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  • The Savannah Bananas are building on one of baseball’s oldest traditions, barnstorming

    The Savannah Bananas are building on one of baseball’s oldest traditions, barnstorming

    One of the more striking sports stories of the last few years has been the dramatic rise in popularity of the Savannah Bananas. Founded as a collegiate summer league team in 2016, the Bananas began playing exhibition games in 2018, when they debuted their signature “Banana Ball,” a fast-paced, acrobatic, comedic, participatory style of baseball. Since 2023 they have dedicated themselves entirely to traveling exhibition games against other “Banana Ball” teams, and their popularity has continued to grow. On May 2, as part of the ongoing Banana Ball World Tour, they played before their largest audience yet, a crowd of 102,000 at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas.

    The Bananas and Banana Ball represent a compelling innovation in baseball and American sports—but at the same time, they’re building on one of the sport’s oldest and most enduring traditions: barnstorming, alternatives to professional and major leagues that have long brought community and inclusivity to baseball and America.

    Most histories of baseball focus on its professional leagues: the U.S. Major Leagues and sometimes other prominent professional organizations such as the Negro Leagues and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. But starting in the mid-19th century, there was an equally popular alternative version of baseball that existed outside of those more established sites. Known as barnstorming, probably because many of its games took place in rural communities that might well have featured farm structures, the reference that also connected these baseball teams to other traveling performers who also used the term. This version of baseball saw touring collections of players—sometimes part of an established team, but just as often cobbled together from across multiple teams—visit communities and stage exhibition games. These games were played against local teams and players, fellow barnstorming teams, or as part of other unique entertainments.

    In the first half of the 20th century barnstorming came to be especially associated with the Negro Leagues and represented a way both for those Black athletes to showcase their talents in front of more diverse and widespread audiences. It also allowed them to play against—and, even at times, alongside—white athletes during a time in which the Major Leagues excluded Black players. Building on the legacy of late 19th century, Black barnstorming teams like Bud Fowler’s All-American Black Tourists, legendary 20th-century players like the great Satchel Paige organized teams that toured constantly and brought baseball to every corner of the nation. It also inspired one of the great sports movies, 1976’s The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, with Billy Dee Williams’s Bingo a clear Satchel Paige type.

    In the 1920s and 30s another American community that was excluded from the era’s professional leagues formed their own prominent barnstorming teams and leagues. Japanese baseball dated back to both Hawaii and Japan in the late 19th century, and the first Japanese American semi-pro clubs formed on the mainland United States in the early 1900s. But it was with the rise of barnstorming teams in the late 1920s that these Japanese American players gained truly national and international fame.

    In 1935, the Japanese World Series prominently featured the Japanese American barnstorming team, the Los Angeles Nippons, in a best-of-three series against Japan’s famous Tokyo Giants. Although the Tokyo squad took two of the three games, at the end of their barnstorming tour of the U.S. a team spokesperson noted that “the Los Angeles Nippons were the best of the Japanese Nines.”

    These early 20th century barnstorming teams and games also captured the attention of the sport’s biggest stars. In October 1927, just after winning the World Series and at the height of their success and fame with the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth and his teammate Lou Gehrig took part in a highly competitive barnstorming game in Fresno against Japanese American semi-pro stars, including the powerful slugger Johnny Nakagawa who was known as the “Nisei Babe Ruth.” With each captaining a different team, and as the only white players in the game, Ruth and Gehrig played both against and alongside the Japanese American players, a reflection of how much barnstorming could break down the period’s policies and practices of segregation.

    The single most famous barnstorming baseball team, the House of David, broke down such barriers consistently and purposefully. Formed in the late 1910s by members of the Michigan religious commune of the same name, the House of David—famous for its long hair and equally impressive beards—gained a reputation for baseball prowess over the next four decades before it dissolved in 1955. It featured former Major Leaguers like Grover Cleveland Alexander, other famous athletes like Mildred “Babe” Didrickson and Satchel Paige, and rising stars like Jackie Mitchell, the teenage pitching phenom who was the first woman to play for a minor league team.

    The House of David also partnered with Negro League teams and players: traveling together, playing exhibition games against each other, and challenging segregation policies inside and outside the stadium along the way. Before the House of David would take on the local team, they demanded a chance to play the Negro League team with whom they had arrived (a request smartly made after the audience was already in the stadium to watch the featured exhibition game). They then ate in the same restaurant and stayed at the same hotel with them as well, pushing the boundaries of racial segregation.

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    The House of David ended its barnstorming tours in 1955 for the same reasons the practice largely faded out during that decade: the racial integration of the Major Leagues. Beginning with Jackie Robinson in 1947, integration meant that more of the best players had the chance to join the Majors; and the growing popularity of television allowed audiences around the country to see those players and games. Some Japanese American semi-pro teams did continue to barnstorm, as Japanese Americans didn’t join Major League teams until the late 1960s, a continued legacy of the earlier segregation policies. But by the late 20th century the practice was generally found only in historical depictions like Bingo Long.

    Recently, the Savannah Bananas announced the reforming of a historic Negro Leagues team, the Indianapolis Clowns, against whom they’ll play barnstorming exhibition games. In that way, as in so many others, this 21st-century team builds on the legacies of barnstorming baseball, on the important role of athletes of color in making it more inclusive, and of the communal and inclusive sides of the sport and nation it represents.

    Ben Railton is Professor of English and American Studies at Fitchburg State University, and the author of six books, two podcast seasons, and numerous columns on the worst and best of American history and identity.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Invading Cuba would be a disaster, and history proves it

    Recently, President Donald Trump declared “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba.” He mused that, “whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it.” Trump’s increasingly hostile rhetoric has led to a debate over whether the U.S. should invade Cuba and remove the island nation’s government from power.

    History suggests that the answer is no. An intervention by the U.S. in Cuba will end badly for both Americans and Cubans. It may prompt a flood of Cuban Americans returning to the island, and the very sort of economic development that, in the past, produced a revolution and ignited a chain of events that led to the current situation.

    U.S. intervention in the Caribbean to “bring democracy” or promote American corporate interests is nothing new — and Cuba is no exception.

    In 1898, the U.S. took control of Cuba after it won a quick victory in the Spanish-American War. What most Americans do not know is that Spain’s defeat was just the epilogue to a Cuban war for independence that had raged for three years.

    The American victory meant that, instead of the independence for which Cubans had been fighting, they became an American colony. Worse, a series of independence wars, dating back to 1868, had left the fledgling Cuban government and landowners bankrupt as the warring factions destroyed property in an effort to break the other’s morale. As a result, many previously wealthy Cubans sold off their properties to American investors.

    U.S. business owners and companies poured money into the island, purchasing some of the best properties in the agricultural zones, as well as telecommunications, mining and railroad infrastructure. These purchases gave Americans dominance over the Cuban economy. At one point 70% of Cuba’s foreign trade was with the United States, and U.S. companies and investors owned 90% of the telephone and telegraph industry, 83% of the railways and 42% of sugar production.

