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This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white or black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do compared to an active male. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers’ interpretations were contingent on where they worked and whom they taught. They also responded to broad historical conditions, including developments in American feminism, law, and education, society’s changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over sex differences and the relative weight of nature versus nurture. While deliberating fairness for female students, white and black women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the twentieth century; while some women teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of “difference,” and devising innovative curricula. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on physical education’s application of scientific ideas, the politics of gender, race, and sexuality in the domain of active bodies, and the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture.

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet school integration was not the only—or even always the dominant—civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift, community empowerment, and self-determination. An African American Dilemma offers a social history of debates over school integration within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. This broad geographical and temporal focus reveals that northern Black educational activists vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. However, there was never a consensus, so the dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms are also highlighted here. Presenting a sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, the book broadens our understanding of school integration by highlighting the diverse perspectives of Black students, parents, teachers, and community leaders all committed to improving public education. It finds that Black school integrationists and separatists have worked together in a dynamic tension that fueled effective strategies for educational reform and the Black civil rights movement. The book draws on an enormous range of archival data including the black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases.

Soon after his first inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms he had installed almost a hundred women as lawyers, board and commission members and secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. These “Women of the La Guardia Administration” met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This book tells their stories. It begins with the city’s suffrage movement, which prepared them for political action. After they won the vote in 1917, they joined political party clubs and began to run for office. Their plan was to use political platforms to enact feminist and progressive public policies. Circumstances unique to mid-twentieth-century New York City advanced their progress. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an inquiry into alleged corruption in the city’s government, long dominated by the Democratic Party’s machine, Tammany Hall. The inquiry turned first to charges of Vice Squad entrapment of women for sex crimes and their treatment in the city’s Women’s Court. Outraged by the inquiry’s disclosures and impressed by La Guardia’s pledge to rein in Tammany, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. As appointees in his administration, they then helped him fulfill his plans for modernizing city government. This book argues that La Guardia’s women appointees contributed to his administration’s success and left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women in politics.

This book is a study of black women as symbols, and as participants, in the reshaping of the meaning of black racial identity. The meanings and practices of racial identity are continually reshaped as a result of the interplay of actions taken at the individual and institutional levels. In chapters that detail the history of pre-Civil Rights Movement black beauty pageants, later efforts to integrate beauty contests, and the transformation in beliefs and practices relating to black beauty in the 1960s, the book develops a model for understanding social processes of racial change. It places changing black hair practices and standards of beauty in historical context and shows the powerful role social movements have had in reshaping the texture of everyday life. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements led a generation to question hair straightening and to establish a new standard of beauty that was summed up in the words “black is beautiful.” Through oral history interviews with Civil Rights and Black Power Movement activists and ordinary women, the book documents the meaning of these changes in black women's lives.

In some ways, The All-Consuming Nation is an autobiography of the baby boom generation since it highlights the consumer culture and rising environmental consciousness that have been central to that generation’s lived experience. This focus should appeal to a wide audience of regular readers. Those who are sensitive to such current issues as wealth inequality, climate change, and the environmental consequences of mass consumerism will also find the book as a way to see how the United States reached its contemporary crisis points, as well as possible ways to curb current excesses. The book alternates chapters on the evolving consumer economy with chapters on environmental critiques of mass consumerism. It considers the technologies that have fueled consumption, strategies such as planned obsolescence that sustain consumption, and the shift in retailing from brick and mortar to online shopping. Environmental critics have viewed every shift in patterns of increasing consumption as ultimately unsustainable. Finally, the book should serve as text for post–World War II surveys in American history, environmental history, as well as business and marketing courses.

Commencing in the 1820’s, American scholars took learning in Germany. There they confronted forms of geography in the universities, and learned of the normal school tradition. Upon their return to North America the normal school was introduced and with it came an early and simplistic variety of geography. Gradually courses geographic in nature began to emerge from the geology offering. Binomial departments, geology-geography, began to emerge. Early content of the geographic offering included delimitation of both the physiographic province and the geographic region. Then came study of economic geography, and development of environmentalism. The 14-18 war involved geography and geographers both on the battlefield and in negotiations with other delegations for the terms of peace. Then the AGS completed a map of Hispanic America (1—1 million) prior to 1945. The Society also made an extended study of the pioneer fringe and pioneer belts in the context of establishing a science of settlement, all of which had relevance for the redistribution of displaced persons resultant to World War II. It was in the 1920’s that both ecologic and political factors began earnestly to create individual genres of the geographic, all of which encouraged Bowman, and more especially R. Hartshorne to write books concerning the nature of geography. Substantial numbers of geographers were employed in World War II, largely in OSS. While in Washington DC, many active geographers who were not AAG members felt disenfranchised. Rigorous competitive activity on their part led to amalgamation of two organizations, the Association of American Geographers and the American Society for Professional Geographers. Then came a renewed quest for definition of the field. “Envoi” concludes the work with guidance to a multiplicity of archival holdings, their lodgment, extent and significance.

