The pariah garbage barge on a two-month odyssey with 3,100 tons of unwanted trash drew throngs of sightseers and reporters Sunday as it anchored just outside New York Harbor while city officials decide its fate.

The trek of the Mobro is well known. On 22 March 1987 the fully loaded garbage barge left Islip, New York, looking for a landfill that would take its unwanted cargo. Five states—North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida—as well as three countries, Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas, had banned the barge from unloading. Reluctantly, the captain turned the Mobro toward home, where it received an unceremonious, and dispirited, welcome.

In 1927, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the national organization founded in 1899 by veterans of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, appeared destined for historical obscurity. The organization that would later stand with the American Legion as a pillar of the powerful twentieth-century veterans' lobby struggled to maintain a membership of sixty thousand veterans. Despite desperate attempts to recruit from the ranks of the nearly 2.5 million eligible World War veterans, the VFW lagged behind in membership both the newly minted American Legion and even the Spanish War Veterans. The upstart Legion alone, from its 1919 inception throughout the 1920s, averaged more than seven hundred thousand members. Indeed, in 1929, Royal C. Johnson, the chairman of the House Committee on World War Veterans Legislation and a member of both the Legion and the VFW, described the latter as “not sufficiently large to make it a vital factor in public sentiment.” And yet, by 1932, in the middle of an economic crisis that dealt severe blows to the membership totals of almost every type of voluntary association, the VFW's membership soared to nearly two hundred thousand veterans. Between 1929 and 1932, the VFW experienced this surprising growth because the organization demanded full and immediate cash payment of the deferred Soldiers' Bonus, while the American Legion opposed it. Thus, by challenging federal veterans' policy, the VFW rose out of relative obscurity to become a prominent vehicle for veteran political activism. As important, by doing so the VFW unwittingly set in motion the protest movement known as the Bonus March.

This article follows the ways through which the concept of juvenile delinquency has been created in the legal and social discourse in Israel. It compares the discourse and resulting social policies regarding juvenile delinquency mainly in two social groups: “middle-class” offenders (youth from high socioeconomic families who immigrated to Israel before 1948); and “lower class” offenders (Middle Eastern “Oriental” youth from low socioeconomic families who came mainly during the 1950s from Asia Minor and North Africa). Societal reactions to juvenile delinquency during the period studied were highly variable, depending on the ethnicity, gender, and social class of the offender.

Liberal historians have traditionally played down or neglected the achievements of the Eisenhower administration in the area of civil rights. At the same time, they have overstated the contributions of liberal Democrats and understated the role congressional Democrats played in obstructing civil rights in the 1950s. The liberal bias of most historians has led to a distorted picture of the political dynamics affecting the struggle for black equality. The fact is that the Democrats, as a party, were not so liberal in the 1950s as they have often been portrayed, and the Republican party was not so conservative. The positions of the parties in fact were not so clear-cut as they became in the next decade. Neither party forcefully and openly advocated full equality for blacks; both reflected the dominant racism of white society. Granting that, however, the Eisenhower administration was not the obstructionist barrier to civil rights that historians have often portrayed.

In February 1936, a former federal government worker named Gussie E. Howell penned a letter to Grace Brewer, director of the Governmental Workers' Council (gwc) of the National Woman's Party (nwp). Howell, who lived in Texas, had apparently heard from colleagues about a questionnaire sent out by the nwp about the effects of Section 213 of the Economy Act of 1932 (“Section 213”). Howell said that while she had not seen the questionnaire, she wanted to describe the effect of Section 213 on her life.

In the 1990s, an increasing number of refugees make their way to the countries of the West. While the annual number of asylum seekers to Western Europe and North America averaged about 20,000 in the mid- 1970s, by 1990 this figure had jumped to more than 500,000. Unlike previous migrants, many of these asylum seekers came from non-Western countries, including Iran, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Ghana. Their flight to the West was but a small part of a worldwide refugee problem that has grown larger since the 1980s, especially in the Third World. The vast majority of the 17.5 million people now considered to be refugees are located in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Despite the improved international climate created by the thaw of the Cold War, the current asylum crisis is likely to continue throughout the decade; the mass exodus of Kurds to Turkey and Iran in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war is one reminder of this.

Social Security has achieved a privileged status in American politics. As a result of the Social Security tax, supporters claim, recipients have not received unearned benefits, nor has Congress felt as if it were building a massive welfare state. Indeed, the Social Security tax system has legitimated the program in the minds of policy experts, politicians, and recipients. Through Social Security, the American state has forged a strong alliance with the elderly and their descendants, both with retirees who received cash payments and with working families who did not have to finance their parents' retirement years.

