The article introduces the approach of a critical ability history by analyzing Progressive Era diet advice. It shows how calorie counting reframed health as an ability resulting from individuals’ responsible self-conduct. At that time, novel understandings of bodies and health, techniques of measuring them, and hopes of improving them in the name of eugenics and industrial capitalism suggested that bodies and health were malleable and that it was the duty of individual citizens to care for and shape them. As such, health as ability became a terrain of exclusion as well as of struggles for citizenship recognition.

In 1910, a meat boycott spread through the United States. Tens of thousands of people pledged not to eat meat for thirty days to demand lower prices and protest the practices of the Meat Trust. The movement, though its outcomes were limited, was supported by consumer organizations, labor unions, lawmakers, suffragists, and women's clubs. It thus intersected with struggles that were at the heart of the Progressive Era's reform movements. This article will explore how various organizations (labor unions, the Socialist Party, suffragists, the National Consumers League) used, or did not use, this event to further their own goals. It will argue that food protests constitute a site from which to analyze particular transformations of the protest landscape of the time, such as the rise of consumer politics; it will also show that as transversal spaces of mobilization, food protests should be studied through the significance of their object. Food, as a meeting point between the individual body and society, can epitomize the blurring of the lines between private and public that characterized Progressive reform movements.

This article unpacks the music of the Townsend Plan, an ambitious Depression-era pension proposal, and the overlooked, yet deeply influential, national movement of its supporters, which aimed to simultaneously eradicate old-age poverty and revive the national economy. As well as providing a musical account of the media strategies, political tactics, and institutional culture of Townsendism, this article charts how different demographics of US society also mobilized popular music in arguments for or against pensions in the 1930s and 1940s. In the process, the article highlights some of the rich discourse about welfare, health, and aging in the mid-twentieth-century USA.

This state-level study emphasizes the influence of local administration on welfare provision, even amidst a huge national New Deal effort. It interrogates John Steinbeck's allegation in “Starvation under the Orange Trees” that migrant children died avoidable deaths in Depression-era California because of discriminatory policies and apathetic officials. Steinbeck's reportage was a political vehicle for his own ends rather than accurate social history. But with hospital care being reserved for local residents and racialized inferior food rations provided to Mexican American children, California's Depression-era welfare system favoured white Californian children over those it categorized as “others,” with potentially deadly consequences.

This article traces the approach of moderate southern Senators toward domestic hunger and welfare in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Often overlooked in scholarly accounts, these Senators formed a significant minority of the southern delegation. Their behavior demonstrates both the continued possibilities of a more inclusive southern politics after the mid-1960s and the importance of moderate southerners to the Food Stamp Program's major expansion in the years after 1964. At the same time, however, these politicians opposed guaranteed-income schemes and endorsed “workfare” measures promoted by more conservative southerners that conditioned aid on participation in low-wage employment.

This article traces the changing terrain of the food stamp program in the pivotal decade of the 1970s. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to put an end to hunger in America, “for all time.” However, in the fifteen years following this announcement, policymakers erected boundaries around the scope of public food welfare programs. In this article, the author highlights key continuities between earlier, modest attempts at program reform under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and the later Reagan-era assault on welfare spending of the early 1980s.