    U.S. industries, like the United Fruit Company, primarily hired Americans to work in upper management, which limited the upward mobility of Cubans. They built enclaves for their managers that frequently segregated them from the Cuban population-at-large except for the laborers who provided services. Often, they even built infrastructure, including railroads and ports, to extract goods and wealth from Cuba rather than serve the people of the island.

    Even worse, as historian Louis A. Pérez, Jr. has eloquently argued, this economy paved the way for a corrupt political system fueled by patronage and pay offs. Engaging in the system became the principal pathway to wealth for Cubans.

    Four years after the occupation, in 1902, the U.S. granted Cuba independence — sort of.

    The U.S. agreed to withdraw its troops, but only after Cuba signed a treaty allowing the U.S. to militarily intervene when its self-interests were imperiled — the so-called Platt Amendment. Cuba also agreed to lease to the U.S. in perpetuity a vast tract of land around Guantanamo Bay for use as a naval base. The lease could only be voided if both parties agreed to end it, which gave the U.S. veto power.

    In 1906, the U.S. demonstrated that Cuba’s “independence” was illusory. Concerned by a faltering Cuban government, the U.S. dispatched troops who would occupy the island until 1909. In 1912, U.S. Marines again invaded eastern Cuba to help put down a local uprising.

    The interventions sent the unmistakable message: Cuban officials had to maintain U.S. support. Accordingly, every Cuban government until 1933 sought to please the U.S. government and powerful American economic interests.

    When the government did try to boost Cuban industries, it often had to reverse course after Washington balked to protect American corporate interests.

    Cubans resented an economy that served U.S. companies well, but not Cubans. They also resented their government for putting American interests ahead of Cuban ones. That led to a powerful backlash typified by the slogan “Cuba for Cubans.” In 1933, Cubans finally revolted.

    The uprising produced some economic and political reforms, including the establishment of an eight-hour work day, a minimum wage, guarantees that industries would maintain a minimum percentage of Cuban workers and the abrogation of the Platt Amendment.

    However, in the ensuing years, the U.S. meddled in Cuban politics in an attempt to temper the revolutionary fervor. Behind the scenes, the U.S. Embassy worked with political groups to try to ensure a compliant Cuban government. They went so far as to help rig the 1936 presidential election to secure victory for a candidate favorable to military dictator Fulgencio Batista (who ruled the island on several occasions between the 1930s and 1950s) and the military. American officials saw the dictator as a stabilizing force in Cuban politics.

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    The U.S. also maintained economic dominance over the island by purchasing most of Cuba’s primary export: sugar. That made it impossible even for democratic Cuban governments to undertake the substantial land reform necessary to create economic prosperity for small farmers. Such reform would have taken land from American owners and therefore risked an U.S. boycott of Cuban sugar or other economic sanctions. The loss of their primary market would have devastated Cuban tenant farmers.

    In 1952, however, the U.S. made a fatal mistake. After an eight-year absence from power, Batista led a coup against democratically elected president Carlos Prio Socarrás. The Eisenhower administration quickly recognized Batista’s government, failing to grasp that it had little popular support.

    Enter Fidel Castro, who quickly built a strong opposition movement, precipitating the Cuban Revolution in 1959. During a visit to the U.S. a few months after his triumph, Castro described his revolution as “humanist.”

    Yet, the Eisenhower Administration suspected that Castro was a Communist at heart. The new leader confirmed their worst fears when he presented a modest land reform plan in June 1959 that would distribute unused parcels of land to tenant farmers. This proposal led to a rapid escalation of American sanctions against Cuba. The Cuban government responded by seizing property owned by American business interests. The escalating bellicosity from the U.S. drove Castro into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. In April 1961, this cycle of escalation culminated in the fiasco that was the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, backed by the U.S.

    Scholars have long debated whether Castro was a Communist when he took power, but it was not until the day before the Bay of Pigs that he made it official by declaring this is a “socialist and democratic revolution of the humble, by the humble and for the humble.”, In October 1962, the conflict between the two nations culminated in the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons in Cuba. After 13 days of brinkmanship between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles. As part of the deal, President John F. Kennedy pledged never to invade Cuba.

    Over decades, however, memory of the cycle that led to the Cuban Revolution — and the rise of a government hostile to the U.S. — has faded. And that has left Americans and Cubans, once again, at a crossroads.

    Cuba, already impoverished by government mismanagement, is being squeezed further by a fuel blockade and new economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. The Trump Administration is seeking a collapse of the Cuban Government. It has not ruled out direct military intervention either to capture former President Raúl Castro (Fidel’s brother) or displace the government.

    Yet, the history of Cuban-American relations suggests that such a move would be a mistake. It is easy to envision Miami Cubans flooding back to the island, some with property claims dating back more than 65 years, and others with mucho dinero ready to invest in Cuban tourism and other economic opportunities. Investment sounds like a great idea but as the first half of the 20th century demonstrated, investment from Americans and American interests probably will not focus on what is good for Cubans.

    If the U.S. recreates an economy dominated by outsiders like it did after the Spanish-American War, trampling all over Cuban sovereignty in the process, that will fuel resentments and anti-American sentiment, and could sow the seeds of revolution once again. If history is any guide, the result will be catastrophic for Cubans and Americans alike.

    Frank Argote-Freyre is a Latin American history professor at Kean University, Argote-Freyre’s first book, Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman, was published in 2006. He is the author of dozens of scholarly works, journalistic articles, and public policy papers on a wide variety of topics from mental health to housing to public education. He is currently working on his next book, Fulgencio Batista: From President to Dictator.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • The 1966 day in the other Philadelphia that showcased the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr.

    The 1966 day in the other Philadelphia that showcased the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr.

    “This is the day he will die,” thought Roy Reed, a reporter for the New York Times.

    On June 21, 1966, Reed was standing behind Martin Luther King Jr., who was surrounded by about 300 hostile white people in Philadelphia, Miss. King had led a delegation from the Meredith March Against Fear to commemorate the second anniversary of the killings of the civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner.

    King was trying to navigate a rocky path full of obstacles: the threats of southern racists, a frayed alliance with President Lyndon B. Johnson and dissent within the civil rights movement.

    His response showcased his greatest gifts — and his actions on June 21 painted a nuanced picture of what made King so influential. Much of our historical memory of the civil rights leader deifies him, a marker of the nation’s racial progress. It also, however, dramatically oversimplifies the man and the movement he helped lead. It cloaks the divisions within the civil rights movement, along with King’s struggle to harness different factions and tactics toward his goals.

