The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) conducted more than 100 atmospheric atomic detonations at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) between 1951 and 1962 depositing radioactivity throughout the United States but particularly the rural communities just “downwind.” The monitoring of radioactivity and efforts to warn downwind residents, however, failed to ensure their safety. I engage in archival analysis of AEC documents to examine decision making in reference to radioactive fallout. In recounting the socionatural history of atmospheric testing at the NTS, the present study argues operational conduct was lethargic due to the adoption of specious organizational heuristics. They included the assumption that fallout is subject to predictable atmospheric dispersion; fallout has noncumulative, undifferentiated effects on people; and downwind residents were prone to unreasoning panic. Thus AEC officials were continually chasing problems after they arose and in the absence of containment of fallout focused on containment of public perception and dialogue. The study concludes by highlighting the lessons relevant to contemporary sociotechnical activities.

River works constituted the largest civil expenditure of the Qing state. In theory, the fiscal responsibility of the Qing state only stretched to major conservancy efforts of the Yellow River and Grand Canal, as well as the construction and maintenance of major river banks and irrigation initiatives. Smaller projects were funded and managed by local communities. Nonetheless, this division of funding between the state and local society was blurred in practice. Since the early eighteenth century, the Qing state routinely advanced the monies to pay for major repair and reconstruction of nonstate water-control projects; the communities who benefited from the finished project returned the investment to the state through extra duties on land taxes. This special method for financing hydraulic projects was frequently used in the first half of the nineteenth century when the Qing state experienced increasing fiscal difficulties. By examining the application of this financing method in different places and under varying circumstances between 1750 and 1850, this paper argues that the legitimation of state power through public good provision was the major justification of this policy.

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South at the beginning of the twentieth century had an enormous impact on cities in the Midwest and North including Hartford, Connecticut. This study examines the movement of African Americans to Hartford at the neighborhood and street level. The new arrivals, many from Georgia recruited to work in the Connecticut River valley tobacco farms, joined long-established African American residents of Hartford. A geographic information system (GIS) analysis at the street level illustrates residential differences within the African American community based on place of birth, socioeconomic status, and voting. In the north end of Hartford migrants from Georgia and Eastern European immigrants, for a moment in historical time, shared residential space at the street level. However the Eastern European immigrants had higher occupation status and moved out of the North End neighborhoods, which became increasingly racially segregated as the Great Migration continued.

This paper examines the discursive production of risk and its management in the German “enlightenment film” of the interwar period. From the sexual enlightenment films of the immediate postwar era to the Nazi-era sterilization films, public health campaigns mobilized new ideas about hygiene and the new resources of the mass media. Depicting a world composed of discrete risks (venereal disease, hereditary illness), on the one hand, and supplying information on how to manage such risks, on the other, public officials and experts invested considerable resources in this project of public education. Yet insofar as this project addressed controversial aspects of human behavior, and often proposed controversial solutions, this campaign of state-sponsored enlightenment remained an ambivalent one. Particularly in campaigns against venereal disease, leading advocates were frequently drawn into debates both about film's value as medium of mass instruction and the nature of the public they sought to address, a public perceived in fundamental ways as “at risk.” Their efforts routinely provoked charges that enlightenment films on sexual conduct could incite the very behaviors they strove to warn audiences against. By the end of the 1920s, the hopes placed in public enlightenment campaigns seemed to have waned. And yet the enlightenment film underwent a significant revival during the Nazi era. The paper concludes by examining the interconnections between the Nazis' reconceptualization of public enlightenment, risk, and strategies for managing it.

Inquisitors engaged in mass censorship across the Iberian and Italian peninsulas; however, the effect it had on scholarship is debated. To test the effect of inquisitorial control a database of more than 2,000 top-tier mathematicians, scientists, authors, artists, and composers was created for 16 European countries from 1000 to 1749. Italy and Iberia had large declines of high-level scholars shortly after the establishment of the inquisitions. In contrast, other countries—both Protestant and Catholic—had increases in top-level scholars. Even though other countries had book burnings, religious persecution, and intolerance, the presence of an institution that became intolerant and oppressive significantly impacted the location of scientists and other top achievers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

While a framework of statist welfare practices was constructed in the 1930s, the principles that underwrote it—and that defined the interaction of individual citizens and state agencies—were changed as a consequence of World War II and transformed as a result of Stalin's death and the onset of de-Stalinization. Following a major sequence of welfare reforms in the Khrushchev period, most people's encounters with social risk were substantially minimized. By the Brezhnev era, problems associated with moral hazard were creating new challenges for policy makers: not only did people enjoy the right to a job, as they had done for decades, but perverse incentives discouraged innovation and, for some, hard work. A welfare system had been established that went far beyond the universalism of Western Europe. Cash transfers diffused social risks. Furthermore, welfare touched almost all areas of life, from jobs to leisure, creating a new kind of industrial society, in which many social risks had been artificially eliminated. The effectiveness of this system was highly uneven, and many miserable examples of welfare provision persisted, but this revised relationship between risk and welfare guided the mentalities of policy makers and ordinary people alike. This article offers a commentary on the long-term nature of this process but focuses particularly on the reforms associated with Khrushchev, especially the pension laws of 1956 and 1964.

From 1870 to the present, the city of New York has built and maintained municipal bathing places including river baths, indoor bathhouses, indoor pools, and outdoor pools, designed around competing motivations of hygiene, recreation, and play. In this paper, I consider what it means for different groups to play in public space using Caillois's (1961) division of ludus—competitive, rule-bound play, and paidia—exuberant, unstructured play. First, using historical examples, I show how these notions of play were expressed in two shifts in the construction of municipal swimming and bathing infrastructure in New York City. In 1870, the enclosure of formerly unstructured bathing spaces at the riverbanks, and the establishment of floating baths in the rivers was meant to structure both time and behavior in the water; in 1936, the construction of 11 enormous swimming pools under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses provided bathing spaces, with recreation at the center of their design program and social function. Second, I offer contemporary ethnographic data from two outdoor pools in Brooklyn to demonstrate how rules around acceptable play are differentially enforced inside of the same institution. Through these historical shifts and contemporary variations, I demonstrate how both the construction and everyday use of municipal bathing infrastructure has been the site of an ongoing tension between ludus and paidia, inflected with urban problematics of class and race.

This article compares the financing of urban infrastructure in nineteenth-century Chicago and twentieth-century Phoenix, highlighting distributional conflicts over the cost of public goods. Using the rich secondary literature on Chicago, particularly Robin Einhorn's book, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872, I explore whether adoption of development impact fees in Phoenix in 1987 represented a transition similar to that in Chicago between 1847 and 1851, when a system of special assessments paid by property owners benefiting from an improvement arose, in contrast to citywide financing of public works for citywide benefit. I examine the history of adoption and implementation of development impact fees, which were intended to “make growth pay for itself” by assessing new development to finance infrastructure it would require, and consider whether the fees resembled Chicago's special assessment system in constituting a privatization of government and in reflecting a view that government should not be used to redistribute. I conclude that models that address the provision of urban infrastructure, such as the Tiebout model, would benefit from greater attention to efforts to shift the cost of public goods over space, time, and social groups or classes in growing communities.