Against the long-standing claim that sport and politics should remain separate, the United States has long included sport within its broader foreign relations efforts. During the second half of the 19th century, American businessmen, members of the military, and missionaries all taught local populations how to play sports like baseball and basketball because they viewed their actions as part of the “civilizing mission” of Americans abroad.
With the onset of the Cold War, the government began incorporating sport into its formal programs to promote the United States overseas, using athletes as a large part of its public diplomacy efforts. Federal programs related to physical education were implemented to improve American health in the interest of fighting the Soviet Union. Sport thus served a role in the global competition of the Cold War as well as contributing to building bridges with other states. In the 21st century, the government formalized the use of sport within public diplomacy efforts with the establishment of a bureaucracy focused solely on sport.
Sport also provided an avenue to spread American culture overseas as a model for organizing events and the approach to marketing and sponsorship. Both the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and Nike’s contract with basketball player Michael Jordan established new forms of cultural capitalism. American professional teams have capitalized on their global interest by holding exhibition and regular-season games overseas, bringing an American sport experience to international audiences while simultaneously expanding marketing opportunities.
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Sports and US Foreign Relations
Heather L. Dichter
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Asian American Activism
Vivian Truong
Activism is a defining element of Asian American history. Throughout most of their presence in the United States, Asian Americans have engaged in organized resistance even in the face of violent exclusion and repression. These long histories of activism challenge prevailing notions of the political silence of Asian Americans, which have persisted since the rise of the model minority narrative in the mid-20th century. Examining Asian American history through the lens of activism shows how Asian Americans were not simply acted upon, but were agents in forging their own histories. In the century after the first substantial waves of migration in the 1850s, Asian Americans protested labor conditions, fought for full citizenship rights, and led efforts to liberate their homelands from colonial rule. Activism has been a key part of determining who Asian Americans are—indeed, the term “Asian American” itself was coined in the 1960s as a radical political identity in a movement against racism and imperialism. In the decades since the Asian American movement, “Asian America” has become larger and more diverse. Contemporary Asian American activism reflects the expansiveness and heterogeneity of Asian American communities.
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Dallas
Patricia Evridge Hill
From its origins in the 1840s, Dallas developed quickly into a prosperous market town. After acquiring two railroads in the 1870s, the city became the commercial and financial center of North Central Texas. Early urban development featured competition and cooperation between the city’s business leadership, women’s groups, and coalitions formed by Populists, socialists, and organized labor. Notably, the city’s African Americans were marginalized economically and excluded from civic affairs. By the end of the 1930s, city building became more exclusive even for the white population. A new generation of business leaders threatened by disputes over Progressive Era social reforms and city planning, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and attempts to organize industrial workers used its control of local media, at-large elections, and repression to dominate civic affairs until the 1970s.
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US-Lebanese Relations
Emily I. Whalen
Lebanon is a relatively minor country in US foreign relations, lacking any significant resources or symbolic importance for Washington. Yet the history of the Lebanese-US relationship is an illustrative example of the consequences of US foreign policy, highlighting the contours of the US role in the international system. The history of Lebanese–US relations falls into four eras. The first period was mostly driven by private individuals, while the second period saw Lebanon undergoing significant changes as the United States competed with the Soviet Union. In the third period, Lebanon’s devastating civil war served as a stage upon which the United States stepped into its role of global hegemon. Finally, during the early 21st century, relations between the United States and Lebanon have faltered, as Lebanon’s post–civil war political system tacks between crisis and paralysis.
Lebanon’s fate as a small nation in the US-led international system of the late 20th and early 21st centuries paints an evocative portrait of US power. To the extent that its relationship with the United States is generalizable, Lebanon serves as an illustration of the costs of maintaining a particular version of the global status quo. Despite its relative insignificance, Lebanon offers a valuable perspective on the impact of US foreign policy.
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Arab American Theater
Hala Baki
Arab American theater broadly includes the dramatic works and performances of self-identified Arab Americans, Americans of Arab heritage, and immigrants to the United States from the Arabic-speaking world. Beginning in the late 19th century with the first wave of modern Arab migration to the United States, the tradition evolved from early intellectual dramas written by Mahjar playwrights to 21st century plays that span the gamut of form and genre. Among the most prominent contemporary playwrights of this tradition are Yussef El Guindi, Betty Shamieh, Heather Raffo, and Mona Mansour. Arab American performance also includes popular entertainment such as stand-up comedy and digital media. Arab American theater has been supported by a collection of amateur and professional companies over the years, as well as festival and digital media producers. Their contributions have culminated in a concerted cultural movement in the 21st century that seeks to disrupt misrepresentations of Arabs in American culture with authentic narratives from within the community. The contemporary Arab American theater and performance canon covers topics ranging from immigrant experiences to cross-cultural conflict, political resistance to identity politics, and popular stereotypes to anti-Arab bias in the government and media. The academic study of this tradition has increased in early 21st century and includes works by scholars in the United States and abroad.