    The enshrinement of King also prevents Americans from seeing just how he married the ideals of American democracy with the righteous struggles of Black Americans. It eludes how he exhibited both spiritual power and political acumen. Looking at King’s actions during the Meredith March, by contrast, spotlights three of his most important roles in the civil rights movement: as an icon of moral courage, as a lodestone for Black activism and as an architect of sustainable ideals for a social justice movement.

    All of these qualities were on display on the extraordinary day of June 21, 1966.

    The Meredith March began on June 5 with one man, James Meredith, who had planned to walk from Memphis to Jackson, encouraging voter registration. On the second day, he got shot, and though he survived, the major civil rights organizations transformed his quest into a mass march.

    By the time King gathered with the activists in Mississippi two weeks later, the big story was Black Power. On June 16, Stokely Carmichael introduced the new slogan as a message of self-determination. It implicitly criticized King’s bedrock values of nonviolence and racial integration.

    On the morning of June 21, King met the marchers at a Black church — and he looked scared, with good reason. Philadelphia, in west-central Mississippi, was off the main route of the march. Instead of protection from the state police, the marchers were under the jurisdiction of Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff at the center of the federal conspiracy trial the three civil rights activists’ killing.

    During their procession to Philadelphia’s town square, the marchers were jeered, spat upon and sprayed with hoses. The air was thick with danger.

    Surrounded by his flock and his foes, King steeled himself. “I am not afraid of any man,” he proclaimed. “We are going to work together for freedom. We are here to save America.”

    Despite the hostile crowd, King didn’t duck the heinous violence that the march was commemorating. He remembered the movement’s martyrs. “I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me,” he intoned.

    “They’re right behind you!” shouted a white boy. The mob hooted. Price smirked.

    As the activists left, the mob tossed eggs, rocks and bottles. Scuffles broke out. The marchers reached the Black district just before some white toughs arrived, brandishing knives, wrenches and ax handles.

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    Confronted by murderous hatred, he was a model of resolve and principle. His fortitude reassured his fellow marchers and it projected the movement’s integrity to the broader public.

    After his speech in Philadelphia, King boarded a tiny, twin-engine plane for Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta, to speak at a voter registration rally.

    “It was like a messiah walking through the community,” recalled local organizer Charles McLaurin. Alongside the legendary Fannie Lou Hamer, McLaurin had led a 10-mile march from the town of Sunflower to the county courthouse in Indianola.

    There, King revealed his magnetic power. Wherever he went, Black folks followed. Because he was in Indianola, over 300 people attended the rally. As was the case throughout King’s life, his reputation attracted a big turnout and his charisma compelled political participation. More than any other figure, he drew people into the southern civil rights movement.

    King’s day was not yet done. He got back on the plane, headed for Yazoo City, on the southern edge of the Delta, where the Meredith Marchers had stopped for the night.

    King arrived for a nighttime rally in a public park. Radical activists gave speeches promising bloody retaliation if white people attacked them again. They won roars from the large crowd. Black Power, with its vows for self-defense and independence, struck emotional chords that exposed the widening fault lines in the movement.

    Yet, even as the crowd cheered the rhetoric of Black militants, it reserved its greatest adoration for King. To reach the podium, he waded through the masses. Old ladies jostled each other to touch him, while weathered farmers pressed their palms into his.

    And as this tumultuous, grueling day turned into a sweaty, bug-filled night, King painted a vision for the movement. He understood the need for Black political power. He acknowledged that Mississippi was afflicted by oppression. But segregation and violence were plagues on everyone, Black and white. To survive, to thrive, Black people needed a “coalition of conscience.”

    “Now,” he said, “I’m ready to die myself.” In his classic style, he weaved together the rhythms of the pulpit with the ideals of American democracy.

    “When I die I’m going to die for something, and at that moment, I guess, it will be necessary, but I’m trying to say something to you, my friends, that I hope we will all gain tonight, and that is that we have a power.” He recalled the movement’s great triumphs and celebrated their destiny to redeem the nation. In the process, he touched people’s souls.

    By insisting on his ideals, and by summoning his greatest oratorical powers, King maintained his slippery grasp on the march’s message. In its final days, the Meredith March encountered more violence, including a tear gas attack in the town of Canton. Yet amid the cries of Black Power, the marchers maintained the discipline of nonviolence. They arrived in the capital city of Jackson for the largest civil rights demonstration in the history of Mississippi, signaling the resonance of mass protest in the lives of Black Americans

    On the Meredith March, King illustrated why his birthday is a federal holiday, a memorial in the National Mall’s Tidal Basin celebrates his legacy and nearly 1,000 streets bear his name. He was neither a saint nor the movement’s single leader. But he exhibited the qualities of leadership, in the service of forging a genuine democracy.

    King demonstrated profound courage, setting a meaningful example. He pulled followers into his orbit, articulating principles that resonated with people. And he insisted that a crusade for justice demanded the best of its advocates, investing their cause with the deepest meaning.

    Throughout his glorious and tragic journey with the civil rights movement, King shared these blessings. Sometimes he did it all on one single day.

    Aram Goudsouzian is the Bizot Professor of History at the University of Memphis. His books include the award-winning Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Delaney Hall’s current crisis builds on decades of N.J. immigration detention

    On May 22, detainees inside Delaney Hall in Newark, the largest immigrant detention center in the Northeast, operated by the private corporation GEO Group, announced a labor and hunger strike in response to months of abuse, unattended complaints over detention conditions, and unmet medical, legal, and personal needs. Detainees detailed these conditions in a series of public letters, as family and community members protested and advocated for freeing their loved ones.

    Their protests were met with violence. Some detainees were pepper sprayed, brutalized, and transferred, while masked ICE agents assaulted protesters outside of Delaney. New Jersey state police later arrived on horseback, tear gassing the crowds and sending community members to the hospital.

    Complaints had been ongoing since Delaney Hall was reopened as a detention facility in May 2025, but the origin of these abuses actually began four decades earlier ago in 1993, in Elizabeth, a small city less than 10 miles away, with the opening of New Jersey’s first privately run detention facility, the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC).

    The history of EDC helps us understand that the battles over Delaney Hall are the outgrowth of detention privatization, its intersection with mass incarceration, and bipartisan political support for detention that has rarely faltered. It also demonstrates the consistency with which detained people have resisted their detention. Far from the southern border, New Jersey has long been a central node in the detention and deportation machine—and in the fight to end it.

    New Jersey was home to the Ellis Island Immigration Station, which opened in 1892. Before the Immigration Act of 1924, Ellis Island served mostly as a gateway and immigrant processing center, but from the 1930s and until its closure in 1954, it operated as a dedicated detention facility, leading a Supreme Court Justice to refer to it as an “island prison.”

    Detention became more central to U.S. immigration policy in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, for example, the United States detained thousands of Cuban refugees who came during the Mariel boatlift. Private corporations, which governments had begun to turn to for running their prisons, expanded into new markets of immigrant detention. Today, more than 90% of detention centers are run by for-profit corporations.

