Beginning in the 1970s, historians and social scientists published a great deal on the birth-control movement in the United States, a subject that had been neglected. They were seeking perspective on the issues raised by profound changes in society that rendered problematic the gender system and family values of previous generations. It is no fluke that these scholars began to write the history of the effort to promote the separation of sex from procreation during the same decade that Congress removed contraception from the practices and information prohibited by the national obscenity laws (1971), and the Supreme Court ruled that married couples had a constitutionally protected right to practice contraception (1965), that the unmarried had a similar right of “privacy” (1972), and that pregnant women had the right to induced abortions performed by physicians during the first trimester of their pregnancies (1973). The Court's affirmation of a limited right to “abortion on demand” in Roe v. Wade followed a decade of intense political struggle and judicial action at the state level, and Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, was self-consciously attempting to forge a consensus in areas of human behavior and public policy where conflicts were literally lethal and threatened the social order. In turn, much of the vitality of the scholarship on reproductive history that coincides with changes in the law sprang from the self-consciousness of women.

Scholarship on the political development of the United States since the 1960s is dominated, not surprisingly, by social scientists. Such recent events fall within the penumbra of “contemporary history,” the standard research domain of social scientists but treacherous terrain for historians. Social scientists studying American government and society generally enjoy prompt access to evidence of the policy-making process–documents from the elected and judicial branches of government, interviews with policy elites, voting returns, survey research. Historians of the recent past, on the other hand, generally lack two crucial ingredients–temporal perspective and archival evidence–that distinguish historical analysis from social science research. For these reasons, social scientists (and journalists) customarily define the initial terms of policy debate and shape the conventional wisdom. Historians weigh in later, when memories fade, archives open, and the clock adds a relentless and inherently revisionist accumulation of hindsight.

In late 1930, as the Great Depression deepened, the Cotton Textile Institute unveiled a plan for eliminating the employment of women and minors at night. The intent behind the national trade association's measure was to discourage cotton textile mills from operating at night, thereby breaking a cycle of overproduction and price-cutting that had beset the industry through the 1920s. Although this fact was not emphasized in public, the measure's particular target was southern mills, which, less restrained than northeastern mills by unions or state labor laws, comprised a disproportionate share of the industry's nightrunners. The Cotton Textile Institute (CTI) anticipated that ending night work for women would reduce night operation because mill tasks historically done by women were interdependent with men's tasks, and replacing women night workers with men would be expensive. Targeting women and children, rather than all employees, enabled the institute to publicize the measure as a “humanitarian” effort, rather than as a move to limit production. CTI leaders hoped that this approach would appeal to the public and—especially important—that it would head off antitrust prosecution by the Justice Department.

Since the onset of the Cold War, and particularly after both superpowers began to amass large arsenals of nuclear weapons, military planners in the East and West have encouraged efforts to develop defenses against nuclear attacks. Both sides have made effective use of “passive” defenses, such as the hardening and dispersal of weapons systems likely to be the prime targets of a preemptive strike and the provision of shelters for command authorities and vital communications centers. Both sides have also tried, but with far less success, to develop “active” defenses, but against the varied and daunting challenge of modern strategic systems, all such efforts so far have been largely in vain, even though they have been undertaken at considerable expense and with great technical sophistication. The main reason is that every advance in active defense has been offset by compensatory improvements in offensive forces.

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, Senator Joseph O'Mahoney (D-Wyo.) warned that “if we let little business go down in a total effort to defend democracy we shall let the very foundation of democracy perish. The total effort will result in total government.” O'Mahoney was concerned that the growing concentration of defense contracts with large corporations would tie big business to big government and thereby leave small business out of the military buildup. This fear that big business might squeeze small manufacturers out of the war effort fueled demands for government assistance. With the antitrust laws suspended for the duration of the war, congressional small-business advocates took positive action, using crisis rhetoric and the ideological appeal of small business to secure the creation of the Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC), the first federal agency to represent small manufacturers.