This article explores responses in the Black press to the rapidly expanding U.S. deportation regime during the interwar period. While their perspectives have been largely absent from scholarship on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators have historically been highly engaged with the issue. Black periodicals provided extensive coverage of the expulsion of Black immigrants, as well as of non-Black immigrants who violated the racial structures of American society (either through antiracist political advocacy or through interracial relationships). In doing so, the Black press insisted that deportation was a Black issue, and that antiblackness was central to the functioning of the early-twentieth-century immigration control system. By surveying roughly 1,100 articles on deportation in the Black press, I highlight how Black writers construed deportation as a powerful tool of white supremacy and a threat to Black immigrants and African Americans alike.

This article considers the role of national spaces in the creation of interwar-era internationalism. Specifically, it explores how the future editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, the mouthpiece of what would become the American Foreign Relations Establishment, found his way to internationalism not in the corridors of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference, but rather through treading through the corners of the newly made Yugoslavia. During the 1920s and 1930s, internationally minded thinkers from across the political spectrum shared at least one commonality: they rooted their dreams for an international world in particular, and expressly national, spaces. This article explores how and why international thinkers became invested in foreign national movements during the interwar, suggesting that to some, these new states both represented and contributed to an idealized vision of an international world that could promote unity while protecting particularities.

In the early 1920s, legal and economic experts in the U.S. Treasury Department played a pivotal role in developing U.S. fiscal policy. Thomas S. Adams was one such expert and a key architect of the World War I fiscal state. After the war, Adams envisioned an innovative business tax that could have been the first broad-based, national consumption tax in the United States but was rejected by populist lawmakers. Later, Adams would be identified as one of the intellectual pioneers of the modern value-added tax (VAT)—a tax that has been adopted in nearly every developed country in the world except the United States and has also come to underwrite expansive, progressive social-welfare spending. How did a tax that began with an American expert fail to take hold in the United States? Democratic forces in the shape of organized political and economic interests both facilitated and frustrated the development of seemingly rational tax laws and spending policies crafted by fiscal experts. While Adams learned firsthand how these democratic forces influenced the relationship between expertise and state capacity, this missed opportunity to enact a comprehensive national consumption tax also influenced the peculiar development of the modern American fiscal and social-welfare states.

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.

From 1921 until 1936, musician Willem Van de Wall pioneered the modern use of therapeutic music in American prisons and psychiatric institutions. His therapy was steeped in the methods and philosophy of social control, and after World War II, it shaped the professionalizing field of music therapy. Van de Wall's influence reveals an overlooked connection between modern clinical practice and the techniques of control employed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals of the early twentieth century. Given music therapy's broader impact as an element of postwar self-help culture, its relationship to social control practices also disrupts longstanding scholarly ideas about the so-called “therapeutic ethos.” The therapeutic ethos did not originate solely in efforts by the middle classes to adjust to bourgeois modernity. The case of music therapy suggests that some elements of “therapeutic culture” were always coercive and always directed toward the maintenance of race, gender, and class hierarchies.

In the interwar years, the colonial powers of the day instantly saw long-range radio technology as an instrument to strengthen their empires as it enabled broadcasters in the European metropoles to reach audiences in the peripheries via the ether. This article focuses on the Dutch colonial station PHOHI, a company that pioneered global radio broadcasting. The station was founded by a group of influential entrepreneurs in order to strengthen ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies by reaching out to colonial expatriates. This case study shows how geopolitical and ideological considerations shaped both the organisation and the content of Dutch intercontinental broadcasting.

After a brief description of the initial development of Venezuela's crude oil industry, this paper examines the impact the 1932 US tariff on crude oil imports had on the country. The US tariff on crude oil imports stabilised domestic crude oil prices but prevented consumers from benefting from lower prices in refned petroleum products. The large us international integrated crude oil companies gained from higher crude oil prices for their domestic production while supplying their european markets with mostly cheap crude oil from their newly developed Venezuelan oilfelds. The tariff increased the Venezuelan oil industry's vulnerability to international events because it narrowed the competitive edge it had over domestic us crude oil production. consequently, the Gómez dictatorship in Venezuela at the time became more dependent on the oil companies operating in the country since they could reduce production considerably, or even leave the country as quickly as they entered with a negative impact on government revenues.