    The presumed “need” for expanding detention bed spaces surfaced after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the predecessor to today’s immigration agencies, issued a request for proposals for a detention center, ideally located near the three major airports in the New York City area. Because the WTC plotters were foreign-born, politicians used national security as an excuse for wide-ranging changes to the immigration system.

    Esmor Correctional Services, a for-profit company which operated halfway houses and welfare hotels, submitted the winning bid to turn a warehouse in Elizabeth into a NYC-area detention center housing up to 300 detainees. Almost immediately after its opening in 1994, people detained there began complaining of inhumane treatment and conditions.

    By 1995, the awful conditions and frequent abuse became public knowledge when detainees organized a hunger strike described in numerous articles in the Bergen Record by journalist Elizabeth Llorente. As Hawa Jama, a Somalian asylum seeker and the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Esmor, described in a deposition, “I complained personally to every INS person, every Esmor official… I come to this country to save my life, to ask [for] asylum. And they put me in jail, hell. I can describe hell… Esmor was hell.”

    On June 18, 1995, the detainees staged a riot inside the facility. The media attention spurred by the hunger strike and the uprising caused INS to terminate its contract with Esmor. In its place, INS contracted Corrections Corporation of America (rebranded as CoreCivic in 2016), which has run it ever since.

    Detention space increased in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed two laws affecting immigrants in the United States. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) delegalized lawful permanent residents who had committed certain crimes, widened what counted as an “aggravated felony,” and made more immigrants deportable and detainable, mandatorily, and indefinitely. This merged with the increasingly harsh penalties for drug crimes, which affected immigrants. The 1996 laws also targeted asylum-seekers as subject to potential removal, creating an artificial need for more detention space, and revoked the discretion of immigration authorities to release certain noncitizens from detention.

    In the 1990s and early 2000s, EDC was just one piece in the larger infrastructure of detention in New Jersey. Bergen, Essex and Hudson counties had also begun to hold immigration detainees in their jails against payment from the federal government. Delaney Hall, which first opened in 2000 as a halfway house for people with substance abuse issues convicted of low-level offenses, also began to hold immigrants for profit. As Essex County Executive Joseph D. Vincenzo said to the Star Ledger in 2008, “This is a home run for us. We have to find a way to bring in new revenue, and this is the way to do it.”

    ICE detention in New Jersey peaked in 2009, then declined until 2015, and increased again after President Donald Trump issued a January 2017 executive order that greatly expanded who would be detainable under the law. In New Jersey alone, ICE arrests more than doubled in 2017 as a direct consequence of the administration’s decision to prioritize the detention of migrants and asylum seekers with no criminal convictions. Because 2017 bail reform had reduced the number of people held in New Jersey’s jails awaiting trial, ICE detention became an even more attractive source of revenue for local county jails.

    Activists and advocates working across the New York/New Jersey border had been fighting against immigration detention since the 1990s. Coalition members organized protests, advocated with communities, and pressured public officials to end ICE detention in New Jersey. Fearing that detention would become a death sentence during the early months of Covid-19, detained people in every facility in the state went on a hunger strike, bringing renewed attention to the campaign of ending detention.

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    In 2021, the political tide turned as county and state democrats came out publicly against ICE detention. Within the course of a year, the county jails depopulated their ICE detainees and Governor Phil Murphy signed a law (AB 5207) that banned the creation or renewal of detention contracts with ICE.

    ICE detention was nearly eradicated in New Jersey. The EDC was the only facility still in operation. Under the new anti-detention law, when its contract came up for renewal, it, too, would close. Instead, CoreCivic sued New Jersey in a U.S. District Court, claiming the state law was unconstitutional. GEO Group soon filed suit as well. CoreCivic and GEO Group were joined by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, who saw New Jersey as essential to immigration enforcement.

    The District Court’s 2023 decision striking down New Jersey’s anti-detention law was appealed by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The federal appeals court upheld the 2023 ruling and thereby created the possibility for Delaney Hall to reopen on May 1, 2025, and to become the largest immigrant detention facility in the Northeast today.

    The lawsuit shows a key tension that continues to play out. While immigration is managed by the federal government, the detention system that EDC and Delaney Hall are a part of, has been forged by bipartisan support at the county and state levels and motivated by economic interests. The overlapping “war on crime” and “war on drugs” caused mass incarceration and immigration detention to become intertwined. Trump has built on this foundation, not created an entirely new system.

    Understanding the current situation at Delaney Hall requires this historical context. More than 30 years ago, the EDC proved to federal and state leaders that privatized immigration detention could “work” in New Jersey, as long as the mistreatment and abuse of detained people could be kept out of the spotlight. But history also shows us that when detained community members resist through complaints, lawsuits, hunger strikes and, even, an uprising, their voices and experiences reveal the system’s underbelly and inspire systemic change. We hope that history will teach future generations that such efforts are worthwhile.

    Ulla Berg is a migration scholar at Rutgers University and co-editor of the book, Elizabeth Detention Center: A Social History of Immigration Detention in New Jersey and the United States (Rutgers University Press, 2026).

    Mary Rizzo is a historian at Rutgers University-Newark, and the co-author of a chapter in Elizabeth Detention Center.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Rocky was the Bicentennial hero Americans needed in 1976

    Rocky was the Bicentennial hero Americans needed in 1976

    Rocky is not only a Philadelphia film, but a Bicentennial film. Writer and actor Sylvester Stallone invokes Bicentennial themes through characters like Apollo Creed, a heavyweight champion eager to represent the American Dream in a showcase match. He chooses down-on-his luck Rocky Balboa, the “Italian Stallion,” as his opponent to highlight the United States as a nation of underdogs only in need of a chance. As reviewer Arthur Knight wrote at the time, “For the course of its two hours we learn that…America is still a place where a man can haul himself up by his own bootstraps provided he believes in himself and has the will to do so.”

    The underdog theme in Rocky resonated with American audiences in 1976 as they were thinking about the 200th anniversary of the United States, which had been born as a long shot fighting for independence from the mighty British Empire. The Revolutionary War was won by American underdogs setting the course for a new nation dedicated to liberty. But the fight for liberty became an ongoing struggle for many Americans over the centuries.

    Rocky was among the many messengers of that theme during the Bicentennial. Few if any characters in the film expect Rocky to win the exhibition fight, but he works hard and refuses to give up, going the distance against the best in the world, and losing on a technicality. He also inspires a nation. Rocky became a sleeper hit that helped awaken Americans from their self-doubts during the dark times of the 1970s.

    The Bicentennial celebration in 1976 was mired in debates over how to mark the milestone. Today, plans for celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence in July 2026 are also fraught with controversy as two separate organizations, the official America250 group authorized by Congress and the President Trump-themed Freedom 250, compete for control of national events and the national narrative. But as the ordeal of the Bicentennial reveals, battles over how to commemorate America’s birthday are nothing new.

