Birth registration formed a key part of the administration of white supremacy between Reconstruction and World War II. In the allotment of Indigenous lands and the enforcement of de jure segregation by states, birth registration served an important ideological and administrative function. Because allotment policy combined property transmission with family reorganization, it made documentation of identity more important to the federal Indian Office. The Office imposed nuclear family structures on complex kin networks to establish access to land title, and it used documentation to alter family relationships to fit with American property law. During the same years, southern states used birth registration to fix racial identity in order to determine access to school, marriage, and many other benefits. Racial classification through birth registration, in other words, worked less to record the truth than to help produce it.

When incorporating the press into historical narratives, scholars have often relied on published newspaper and magazine articles without interrogating how those pieces were produced. This article relies on the under-used archival papers of journalists in the early Cold War period to argue that they actively created a Washington consensus on foreign policy that kept economic determinism out of the U.S. public's understanding of policies like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In private, however, the more anticommunist public narrative was contradicted by a discourse that emphasized the importance of access to colonial raw materials. This private discourse was enabled by the Washington press corps’ social spaces, which were segregated by race and gender and helped create a worldview that acknowledged the hypocrisy of the U.S. government but not their own.

In 1974, Congresswoman Bella Abzug introduced the Equality Act, the first federal gay rights legislation. A high-profile ally, Abzug occupied a unique space in the gay rights movement, and the Equality Act cemented her as the premier political intermediary for gay rights. Owing to her prominence, Abzug attracted a geographically and ideologically diverse constituency of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans. Gay activists as well as isolated individuals reached out to Abzug as a conduit for their grievances and political hopes, and her support unified gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans around a national focal point at a time when the movement was fractured and regional. In the period after Stonewall, Abzug was gay liberation's most meaningful national intermediary. Routinely undervalued in the history of the gay rights movement, Abzug's legislative advocacy reveals the centrality of political allyship within the struggle for equality.

The fate of caring labor was up for grabs in the 1970s, when Americans debated how to value feminized work—paid or unpaid, professional or service-oriented, performed in one's own home or beyond it—as women's social roles shifted. President Richard Nixon and his allies proposed reassigning caregiving functions to volunteers as a way to resist new demands on the welfare state and shrug off unmet social needs. Although many women's groups objected, their varied approaches to feminized labors also kept them from forging a united response. Recovering these volunteering wars offers up a vital perspective on the conflict between postwar movements advancing broad rights claims and the New Right's frontal assault on the “undeserving.” Manipulating notions of benevolence, Nixon and his associates found new ways to puncture the social safety net—a process that political leaders from both major parties would emulate and accelerate.