W. E. B. Du Bois stands as one of the most celebrated and studied African Americans in United States history. Nevertheless, Du Bois's substantial body of writings on World War I has received little scholarly attention. This article explores Du Bois's published and unpublished work, revealing the centrality of World War I to Du Bois's life and historical imagination. Du Bois devoted decades to writing about and grappling with the historical legacy of World War I for African Americans, broadly, and for himself, individually. His inability to find both collective and personal redemptive meaning in the war reflects his struggle to reconcile the tension between history and memory, as well as the still contested place of World War I in African American history.

The main components of the Israel lobby in the United States were organized in the spring of 1954, six years after the State of Israel declared independence, in response to a crisis in U.S.–Israel diplomacy that erupted in October 1953. Israeli soldiers had massacred more than sixty Palestinian villagers in Qibya, on the West Bank, eliciting widespread condemnation; American Jews, in reply, mobilized to defend Israel in new ways. The American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, established at this time, displayed two outstanding features. They were Jewish united front organizations that brought together Zionist with “non-Zionist” groups. They also emerged from transnational contacts with Israeli leaders and realities. A staunch near-consensus in defense of Israel in the most trying circumstances established a lasting framework in American Jewish life.

During the 1970s, activists first popularized the concept of “environmental justice” in the context of growing environmental degradation, racialized urban poverty, and working-class fears of plant closure. To address these problems, leaders in the United Auto Workers and other unions formed coalitions with civil rights and environmental groups, and advocated federal policies that would reduce both pollution and unemployment. This article argues that the defeat of these efforts, and the political marginalization of full employment and other social-democratic goals in the 1980s, resulted in a narrower conception of environmental justice among many scholars and activists. Revisiting this forgotten history calls into question common claims about environmentalism in recent scholarship on the 1970s, and suggests the need to revise conventional narratives of the emergence of the environmental justice movement.

Oil is the elephant in every room in modern American history. From the consumer-culture room to the politics room, the labor room to the U.S.-and-the-world room, oil is right there, as big as Texas, yet hardly anyone notices. That is less true than it used to be. The Journal of American History even devoted a special issue to oil in 2012. Yet modern American historians still have not thought enough about “crude reality.”

“The whole world knows that we covet no territory,” announced Herbert Hoover. Or was it Dwight Eisenhower who said that? (“The United States does not covet a single acre of land that belongs to another.”) Or perhaps John F. Kennedy (“This nation does not covet the territory of any people”), Lyndon Johnson (“We threaten no regime and covet no territory”), Gerald Ford (“America covets no one else's land”), or Ronald Reagan (“We Americans covet no foreign territory”)? The disavowing of territorial ambitions is a hallowed, bipartisan presidential tradition, like pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving or hosting the annual Easter egg roll.

On the cratered surface of the moon, a small stainless steel plaque commemorates the remarkable visit made by “men from the planet earth” who “came in peace for all mankind” in the summer of 1969. It bears the name of the three men who made the journey, Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins. And it features the name of one man who did not: President Richard M. Nixon.

On July 15, 1969, while more than one million space enthusiasts flocked to Florida's Cape Canaveral to celebrate the final countdown of the Apollo 11 launch the following day, a less festive gathering took place just a few miles away in an empty field outside the western gate of the Kennedy Space Center. On one side of the clearing stood NASA's chief, Thomas O. Paine, with several space agency administrators, while at the other end waited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) president, Ralph Abernathy, with twenty-five poor African American families, four scruffy mules pulling two rickety wagons, and, much to Paine's dismay, a phalanx of newspaper reporters and television news crews. When Abernathy's group began slowly marching hand-in-hand singing “We Shall Overcome,” Paine and his entourage walked forward to meet them in the middle of the field. Abernathy then took a microphone, nodded toward the Apollo 11 rocket towering in the distance, and explained that his Poor People's Campaign had not traveled to the cape to protest the Apollo launch, but instead to demonstrate against the country's distorted sense of national priorities. “I want NASA scientists,” he explained to the gathered press, “to tackle problems we face in society”.

“Do you think that whenever I'm talking to someone I'm conscious of whether or not he is ‘white’ or ‘colored’? … I was born a ‘native,’ and I've lived with racial discrimination. But we are free now. I'm no longer a ‘native’ but an Indonesian…. I don't feel inferior to whites, and I don't hate them either,” Sitor Situmorang, a preeminent Indonesian poet and essayist, told African American writer Richard Wright at an April 1955 social gathering in Wright's honor. Growing more agitated, Situmorang raised his voice and continued, “We are against colonialism, but we are not against whites. We struggled for racial equality, not for the belief in another superrace, a colored superrace.”