    Though the United States had 200 years of history to celebrate, the Bicentennial in 1976 was shrouded by the recent past. The Vietnam War, protests, political violence, scandals, and economic uncertainty compelled reassessments of the nation’s identity and its founding ideals. In the aftermath of the civil rights revolution, more Americans than ever in the 1970s sought to contribute to the story—making a simple, patriotic interpretation of US exceptionalism difficult to promote.

    At first, the official American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), funded by the federal government, tried to present a triumphalist version of the nation’s past, focused upon democracy and liberty as mainstays of American identity. The Commission immediately met with resistance. Some critics questioned the need to spend money on the extravagance of U.S. pride.

    Others denounced the commercialism of a Bicentennial sold to consumers through commemorative trinkets as well as the inherent racism of a whitewashed US history that marginalized the experiences of Black Americans. Corporate power was a prime target of protests. The Boston Oil Party of 1973, for instance, dumped oil barrels, not tea, into the harbor and hung an effigy of President Richard Nixon.

    Instead of a centralized, unified series of events organized at the top, the Bicentennial became a grassroots effort by multiple groups and communities mining the American past to bolster their political viewpoints. The People’s Bicentennial Commission, a New Left rival to the official committee, emphasized the revolutionary tradition that had secured independence and established the republic. Jeremy Rifkin, director of the group, wrote “Red, White, and Blue Left,” an essay that encouraged activists to embrace American radicalism rather than follow Lenin, Mao, or Castro. “For the American left to develop a strategy that can win popular support for programs that answer present grievances,” he argued, “it must first gain a clear understanding of the role which the American heritage plays in the formation of American people’s political attitudes and behavior.”

    Though leftists faced an entrenched capitalist system, Rifkin enlisted the rebels of the 1770s as models for a “second American revolution” for economic equality in the 1970s, drawing upon their dark horse determination to overcome power. Like Rocky, Rifkin projected an underdog endurance that he believed defined American greatness.

    Race and class issues were prominent during the Bicentennial, as Black Americans spoke about the unfinished revolution of 1776 and the uncritical patriotism of 1976 that treated them as collateral damage. Comedian Richard Pryor’s caustic Bicentennial-themed act won best comedy album Grammy of the year and Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word poem “The Bicentennial Blues” framed America as “home of the blues.” The blues, the lyrics explained, had been “born on the slave man’s auction block” and “grew up a slave.” For over 200 years, Scott-Heron reminded, the blues expressed the pain of second-class citizens “ripped off” and “violated by commercial corporations.” The poem dismissed the Bicentennial as another “blues year” marked by “halfway justice, halfway liberty, halfway equality, it’s a half-ass year.”

    Protest parades for July 4, 1976, took place in Philadelphia and D.C. as a coalition of Black Americans, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and various dissenters made their voices heard.

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    Despite waves of disillusionment, the Bicentennial provided an ocean of opportunity for Americans to recover from the Vietnam War and reassess patriotism. Millions focused on the bright side of U.S. history, celebrating American virtues. Red, white, and blue floodlights illuminated the top of the Empire State Building, starting a tradition of using colored lighting patterns to mark special occasions. Little Liberty Bells and coins were popular items, while Queen Elizabeth II sent the city of Philadelphia the “Bicentennial Bell,” a full-size replica of the Liberty Bell from the same London foundry that created the original. Speechwriters for President Gerald Ford encouraged him to put the meaning of America in terms of an ongoing “experiment” that still represented the world’s best hope for freedom. “Rebirth” and “renewal” were stated themes of administrators trying to lift the gloom and shift the mood of the nation.

    Ford declared that Americans needed to uphold liberty and democracy, not only for U.S. citizens but all humanity. For a nation chastened by recent war, Ford’s words were balanced between humility and hope, the same notes that Rocky hit.

    In 2026, like in 1976, the American people continue to debate the meaning of America and whether the country’s founding values are still viable or ever were. Celebrating the anniversary of U.S. independence, therefore, is always as much about hope for the future and the mood of the present as it is about pride in our past. Like Rocky and his underdog spirit, Americans keep fighting the good fight for the liberties that have remained insecure since 1776.

    Vaneesa Cook is a PhD historian and the author of Empire & Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), from which this essay is adapted.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • History suggests there won’t be enough political will for ‘freedom cities’ to achieve their promise

    History suggests there won’t be enough political will for ‘freedom cities’ to achieve their promise

    As the United States approaches its 250th birthday on July 4, a coalition of libertarian think tanks is pushing the Trump administration to mark the occasion by unveiling the first sites for “freedom cities.” These privately developed towns built on federal land would fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to charter 10 such cities. They’re intended, in his words, to “reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination, and give hardworking families a new shot at the American dream.”

    Groups such as the Frontier Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Charter Cities Institute have run with what seemed like a far-fetched campaign promise. They have drafted proposals to hand public land to private developers for single-family homes and high-tech enclaves free from state and federal oversight. These groups have latched onto the idea of “freedom cities,” because the towns tap into a cluster of contemporary American anxieties about housing affordability, stagnant social mobility and global economic competition, especially with China.

    Trump and his allies see these cities as an innovative solution to major American problems, but they’re hardly new. Freedom Cities continue a long history of Americans looking to their vast endowment of public land as a safety valve for social and economic pressures. This is a “supply-side” solution for perceived scarcity, whether of housing or freedom from regulatory red tape.

    Yet, while tapping public land is a common move, the history of such undertakings — especially government-engineered colonies on public land in the early 20th century — suggests that the Freedom Cities face long odds of achieving their promise. Traditionally, the political will has faltered and such projects have collapsed long before the crises they’re designed to address abate.

    The Homestead Act of 1862 remains the most famous of Congress’ many attempts to underwrite opportunity through grants of essentially free land. But striking the right balance between acreage and price — while preventing speculation and corruption — proved difficult. In the two centuries between 1789 and 1976, when the Federal Land and Policy Management Act effectively ended private sales of public land, Congress passed hundreds of land laws and amendments. Most historians today would agree that the results were mixed at best.

    Government colonies emerged from a similar impulse to use public land to achieve social and economic goals at the state level. In the wake of World War I, legislators across the U.S. West began to fear for the future of the family farm. Modern farming required capital, technology and expertise that often exceeded the capacity of an ordinary individual. In the arid West, farming demanded mass irrigation, which only the government could afford to build. Meanwhile, farmland values grew exponentially, especially in California.

    State legislators worried that without farm work, landless Americans would congregate in cities as they had in Europe and Russia, and that this might foment radical ideas about socialism, communism and anarchism. “A prosperous farmer on his land does not turn berserker or run amok,” promised a 1920 California state pamphlet.

    The solution was utopia by statue. To keep small farmers in business, five states, beginning with California in 1917, passed Land Settlement Acts, empowering state officials to build planned farming colonies on state-owned land.

