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.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. newspapers began to address women specifically in separate sections, hoping to gather a female audience for advertisers. Scholarship on early twentieth-century women consumers tends to emphasize possibility and self-expression. Women’s reactions to the first women’s pages, by contrast, indicate that they could feel constrained and condescended to when welcomed into the public sphere on the basis of being consumers. Readers and journalists aired their grievances about the women’s page in its first decades, and sometimes found ways to use the page to their own ends. But publishers carried on designing women’s features with advertisers in mind. By the 1920s, the women’s page had become visually seductive, didactic, domestic, and relentlessly consumerist. This article uses the women’s page to investigate the rise of ad-subsidized media in the twentieth century and to weigh up the opportunities and costs of this media system.

This article examines the role played by comic books in justifying the Korean War to adolescent readers in the United States. Specifically, it argues that romance comics—perhaps the most widely read youth publications of the early 1950s—helped to prepare teenaged girls for the trials and tribulations that an emerging Cold War would entail. Love-themed comic books dealt with issues like dating and marriage at a time of mass mobilization and international political emergency, and in doing so, attempted to redefine the meaning of courtship and sexual maturity during a new era of permanent national security crisis. By studying this enormously influential literary genre, we gain important insight into both the popular cultural dimension of a “forgotten war,” as well as a richer appreciation of the ways in which girls have been asked to make their own sacrifices on the altar of American military preparedness.

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.

This article examines a contentious, failed unionization drive among 140 Latino cemetery workers in the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles between 1988 and 1991. In exploring the bitter fight between Archbishop (later Cardinal) Roger Mahony and the workers and their hopeful union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), this piece centers the voices of cemetery workers as they fought for dignity and a recognition of the spiritual and human significance of their labors within an increasingly commodified and corporatized cemetery industry. These workers’ struggle also highlights important, but underexplored, twin transformations in American labor, faith politics, and culture in the late twentieth century: intensifying unionization efforts at religious institutions (such as cemeteries, schools, and hospitals) and an attendant fracturing and remaking of labor-Catholic alliances.

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.

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.

From 1951 to 1976, the United States National Labor Relations Board enforced a policy of union exemption, analogous to tax exemption, which categorically dismissed union petitions from workplaces deemed to have a charitable purpose. Controversies over the nonprofit sector’s place in American society during the twentieth century are well-known, but most historical analysis of this topic focuses on its political influence. Union exemption and its reversal demonstrate that the nonprofit sector’s economic status was contested too: employees, executives, and policy makers wrestled with the relationship of institutions that carried out the work of social reproduction to the structures of the postwar economy. Union exemption rested on an assumption that nonprofits and the work they did were naturally sequestered from commercial life. Its reversal signified a shift, driven by mobilizations of nonprofit employees and elite philanthropists alike, to a view of nonprofits as a “third sector” inextricably embedded in commercial life.

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.

Starting in late September 1872, horses started falling ill with a severe respiratory complaint in the countryside about a dozen miles north of Toronto, Ontario. Veterinary experts swiftly diagnosed the malady, which paralyzed street transportation, commerce, and everyday life in Toronto itself during the first weeks of October, as influenza. Over the next year, an equine plague that most contemporaries referred to as the epizootic—and which I call the Great Horse Flu in the book I am completing on this outbreak—spread throughout southern Canada, every reach of the United States, and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. The novel influenza virus responsible for this outbreak sickened between ninety and ninety-nine percent of horses, donkeys, and mules across this vast swath of the northern Americas.1 Our best guess is that the Great Horse Flu killed between one and four percent of the equines it afflicted—a case fatality rate roughly not unlike those recorded by the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1920 and the COVID Pandemic. In less than a year, an estimated 112,500 to 554,000 horses and ponies perished alongside tens or hundreds of thousands of mules and donkeys.2

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

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.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon is one of the best-known cautionary tales in American environmental history. At one time, between three and five billion passenger pigeons blanketed the skies over central and eastern North America. Passenger pigeons were swift (they could fly as fast as sixty miles per hour) and gregarious (in the winter, thousands would roost together on a single tree, occasionally causing limbs to break beneath their weight). They survived primarily on the beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts found in the mixed hardwood forests of the eastern United States. Between 1810 and 1867, Americans destroyed much of that habitat, clearing 200,000 square miles of woodlands (an area equal to the size of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin combined). The passenger pigeon was also tasty, which is why between about 1870 and 1900, market hunters reduced what remained of the population to only a few dozen. The last of the species, named Martha by its keepers, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Even more than the North American bison, a few hundred of whom survived the hide hunters who slaughtered millions of them in the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, the passenger pigeon’s story exemplifies the wastefulness and shortsightedness of Americans’ exploitation of animals in the early years of industrial capitalism.

Two of the world’s greatest boxers—Muhammad Ali of Louisville, KY and George Foreman of Houston, TX—met for the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. With concerts by the African American “Godfather of Soul” James Brown and South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” the entwining tones of the U.S. civil rights era and anti-Apartheid movement augmented a cultural moment that displayed Pan-African, Black nationalist, and anti-imperial connections. However, the appearance of an insidious symbol from each aforementioned era is what decidedly swayed the local population against Foreman and for Ali.1

In a private 1972 report to the Director of the National Park Service, Jack Anderson, Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, confessed that “we are apprehensive that their proposal would ultimately end up with the complete slaughter of all bison, as occurred on the Crow Indian Reservation.”1 For decades, livestock producers at the local and national level pressured park officials to eliminate a specific disease—brucellosis caused by Brucella abortus—from Yellowstone’s buffalo herds. Following World War II, governments targeted this bacterial contagion in American domestic and wild animal populations to improve public health and livestock producers’ profits. Symptoms of brucellosis, which humans can catch from other mammalian hosts, vary across species. For domestic cattle, it can cause spontaneous abortions and, in rare cases, death. Buffalo seem largely unaffected by brucellosis but for humans, the bacterial infection can cause a plethora of chronic and debilitating symptoms.2