This article explores the programs known as Project 100,000 and Project Transition developed within the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War. Viewing them as the intersection between the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam, this article contends with how these programs were designed to serve the goals both of social uplift and crime prevention through the rehabilitation of low-IQ men via military service. The article analyzes the racialized aspects of these programs, as they were disproportionately composed of Black men, and questions the motivations behind the construction of Project 100,000 and Project Transition as a means of “transporting” America’s racial unrest abroad. At its core, the article argues that these programs were inherently at odds with the intense manpower demands of the Vietnam War and the reluctancies of military officials to properly train Project 100,000 men. The program formed another tragedy of the Vietnam era.

In the 1970s, activists in the Youth International Party transformed new technologies and techniques in the American telephone system into tools for advancing the political aims of the New Left. The Yippies adopted new practices of telephone “hacking” or “phone phreaking” and developed these practices to manipulate, defraud, and protest the AT&T Bell System. Appeals to and protests of “the system” invoked the image of a broader American state. The practice of phone phreaking bridged the technical exploitation of AT&T with critiques of monopoly capitalism, state surveillance, postwar conformity, and American empire. By the late 1970s, as the New Left faded in prominence and the Bell System was itself broken up, the vernacular of system changed. Within an emerging “computer underground” of phreaks, hackers, and users connected through electronic bulletin board systems, the Yippie vernacular of system was reinterpreted as a critique of the state in the language of ascendant conservative and libertarian politics.

Among Jewish Washingtonians, restrictive covenants that discriminated against Black and Jewish home seekers in equal measure are a recurring theme in memories about mid-twentieth-century DC, and they remain a part of that Jewish community’s collective identity. This linking of Black and Jewish experiences with discrimination is uniquely meaningful to many American Jews, and it is difficult to extricate one story from the other. This article argues that such extrication, separating Black and Jewish encounters with racial restrictive covenants, helps to reveal the specific forms and experiences of antisemitism Jewish Washingtonians encountered, as well as how and why a shared narrative about restrictive covenants does not always reflect the region’s history of racial discrimination. This article plumbs property, community, and personal records to tell a fuller story.

Following the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898, ethnic Chinese, other Asians, and almost all individuals born on U.S. soil secured the right to jus soli birthright citizenship. They could not, however, secure recognition of their citizenship without documentation, the key that linked birth to birthright. At a time when birth registration was not common, ethnic Chinese were able to establish U.S. citizenship in two main ways: through an order by a U.S. District Court or certification by U.S. immigration authorities.1 However, this documentation did not settle questions of the holder’s identity, immigration or citizenship status. Immigration inspectors generally doubted testimony given in these cases and believed that it was used to obtain fraudulent documentation of lawful immigration or citizenship status.

Birthright citizenship, as a common law principle, was a cornerstone of the American Republic at its founding.1 Like many “universal” rights at the time, it was presumed to apply to white people, routinely denied to enslaved people, and deeply contested for free people of color. After the Civil War, amid the effort to rebuild a fractured Union and answer the decades-long Black freedom struggle, Congress sought to affirm and extend the principle of birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution. In 1868, Congress recognized the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment was clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”2 This included—as the congressional record reveals—the children of immigrants regardless of race, nationality, or desirability of their parents.3

On October 7, 1888, approximately 176 Chinese passengers arrived in San Francisco aboard the S.S. Belgic. They carried laborer return certificates—documents that, until just days earlier, had guaranteed their right to reenter. But on October 1, President Grover Cleveland had signed the Scott Act into law, abruptly voiding those certificates. Officially, the act barred only Chinese laborers from returning. In practice, however, Chinese merchants and U.S.-born children of Chinese parents also traveled with laborer return certificates. They, too, would now be denied readmission.

On July 11, 1924, the Lincoln reached Angel Island, the desolate and remote location of the infamous immigration station in California. Aboard the ship were nine Chinese wives, hopeful that they would soon reunite with their spouses who had preceded them to the United States. Until then, despite harsh immigration laws, many Chinese women had been admitted to the country because they were married to noncitizen merchants or to American citizens. Building on coverture principles that a man’s care and comfort were so important that his wife’s status should follow his, Chinese husbands had often argued successfully that their right to reunite with their families took precedence over existing immigration laws, which excluded Chinese immigrants because of their race. It was these laws, they contended, that had forced many Chinese migrants into transnational marriages in the first place. Despite these precedents, the immigration officers who inspected the women on the Lincoln rejected them all, regardless of their age, education, and class.