    In California, the project fell to Elwood Mead, a civil engineer who oversaw the state’s acquisition of 6,239 acres in Durham, Butte County. The site seemed like a good bet. It was fertile, well-watered and close to a highway and rail connections. Mead invited Americans to apply for farm allotments while the state constructed irrigation and officials planned the layout of farm buildings, orchards and gardens. This was not private speculation but the expert-led engineering of a new community from scratch.

    For a few years, it appeared to work. Even after costs ran more than double the state’s appropriation of $260,000, forcing residents to take out loans, they were able to keep up with their payments. With European agriculture still recovering from World War I, commodity prices remained high and state officials interpreted those windfalls as a sign of success. Mead reported that “considerably more than half the [Durham] settlers were tenant farmers, and they would still be renters if they had been compelled to buy under ordinary commercial conditions.” The Durham colony, Mead declared, guaranteed “independence, ambition, [and] self-respect” for its settlers.

    Emboldened, in 1920 the California legislature authorized $1 million ($16.5 million in 2026 dollars) to purchase 8,400 acres for a second colony in Delhi, Merced County. Delhi’s sandy soil required far more preparation than Durham’s, meaning the state’s investment would pay off only after years of stable yields and favorable market conditions.

    But state support didn’t last. Mead, it turned out, had cooked the books at Durham, misleading the legislature. Settlers quickly drained their personal savings to keep up with loan payments. After the nationwide agricultural depression in the early 1920s, both colonies’ finances collapsed. In 1923, Mead skipped town.

    The next year, after spending $2.5 million over four years, the California legislature admitted defeat at Delhi. Following extensive litigation, it shuttered its experiment in engineering a utopian farming future. The settlers weren’t bad farmers. It’s just that they required state subsidies, stable global markets and honest accounting to succeed.

    Perhaps ironically, to endure economic depression and environmental constraints, California’s utopian colonies needed more government, not less. But in the 1920s, the agricultural downturn and rising fiscal conservatism among voters and their officials, including Friend W. Richardson, elected governor in 1922, eroded the political will for state-directed rural planning.

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    Yet, that cautionary tale didn’t deter the federal government from trying something even more ambitious a decade later. In 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched one of his vaunted New Deal agencies: the Resettlement Administration, run by Columbia economist Rexford Tugwell. It proposed to build 100 “greenbelt towns” on the outskirts of major cities. The vision was utopian: modern, well-designed communities housing low- and middle-income families in garden settings, shielded from the squalor of unplanned urban growth. They would be cooperative, self-governing and superior to anything the private market had produced.

    Three towns were built: Greenbelt, Md.; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wis. They were architectural and planning achievements. Greenbelt, outside Washington, D.C., was admired for its curved streets designed to limit through traffic, communal green spaces and cooperative stores. Life magazine called it a model for the future.

    There was a problem, however: the government invested roughly $16,000 per unit — about 10 times the cost of a private home at the time. In a country still climbing out of depression, that figure proved politically toxic.

    The backlash was almost immediate. Real estate and homebuilders’ associations, alarmed by the prospect of federally subsidized communities competing with private development, mobilized against the program. They found allies in a new conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress who began rolling back New Deal initiatives in 1937 and 1938. Critics branded the greenbelt towns “socialist colonies” and “Tugwelltowns,” after their architect. The label stuck because Tugwell had visited the Soviet Union in 1927 as part of a U.S. trade delegation and had praised state planning, making him an easy target.

    The 1937 recession drained Roosevelt’s political capital, and in 1938, Congress defunded the program. Tugwell resigned. After World War II, the federal government sold the greenbelt towns to private developers and residents’ cooperatives, washing its hands of the experiment. They survive today as pleasant, somewhat quirky suburbs, fossils of a dream that the government could not sustain as a reality.

    Today’s advocates of Freedom Cities present their proposal as a tech-enabled departure from the timid incrementalism of conventional planning. But what they propose is actually part of an American ritual: imagining public land as a blank slate somehow immune from contemporary economic, environmental and political challenges.

    A century ago, state-sponsored colonies were going to make land affordable again and save the family farm. Ninety years ago, greenbelt towns hoped to prove that the U.S. government could outbuild the private market. And now, Freedom Cities purport to solve the housing crisis, outcompete China and restore the frontier spirit, all while remaining exempt from the federal management and environmental and labor regulations that, according to advocates, are the source of America’s problems, not hard-won protections against them. In the past, however, the crises that give rise to these so-called utopias — whether agricultural collapse or housing scarcity — outlasted the political will required to build the utopias meant to solve them. Freedom Cities depend on the same fragile arrangements: federal land transfers, regulatory exemptions and sustained political protection by the very government their boosters claim to escape. History suggests that arrangement won’t hold.

    Daniela Blei is a historian, editor and book coach who helps writers develop and finish their books. Find her at Daniela-blei.com/writing and scholarsandwriters.com.

    Tamara Venit-Shelton is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • The Philadelphia-born Chinese American who tested the limits of birthright citizenship

    The Philadelphia-born Chinese American who tested the limits of birthright citizenship

    In 1950, Ernest Moy was trying desperately to return to the United States after spending the previous 20 years working in China. Since he had reentered the U.S. twice before, immigration officials already possessed thick files of evidence attesting to his U.S. citizenship, including his birth certificate from Philadelphia. This unquestionably established his status because of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause and an 1898 U.S. Supreme Court decision that had affirmed this: if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen.

    But more than 50 years of settled law meant less to the Immigration Service than the fact that Moy was Chinese American. Because of his race, officials considered him both undesirable and unassimilable. When he finally did get permission to reenter the United States, it was only as a temporary immigrant who required further investigation. Moy bristled at such treatment but had learned to expect no better.

    In 2026, as the Supreme Court considers Trump v. Barbara, many Americans have learned for the first time about the Supreme Court ruling that should have guaranteed Moy’s reentry: U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. The aftermath of that case — and the story of Ernest Moy — show how the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship has on its own never been sufficient to protect the rights of many Americans. When those in power define citizenship as whiteness, they enable and encourage immigration officials to do the same.

    The landmark case began in 1895, when immigration officials barred Wong Kim Ark, a native of San Francisco, from reentering the United States after a trip to China. Authorities argued that because Wong’s parents were Chinese immigrants — a group barred from naturalizing because of their race — the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to their son. What did cover him, officials claimed, was the Chinese Exclusion Act. This 1882 law prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers, and because Wong was a cook, he fit into that category. As the government succinctly put it, “although he is native born, he is not entitled to come into the United States because he is a laborer and of the Mongolian race.” Wong responded by taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1898 clearly and unambiguously affirmed his U.S. citizenship.