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Phoenix
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Phoenix, the capital of the state of Arizona, exemplifies the ways Sun Belt cities dramatically grew after World War II. Phoenix was best described as a small trading town in 1912, when Arizona became the last territory to achieve statehood in the continental United States. Although Phoenix was a capital city located in an area with little rainfall and high summer temperatures, its economy depended heavily on the sale of cotton and copper as well as tourists attracted to the Salt River valley’s warm winters. But members of the local Chamber of Commerce, like many small-town boosters across the US South and West, wanted to attract manufacturers by the 1930s, when the Great Depression upended the agricultural, mining, and tourism markets. The Chamber’s White male leaders (including future Senator Barry Goldwater) succeeded during World War II. They lobbied for wartime investment that transformed Phoenix into one of the many boom towns that dotted the South and West. That success fueled postwar efforts to attract industry by building a favorable “business climate.” Local leaders, business executives, and industry experts used that seemingly benign phrase to describe cities that guaranteed investors low taxes, weak unions, few government regulations, and other policies that maximized profits and undermined 1930s reforms. Phoenix stood out in what reporters called the “Second War between the States” for industry. General Electric, Motorola, and Sperry Rand had all opened branch plants by 1960, when Phoenix was already one of the largest US cities. It also stood out in 1969, when Republican strategist Kevin Phillips drew attention to the “Sun Belt phenomenon” that seemed to be the metropolitan core of a new conservative politics dedicated to free enterprise and poised to spread across the rapidly deindustrializing Northeast and Midwest. But growth undermined the Chamber’s power. By the 1970s, citizens questioned putting business first, and investors began shifting manufacturing overseas, which left residents to deal with the environmental, fiscal, and political damage the business climate ideal had wrought.
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San Francisco
Ocean Howell
San Francisco has a reputation as a liberal city. But history shows that San Francisco’s liberalism must be regarded as evolving, contested, and often internally contradictory. The land that became the city was originally home to the Yelamu people, a small tribe in the Ohlone language group. Spanish missionaries arrived in 1776, but the Spanish empire only had a tenuous hold on the place—it was the furthest outpost of empire. By 1821, when the Mexican government took the land, most of the Native population had perished from disease. Immediately after the Americans took the place, in 1848, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and the world rushed in. The population increased 2,400 percent in one year, and fewer than half of the new residents had been born anywhere in the United States. Well into the 20th century, elite San Franciscans worried that the rest of the country viewed their city as a barbarous place, full of foreign libertines seeking fortune and pleasure. These narratives masked the extent to which San Francisco’s economy was corporatized from the early days of the Gold Rush. They also present an image of racial liberalism that ultimately must be regarded as a myth. However, there is some truth in the view that the city has been a comparatively tolerant place, where various subcultures could thrive. San Francisco’s status as a bohemian place, a wide-open town, has always sat in tension with its role as a headquarters of global, corporate capital.
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The History of Jewish Women in the United States
Joyce Antler
The story of Jewish women in the United States is one of impressive achievement. Despite their numerically small representation in the American population, they made major contributions to politics and culture, and their organizations were among the nation’s most influential women’s groups. Yet both as women and as Jews, they often confronted troubling inequities in religious and secular life and struggled to balance their multiple identities.
Jewish women played vital roles in colonial and revolutionary America, managing their household economies and family life. Highly literate and with extensive social networks, they often engaged in commerce in the interconnected Atlantic world. Jewish women were the mainstays of religious observance, promoting religious worship and the construction of synagogues and schools. Intermarriage was infrequent, with Jewish men marrying out more frequently than women.
In the early 19th century, some Jewish women attended the new female academies, becoming teachers, social reformers, and writers. They also founded and managed educational and philanthropic institutions, including the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, the coeducational Hebrew Sunday School, orphan associations, and mutual aid groups, including the Independent Order of True Sisters, the first national Jewish women’s organization.
