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The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), the book reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses) and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era. The book is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. It reinterprets the political origins of the “Second” New Deal and Roosevelt's electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, the book details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.

In the decades after the Civil War, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration marked the start of the Gilded Age, a period of rapid economic growth but also social upheaval. Reformers responded to the social and economic chaos with a “search for order,” as famously described by historian Robert Wiebe. Most reformers agreed that one of the nation's top priorities should be its children and youth, who, they believed, suffered more from the disorder plaguing the rapidly growing nation than any other group. This book explores both nineteenth-century conditions that led Progressives to their search for order and some of the solutions applied to children and youth in the context of that search. The book offers case studies relevant to educational reform, child labor laws, underage marriage, and recreation for children, among others. Including important primary documents produced by children themselves, the book foregrounds the role that youth played in exerting agency over their own lives and in contesting the policies that sought to protect and control them.

Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied, but at times from enemy, nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions. This book uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in US foreign relations. It draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

Returning Vietnam War veterans had every reason to expect that the government would take care of their readjustment needs in the same way it had done for veterans of both World War II and the Korean War. But the Vietnam generation soon discovered that their G.I. Bills fell well short of what many of them believed they had earned. This groundbreaking study provides the first analysis of the legislative debates surrounding the education benefits offered under the Vietnam-era G.I. Bills. Specifically, the book explores why legislators from both ends of the political spectrum failed to provide Vietnam veterans the same generous compensation offered to veterans of previous wars. This book should be essential reading to scholars of the Vietnam War, political history, or of social policy. Contemporary lawmakers should heed its historical lessons on how we ought to treat our returning veterans. Indeed, veterans wishing to fully understand their own homecoming experience will find great interest in the book's conclusions.

If the railroads won the Gilded Age, the coal industry lost it. Railroads epitomized modern management, high technology, and vast economies of scale. By comparison, the coal industry was embarrassingly primitive. Miners and operators dug coal, bought it, and sold it in 1900 in the same ways that they had for generations. In the popular imagination, coal miners epitomized anti-modern forces as the so-called “Molly Maguire” terrorists. Yet the sleekly modern railroads were utterly dependent upon the disorderly coal industry. Railroad managers demanded that coal operators and miners accept the purely subordinate role implied by their status. They refused. This book shows how disorder in the coal industry disrupted the strategic plans of the railroads. It does so by expertly intertwining the history of two industries—railroads and coal mining—that historians have generally examined from separate vantage points. It shows the surprising connections between railroad management and miner organizing; railroad freight rate structure and coal mine operations; and railroad strategy and strictly local legal precedents. It combines social, economic, and institutional approaches to explain the Gilded Age from the perspective of the relative losers of history rather than the winners. It examines the still-unresolved nature of America's national conundrum and asks how to reconcile the competing demands of national corporations, local businesses, and employees.

Shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century, the New York City Department of Health decided to address what it perceived as the racial nature of health. It delivered heavily racialized care in different neighborhoods throughout the city: syphilis treatment among African Americans, tuberculosis for Italian Americans, and so on. It was a challenging and ambitious program, dangerous for the providers, and troublingly reductive for the patients. Nevertheless, poor and working-class African American, British West Indian, and Southern Italian women all received some of the nation's best health care during this period. This book challenges traditional ideas of early twentieth-century urban black health care by showing a program that was simultaneously racialized and cutting-edge. It reveals that even the most well-meaning public health programs may inadvertently reinforce perceptions of inferiority that they were created to fix.

Every year, more than thirty-three million vehicles traverse the Holland Tunnel, making their way to and from Jersey City and Lower Manhattan. From tourists to commuters, many cross the tunnel's 1.6-mile corridor on a daily basis, and yet few know much about this amazing feat of early 20th-century engineering. How was it built, by whom, and at what cost? These and many other questions are answered in this book about this seminal structure in the history of urban transportation. The book explains the economic forces which led to the need for the tunnel, and details the extraordinary political and social politicking that took place on both sides of the Hudson River to finally enable its construction. It also introduces us to important figures in the tunnel's history, such as New Jersey Governor Walter E. Edge, who, more than anyone else, made the dream of a tunnel a reality and George Washington Goethals (builder of the Panama Canal and namesake of the Goethals Bridge) the first chief engineer of the project.

This book focuses on the Americans who served in the Korean War from June 1950 to July 1953. More specifically, it examines the Korean War veterans' upbringing, military training, and wartime experiences as well as attitudes and post-Korea lives. Unlike their older brothers and cousins who served in World War II and who were welcomed home with ticker-tape parades and bands, Korean War veterans returned to America without much fanfare. Returning veterans could only wonder why they had been seemingly forgotten by the public. This book attempts to give a face to those who served in the Korean War and to understand the impact that this war had on veterans and on the world to which they returned. It discusses the various circumstances compelling Americans to accept military service, their decision to join the armed forces in the early 1950s, their experiences in the battlefields of the Korean Peninsula, and the experiences of American prisoners of war captured by the North Koreans and Chinese. It also considers the lives of women and African Americans in the war zone and what happened to Korean War veterans once they returned to the home front.

During and especially after World War I, the millions of black-clad widows on the streets of Europe's cities were a constant reminder that war caused carnage on a vast scale. But widows were far more than just a reminder of the war's fallen soldiers; they were literal and figurative actresses in how nations crafted their identities in the interwar era. This book compares the ways in which German and American widows experienced their postwar status, and how that played into the cultures of mourning in their two nations: one defeated, the other victorious. Each nation used widows and war dead as symbols to either uphold their victory or disengage from their defeat, but this book, parsing both German and U.S. primary sources, compares widows' lived experiences to public memory. For some widows, government compensation in the form of military-style awards sufficed. For others, their own deprivations, combined with those suffered by widows living in other nations, became the touchstone of a transnational awareness of the absurdity of war and the need to prevent it.

This book tells the story, from the 1960s to the present, of the South Street Seaport District of Lower Manhattan—one of the last neighborhoods of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New York City not ruined by urban development. The neighborhood was earmarked for the erection of the World Trade Center until its placement moved one mile westward. After Penn Station's demolition had angered many New York citizens, preservationists mobilized to save this last piece of Manhattan's old port and recreate its fabled nineteenth-century “Street of Ships.” The South Street Seaport and the World Trade Center became the yin and yang of Lower Manhattan's rebirth. City Hall designated the museum as developer of the twelve-block urban renewal district. However, the Seaport Museum was never adequately funded, and it suffered with the real estate collapse of 1972. The city, bankers, and state bought the museum's fifty buildings and leased them back at terms that crippled the museum financially. That led to the controversial construction of the Rouse Company's New Fulton Market and Pier 17 mall. Though the Seaport Museum's finances were always tenuous, the neighborhood and the museum were improving until the tragedy of 9/11, followed by Superstorm Sandy. Today, the future of this pioneering museum is in doubt. The book reveals the pitfalls of privatizing urban renewal, developing museum–corporate partnerships, and introducing a professional regimen over a people's movement, and how a decrepit piece of waterfront became a wonderful venue for all New Yorkers and visitors.