Six weeks after the United States entered World War II, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking if he thought Organized Baseball should continue during the war. FDR responded the next day with his famous Green Light Letter, basically saying yes. Although this simple decision has been amply covered by scholars, its complex consequences have not. During the course of the war, more than a dozen executive agencies were called on to deal with practical aspects of the Green Light letter decision including the Selective Service; the Office of Defense Transportation; the War Mobilization Commission; the Office of War Mobilization; and the departments of war, treasury, and agriculture.

Our thesis is that the degree of permissible interaction between government and religion and its policy implications is most strikingly documented in the educational arena. To support our claim, we make three arguments: (1) by the early 1970s, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and other states were experimenting with accommodationist policies in education that neither increased religious divisiveness nor denied religious freedom. These policy experiments contributed to the Supreme Court’s new understanding of religious accommodation under the First Amendment; (2) beginning in the late 1970s, a scholarly reappraisal of the establishment clause—based on a close reading of the debates over the First Amendment in Congress and the states—was demonstrating that reasonable governmental accommodations, particularly in education, would not violate the establishment clause; and (3) that periodizing the establishment clause’s history, by focusing on state-level innovations and scholarly reinterpretations, enhances the understanding of the policy developments of the First Amendment, particularly in the educational field.

Between 2021 and 2025, national media gave attention to federal court cases and legislation that established new policies for increasing the compensation of college athletes. Foremost was “NIL,” acronym for the “Name-Image-Likeness” payment guidelines. Although NIL was hailed as a “whole new ball game” for students as paid athletes, our research tempers news coverage by drawing from historical findings about trends and traditions in college sports practices and policies. Compensation and commercialization in American intercollegiate athletics—and issues of the rights of college students and the governance of college sports—have been central to intercollegiate athletics from their founding to the present. An enduring legacy is an “American Dilemma” in the balancing of academic and business principles in the education of collegiate student athletes and conduct of varsity sports programs.

This essay examines the Army’s efforts to cultivate and gain congressional support for the GI Bill in the 1980s. Focusing on the relationship between Representative Sonny Montgomery, senior Army leaders like Maxwell R. Thurman and Robert Elton, and the staffers who worked for each of them, it illustrates the intentionality with which Army leaders worked to cultivate congressional support for and to head off congressional and presidential opposition to a bill that they saw as essential. Analyzing their public and private efforts at critical moments when the legislation was imperiled reveals that relations between the Army and Congress are more intricate than testimony at hearings and budget requests might reveal, that throughout the 1980s, Army leaders remained deeply concerned about sustaining the All-Volunteer Force, and that the ultimate success of that force and the legislation that helped ensure it rested with individuals who built and then leveraged personal relationships.

Jack Kemp’s ascent from cast-off professional football player to conservative national figure requires understanding how the phases of his athletic career, which he filtered through his on-field experiences, shaped his unorthodox hybridity. He was in many ways a standard small-government conservative advocating the tenets of the technocratic Sunbelt New Right, but one who took surprisingly progressive stands on issues of labor and race very much at odds with developing Republican orthodoxy.

The Supreme Court is less constrained than political science has recognized. Motivated justices can dramatically alter politics without deferring to actors in the other branches. Subverting constraints, justices can aggrandize power and impose their irreducible preferences. Using Reconstruction as an example, this article brings new evidence to support the claim that an autonomous Court precipitated the end of Reconstruction. I make three essential arguments: First, the Republican commitment to federal civil rights protection extended longer than is traditionally supposed. Second, the architect of postbellum constitutionalism, Justice Bradley, harbored long-standing fear of Black equality and enfeebled the Reconstruction amendments when neither legal nor political imperatives compelled him to do so. Last, Bradley’s interventions substantially hindered Reconstruction by facilitating the “redemption” of southern state governments. This article employs mixed-methodology, using a difference-in-differences analysis and novel archival data. Contrary to scholarship arguing that the Court simply followed a Republican retreat, the Court dramatically reshaped the political-social development of Reconstruction.

This essay memorializes William E. Leuchtenburg (1922–2025), who over the course of his long, distinguished career made numerous significant contributions to policy history, presidential history, and the history profession in general.

This article uses youth soccer in Georgia, a state traditionally dominated by American football, as a case study of the challenges of the American youth sports system as a mechanism for talent development. We trace the historical divergence of US youth sports from global models, emphasizing the inefficiencies of school-based athletics and the rise of privatized club systems. Through historical analysis and interviews, the study reveals how socioeconomic barriers, geographic disparities, and competing league structures hinder equitable access and talent development. The pay-to-play model exacerbates exclusion, particularly for minority and low-income families. Georgia’s case reflects broader national trends, where market-driven youth sports systems prioritize elite experiences over inclusive development.

In 1977, British Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan joined Commonwealth leaders by committing to the Gleneagles Agreement and thereby pledged to “combat the evil of apartheid” by “taking every practical step” to prevent sporting contacts between Britain and South Africa. Within two years of the agreement being struck, the Tories came to power under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Until the end of Thatcher’s time in office (1990), Britain’s application of the agreement became more controversial and divisive than it ever had during Callaghan’s administration, as critics zeroed in on the new Prime Minister’s interpretation of what “every practical step” represented or required. Although there are several studies that explore how and why Thatcher’s government chose to apply Gleneagles, none consider how the agreement was interpreted, debated, and contested from multiple perspectives. In this article, we examine what motivated such different reactions to Gleneagles in Britain and the Commonwealth and why ultimately Thatcher could not seem to please anyone.