    Wong Kim Ark, the son of Chinese parents in San Francisco, was determined by the Supreme Court to be a citizen by virtue of being born in the United StatesNational Archives

    Yet in the years that followed, the Immigration Service found plenty of ways to thwart the spirit of the ruling, all while claiming to recognize birthright citizenship as settled law. Wong Kim Ark, now back home in El Paso, discovered this firsthand in 1901. Three years after the Supreme Court decided his case, authorities in Texas briefly detained him, charging him with violating the Chinese Exclusion Act for living and working in America, the land of his birth.

    Hoping to head off reentry problems, other Chinese American citizens planning to travel abroad learned to gather substantial evidence of their birth in the United States and ask white acquaintances to vouch for them at local courts or Immigration Service offices. Those with enough money hired attorneys to help navigate the haphazard process more effectively, though one such lawyer warned his client that even the most thoroughly documented travelers often faced “considerable trouble” reentering. In such cases, attorneys needed to sue for writs of habeas corpus, just as Wong Kim Ark had done in 1895.

    Wong Kim Ark, whose Supreme Court case determined that he was a citizen by virtue of being born in the United StatesNational Archives

    In 1909, U.S. officials rolled out a new procedure for Chinese American citizens, unsurprisingly modeled on the way the government vetted China-born temporary residents. The entire process reflected authorities’ continued hostility toward the very idea of Chinese American citizenship as a legitimate concept — and their eagerness to deny or at least constrain it in any way possible. Even the official name of the Immigration Service’s new form broadcast this attitude: “Application of Alleged American-Born Chinese for Preinvestigation of Status.”

    Resentful of the word “alleged,” most Chinese American citizens chose to refer to the application by its official number: Form 430. No matter how they felt, those planning to travel abroad had little choice but to fill out the form and submit it together with copious additional documentation, including birth certificates, school records, photographs, selective service certificates, and the citizenship identity cards that only Chinese American citizens had to carry. By the 1920s, when passports became common for all U.S. citizens traveling abroad, Chinese Americans included those, too. But while a passport could guarantee reentry for other American citizen travelers, officials considered it inadequate evidence of citizenship for Chinese Americans who did not also carry an endorsed Form 430.

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    In addition to gathering documents, Chinese American citizens also had to testify at the closest Immigration Service office, answering detailed questions about their lives and families to establish their birth in the United States. Many brought in friends, relatives, and community members to undergo similarly detailed interrogations on their behalf. Immigration Service agents tended to view the testimony of white acquaintances, including family doctors, teachers, and local Christian leaders, as particularly valuable.

    Even after the Immigration Service “conceded” (in its words) an applicant’s birthright citizenship and endorsed the person’s Form 430, obstacles remained. For instance, returning travelers, including those with U.S. passports, had to sit for further interrogation when reentering the United States. And the Immigration Service required Chinese American citizens to undergo a new preinvestigation each time they left the U.S., even for brief trips to Canada or Mexico. In other words, officials “conceded” citizenship only temporarily, so U.S.-born Chinese Americans became “alleged” citizens before every new departure. No other group of U.S. citizen travelers endured such treatment in the pre-World War II years. While Congress finally repealed Chinese exclusion in 1943, official attitudes barely changed over the next decade, as Ernest Moy’s experience shows.

    Ernest Moy first underwent pre-investigation in 1920, when he received this endorsed Form 430.National Archives at Seattle

    By the 1910s, large numbers of Chinese Americans started to undergo preinvestigation, but not for the kinds of short trips Wong Kim Ark had taken. Many began to relocate to China, a struggling young republic that offered Western-educated people career opportunities unconstrained by American racial discrimination. Eventually, close to half the Chinese Americans born in the United States, including Ernest Moy, moved to China. Before departing, almost all these U.S. citizens underwent preinvestigation — Moy did so three times — to ensure that they could retain the right to return to the country of their birth, the United States.

    Eventually, Wong Kim Ark returned to China, too. The citizenship rights that officials “conceded” to him came with restrictions that didn’t apply to other Americans, and at 61, he was both lonely and fed up. For years, Wong had supported his family from afar because Chinese exclusion laws prevented him from bringing his China-born wife to the United States. In 1931, he retired and joined her in the village where she had raised their sons. But unwilling to relinquish the rights for which he had fought 35 years earlier, Wong submitted to preinvestigation one last time before making that final trip.

    The institutionalized harassment of Chinese Americans is just one example of the way the U.S. government for decades equated citizenship with whiteness — and nonwhiteness with alien status. President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship is rooted in this same idea, and the Supreme Court must and should reject the president’s deeply unconstitutional executive order. But as the lives of Wong Kim Ark, Ernest Moy, and so many of their peers show, such a ruling, though essential, will be incomplete without a larger challenge to the pernicious idea that whiteness and Americanness are the same.

    A professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Charlotte Brooks has written several books about Asian American history, including the newly published The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Inquirer editors.

  • Trump may hope for a redo of the 1876 World’s Fair—but even that expo revealed a nation in crisis

    Trump may hope for a redo of the 1876 World’s Fair—but even that expo revealed a nation in crisis

    From the end of June to early July, the Trump administration will host what it is calling “The Great American State Fair,” a weeks-long event to help mark the nation’s 250th birthday. The White House is promoting the fair as “a master-planned celebration” in and around the nation’s capital. They note that it will feature “pavilions, designed in the beaux-arts style [sic]” that will “highlight national pillars,” such as “Arts & Culture,” “Land & Expansion,” “The Arts & Innovation,” “Technology & Progress,” and “Horsepower” to “ignite a spirit of adventure and innovation to help our nation succeed for the next 250 years.”

    These grand pronouncements call to mind a classical world’s fair exhibition, even if the administration hasn’t put in the work to pull it off. By contrast, the first major world’s fair held in the United States 150 years ago, the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, was ten years in the making, spanned six months, attracted more than 10 million visitors, and featured the work of over 30,000 exhibitors, including Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Today, the White House is fighting poor publicity, scrambling to find respectable entertainers to perform, and floating a plan to cancel its fair altogether.

    Yet, we can find echoes of the Philly Expo in today’s slapdash 250th celebration. History reveals that America in 1876 was, as it is now, in turmoil, gripped by a growing economic crisis and mounting unemployment, politically torn apart, debating the impact of new technology, and reeling from the cost of war. In the familiar context of extreme uncertainty, the glorious Exposition also drew sharp criticism and, more poignantly, highlighted the nation’s fragility.

    In 1876, from May to November, Philadelphia was the site of the biggest public event in the nation’s history up to that point – the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, or more simply, the Centennial Exposition. This was a world’s fair, a unique event in which the host nation spent lavishly to build elaborate fairgrounds, exhibition halls, courtyards, and gardens to grab the global spotlight and celebrate progress. In the 19th century, amid the industrial revolution, a world’s fair commonly featured thousands of displays promising a peek into the future. Visitors could glimpse the cutting edge in science and technology, advances in the arts, new discoveries in medicine, innovations in transportation, and the latest consumer products.