As it had for countless other children in Arlington, Virginia, the idyll days of summer had come to end for eleven-year-old Edward Leslie Hamm Jr. on the morning of 5 September 1957. After donning a pair of clean khaki pants and a freshly pressed, short-sleeved white shirt, Hamm was heading back to the classroom along with twenty-one thousand other students in this Northern Virginia community. That alone was enough to put a pit in any child's stomach. But for Hamm the day possessed an added dimension. Instead of riding a bus for forty-five minutes to the Negro school six miles across the county, his parents were dispatching him, along with two other black pupils, to challenge the continued exclusion of blacks from the all-white school, one mile from their isolated exclusively black neighborhood. A full three years after Brown v. Board of Education, not a single black student had yet attended a white public school in Virginia, seen by many observers as the frontline state of resistance to school integration. The three children were nervous and took no comfort in thinking of themselves among a vanguard of the civil rights movement. “I wasn't into an integration thing,” recalled George Tyrone Nelson, who was fourteen at the time and among the trio challenging the segregated schools that day.

It is commonly accepted that innovation and economic prosperity after World War II were really spurred by the tremendous benefits of public investments. While public funding was crucial, a missing component of the historical analysis is a synthesis of the effects of these investments with changes in financial regulations enacted during the Great Depression, specific economic and employment policies, and the infusion of intellectual capital from scientists and engineers fleeing Nazi Germany and the turmoil of the war. The purpose of this article is to synthesize and analyze the effect of these three components—public polices, changes in private financial structures, and highly skilled immigration. This analysis will allow us to explore the broader impact and interdependence of knowledge creation, human and financial capital, and innovation.

Over the past decade, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has become the standard for medical practice.1 Evidence-based practices have been established in general medicine and specialized fields; new evidence-based journals have been launched.2 Although its roots can be found in mid-nineteenth-century medical philosophy, contemporary EBM was largely developed by the clinical epidemiology program at McMaster University in 1992.3 According to the McMaster manifesto published in JAMA, EBM “deemphasizes intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiologic rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision-making, and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research.”4 The most frequently cited definition of EBM is reliance on the “conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients,” based on an integration of “individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.”5 However, as Stefan Timmermans and Aaron Mauck recently observed, EBM “is loosely used and can refer to anything from conducting a statistical meta-analysis of accumulated research to promoting randomized clinical trials, to supporting uniform reporting styles for research, to a personal orientation toward critical self-evaluation.”6

To operate within a strictly political frame of reference, the dispute over abortion—the centerpiece of the controversy over reproduction and population control in America—would seem to be over. With the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992, many observers declared as much. Charles Krauthammer, for one, argued that “one can reasonably declare a great national debate over when all three independently (s)elected branches of government come to the same position.” In 1992 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade in the Casey decision. Given this and an apparent majority of pro-choice votes in both houses of Congress, the new President-elect vowed to make good on his campaign pledge to pass the “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA), the legislative equivalent of Roe, as a safeguard against any future challenges. Certainly there seemed to be grounds for such a claim.

Milton Friedman’s idea of flexible exchange rates was heresy for Americans until the mid-1960s. However, by the late 1970s the idea became embedded in academic thought, policymaking, and business practices. This article analyzes how floating currencies, once eschewed, became embraced as legitimate in the US through the late 1960s and early 1970s. It demonstrates how business leaders’ economic interests and laissez-faire economists’ framework for causes of and solutions to business hardships contributed to society’s acceptance of currency flexibility. Increasing societal support of flexible currencies strengthened the power of float-advocates within the US government, facilitating the transition of the international monetary system from fixed exchange rates to floating. This study highlights how material interests and policy discourses contributed to America’s new policy orientation. It also addresses the origins of the neoliberal international financial order by documenting how American elites reconstituted the state-market balance in global finance while navigating monetary crises.

This article analyses the inherent conflict between public and private interest from a long time-perspective, using the example of Sweden from 1620 to 2000. The main argument is that there have been two equally decisive historical shifts in the political discourse on how to organize public services in the past: First, a shift from an early modern patriarchal discourse to a more expansive articulation of publicness during the nineteenth century. Second, a shift toward privatization and deregulation in the late twentieth century. Both these shifts must be considered to fully explain the changing forms of public organization up to the present day. Theoretically, the concept of “publicness” is used to explain the political discourses on the organization of public services. Drawing on three discursive chains, the argument is that the political development was affected by the politicians’ conception of the political community, the form of organization, and by perceptions of values such as equal access and modernity. Our results demonstrate how and why political arguments for or against private service providers have motivated profound changes in the way public services are perceived of and organized.