In the twenty-first century, providing humanitarian assistance to other nations forms an essential part of the U.S. military's mission. Designed to “relieve or reduce endemic conditions such as human suffering, disease, hunger, [and] privation,” the military's humanitarian tasks include such activities as assisting refugees, delivering food and medical equipment to partner nations, and removing unexploded landmines.1 But among the most recognized—and best publicized—of the U.S. Armed Forces’ humanitarian activities are its foreign disaster relief operations. In response to such recent catastrophes as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2011 tsunami in Japan, 2019's Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, and the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, the Department of Defense launched extensive humanitarian operations. Taking advantage of the U.S. military's vast global footprint, military leaders dispatched ships and aircraft, service personnel, relief supplies, equipment, and other material and logistical aid to the scene of these crises and to many others like them globally.2 Carried out for the humanitarian goals of saving lives and reducing suffering, each of these foreign disaster aid operations also shared a critical diplomatic objective: “generating goodwill” for the United States and creating a “favorable impression” of its armed forces.3 Never purely altruistic, the U.S. military's responses to global disasters also function as a valuable instrument of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

During the First World War, the American home front was awash with conspiracy theories alleging that internal German enemies were intentionally spreading disease among both human and animal populations, most egregiously in the case of the influenza epidemic. While false, these stories nonetheless revealed Americans’ shifting relationships to the environment, warfare, and the federal state. They channeled immediate fears over what type of war, and what type of enemy, the nation faced, as well as deeper, Progressive-era anxieties related to the dramatic expansions of government and scientific expertise in American life. As an unexplored vernacular archive, they underline how the war permitted individuals to discuss, denounce, and contest state and scientific authority at this moment in the early twentieth century.

Beef creates an emotional resonance that far outstrips its place within the market. In the 2000s, chicken may have dethroned beef as the most common meat on American plates, ending its reign since the 1940s, but most people do not seem to associate chicken breasts or poultry farmers with national identity the way Americans see ribeyes and cowboys as symbols of the nation's muscular, frontier past.

Historians often understand the 1970s and 1980s in terms of a declining New Deal order, in which an antistatist right as well as a conflicted relationship between public interest movements and administrative authorities undermined the notion of an effective federal government. Nowhere was the erosion of federal administration seemingly more apparent than in the West. An examination of the regulation of off-road racing in the California desert, focusing on everyday administration rather than on elections and lawsuits, reveals how federal agencies actually worked more collaboratively and productively with different interest groups than familiar narratives about these polarized decades would suggest. Contrary to depictions of federal agencies as administrating from afar, and of environmental organizations as overly litigious and out of touch, regulatory work in the California desert happened locally and through relationships shaped by new laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act.

During the 1970s, activists first popularized the concept of “environmental justice” in the context of growing environmental degradation, racialized urban poverty, and working-class fears of plant closure. To address these problems, leaders in the United Auto Workers and other unions formed coalitions with civil rights and environmental groups, and advocated federal policies that would reduce both pollution and unemployment. This article argues that the defeat of these efforts, and the political marginalization of full employment and other social-democratic goals in the 1980s, resulted in a narrower conception of environmental justice among many scholars and activists. Revisiting this forgotten history calls into question common claims about environmentalism in recent scholarship on the 1970s, and suggests the need to revise conventional narratives of the emergence of the environmental justice movement.

Oil is the elephant in every room in modern American history. From the consumer-culture room to the politics room, the labor room to the U.S.-and-the-world room, oil is right there, as big as Texas, yet hardly anyone notices. That is less true than it used to be. The Journal of American History even devoted a special issue to oil in 2012. Yet modern American historians still have not thought enough about “crude reality.”

On July 15, 1969, while more than one million space enthusiasts flocked to Florida's Cape Canaveral to celebrate the final countdown of the Apollo 11 launch the following day, a less festive gathering took place just a few miles away in an empty field outside the western gate of the Kennedy Space Center. On one side of the clearing stood NASA's chief, Thomas O. Paine, with several space agency administrators, while at the other end waited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) president, Ralph Abernathy, with twenty-five poor African American families, four scruffy mules pulling two rickety wagons, and, much to Paine's dismay, a phalanx of newspaper reporters and television news crews. When Abernathy's group began slowly marching hand-in-hand singing “We Shall Overcome,” Paine and his entourage walked forward to meet them in the middle of the field. Abernathy then took a microphone, nodded toward the Apollo 11 rocket towering in the distance, and explained that his Poor People's Campaign had not traveled to the cape to protest the Apollo launch, but instead to demonstrate against the country's distorted sense of national priorities. “I want NASA scientists,” he explained to the gathered press, “to tackle problems we face in society”.