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.

On the cratered surface of the moon, a small stainless steel plaque commemorates the remarkable visit made by “men from the planet earth” who “came in peace for all mankind” in the summer of 1969. It bears the name of the three men who made the journey, Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins. And it features the name of one man who did not: President Richard M. Nixon.

From Oliver North's congressional testimony in 1987 to his near-successful Senate run in 1994, this article assesses the significance of the Iran-Contra scandal to the American domestic political landscape. It positions Iran-Contra at a transitional moment in right-wing politics, torn between loyalty to Reagan on one hand and the combativeness of the 1990s’ New Right on the other. In four stages—denial, fame, fundraising, and forgetting—defenders of North set forth a model of how ascendant forces in the New Right would, post-Reagan, transform scandal into political capital. Iran-Contra provided grist for media outlets that demonized the mainstream media, voters and members of Congress who excused criminality, and two White Houses who longed to forgive and forget. Thus can the historiography of American conservatism, currently in full bloom, begin to reckon with Iran-Contra's place in domestic politics.

A new generation of liberals emerged in the 1970s, a decade of stagflation, deindustrialization, global capital flight, and public sector fiscal crises. Prevailing interpretations of New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis explain their emphasis on entrepreneurialism and post-industrial sectors as the byproduct of cynical electoral strategies of “triangulation,” that is, primarily as a reaction to the rise of Reagan Republicanism. This article instead positions their political economy as part of a much longer history of liberals’ efforts to restructure the economy in order to stimulate new jobs and tax revenues that might also generate public revenue and support a progressive policy agenda. With roots in local, state, and regional industrial policies inspired by the New Deal, “supply-side liberalism” reemerged with force in the 1970s and 1980s, revealing heretofore unappreciated continuities that contextualize and clarify the origins of New Democrats’ promotion of a set of seemingly “neoliberal” economic policies.

On July 15, 1969, while more than one million space enthusiasts flocked to Florida's Cape Canaveral to celebrate the final countdown of the Apollo 11 launch the following day, a less festive gathering took place just a few miles away in an empty field outside the western gate of the Kennedy Space Center. On one side of the clearing stood NASA's chief, Thomas O. Paine, with several space agency administrators, while at the other end waited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) president, Ralph Abernathy, with twenty-five poor African American families, four scruffy mules pulling two rickety wagons, and, much to Paine's dismay, a phalanx of newspaper reporters and television news crews. When Abernathy's group began slowly marching hand-in-hand singing “We Shall Overcome,” Paine and his entourage walked forward to meet them in the middle of the field. Abernathy then took a microphone, nodded toward the Apollo 11 rocket towering in the distance, and explained that his Poor People's Campaign had not traveled to the cape to protest the Apollo launch, but instead to demonstrate against the country's distorted sense of national priorities. “I want NASA scientists,” he explained to the gathered press, “to tackle problems we face in society”.

“Do you think that whenever I'm talking to someone I'm conscious of whether or not he is ‘white’ or ‘colored’? … I was born a ‘native,’ and I've lived with racial discrimination. But we are free now. I'm no longer a ‘native’ but an Indonesian…. I don't feel inferior to whites, and I don't hate them either,” Sitor Situmorang, a preeminent Indonesian poet and essayist, told African American writer Richard Wright at an April 1955 social gathering in Wright's honor. Growing more agitated, Situmorang raised his voice and continued, “We are against colonialism, but we are not against whites. We struggled for racial equality, not for the belief in another superrace, a colored superrace.”

I am delighted to have an opportunity to reflect on Paul Kramer's rich and highly influential “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World.” Since its publication in 2011, “Power and Connection” has been a cornerstone of my graduate U.S. in the World classes and has been invoked in every graduate qualifying exam. The essay has had a direct and indirect influence on the wave of innovative scholarship that has been produced in the past decade. I first want to note some of the essay's important interventions. Then, rather than attempting to extend or update Kramer's extensive historiographical review, I want to think with “Power and Connection” by taking up two of Kramer's suggestions and discussions. First, I take up his suggestion to think about imperial power through a Gramscian frame of domination and consent, arguing that the concept of hegemonic struggle is critical for thinking about power within empires and shifts in global imperial formations. Second, I engage Kramer's discussion of the relationship between imperial and transnational histories, arguing that scholars need to consider transnationalism as a highly specific and contingent political formation, as well as an analytic category and sometimes actors' category.

In 2011, Paul Kramer published a review essay titled “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the US in the World.” Thick with conceptual language and historiographical references, the piece is clearly pointed toward a professional audience. Yet beneath its heavy academic garb lay an urgent practical matter. Americanists, Kramer contended, needed to get outside of their innocent nationalistic space and take up the burden of the “imperial” category. And they needed to do so consistently – not conveniently, as a political cry against the declining virtue of the republic.

