The Democratic Party faced a crisis of political legitimacy in the late 1960s as distrust and protest permeated its electoral base. In response, the Democratic National Committee established the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, tasked with restructuring the party’s presidential nomination process. Contrary to the conventional historical narrative of the McGovern-Fraser Commission that has focused on a supposed displacement of the party’s old guard by radical insurgents, this article instead argues that the main impetus for reform came from national party leaders seeking to build up the legitimacy and authority of the National Committee. Commission Chair George McGovern and the DNC used a particular reform rhetoric that charged state parties with the corruption of the political process, necessitating rescue by an empowered national party. This focus on the nationalizing impulses behind McGovern-Fraser serves to shift our attention away from ideological struggles and toward institutional motives.

NASA has put people in unique and extreme environments for over six decades. Supporting these individuals with a comprehensive health-care system has evolved over this period. As the Apollo program ended and NASA began to contemplate a space shuttle and space station program, societal pressures in the late 1960s and early 1970s caused federal agencies such as NASA to reconsider how to link the needs of the space program with a growing pressure to address societal needs by forging interagency partnerships. The Space Technology Applied to the Rural Papago Health Care (STARPAHC) project provides an example of how NASA sought to balance these two imperatives in an age of diminishing federal support. This project can provide lessons for today’s uncertain budgetary future for agencies such as NASA, which are once again being asked to find creative and innovative ways to support their missions while demonstrating their larger value to society.

The conflict between the US government and the Mormons in Utah Territory during the second half of the nineteenth century reflected shifts in the American territorial system. Through a repudiation of religious practices and dismantling of the Latter-Day Saints’ Church as an institution, the federal government demonstrated a willingness and ability to interfere with and regulate traditional local issues such as marriage and religion. This provided a foundation for the changes to the territorial system outlined by the Supreme Court in the Insular Cases. Scholars have overlooked the continuities between earlier territorial policy and the post-Insular Cases colonial system. Linking the struggle over authority in Utah Territory with the outcome of the Insular Cases as a component of territorial policy history fills this gap and helps to illuminate the policy connections between continental expansion and overseas expansion.

This essay examines the origins of physician-patient privilege in the United States. It concentrates an 1828 New York law that protected medical confidentiality in the courtroom—the first statutory guarantee of physician-patient privilege—as well as the rapid spread of privilege statutes throughout the nineteenth century. Using the published notes of the authors of New York’s influential statute alongside other primary sources, I argue that these early statutes are best explained as the result of nineteenth-century efforts to codify American law. The medical profession took little note of physician-patient privilege until much later, indicating that privilege emerged not as a protection of doctors’ professional status, nor as a means of protecting patients in the courtroom, but rather as an inadvertent offshoot of attempts to streamline and simply judicial proceedings. It is perhaps because of these unsystematic origins that physician-patient privilege still remains such an unevenly applied rule in American courtrooms.