Asian Americans were brought into the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, during World War II under the assumption of a secure loyalty. They served as research analysts, special operations members, morale operations propagandists, secret agents gathering covert intelligence, and, after the war, as war crimes investigators in East Asia where their cultural and linguistic skills, coupled with the correct racial uniforms, made them invaluable to America’s first centralized intelligence agency. These agents were drawn from New York City to Honolulu, where Asian immigrants and their American-born offspring had developed loyalties that were multiple and flexible, not singular and fixed. Despite this, European American OSS recruiters admitted them even as they believed their own loyalty was more certain and fixed, since they hailed from families with roots reaching far back into America’s past. In their joint struggle against the Imperial Japanese forces, these Asian Americans and their European American OSS colleagues generated propaganda to demoralize the enemy and encourage surrender, gathered overt intelligence from a wide variety of media sources, obtained covert intelligence inside enemy-occupied territory, and trained and executed guerrilla operations scores of miles behind the battle lines where, if captured, they faced torture and execution. Immediately after the war, they conducted war crimes investigations that included some Asian American collaborators, raising questions about the meaning of loyalty. The end result of their activities was not only the satisfaction of seeing Imperial Japan defeated, but a new understanding of loyalty, race, and Asian Americans.

This is the story of water, a valley, and a city. The city was San Francisco, the valley was Hetch Hetchy, and the waters were from the Tuolumne River watershed, located within Yosemite National Park. In 1905, for the first time in American history, a significant national opposition led by John Muir and the Sierra Club sought to protect the valley from a dam, believing that its beauty should be enjoyed by the American people. On the other side, San Franciso mayor James Phelan believed it was his civic responsibility to provide his 750,000 constituents with a pure, abundant source of water. From 1905 until 1913, the two sides fought over the destiny of the Hetch Hetchy: Would the glacier-carved valley become a reservoir or remain an inviolate part of Yosemite National Park? Finally, Congress decided the issue by passage of the Raker Act, granting the valley to San Francisco's use. By 1923, San Francisco engineers completed the huge O'Shaughnessy Dam, submerging the valley under over 200 feet of water. However, the battle did not end. Who would control the vast watershed of the Tuolumne River: The City of San Francisco or the National Park Service? And would the hydro electric power provide for a city-owned system or would it be sold to a private company? For the first time, the full story of this epic battle is told in an evenhanded way. It is a story without end, however, and the final chapter discusses the idea of removing the dam and restoring the valley, an idea which is gaining currency throughout the US.

At the start of his administration, John F. Kennedy launched a personal policy initiative to court African nationalist leaders. This policy was designed to improve US-African relations and constituted a dramatic change in the direction of US foreign relations. The Kennedy administration believed that the Cold War could be won or lost depending upon whether Washington or Moscow won the hearts and minds of the Third World. Africa was particularly important because a wave of independence saw nineteen newly independent African states admitted into the United Nations during 1960–61. By 1962, 31 of the UN’s 110 member states were from the African continent, and both Washington and Moscow sought to add these countries to their respective voting bloc. For Kennedy, the Cold War only amplified the need for a strong US policy toward Africa—but did not create it. The Kennedy administration feared that American neglect of the newly decolonized countries of the world would result in the rise of anti-Americanism and for this reason needed to be addressed irrespective of the Cold War. For this reason, Kennedy devoted more time and effort toward relations with Africa than any other American president has. By making an in-depth examination of Kennedy’s attempt to court African nationalist leaders, this study adds an important chapter to the historiography of John F. Kennedy’s Cold War strategy. It also demonstrates that, through understanding and personal diplomacy, Kennedy realigned US policy toward Africa and largely won over the sympathies of its people.

Before World War II, Japanese immigrants, or Issei, forged a unique transnational identity between their native land and the United States. Whether merchants, community leaders, or rural farmers, Japanese immigrants shared a collective racial identity as aliens ineligible for American citizenship, even as they worked to form communities in the American West. At the same time, Imperial Japan considered Issei and their descendents part of its racial expansion abroad and enlisted them to further their nationalist goals. This book shows how Japanese immigrants negotiated their racial and class positions alongside white Americans, Chinese, and Filipinos at a time when Japan was fighting their countries of origin. Utilizing rare Japanese and English language sources, the book stresses the tight grips, as well as the clashing influences, the Japanese and American states exercised over Japanese immigrants and how they created identities that diverged from either national narrative.

