This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller, One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered a universal view of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial power contested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial power obscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour from One World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.

This article presents an intellectual and social history of the concept of the baby boom. Researchers first invented the notion of a population bulge in the mid-twentieth-century United States to explain birth rates that were higher than predicted by their theories of a mature population and economy. As the children born during this “baby boom” entered schools in the 1950s, they were drawn into a pre-existing conversation about an educational emergency that confirmed researchers’ suspicions that the bulge would spread crisis over time throughout all of the nation's age-graded institutions. New sociological and demographic explanations of the bulge subsequently merged with heightened talk of generational conflict during the 1960s and 1970s to define, with journalistic help in 1980, the “baby boom generation” and the “baby boomer.” Crisis talk has pursued the boomers into the present, mobilized most effectively by opponents of the welfare state.

This article examines the Amway Corporation, one of the largest direct sales companies in the world, and its founders, Republican kingmakers Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel. It argues that Amway and its cofounders embodied small-business conservatism, an ideology that simultaneously critiqued government largesse and corporate capitalism, viewing both as threats to individual freedom. Beginning in the 1970s, DeVos and Van Andel became involved in the conservative effort to promote free enterprise and roll back government. At the same time, Amway and its allies presented direct sales as a more rewarding and liberating alternative to traditional, nine-to-five employment. This history highlights the important role that small-business conservatives played in the Right's campaign against the New Deal state between the 1930s and the 1980s.

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of work on Marcus Garvey, Garveyism, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the American academy. Building on a first wave of Garveyism scholarship (1971–1988), and indebted to the archival and curatorial work of Robert A. Hill and the editors of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, this new work has traced the resonance of Garveyism across a staggering number of locations: from the cities and farms of North America to the labor compounds and immigrant communities of Central America to the colonial capitals of the Caribbean and Africa. It has pushed the temporal dimensions of Garveyism, connecting it backward to pan-African and black nationalist discourses and mobilizations as early as the Age of Revolution, and forward to the era of decolonization and Black Power. It has revealed the ways that Garveyism, a mass movement rooted in community aspirations, ideals, debates, and prejudices, offers a forum for excavating African diasporic discourses, particularly their contested gender politics. It has revealed that much more work remains to be done in Brazil, West Africa, Britain, France, and elsewhere.

Don Quixote is remembered as a dreamer, but he was, in the first instance for his creator, a cautionary tale about the bewitching danger of reading fiction. When Cervantes wrote what is considered to be the first modern novel, he did so having witnessed the explosion of printed texts thanks to the invention of the printing press, and his story chronicles what happens to hapless readers who are sucked into the dreamy world of fiction's unreality. Poor Don Quixote envisioned himself as a swashbuckling knight like those in the chivalric stories he consumed, and his metastasized imagination got him into heaps of trouble. He mistook inns for castles, flocks of sheep for advancing armies, and, most memorably, windmills for giants. Cervantes did not just give readers a unique portrait of an outlandish, romantic, and impractical schemer—he also inspired the word “quixotic” to describe others like him.