The idea that friendship and dialogue are the first steps to making a better world has a history. During the first half of the twentieth century, American Protestants powered a national movement for dialogue and cooperation among people of different races. In the 1940s and 1950s, Black leaders in predominantly white ecumenical Protestant institutions created a series of workshops and dialogue guides that popularized the notion that interracial exchange would lead to action. Backed by their institutions’ financial, moral, and organizational resources, they transformed both the interracial movement and dominant understandings of how to change society. Yet, while Black ecumenical leaders insisted that facilitating interracial exchange was just the beginning form of action in ending discrimination, they unintentionally facilitated problematic assumptions about the standalone power of “first steps” in creating a more equitable society.

American Jewish support for Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was in part the result of an emotional mobilization. American Jewish fundraisers constructed an extensive public-relations apparatus and formulated strategies for honoring supporters and shaming shirkers. They, along with journalists for the Jewish press, interpreted events through the lens of information provided by the newly formed Israeli government. Fundraising, however, could succeed only by responding to donors’ emotional proclivities, and expressions of solidarity with Israel in Jewish media were laterally reinforcing as well as shaped from the top down. These findings underscore the role of positive emotions in generating “groupness.”

In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration and Congress erupted in a sharp partisan debate over how to pay for the novel National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, slated to become the most expensive and expansive public works project in United States history. Republicans advocated for interest-bearing bonded debt borrowed from banks, while Democrats preferred to avoid debt service costs and apply a direct tax-and-pave approach to the enormous state building project. The chosen fiduciary practices promised to be as permanent as the physical infrastructure they paid to construct and maintain. Consequently, the fraught episode saw the two parties contest not only transportation infrastructure and the capital supply upon which it depended, but indeed the very nature and future of American political economy. When the tax-and-pave approach prevailed, it saved taxpayers interest costs, but came with its own perilous consequences as it set near-limitless development in motion.

In the late twentieth century, the American prison system expanded in ways that denied women, and especially working-class and women of color, adequate medical care with regard to HIV-AIDS and their reproductive, chronic, and other illnesses. The experience of living within a racist, misogynistic, and privatized prison system shaped women's organizing on the inside, inspiring forms of mutual aid among prisoners and compelling the formation of inside–outside alliances. Activists not only addressed HIV-AIDS, but also the absence of all the healthcare that incarcerated women failed to receive. Their efforts highlight the systemic and cyclical problems diverse groups of women have faced within the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the United States, as well as women's interpersonal, organizational, and legal efforts to overcome them.

Beef creates an emotional resonance that far outstrips its place within the market. In the 2000s, chicken may have dethroned beef as the most common meat on American plates, ending its reign since the 1940s, but most people do not seem to associate chicken breasts or poultry farmers with national identity the way Americans see ribeyes and cowboys as symbols of the nation's muscular, frontier past.