This article follows the bicycle journeys of Fanny Bullock and William Hunter Workman as they cycled through the imperial spaces of Algeria, Sri Lanka, and India between 1894 and 1899. It thinks through how a new technology of personal mobility shaped the Workmans’ experience of the world and seeks to better understand the ways the forces of empire both produced and influenced their outlooks. In these spaces of European empire, Fanny Bullock Workman crafted a sense of New Womanhood rooted in the politics of gendered ability and racial superiority that was given intense meaning by a technology socialized as a way to gain authentic experiences of both the past and present. By looking at the ways people moved through overlapping imperial modalities, this article argues, historians can better access the American experience of the world at a granular level.

This article examines the Peoples Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a New Left group founded in 1971 to provide an alternative to official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution that culminated on July Fourth, 1976. The PBC has gone down in history mostly as a disappointment for having failed to halt the rise of the New Right. This study, though, takes a longer view of history to argue that the PBC, despite its faults, pursued a red, white, and blue brand of patriotic protest that worked to rekindle traditions of dissent that date from the early republic. By embracing America’s revolutionary heritage and rediscovering forgotten practices, such as staging July Fourth protests and issuing alternative declarations of independence, the PBC helped not only to reinvigorate the left at a critical juncture in the 1970s but to model effective protest strategies moving forward.

This article situates the 1976 United States Bicentennial as a critical juncture in the late-twentieth-century transformation and—borrowing from Daniel Rodgers—“thinning” of American understandings of society, state, and nationhood. It demonstrates how, amid economic crises and post-Watergate disillusionment, bicentennial commemorations provided key vehicles for reconfiguring more vernacular and granular conceptualizations of American identity and political economy. Repeatedly, discourses surrounding the bicentennial intertwined pro-enterprise ideals of producerism and economic self-determination with New Left idioms of personal empowerment, authenticity, and liberation. Following three interlinked case studies of bicentennial initiatives that sought to rehumanize American capitalism and restore its moral legitimacy, this article thus traces how less explicitly political commemorative discourses articulated, diffused, and naturalized soon-prevalent pro-market ideas. Ahead of the 2026 semiquincentennial, this article thus situates commemorative occasions not as political sideshows but as key formative moments in shaping Americans’ understandings of society, state, and nationhood.

“The Bicentennial is one of the best ways to promote libertarian ideas.” In the early 1970s, the nascent libertarian movement, spearheaded by the enigmatic ideologue Murray Rothbard, co-opted national celebrations of the United States Bicentennial to further their own political agenda. Devoted to the image of a “libertarian founding,” activists engaged in the gleeful work of undoing mainstream historical narratives on the Left and Right, ultimately claiming the spirit of 1776 for themselves. This late-twentieth-century intellectual work has had long-term effects in American politics. This article introduces historians to the as of yet unexplored reclamation work done by the libertarian movement and then moves through its more recent echoes and contemporary resonances. It contributes to literatures on libertarianism, late-twentieth-century political development, and the history of the memory of the United States.

This article examines planning for the United States Bicentennial in Washington, DC, focusing on the work of the DC Bicentennial Assembly in the early 1970s, as well as the Nixon administration’s response. While the national bicentennial is often remembered through large federal celebrations on the National Mall, planning in the capital became a venue for local political engagement and advocacy. I show how Washington residents used bicentennial planning to articulate claims about representation, citizenship, and the city’s political future, framing the anniversary as an opportunity to press for greater local control and a more meaningful realization of democratic ideals in the nation’s capital. Federal officials, meanwhile, sought to channel commemorative activity into redevelopment efforts that targeted tourists and visitors, putting forth a different vision for the city. The resulting bifurcation, characterized by Nixon as a “civic schizophrenia,” remains in the present day.

Following the end of the Great War in November 1918, fears of a nationwide crime wave spread through American newspapers. As East Coast and Midwestern cities struggled to suppress waves of crime, Los Angeles County appeared immune. But by fall 1919, Los Angeles (LA) County press and police officials admitted that the region was experiencing a wave. To break the wave, LA County police departments, especially in Los Angeles and Long Beach, expanded their officer pools, created new specialized squads, and embarked on arrest-heavy campaigns while city governments imposed strict curfews. Newspaper crime wave reporting provided the foundation for these expansions of police power, often in contradiction to reported crime statistics, and despite endemic police corruption.

