that such changes were necessary to protect the rights of taxpayers against the “criminal” predations of welfare recipients. These policy changes initiated in 1967 redefined poor women's non-work, as well as their sexual and reproductive decisions, as crimes against taxpayers. Welfare recipients contested this logic and the policies that flowed from it by insisting on the value of their own domestic labor and rejecting a narrow view of taxpaying citizenship. The resolution of these questions played a critical role in revising the American social contract.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a set of liberal intellectuals promoted a vision of liberal renewal at home and abroad, hoping to create a new political and foreign policy paradigm. They sought to revive a form of early Cold War “Vital Center” liberalism by supporting democratization and human rights, designing a liberal version of patriotism, and supporting confrontations with illiberal autocracies and radical Islamists. They hoped to reverse decades of liberal decline in domestic politics, to distance themselves from the political left, and to critique President George Bush's response to 9/11, which they viewed as unilateralist, militaristic, and intellectually vapid. This revival of optimistic, universalist liberalism represents the peak of liberals’ post–Cold War belief in the ability of U.S. power to spread presumably universal values. The failure of the Iraq War, which many of these thinkers supported, undermined this brief project and returned liberals to a more cautious, defensive mindset.

Recent studies have shown that the punitive drug laws enacted in the mid-1970s led to a sharp increase in incarceration only in the mid-1980s, when city police departments started policing street-level drug markets much more intensively. The case study of New York City in the wake of the Rockefeller Drug Laws of 1973 presents an explanation. Only when new policing ideas, popular dissatisfaction with street crime, and the revival of the city's fiscal capacity coalesced as part of a larger project to rebuild urban governance in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s did New York turn toward street-level drug enforcement. An examination of the political history of street-level drug enforcement offers a better understanding of the history of New York's war on drugs, as well as a new chronology of the political dynamics of state rebuilding in the 1980s.

When a new strain of influenza circled the globe in the fall and winter of 1918, it swept through the United States at terrifying speed, infecting at least 25 million Americans—roughly one-quarter of the population—over the next two years. Based on any metric, the pandemic was the country's largest mass-mortality episode of the twentieth century, killing approximately 675,000 Americans and surpassing the death toll of World War I. Even as the virus struck the United States with unprecedented ferocity, however, the federal government left most public health decisions to the states, producing a disjointed and hyper-localized approach to a crisis that was national and global in scope. In the absence of a strong federal role, state governments carved out their own policy paths, adopting widely divergent strategies to stem the spread of the disease. This preventive playing field was wildly uneven. Some states were well-equipped with robust public health infrastructures; others lacked the tools to manage the disease's rampant spread.