In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of the development of U.S. power in the Pacific, some American Protestants began to articulate a new approach to Catholicism and American national identity. In Southern California, Anglo-American boosters began to celebrate the region's history of Spanish Franciscan missions, preserving and restoring existing mission buildings while selling a romantic mission story to tourists and settlers. In the Philippines, U.S. imperial officials, journalists, and popular writers tempered widespread critiques of contemporary Spanish friars, celebrating the friars' early missionary precursors as civilizing heroes and arguing that Filipino Catholic faith and clerical authority could aid in the maintenance of imperial order. Against persistent currents of anti-Catholicism and in distinct and locally contingent ways, American Protestants joined Catholics in arguing that the United States needed to evolve beyond parochial religious bigotries. In both places, in popular events and nationally circulating publications, the celebration of particular constructions of Catholic histories and authority figures served to reinforce U.S. continental expansion and transoceanic empire.

During the Progressive Era, bob veal, the meat of calves slaughtered at younger than four weeks of age, was incorrectly believed to be poisonous, and its sale was prohibited in areas across the United States. Yet a thriving underground trade persisted. This article studies bob veal's prohibition in Progressive Era New York City to understand where the meat was coming from, how it reached diners' tables, and who was eating it. I argue that bob veal's consumers, many of whom were recent immigrants and the urban poor, recognized the meat was benign. In examining the prohibition's failure, this article studies the politics of regulation and policing. For the ban's advocates, the language and assumptions of the broader pure food and public health movements were simultaneously empowering and constraining, giving reformers a political language to build institutional support for the prohibition and helping journalists sell newspapers even as this language required effacing the complexity of the bob veal trade. From the perspective of bob veal's many producers, smugglers, and consumers, this article highlights how a diffuse social power—a politics on the ground—can trump formal authority.

Jewish women played important roles in many aspects of the birth control movement, as activists, consumers, and distributors. Yet just as the legal system was not yet sure what to make of contraception, neither was the American Jewish community. While hundreds of thousands of Jewish women clearly limited their family size, both ambivalence toward birth control and pockets of outright opposition also persisted. This essay briefly examines the developments in the birth control movement during the pivotal year of 1916 in which Jewish women played important roles. The essay then turns to analysis of two Yiddish plays on the topic written that year. Neither play has ever before been translated in full. Because the Yiddish theater was a central American Jewish cultural institution, the production of plays on the subject of birth control in 1916 dramatized the importance of the issue within the American Jewish community. Though the plays quite possibly loom larger in retrospect than they did at the time and are notable more for content than literary merit, they nonetheless provide a critical lens through which to explore the complex relationship between American Jewry and the birth control movement.

Between 1915 and 1925, Harvard University conducted the first national public fund-raising campaign in higher education in the United States. At the same time, Harvard Law School attempted the first such effort in legal education. The law school organized its effort independently, in conjunction with its centennial in 1917. The university campaign succeeded magnificently by all accounts; the law school failed miserably. Though perfectly positioned for this new venture, Harvard Law School raised scarcely a quarter of its goal from merely 2 percent of its alumni. This essay presents the first account of this campaign and argues that its failure was rooted in longstanding cultural and professional objections that many of the school's alumni shared: law students and law schools neither need nor deserve benefactions, and such gifts worsen the overcrowding of the bar. Due to these objections, lethargy, apathy, and pessimism suffused the campaign. These factors weakened the leadership of the alumni association, the dean, and the president, leading to inept management, wasted time, and an unlikely strategy that was pursued ineffectively. All this doomed the campaign, particularly given the tragic interruptions of the dean's suicide and World War I, along with competition from the well-run campaigns for the University and for disaster relief due to the war.