In “Disquisition on Government,” John C. Calhoun divided citizens into “tax-payers” and “tax-consumers,” foreshadowing the connection that would be made between taxation and citizenship rights in twentieth-century education policy and law. Recent scholarship has explored that relationship, analyzing the language of legal cases to demonstrate that court cases reflect citizens’ perceptions of economic stakes and related education rights. Northern foundations that focused on southern education reform during Jim Crow understood the importance of taxpayer perception to education reform and recognized that it was not a byproduct of tax policy but something that might be shaped by it. Foundations influenced education and taxation policies in North Carolina. Although they failed to address inequality and problems of the racial state, their work provides a useful framework for considering the role of both early twentieth-century foundations in education reform and, more generally, the role of foundations in civil society.

This article offers a comprehensive history of the development of the federal role in education and juvenile justice policy from the 1950s to the 1970s. We argue that the issues of juvenile delinquency and education became linked during this period and policies that were enacted reflected the belief that education was a solution to delinquency. In the mid-twentieth century, a broader variety of approaches to antidelinquency, such as public job creation for youth, began to fall out of favor and education became elevated as the primary policy area for addressing delinquency outside the criminal justice system. Policy makers frequently justified federal involvement in education by arguing that schools were central to antidelinquency efforts. Drawing educational institutions into the fight against delinquency made schools susceptible to the punitive turn in crime policy. Ultimately, these developments have introduced punitive policies into schools and pushed antidelinquency efforts away from broader structural reforms.

Toleration of suicide and the campaign to legalize euthanasia, this article shows, are historically separate developments. From the early 1880s to the 1900s the American press featured moral discussions of suicide alongside gloomy roll calls and expressions of anxiety about an alleged increase in suicide. Focusing on an extensive discussion in the San Francisco Call in 1896, the article shows that Robert G. Ingersoll’s liberal individualist toleration of suicide clearly resonated with many Americans at the time. I trace the rise of suicide from private tragedy to public issue in the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no crossover with euthanasia and no call whatever for assistance with suicide, despite the frequent employment of the plight of the terminally ill in the discussion. Finally, the article shows that those who called for euthanasia thought of it as a human utility and not a right.

As early as 1704, noncitizen immigrants were legally allowed to vote in what would become the United States. By the end of the eighteenth century, noncitizens could legally vote in most states. State lawmakers offered the franchise as an incentive for white, male, Europeans of working age to migrate. However, rising immigration and nativism led states to reconsider alien suffrage, as noncitizen voting was known, and alien suffrage nearly disappeared by the 1840s. Revived by territorial expansion, demands for cheap labor, urbanization, racism, and sexism, alien suffrage expanded in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, peaking a century after the nation’s founding. However, resurgent nativism, wartime xenophobia, and corruption concerns pushed lawmakers to curtail noncitizen voting, and citizenship became a voting prerequisite in every state by 1926.

This article explores the role of business in supporting and benefiting from nature protection during the second half of the nineteenth century. It begins with the support of business for protecting scenic wilderness in California and the creation of Yellowstone, as well as the role of the railroads in encouraging easterners to visit to the nation’s western national parks—all designed to create economic value by promoting tourism. It then examines the efforts of a wide range of business interests to protect the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Adirondack forest in New York State. The later effort was led by business interests from New York City who worried that deforestation would impair freight traffic on the Erie Canal and Hudson River as well as endanger the city’s water supplies. This article compliments Hay’s research on business and conservation during the Progressive Era by demonstrating that business also played a critical role in supporting wilderness and forest protection.