In 1974, Congresswoman Bella Abzug introduced the Equality Act, the first federal gay rights legislation. A high-profile ally, Abzug occupied a unique space in the gay rights movement, and the Equality Act cemented her as the premier political intermediary for gay rights. Owing to her prominence, Abzug attracted a geographically and ideologically diverse constituency of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans. Gay activists as well as isolated individuals reached out to Abzug as a conduit for their grievances and political hopes, and her support unified gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans around a national focal point at a time when the movement was fractured and regional. In the period after Stonewall, Abzug was gay liberation's most meaningful national intermediary. Routinely undervalued in the history of the gay rights movement, Abzug's legislative advocacy reveals the centrality of political allyship within the struggle for equality.

This article explores some of the less obvious and even surprising repercussions of September 11th. To do so, it draws on an online archive of more than 12,000 emails sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in response to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Just eleven days after September 11th, Congress created the fund for the express purpose of preventing victims’ families from suing the airlines. After the act passed, the DOJ solicited public comments and posted them to its website, and from the start, the tone was combative. This essay focuses on two especially acrimonious issues: first, gay rights and the recognition of same-sex partnerships and, second, economic inequality and populist anti-elitism. Taken together, the emails showcase how September 11th precipitated fundamental and divisive debates on who deserved the nation's largesse.

The history of the Social Security Amendments of 1967 illuminates the contours of fiscal citizenship. This watershed law created both work requirements for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients and new policy instruments, including federal child support enforcement, to compel poor men to fulfill their financial obligations to their families. Welfare reformers claimed that such changes were necessary to protect the rights of taxpayers against the “criminal” predations of welfare recipients. These policy changes initiated in 1967 redefined poor women's non-work, as well as their sexual and reproductive decisions, as crimes against taxpayers. Welfare recipients contested this logic and the policies that flowed from it by insisting on the value of their own domestic labor and rejecting a narrow view of taxpaying citizenship. The resolution of these questions played a critical role in revising the American social contract.

The fate of caring labor was up for grabs in the 1970s, when Americans debated how to value feminized work—paid or unpaid, professional or service-oriented, performed in one's own home or beyond it—as women's social roles shifted. President Richard Nixon and his allies proposed reassigning caregiving functions to volunteers as a way to resist new demands on the welfare state and shrug off unmet social needs. Although many women's groups objected, their varied approaches to feminized labors also kept them from forging a united response. Recovering these volunteering wars offers up a vital perspective on the conflict between postwar movements advancing broad rights claims and the New Right's frontal assault on the “undeserving.” Manipulating notions of benevolence, Nixon and his associates found new ways to puncture the social safety net—a process that political leaders from both major parties would emulate and accelerate.

Typically understood only within the cultural history of the post–World War II folk music revival, documentarian Alan Lomax's “Cantometrics” research and artist Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of American Music also deserve to be positioned within the broader Cold War–era rise of the digital computer and tactics of computation in American society. Linking what Ross Cole describes as the “folkloric imagination” to what we might call the Cold War “computational imagination,” Lomax and Smith each examined folk music not through conventional ethnographic or musicological modes, but rather through computational lenses of data analysis, systems theory, informatics, and cybernetics. Both sought to expand cultural democracy by doing so, carrying Popular Front ideals into the postwar milieu while also presaging dilemmas found in today's fraught context of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the application of digital technologies to almost all aspects of human culture.

The media outlets usually identified as building blocks of New Right are niche ideological journals (such as National Review) and radio broadcasts. As crucial as these outlets were, other mainstream publications propagating similar ideas had a far greater reach—foremost among them the New York Daily News, the highest-circulation newspaper in the country. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Daily News espoused a conservative populism further right than National Review, binding its readers into a community based on anti-elitism and white working-class identity.

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.

The twentieth century saw unprecedented efforts to measure, analyze, and control the world's population. Particularly after World War II, population control and demography—the social science of human population dynamics—developed in tandem and largely through the impetus of U.S.-based philanthropies. This article explains how U.S. actors exercised power over population in sovereign nations throughout the Global South and how demographic theory came to shape population policy worldwide. It contends that U.S.-based philanthropies gained global traction for their population control projects by developing demography as an ally and then leveraging its scientific authority to put population control on the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government and on the nation-building and economic development agendas of countries in the Global South.

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.

Memorial Day 2023 was a significant moment in twenty-first-century U.S. military history. Although U.S. service members remained deployed around the world and Operation Inherent Resolve continues to target the Islamic State (in April 2023, the U.S. military and its partners executed thirty-five missions against ISIS in Iraq and Syria alone), this year's celebrations came six weeks after the U.S. Senate repealed the two-decade-old Authorization for the Use of Military Force that had made possible the 2003 invasion of Iraq.1 It was also only the second Memorial Day since U.S. troops left Afghanistan, abruptly and somewhat disastrously, in August 2021. As a result, the holiday was arguably the first in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be understood as having transitioned from “current events” to events whose legacies Americans were beginning to imagine and define.