In the first half of the twentieth century, debt played an unexpectedly large role in shaping public views of American foreign relations. Debt—specifically, the public debt of other sovereign states—seems far removed from the everyday experience of Americans seeking credit from butchers and grocers or, in the global arena, decidedly dull in contrast to headlines about wars and assassinations. Yet if articles in thousands of local newspapers are an indicator, before World War I millions of Americans had been exposed to detailed coverage of the problematic indebtedness of the nearer nations of Latin America. To engaged readers in every corner of the United States, the financial entanglements of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras must have been a familiar trope—a sign of weakness if not immorality—and, as the policy of Dollar Diplomacy emerged after 1904, a harbinger of U.S. intervention.

Firearms and ballistics are at the center of public debate in the United States today. They are technologies that are associated both with danger (in the form of gun violence) and safety (in the form of claims that firearms offer personal protection). This essay explores our understanding of the role of gun rights in American society through history: an issue which recent Supreme Court rulings have moved to the forefront of political debates in the face of efforts to regulate firearms and stem the tide of gun violence in the United States.

#BankBlack. #BuyBlack. In the wake of deadly police murders of unarmed Black women and men, calls for greater investment in Black business emerged as one panacea for the myriad divisions rending the very flesh of the American promise. In July 2016, hip-hop artist and business owner Michael “Killer Mike” Render issued a call to action days after the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “We owe them our outrage,” he stressed in a call-in to a town hall meeting sponsored by cable television channels MTV and BET and hosted by a popular local Atlanta radio station. “But,” he countered, “we don't have to burn our city down.” Instead of burning, he challenged 1 million people to open a 100-dollar account at a Black bank. Days following Killer Mike's call to “bank Black,” about 8,000 Atlanteans opened accounts in Citizens Trust Bank, a Black-owned bank started in 1921. Riding a catchy hashtag and waves of discontent, the #BankBlack movement quickly spread beyond Atlanta. In less than a year, people around the world moved an estimated $60 million into Black-owned banks.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court handed down a decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which dismantled a fundamental right to choose abortion. A line of Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1920s recognized unenumerated liberties related to parenting, marriage, and contraception tied to the constitutional right to privacy. Almost half a century ago, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared that this constitutional right to privacy was broad enough to encompass the right to terminate a pregnancy. The Dobbs decision reversed Roe and disparaged the right to abortion in the strongest terms: the decision recognizing it was “egregiously wrong” and “on a collision course with the Constitution.”

Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley was one of many progressive Democrats denouncing student debt as a “multigenerational, multiracial injustice” in the new millennium. She joined researchers, activists, and frustrated borrowers in pointing out that federal student loan programs disproportionately left people of color, especially women, drowning in college debt.

In May 1990, in the first case of its kind, the National Gay Rights Advocates (NGRA) secured a California court judgment prohibiting an insurance company from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Great Republic Insurance Company had been using a supplemental questionnaire to screen out “occupations that do not require physical exertion … such as florists, interior decorators, and fashion designers,” as well as to use applicants’ marital status, “living arrangements,” and medical history to assess the likely risk of their exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) when denying health care coverage.1 That same year, Moblization for Youth (MFY) Legal Services in New York filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of women living with HIV who had been denied access to Social Security benefits because the government did not recognize their HIV-related conditions as qualifying for state health care coverage under the Medicaid program.2 In one sense, the cases were starkly different: one sought to protect the privately insured from discriminatory scrutiny on the basis of their sexuality while the other attempted to bring a protected class of people into public view to make a claim to health care. Yet both reveal an important truth about the concept of rights in an American context. The structure of the U.S. health care system, one based on private insurance for most and a threadbare, convoluted system of categorical assistance and public insurance for children, the disabled, and the elderly, has shaped Americans’ experience of their own sexuality and bodily autonomy in ways arguably unique to the United States. The public/private hybrid in health care has dramatically curtailed the capacity of those outside the heteronormative family structure to realize their demands for full equality in the wake of the rights revolutions. Efforts to secure a right to sexual or gender identity have foundered on the rocks of the health care system when faced, for example, with a public health crisis like HIV or a lack of health insurance plans willing to fund gender-affirming health care.

This essay argues that historical scholarship has taken an infrastructural turn in recent years. “Infrastructure” serves not just as a popular keyword in monographs and journal articles; it reflects a new approach to research that has permeated the field. An infrastructural approach offers a framework for historians to understand the power of traditional structures like the state and the economy in ways that accommodate transnational interconnections, technology, and the stubborn materiality of the phenomena under study. This essay analyzes why scholars have embraced the term recently, and it outlines the basic components of an infrastructural orientation. It concludes by considering the blind spots of an infrastructural approach, as well as directions for future scholarship.

In January 1918, Teddy Brown from Fairbanks, Alaska, was coming home. As he entered the house, the ten-year-old boy slammed the door shut, stormed into the living room, and demanded that his parents put on their coats. Teddy solemnly proclaimed that he had heard harrowing stories about French children's sufferings and wanted to contribute a weekly donation of seventy-five cents in order to help “a brother” in France. After listening to his pleas, Teddy's parents eventually came to endorse his chosen mission. The family left the house, venturing out into the sub-zero temperatures, and headed to the local committee of the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS). By the time Teddy made his commitment, thousands of other American children had already “adopted” orphans in France.

Early on in her often moving new book, Queer Career, Margot Canaday quotes from an oral history interview she conducted in New York in 2012, at the very beginning of her research. The participant, an African American gay man, recalled his entry into the working world: “I was a typist, and I wanted to type.” The sentence provides early evidence for one of the major findings of the book, that before gay liberation, many queer and trans people chose lower-paying jobs in office and service work because it allowed for greater flexibility to pursue a sexual and social life outside of their job, and because there was less to lose if you were arrested. But Canaday also slows down to parse not just the speaker's words but also his intonation. As Canaday recalls, “[H]e didn't just state this; he joyfully exclaimed it: ‘I was a typist,’ his voice rose, ‘and I wanted to type!’” (19).

Queer Career opens with a reflection on work's contradictions. While jobs impose discipline and mandate conformity, workers also hope to find fulfillment and express their individuality while on the clock. Labor force segmentation mirrors social disparities, but workplaces are also sites where diverse people converge and collaborate. The tensions in this abstracted meditation—between exploitation and authenticity, between domination and subjectivity—ground the book's historical analysis and shape the tools Margot Canaday brings to the job. There is much to say about Queer Career's interventions as a history of gender, sexuality, law, and social movements. Still, its most revelatory innovations are as a model of what Canaday terms “an affective labor history” (19).

Margot Canaday offers this new book as a kind of continuation of her classic 2009 study on the bureaucratic persecution of gays, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century. Rather than government documents, Queer Career draws on more than 150 oral histories of subjects recalling employment memories and complaints, as well as her signature exhaustion of the secondary sources.