Drawing on sensory, animal, environmental, and Japanese American history, this article explores Cat Island, Mississippi, site of a top-secret Army dog training program during the Second World War. Based on the theory that different races emitted distinct scents, the project attempted to train dogs to detect Japanese people, with the goal of deploying them in the Pacific theater. To develop the canine’s olfactory skills, the Army used Japanese American soldiers as bait. The project failed because William Prestre, the project’s director, sought a stable and immutable conception of race and the environment that did not exist. Military officials focused on the strategic value of the dogs and were circumspect about the existence of a racial odor, whereas Japanese American soldiers derived enjoyment from their activities along the Gulf Coast. Thus, constructions of race and environment were highly malleable, even during the short tenure of the Cat Island project.

This article identifies the centrality of the consumer to efforts to elicit civilian participation against rising crime in 1970s and 1980s New York City. From “best buy” reviews of anticrime products to the self-evaluation of home security arrangements and police services, these efforts championed individual responsibility, enterprise, and a vision of consumer citizenship, with safety secured via the acquisition of consumer goods or the assertion of consumer rights and rationality. Within a context of municipal austerity, diminished state legitimacy, and market-led restructuring, this vision proved popular and enduring, reorienting New Yorkers’ responses to crime but also their understandings of self and community and their relationship with the state. Yet it also embedded inequalities and exclusions inherent to urban neoliberalism and contemporary cities. A focus on consumer citizenship reveals the popular dimensions of the neoliberal turn and its ongoing relevance to both urban governance and anticrime activity in today’s New York City.

On August 7, 1942, Allied forces began their first offensive action against Japan on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Over the next few years, thousands of Solomon Islanders assisted Allied soldiers as construction workers, local scouts, and messengers. Based on oral histories and soldiers’ memoirs, this article argues that these islander war workers not only played a crucial role in the ultimate Allied success in the Pacific war but were also part of a longer history of foreigners in the service of the U.S. empire. In fact, recruiting and managing non-combat workers of color became an important source of U.S. military and imperial power during World War II. Despite pervasive racism and demeaning work conditions, Solomon Islanders managed to create new opportunities both for themselves and for their home societies.

From 1950 to 1963, over 200,000 international military officers trained in the continental United States through the Military Assistance Program (MAP). This article examines how military “study abroad” was pivotal to Cold War cultural diplomacy and empire building. Beyond transferring military skills, military study abroad sought to transform the worldviews of officers from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and other Asian nations through immersion in American life. U.S. programs relied on the gendered labor of American women to curate an idealized vision of suburban domesticity and liberal democracy, while attempting to insulate officers from the ills of 1950s American society. Asian officers also navigated and bucked official expectations, reacting to the quality of their training, race relations, and cultural friction. Military study abroad thus illuminates the complexities of U.S. global power: ambitious in scope and far reaching, yet vulnerable to the dynamics of unpredictable everyday encounters between the foreign and the domestic.

This Q&A explores the benefits of and challenges to translating historical scholarship for a legal audience. MAH editorial board member Sarah A. Seo (NYU Law School) asked historian-experts Laura Edwards (Princeton University), Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers University–New Brunswick), collaborators Samuel Erman (University of Michigan Law School) and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (University of Southern California), as well as Maggie Blackhawk (NYU Law School) and Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) to reflect on their experiences.

This article shows how public administration experts theorized and enacted changes to the American administrative state over the twentieth century. In the prewar period, they advanced a strict politics-administration binary that legitimated an expanding administrative state on the premise that it was a politically neutral vehicle for the execution of the public good. But during the Second World War, mounting scrutiny of the administrative state exposed the fragility of the politics-administration binary and undermined confidence in prewar administrative principles and the statebuilding they had sustained. In response to escalating dissatisfaction with existing administrative forms, public administration experts rejected administrative neutrality and turned to new theories and practices of administration emphasizing political responsiveness, managerial efficiency, and individual discretion and choice. In the late twentieth century, these shifts culminated in reforms that cut and contracted out the administrative state, recasting administration as an arbiter of private interests rather than a neutral instrument for realizing a unified public will.

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.

Recognizing disability as a socially created category, a lived experience with real-world consequences, and part of a critical analytical framework, disability historians have illuminated core aspects of modern American history. With some frequency, however, both scholars and community members conflate disability with ableism. At other times, disability is presented as a category or identity separate from questions of power, privilege, and marginalization. It is common too that scholarly works focused on locating and defining ableism narrow or neglect historical context or specificity. In framing understandings of ableism around disability, many of us have largely ignored how ableism shape-shifts, how it is connected to other systems of power, or how the defining elements of ableism ebb and flow. This article calls on us to focus on the system of power itself—historicizing ableism. Making this move expands who we can write about, what sources we look at, and what purposes our historical work serves.