This issue of The American Historian features four articles on “Cold War, Prosperity, and Civil Rights,” part of OAH’s U.S. History at 250 series. The OAH’s U.S. History at 250 project features a nine-issue TAH series focusing on U.S. history from colonial contact to the present, in the run-up to our Conference on American History and the Semiquincentennial in 2026. OAH members can download the full digital version here.
The “Cold War, Prosperity, and Civil Rights” issue features four essays.
Allison Mashell Mitchell explores grassroots organizing during the civil rights movement to show how local organizers played a vital role in the movement by building personal relationships with locals throughout the South.
Cookie Woolner offers an exploration of the gay rights movement and demonstrates how the movement went through three distinct periods from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Lilia Fernández looks at the Latino civil rights movement and shows how the experience growing up in multiracial communities impacted Latino activists in their struggle for equal rights.
Ben Zdencanovic examines roots of the War on Poverty and demonstrates that a driving force behind antipoverty federal programs was to create a stronger and healthy populace which could then be drafted into the military to bolster the United States’s fight against communism in the Cold war.
Also inside is “Race and the Legacy of the Cold War” by OAH President Annette Gordon-Reed.
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