On July 4, 1895, U.S. flags fluttered alongside red Chinese lanterns outside 753 Clay Street, the newly claimed San Francisco headquarters of the Native Sons of the Golden State (NSGS).1 Inside, NSGS president Chun Dick rose to speak. Standing at five feet two inches with short-cropped black hair, he shared that at least fifty men in NSGS were birthright citizens and ready to vote, and that more Chinese American voters would follow.2 Chun Dick, members of the Chinese community in attendance, their guests, and journalists in the room reflected a new political reality: Chinese American children, born in the United States, were coming of age and claiming a place in U.S. politics. Chinese immigrants constituted the largest racial minority in the state, and while many were ineligible to vote, their children who could were organizing to do so. Therefore, this moment on July 4 in San Francisco marked a turning point.

When Congress debated the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chinese immigration was not at the forefront of legislators’ minds. They were primarily focused on granting citizenship to newly emancipated Black people while continuing to deny it to Native people living outside of America’s jurisdiction. Their ultimate choice of words reflected these desires. The first sentence of the amendment proclaimed, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”1

When Vietnamese refugees came to the Gulf Coast they were attracted to the region, in part, because of the fishing industry. But their entry into the fishery created friction with white fishers who had fished those waters for years. This friction would result in violence. This article anchors this history in the marine environment of coastal Texas. Many white fishers objected to Vietnamese resettlement because of how the Vietnamese fished. Local fishers had, for years, worried about the fisheries given decades of overfishing and pollution. In this context, white fishers weaponized these very real anxieties to argue that the Vietnamese were a threat to the coastal ecosystem. This threat the Vietnamese supposedly posed to these waters, along with the racism and xenophobia of white fishers, accounted for the depth of division and the degree of violence along the coast of Texas during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This study charts the ineffective vigilante violence perpetrated by growers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to suppress farmworker activism from the mid-to-late 1970s and their abrupt shift in tactics with a 1980 strike in Hereford, Texas, toward the adoption of strictly nonviolent and tediously legalistic new methods associated with the neoconservative backlash. It does so in two major sections. In the first, grower violence is chronicled in detail that underscores both its rage and ineffectiveness. The second section shows how the New Right usurped the longstanding usage of physical violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas, prompting conservatives to flock to the Republican banner due to the party’s ability to deliver on the New Right’s designs of defeating the cultural liberalism embodied by the civil rights movement of previous decades.

This article explores the reactions of white U.S. elite travelers to the greater Caribbean in the Gilded Age and progressive era. Focusing on the tropical port system that was the center of the region’s commodity export trade and simultaneously a center of visitor transit, it explores how visitors’ negative reactions, especially of disgust, fed into the politics of race and empire by attributing the effects of rapid globalization to non-white autonomy in the region.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution reverberated the world over. As many scholars have shown, Maoism, an amorphous body of ideas originating from Chairman Mao Zedong, fed into different facets of the U.S. New Left, becoming one of the most powerful political forces in the 1960s. This article examines the fragmentation of U.S. Maoism in the 1970s to further illuminate the relationship between Mao’s China and its devout followers in the heartland of capitalism. As Sino-American “rapprochement” unfolded, U.S. Maoists travelled to China in droves to learn the essence of Mao’s revolution and replicate their own back home. They sought to build a united front party modeled after the Chinese Communist Party, while debating the “correct” line that their party should follow, an ideological altercation that fueled factional tension. Drawing on an array of U.S. and Chinese sources, this article argues that the quest for unity and struggle, the core tenet of Maoism, precipitated its downfall in the United States.

In the post-World War II period, as they faced a spate of prison riots and rising concerns about juvenile delinquency, many states set up penal forestry camps. Portrayed as a progressive step that would make incarcerated people fit for freedom through healthy work in natural settings, forestry camps also promised to contribute to the public good by fulfilling the forests’ manpower needs. At a moment when outdoor leisure was increasingly popular, the work of incarcerated workers helped create infrastructures that would make forests accessible to visitors. Using primarily the case of Washington state, this article shows how and why incarcerated people became a material and ideological resource for the state. It also shows how official discourse about forestry camps clashed with material and human realities on the ground.

