The comic-book artist Carl Barks was one of the most-read writers during the years after the Second World War. Millions of children took in his tales of the Disney characters Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. Often set in the Global South, Barks's stories offered pointed reflections on foreign relations. Surprisingly, Barks presented a thoroughgoing critique of the main thrust of U.S. foreign policy making: the notion that the United States should intervene to improve “traditional” societies. In Barks's stories, the best that the inhabitants of rich societies can do is to leave poorer peoples alone. But Barks was not just popular; his work was also influential. High-profile baby boomers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas imbibed his comics as children. When they later produced their own creative works in the 1970s and 1980s, they drew from Barks's language as they too attacked the ideology of modernization.

From 1921 until 1936, musician Willem Van de Wall pioneered the modern use of therapeutic music in American prisons and psychiatric institutions. His therapy was steeped in the methods and philosophy of social control, and after World War II, it shaped the professionalizing field of music therapy. Van de Wall's influence reveals an overlooked connection between modern clinical practice and the techniques of control employed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals of the early twentieth century. Given music therapy's broader impact as an element of postwar self-help culture, its relationship to social control practices also disrupts longstanding scholarly ideas about the so-called “therapeutic ethos.” The therapeutic ethos did not originate solely in efforts by the middle classes to adjust to bourgeois modernity. The case of music therapy suggests that some elements of “therapeutic culture” were always coercive and always directed toward the maintenance of race, gender, and class hierarchies.

In 1967, Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kotex, hired women's marketing consultant Estelle Ellis to create and run the corporation's new sex education program. The Life Cycle Center, which opened in 1968, did not produce advertisements, but rather developed sex education curricula for public school classrooms. Its program, the Life Cycle Library, divided women's lives into distinct stages, tethering Kimberly-Clark goods and services to specific junctures of an idealized, heterosexual life. Ellis transformed the “life cycle” into a profitable, enduring marketing concept for Kimberly-Clark. She also extended the Center's influence, rendering it a research and educational authority on women's reproductive health for teachers, social scientists, government actors, and readers. Ellis's career reveals how marketers infiltrated powerful sites of institutional and public health discourse, reshaping them to fit commercial aims and intentions.

In 1968, veteran Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations J. William Fulbright summoned a series of experts to a hearing on the Vietnam War and American foreign policy. The assembled academics were not asked to examine the minutiae of U.S. strategy and tactics in Vietnam, but to grapple with a more fundamental issue—what was the nature of revolution? The participants’ testimonies interrogated the nation's revolutionary past to understand and inform their perspectives on Vietnam, the limits of U.S. power, and the contested legacies of the American Revolution. The hearings illuminated the intellectual history of an underexplored theme in U.S. foreign relations history—a marked ambivalence toward other people's revolutions, especially in the twentieth century, and the consequences of this contradictory posture for the United States's self-image and foreign policy.

In 1974, women at the New York Times made national headlines when they filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit. The drama of the court case, however, has overshadowed the formation of the Times Women's Caucus two years prior, in 1972. A focus on the Caucus, the daily labor its members undertook in the years before and after filing suit, and the behind-the-scenes negotiation of internal office politics reveals the years-long process of consciousness raising and workplace organizing required to undertake a lawsuit in this novel legal area. Activist newswomen operated with unique restrictions and necessarily distanced themselves from the feminist movement, while quietly advocating for feminist goals. Caucus members drew from the feminist, labor, and union movements strategically rather than ideologically, and laid the foundation for substantial shifts in women's participation and representation in the mainstream media.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, New York City experienced escalating crime alongside residents’ growing frustration with the inability of municipal officials and the police to curtail it. These forces led a range of New Yorkers, from those in low-income neighborhoods to those in business districts, to sidestep the police and reimagine their responses to crime. Increasingly, everyday residents formed neighborhood patrols and hired guards, while businesses and institutions employed private security forces. These developments forged a new role for private actors in the patrolling of city streets. Over time, as resident patrols waned and as security guards proliferated, the private sector gained significant new capacities to surveil and police public space. Additionally, by formalizing a cooperative relationship with private security forces, the New York police and municipal authorities captured these private resources for the expansion of the carceral state.

As the televised Watergate hearings captivated the nation during the summer of 1973, they provided innovative programming that stimulated civic activism and taught Congress about the political power of television. Both of these developments ultimately boosted the fortunes of the cable television industry. The Senate hearings, which initiated a dramatic conclusion to a presidency that redefined the place of media in American political life, served to elevate a national conversation about the role of television in politics and to catalyze, across the political spectrum, a reconsideration of the structure of the broadcast network oligopoly. The post-Watergate era provided multiple opportunities to reimagine cable TV as a tool to assert political leadership, encourage civic engagement, and govern the public.

History is a word for a certain kind of reasoning: reasoning about time, about human agency, and about material records that can provide information about humans as marked by time. For many scholars—not to mention many of those outside the academy—such reasoning is antithetical to the word religion. No matter how many books prove incontrovertibly that the authors of the Talmud engaged rigorously with Greek philosophy, or that Islamic philosophers contributed to the formation of modern scientific practice, or that evangelical readers engaged significantly with Biblical criticism, scholars of religion have not (and perhaps finally cannot) upend the common perception that religion is not a site of reasoned thought, but rather a space where reason is suspended. “Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth,” David A. Hollinger opined in response to reports about the flurry of scholarly interest in religion as an effect in the modern United States. It is a good quip, but one that portrays the historian as an axiomatically rationalist hero, swooping into medieval confusion in order to give clarifying accounts of the truth behind puzzling theologies, curious myths, and archaic rituals. Hollinger suggests that religious people or religious historians cannot do this work. Believers by his lights are not to be trusted with the reasoning history demands.

On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Afghan Taliban signed an agreement in Doha, Qatar, bringing the United States potentially closer to ending the war in Afghanistan than at any point in the conflict's eighteen-year history. After months of military escalations, negotiations, and recriminations, the United States agreed to a token withdrawal of several thousand forces by August 2020 and to remove all remaining forces by May 2021. The Afghan government had been cut out of the talks, but the United States also vowed to encourage it to release thousands of Taliban prisoners and to enter into its own negotiations with the Taliban in order to pave the way to a permanent ceasefire agreement. For its part, the Taliban agreed to negotiate with Kabul after the troop withdrawals began and to halt cooperation with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

With its annual World Happiness Report, Gallup has been ranking the feelings of different nations since 2012 (Figure 1). In the latest contest, Finland edged out Denmark for happiest nation on earth. The United States placed nineteenth. South Sudan came in last. The results are based on surveys with queries such as the following: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” and “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” Respondents also report whether they have made charitable donations, and whether they have smiled, laughed, or experienced feelings of enjoyment or happiness recently.

Most histories fail to convincingly explain why 81 percent of American white evangelical voters supported Trump in the 2016 election. Many scholars, like political pundits, hold an idealized vision of the evangelical past, which leads them to assume that “real” evangelicals are actually not so enthusiastic about the deeply anti-intellectual, frankly authoritarian, materialistic, and sexually promiscuous media personality who won the White House. The history of evangelical thought and action after all includes many examples of sensible, humane, and intellectually creative work. How could such a wholesome religious tradition as evangelical Protestantism possibly share responsibility for the political success of Donald Trump?