Jewish women constituted roughly half of the Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from German-speaking European nations in the first half of the 19th century. They also constituted about half of the two and a half million Eastern European immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920. Upper- and middle-class Jewish women established sisterhoods, settlement houses, clubs, and schools to aid the new arrivals, inaugurating the first Jewish women’s movement. In 1909, laboring under exploitative conditions, Jewish women garment workers launched an eleven-week strike that transformed the labor movement. Highly represented in movements like socialism, anarchism, and communism, Jewish women also participated in campaigns for birth control and international peace.
By the mid-20th century, a new generation assumed leadership at the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah, and other Jewish women’s groups. Involved in campaigns against immigration restriction, rescuing refugees from Nazism, and efforts to create a Jewish national homeland, they strengthened Jewish communities throughout the world.
In the postwar decades, Jews migrated in significant numbers to the suburbs, where they were the mainstay of synagogue life and helped popularize new rituals like the bat mitzvah. Major leaders in the campaigns for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and peace, in the 1960s and 1970s they helped launch second-wave feminism. Jewish women were prominent in both liberal and radical branches of the women’s liberation movement. As Jewish feminists, they challenged sexism within Jewish religious and community life and pressed for more egalitarian practices across the denominations. By the early 1970s, Jewish women began to serve as rabbis in the Reform and Reconstruction movements; the first Conservative woman rabbi was ordained in 1985.
In the 21st century, Jewish women reflect a more culturally, religiously, and racially diverse population than before. Jewish women and men are increasingly likely to marry or partner with non-Jews, but to raise their children Jewishly. They are more than twice as likely as prior generations to identify with a race or ethnicity other than white. Asian American, Syrian American, and African American women rabbis have been among the most influential voices in their communities. The gay and lesbian synagogue movement, which began in the early 1970s, provided a locus for lesbians to explore their own religious identities. Jewish Women of Color, an expanding group, places itself at the intersection of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism as it pursues an intersectional vision of social justice.
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Credit Reporting and the History of Commercial Surveillance in America
Josh Lauer
The first credit reporting organizations emerged in the United States during the 19th century to address problems of risk and uncertainty in an expanding market economy. Early credit reporting agencies assisted merchant lenders by collecting and centralizing information about the business activities and reputations of unknown borrowers throughout the country. These agencies quickly evolved into commercial surveillance networks, amassing huge archives of personal information about American citizens and developing credit rating systems to rank them. Shortly after the Civil War, separate credit reporting organizations devoted to monitoring consumers, rather than businesspeople, also began to emerge to assist credit-granting retailers. By the early 20th century, hundreds of local credit bureaus dissected the personal affairs of American consumers, forming the genesis of a national consumer credit surveillance infrastructure.
The history of American credit reporting reveals fundamental links between the development of modern capitalism and contemporary surveillance society. These connections became increasingly apparent during the late 20th century as technological advances in computing and networked communication fueled the growth of new information industries, raising concerns about privacy and discrimination. These connections and concerns, however, are not new. They can be traced to 19th-century credit reporting organizations, which turned personal information into a commodity and converted individual biographies into impersonal financial profiles and risk metrics. As these disembodied identities and metrics became authoritative representations of one’s reputation and worth, they exerted real effects on one’s economic life chances and social legitimacy. While drawing attention to capitalism’s historical twin, surveillance, the history of credit reporting illuminates the origins of surveillance-based business models that became ascendant during the 21st century.
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Cold War in the American Working Class
Rosemary Feurer
The US working class and the institutional labor movement was shaped by anticommunism. Anticommunism preceded the founding of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and this early history affected the later experience. It reinforced conservative positions on union issues even in the period before the Cold War, and forged the alliances that influenced the labor movement’s direction, including the campaign to organize the South, the methods and structures of unions, and US labor’s foreign policy positions. While the Communist Party of the USA (CP) was a hierarchical organization straitjacketed by an allegiance to the Soviet Union, the unions it fostered cultivated radical democratic methods, while anticommunism often justified opposition to militancy and obstructed progressive policies. In the hottest moments of the postwar development of domestic anticommunism, unions and their members were vilified and purged from the labor movement, forced to take loyalty oaths, and fired for their association with the CP. The Cold War in the working class removed critical perspectives on capitalism, reinforced a moderate and conservative labor officialdom, and led to conformity with the state on foreign policy issues.
