In 1961 families across the United States witnessed the sudden growth of one of the most remarkable consumer products of the Cold War: the home fallout shelter. This article charts the rise of domestic sales for home fallout shelters between 1961 and 1963, the growth in the number of shelter salesmen, the public backlash against their sales techniques, and the eventual decline of the home shelter market. The story of the family fallout shelter exposes the limitations of consumer capitalism in mobilizing and sustaining popular support for national security policy. Questioning the validity of the product being sold and the trustworthiness of the person pitching it, homeowners challenged the citizen-consumer ideal that supposedly went hand-in-hand with the state sanctioned vision of privatized survival.

A new generation of liberals emerged in the 1970s, a decade of stagflation, deindustrialization, global capital flight, and public sector fiscal crises. Prevailing interpretations of New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis explain their emphasis on entrepreneurialism and post-industrial sectors as the byproduct of cynical electoral strategies of “triangulation,” that is, primarily as a reaction to the rise of Reagan Republicanism. This article instead positions their political economy as part of a much longer history of liberals’ efforts to restructure the economy in order to stimulate new jobs and tax revenues that might also generate public revenue and support a progressive policy agenda. With roots in local, state, and regional industrial policies inspired by the New Deal, “supply-side liberalism” reemerged with force in the 1970s and 1980s, revealing heretofore unappreciated continuities that contextualize and clarify the origins of New Democrats’ promotion of a set of seemingly “neoliberal” economic policies.

During the 1932 campaign, Franklin Roosevelt explicitly committed himself to nearly all of what would become the important programs of the New Deal. In the months before his March 4, 1933, inauguration, he made his proposed policies even clearer. Yet many Americans have forgotten this clarity of purpose, led in large measure by histories of the New Deal and biographies of Roosevelt that echo old misconceptions of this critical election. Such texts are far more likely to describe Roosevelt's campaign as so devoid of substance and full only of “sunny generalities” that at the time he took the oath of office his “plans remained largely unknown to the public.” He had “no larger philosophy or grand design.” He stood only for “action, any action, with little or no thought given to the long-term consequences.” One historian recently declared, “The notion that when Franklin Roosevelt became president he had a plan in his head called the New Deal is a myth that no serious scholar has ever believed.”

War is central to U.S. immigration history. Yet too often that fact has been obscured by folktales that rhapsodize about the feel-good Ellis Island story: lured by the American Dream, strangers come to a promised land, put down roots, and triumph over adversity through industry, resolve, and pluck.

Rows upon rows of “virtual stacks” now stretch as far as the eye can see. From JSTOR to the Library of Congress to Ancestry.com, unprecedented quantities of historical material are being added to the digital ether. In fact, you are probably reading these words on a screen right now. Search-box interfaces allow historians to instantly query vast quantities of historical material in order to pull out information about individuals, events, institutions, and locations. With just a few strokes of a keyboard, a historian can sift through millions of digitized pages of newspapers, government documents, or books. A process that would have once taken a lifetime of flipping through microfilm or archival folders can be conducted in just a few minutes. As historian Lara Putnam notes, this now “feels as revolutionary as oatmeal.” But, she argues, the “mass digitized turn” has nevertheless had a profound impact on the practice of history in ways that the discipline is only beginning to understand. This is especially true for a field like modern American history, where an abundance of easily scannable English-language sources has generated a wealth of online material.