The Supreme Court issued its first decision on affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. Like most conflicts about civil rights in this era, the fight over affirmative action is presumed to involve primarily Black and White Americans. But Bakke cannot be understood without including Latino participants in the origin story. During the 1970s, Latinos’ rates of university enrollment increased more than those of any other group, especially in California, where the case originated. So when Bakke’s legal challenge threatened that access, Latino lawyers, students, and higher education advocates collaborated on a strategic defense of affirmative action. They drafted legal briefs, formed regional and national committees, and took to the streets. First in California and then in the East and Midwest, Latinos worked to shape the national discussion over the value of affirmative action and to protect their hard-won gains in higher education.

How did activists on the colonial “margins” of the United States and the domestic environmental movement fight environmental battles? And how did these contests relate to the politics of decolonization? This article takes up these questions through a comparative exploration of two environmental movements at opposite ends of the U.S. overseas colonial empire during the 1970s. In Puerto Rico and Palau, plans for two petroleum “superports” threatened massive environmental destruction in service of state programs of energy security and industrialization. This article examines how Puerto Rican and Palauan activists developed novel environmental critiques and movement strategies to oppose them. Through an examination of these two anti-superport movements, this article reveals the innovative ways that activists waged environmental campaigns from the colonial “periphery” of both the U.S. polity and its domestic environmental movement.

In the 1970s, deindustrialization and urban decay forced national, state, and local policymakers to focus more intensely on public-private partnerships as mechanisms of economic regeneration. This approach to postindustrial regeneration intersected with a rising generation of liberal politicians: labeled variously “Atari Democrats,” “neoliberals,” or “New Democrats,” they sought to orient the Democratic Party towards market-friendly politics. This intersection was evinced in the regeneration of Lowell, Massachusetts, a city dealing with decades-long industrial decline. Contrary to narratives that emphasize public-private partnerships only as instruments of privatization, however, Lowell’s experience exemplified how successful regeneration required an expanded role for the state: this article reinserts the “public” into “public-private partnership.” Excavating this reality in Lowell’s heretofore understudied history also demonstrates that New Liberals’ market-friendly political posture obscured deeper policy continuity with twentieth-century liberalism. Far from emerging locked into an ideological embrace of “neoliberalism,” the New Liberals sought to reimagine liberalism’s commitment to developmentalism.

With the oil crises of the 1970s as a backdrop, this article explores the oil industry’s efforts to present its own interests as aligned with those of future generations in order to justify state disinvestment and environmental deregulation. Although histories of neoliberalism’s cultural dimensions have typically been treated as distinct from scholarship on the oil industry’s anti-environmental campaigns, this article bridges these histories’ intersections in the 1970s. Using Mobil Oil as a case study, I focus on three venues of address—advertising, television sponsorship, and education—to analyze how the industry naturalized its role in American life in a moment in which energy consumption and corporate power were called into question. By promoting its investments in children and families, Mobil bolstered its reputation as a socially responsible corporation committed to the public good. Ultimately, I argue that the oil industry participated in constructing “cultures of privatization,” sidelining alternate visions of economic redistribution.

In winter of 1900, the famed nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton lived briefly in a log cabin built in the middle of the National Zoological Park, located just north of the White House. The small lodging was placed between the muddied bison paddocks and the denuded deer and antelope yards.

Sometimes male ostriches emit a low guttural sound that sounds strangely like a lion. On the plains in South Africa, these sounds aimed at female ostriches might confuse an unknowing listener. But on a ship bound from South Africa to Galveston, Texas in February 1887, these lion-esque sounds would not have been heard. Instead, as these dozens of ostriches crossed the Atlantic, their vocalizations were probably a quiet chirp, despite each bird weighing well over 100 pounds. Each ostrich had a more solitary existence on the ship than they had experienced in the wild or on a South African farm. On the Atlantic, they lived in single padded stalls near the middle of the hold, with paddocks between the stalls to offer some exercise and perhaps some interaction among the birds.1