In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. Only recently have scholars begun to realize that there is another history of international affairs in the decade. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face today—inequality, terrorism, demographic instability, energy dependence, epidemic disease, massive increases in trade and monetary flows, to name just a few examples—asserted themselves powerfully during the 1960s. The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson confronted tectonic shifts in the international environment and perhaps even the beginning of the post?Cold War world. While the East?West struggle was indisputably crucial, new forces and new actors altered international relations in profound and lasting ways. This book asks how the Johnson administration responded to this changing landscape. To what extent did US leaders understand the changes that we can now see clearly with the benefit of hindsight? How did they prioritize these issues alongside more immediate geostrategic concerns? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda?

Race first emerged as an important ingredient of New York City's melting pot when it was known as New Amsterdam and was a fledgling colonial outpost on the North American frontier. This book details the arrival of the first immigrants, including African slaves, and traces encounters between the town's inhabitants of African, European, and Native American descent, showing how racial domination became key to the building of the settler colony at the tip of Manhattan Island. During the colonial era, the art of governing the city's diverse and factious population, the book reveals, involved the subordination of confessional, linguistic, and social antagonisms to binary racial difference. Everyday formations of race are investigated — in slave owning households, on the colonial city's streets, at its docks, taverns, and marketplaces, and in the adjacent farming districts. Even though the northern colonial port town afforded a space for black resistance, that setting did not, this book argues, effectively undermine the city's institution of black slavery. This history of New York City demonstrates that the process of racial formation and the mechanisms of racial domination were central to the northern colonial experience and to the founding of the United States.

National parks have played a unique role in the development of wildfire management on American public lands. With a different mission and powerful meaning to the public, the national parks have been a battleground between proponents of fire suppression and proponents of its use as a management tool. This book explains how the national parks have shaped federal fire management. Areas discussed include the military in the national parks (1872-1916), development of fire management structure, the New Deal and fire policy, post-war policies, Yellowstone and Cerro Grande.

At the dawn of the nuclear age, the US government was faced with an impossible task: to convince the American public that it could survive a nuclear attack. And so civil defense was born. Numerous federal and state civil defense programs sprang up, intended to pacify the population and legitimize deterrence policy, as well as to justify the billions spent on secret underground bomb shelters reserved for the government elite. A generation of Americans was indoctrinated to the catchy tune of “duck and cover”. Yet the civil defense program was a complete failure. In the 1950s and 1960s, early protests against federal nuclear air raid drills greatly strengthened public awareness of the deadly nature of nuclear war. The 1980s brought a second wave of protests, as millions of citizens throughout the United States rejected new forms of civil defense and a crisis relocation plan to evacuate urban populations into “safer” rural areas if nuclear war seemed imminent. Political leaders and members of Congress consistently starved civil defense initiatives, while most citizens ridiculed and rejected both its practice and its very premise. Widespread skepticism about civil defense came to threaten not just deterrence policy, but the entire Cold War system of nuclear crisis management. This book aims to pull back the curtain on the US government's civil defense plans from World War II through the end of the Cold War. Based on government documents, peace organizations, personal papers, scientific reports, oral histories, newspapers, and popular media, the book chronicles the operations of the various federal and state civil defense programs from 1945 to contemporary issues of homeland security, as well as the origins and development of the massive public protest against civil defense from 1955 through the 1980s.

This book is an international history of the relations between the United States, Britain, and the West Indies during the long decolonization of the latter. It draws on archives in seven countries to recover the story of that process, which resulted in the first new nations in the hemisphere—Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago—since the turn of the century. The process had begun amid depression, riot, and World War II, and it concluded at the moment of highest tension in the Cold War Caribbean. Moreover, the islands were a historical fount of black radicalism, which coursed intermittently through the hemisphere as the civil rights movement made the issue of American race relations particularly acute. In addition, the structure built to bring the islands to independence—the West Indies Federation—unexpectedly collapsed at perhaps the worst possible moment. Yet despite these ominous circumstances, the West Indian transition to independence was ultimately among the smoothest seen anywhere in the “Third World.” It avoided the bloodshed that accompanied the end of empire in many areas, and avoided the U.S. military intervention so historically promiscuous around the Caribbean littoral. This book argues that a unique “protean partnership” between the U.S. and the West Indies, one which complemented the Anglo-American relationship, explains the smooth transition. That partnership encompassed the U.S. pursuit of national-security assets such as military bases and strategic materials, the give-and-take of formal Anglo-American diplomacy, and the informal “diaspora diplomacy” of transnational race-activism that nurtured West Indian nationalism and the African American freedom struggle alike. This study contributes to the literatures on inter-American relations, race and foreign affairs, the Cold War, and decolonization.

Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment presents the historical relationship between statistical risk assessment and race in the United States. It illustrates how, through a reliance on the variable of race, actuarial science transformed the nature of racism and, in turn, helped usher racial disparities in wealth, incarceration, and housing from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The monograph begins by investigating the development of statistical risk assessment explicitly based on race in the late-nineteenth-century life insurance industry. It then traces how such risk assessment migrated from industry to government, becoming a guiding force in parole decisions and in federal housing policy. Finally, it concludes with an analysis of “proxies” for race—statistical variables that correlate significantly with race—in order to demonstrate the persistent presence of race in risk assessment even after the anti-discrimination regulations won by the Civil Rights Movement. Offering readers a new perspective on the historical importance of actuarial science in structural racism, Calculating Race is a particularly timely contribution as Big Data and algorithmic decision-making increasingly pervade American life.

Jack London (1876–1916) wasn’t just lucky at what he called the “writing game”—he is, by many accounts, the most popular American author in the world today. Two novels, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, are literary classics and have never been out of print. His forty-four published books and hundreds of short stories and essays have been translated into more than a hundred languages and universally hailed by critics. London, moreover, was America’s first novelist to earn more than one million dollars a year from his writing (more than $20 million today). A vigorous self-promoter and the kind of media celebrity we would recognize today, London died unexpectedly at age forty, at the zenith of his career. His death shocked the world but sealed his reputation as one of the greats. This book seeks to look behind the public persona and reveal a side of the author’s life that has been overlooked by academics and critics, yet is essential to understanding the character, drive, and success of this extraordinary man. We shall ask how London achieved international fame, and what part he played in engineering his own success with his foreign publishers. At his death, London was a recognized “brand,” as readers around the world looked forward to “the next Jack London book.” London, moreover, is read and remembered today, unlike most of his contemporaries. The answers to how this happened take us to London’s namesake city on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

John F. Kennedy’s thousand days as president coincided not only with the crisis years of the Cold War, but also with the most fractious period in the Canada–United States relationship since the War of 1812. Thanks in part to mounting Canadian nationalist sentiment, Kennedy confronted a host of issues with Canada magnified by Canadian concerns over their country’s close economic, cultural, military, and diplomatic links with the United States. The early 1960s saw tensions in Canada–US relations as growing numbers of Canadians came to question both their government’s quiet support for US leadership in the Cold War and American economic and military hegemony. Canada’s prime minister, John Diefenbaker, with whom Kennedy had a tense relationship, personified these sentiments. While the young president and his administration have often been criticized for stirring up anti-US opinion due to their conduct toward Canada, Camelot and Canada shows that US foreign policymakers dealt with Ottawa in a judicious manner that took account of Canadian nationalism as well as Canadian concerns. In re-examining this fascinating period in Canada–US relations, this book makes clear that the special relationship between Canadian and US officials continued to function, even as the overall bilateral relationship suffered due to nationalist attitudes and differences over major foreign policy issues, from the Cuban revolution to Britain’s decision to join the European Common Market. The image that emerges of Kennedy is of a policymaker who was pragmatic in his handling of his country’s increasingly nationalistic northern neighbor.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was an unexpectedly political comic strip. While many people have come to identify Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, and Snoopy with childhood and innocence, Peanuts regularly commented on the politics and social turmoil of Cold War America. From nuclear testing to the civil rights movement, from the Vietnam War to the feminist revolution, Peanuts was an unlikely medium for Americans of all stripes to debate the hopes and fears of the era. Charlie Brown’s America is the story of how the creation of one Midwestern man became one of the most influential pop-culture properties of the twentieth century and what its popularity reveals about the character of the United States.

Choose Your Medicine is the first comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States. It draws on legal history and the history of medicine (as well as political, intellectual, cultural, and social history) to examine the ways that persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American law, regulation, and policy from the country’s origins to the present. It describes social movements and legal efforts dedicated to resisting government measures denying individuals an unfettered choice among therapeutic products and methods. The targets of this activism have included, among others, state medical licensing statutes, FDA restrictions on the distribution of unapproved drugs, state and federal prohibitions against medical marijuana, formulary limitations in government insurance programs, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions on physician-assisted suicide. The narrative’s protagonists range from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. The book considers how all of these examples, taken together, fit within the broader development of the idea of freedom of therapeutic choice in American history and law.