Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants’ everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past.

What prompted New York City teachers to form a union in the Progressive Era? The founding of the journal American Teacher in 1912 led to creation of the Teachers’ League in 1913 and then the Teachers Union in 1916, facilitating formation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Despite historiographical claims that teacher union drives needed a focus on bread-and-butter issues to succeed, ideals of educational democracy and opposition to managerial autocracy motivated the Teachers’ League. Contrary to claims that early New York City teacher unionism was unrepresentative because dominated by radical male Jewish high-school instructors, heterogeneous majorities of women and elementary school teachers formed the Teachers’ League and Teachers Union leaderships. Board of Education representation, maternity leave, free speech, and pensions were aims of this radically democratic movement led by socialists and feminists, which received demonstrably greater mass teacher support than the conservative feminism of a rival association.

World War II transformed policing in the United States. Many police enlisted in the military during the war, and in turn many veterans joined police forces following the victories of 1945. As wartime labor shortages depleted their ranks, police chiefs turned to new initiatives to strengthen and professionalize their forces, redoubling those efforts as growing fears of crime and internal security threats outlasted the global conflict. This article investigates the rapid growth of the military police, how African Americans responded to changes in policing due to the war, and these wartime experiences’ lingering impacts. Based on research in obscure and difficult-to-find police professional literature, and closely examining New York City, it argues that the war's effects on policing did not amount to “militarization” as currently understood, but did inspire more standardized and nationally coordinated approaches to recruitment as well as military-style approaches to discipline, training, and tactical operations.

The history of the Social Security Amendments of 1967 illuminates the contours of fiscal citizenship. This watershed law created both work requirements for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients and new policy instruments, including federal child support enforcement, to compel poor men to fulfill their financial obligations to their families. Welfare reformers claimed that such changes were necessary to protect the rights of taxpayers against the “criminal” predations of welfare recipients. These policy changes initiated in 1967 redefined poor women's non-work, as well as their sexual and reproductive decisions, as crimes against taxpayers. Welfare recipients contested this logic and the policies that flowed from it by insisting on the value of their own domestic labor and rejecting a narrow view of taxpaying citizenship. The resolution of these questions played a critical role in revising the American social contract.