    The stakes were terribly high for the United States as it planned to host its own world’s fair in 1876, the first held in the U.S. since the Civil War. Although the war had been devastating, and the work of reconstructing the South still threatened the lives of freed Black people and the American two-party political system, the preserved republic was pursuing new projects, including building a continent-crossing railroad and rapidly expanding the industrial economy. Both fueled the growth of cities and a new diversified workforce thanks to emancipation, immigration, and the rise of the middle class. In the midst of big changes, the world’s fair in Philadelphia was an opportunity for America to present itself to the nation and the world as a stable and culturally advanced industrial giant with a bright future.

    Covering 450 acres of Philadelphia’s vast and bucolic Fairmount Park—celebrated at the time as one of the world’s most beautiful public parks in one of its greatest cities—the exposition grounds included dozens of grand buildings surrounded by riverbanks and tree groves. The event site was also linked to eight streetcar lines that connected the fairgrounds to the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads.

    For six months, visitors from all over the country and abroad poured in to see tens of thousands of exhibits, many of them astonishing firsts: incandescent light bulbs, the typewriter, a dishwasher, Alexander Graham Bell’s first prototype for the telephone, and a new fireproofing material called “asbestos.”

    In addition, farmers put several agricultural wonders on display including new types of citrus trees that could thrive in the American West, and bananas, considered an expensive delicacy and priced at $2 each (about $60 today). At the center of the Machinery Hall exposition building was one of the fair’s main attractions: a hulking, 1400 horsepower steam engine, 45 feet tall, and weighing 650 tons. This Corliss engine was the biggest of its kind and, in size and power, signaled America’s industrial might. For 50 cents ($15 today), visitors could climb to the top of a towering hand and torch structure called “Liberty Enlightening the World”—a portion of what would eventually become the Statue of Liberty.

    The Philadelphia Centennial seemed to say that, yes, the United States may have been, in a global context, a young country. But that fact only reinforced all that it had accomplished in one short century.

    The timing for such a vainglorious celebration wasn’t optimal. The year of the Exposition came at the height of the so-called “Terrible Seventies,” an era of disastrous economic news that began with the financial panic of 1873 and continued through the decade with bank closures, business failures, railroad bankruptcies, mass layoffs, and inept government leadership. Indeed, the crisis forced fair planners to resort to penny pinching in the final stages of construction, leaving some exhibition buildings unfinished after opening day.

    The era of the Philadelphia World’s Fair was also a time when a handful of capitalists accumulated extreme wealth and tightened their grip over the nation’s resources while workers began to lose control over their own conditions of labor. In growing cities like Philadelphia, where industrial wage workers, including Black laborers and new immigrants, were concentrated, poverty spread quickly. Outside of urban centers, small farmers lost ground to commercial agriculture and worried about sustaining their rural way of life and simply making ends meet. At a time when the average laborer made around $1.25 a day and people in the skilled trades made little more, the 50 cent fair entry fee was an extravagance reserved for only those with expendable time and income.

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    Some fairgoers left ambivalent about the future and puzzled by how disconnected the consumer-focused displays seemed to be from current economic realities. One visitor from Connecticut complained to the Hartford Christian Secretary that the fair seemed to be little more than “a scramble for the Almighty dollar” at a time when terrific economic fear “pervades the country.” Another wrote with dismay to Ohio’s Worthington Advance that the grandiose festivities focused on consumer abundance proceeded, even as a “great army of men and women out of employment is on the increase.”

    The Terrible Seventies revealed a tough truth: America had survived war, embraced modernity, and proved more than capable of industrial might. But it remained fragile. The awe and grandeur of Philadelphia’s sprawling Centennial Exposition paradoxically reminded the nation of the challenges – both predictable and unpredictable – that lay ahead. It turned out, great progress and great problems would be inseparable.

    Trump’s Freedom 250 events aren’t likely to be successful as a showcase of national advancement. Still, as with the 1876 Philly Expo, some Americans will find meaning and pride in the fact that this year’s Great American State Fair will take place on the National Mall near the White House, where Trump has asserted his power. Its location and its brazen host will be enough to elevate Make America Great Again spirits, even at a time when they’ve been shaken by rising costs, an unpopular war with Iran, and declining global power.

    For many other Americans and for the world watching, this fair will not be a glorious reminder of the nation’s birth. Instead, in the midst of economic crisis, political animosity and corruption, and fears that American principles won’t survive, the commemoration of the nation’s founding will likely reinforce uncertainty ahead— just as was the case a century and a half ago.

    Felicia Angeja Viator is an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, a pop culture writer, and editor for Made By History.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Could the FIFA World Cup reduce U.S.-South African tensions?

    Could the FIFA World Cup reduce U.S.-South African tensions?

    The Trump administration has adopted a confrontational approach toward long-time ally South Africa. Washington has spent the past year spreading falsehoods about “white genocide,” cutting crucial HIV funding and blocking South Africa from the G20 while threatening its trade relationships. The United States has also made a point of resettling white Afrikaners as refugees, while excluding nearly all other refugees around the world.

    With the FIFA World Cup approaching, some may hope for a new chapter of “sports diplomacy” to relieve tensions between the countries. When South Africa’s national football team takes the field this summer, it marks Bafana Bafana’s first World Cup appearance in 16 years. But U.S. visa policies initially threatened South Africa’s ability to travel. At nearly every turn, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: it is hostile to a Black-led South Africa and sympathetic to its white minority. The domestic politics of race and white supremacy, long an undertone of U.S.-South African ties, animate the current bilateral relationship.

    The Trump administration’s embrace of white South Africans and the tensions with the African National Congress (ANC), the liberation movement-turned-political party that currently governs South Africa as part of a coalition, are not without historical precedent. Throughout the Cold War, Washington maintained close ties with apartheid South Africa’s white minority regime. Race was always part of the equation, but it was camouflaged in the language of anticommunism and strategic interest. Today, with the Cold War long over, racial politics are more exposed.

    From the early years of the Cold War, anti-Communism and race were entangled features of the U.S.-South African relationship. For Washington, South Africa’s white minority government was a reliable ally: rich in strategically important natural resources, home to a crucial shipping route and a bulwark against the Soviet Union in southern Africa.

    This relationship continued despite the formal consolidation of apartheid in 1948. The Afrikaner-led National Party systematically implemented apartheid, a draconian patchwork of racial segregation policies that stripped Black South Africans of their land and citizenship while blunting Black mobility. Despite this odious lack of democracy, Washington actively encouraged friendly relations with the white-minority-ruled South Africa. Cold War objectives overpowered moral arguments against apartheid.

    But the Cold War also shaped racial politics in unexpected ways. Just as Washington tolerated apartheid abroad, it was contending with its own system of racial segregation under Jim Crow. The Cold War created a powerful incentive for the United States to manage its image on race at home and abroad. The Soviet Union eagerly broadcast U.S. racial violence to newly decolonizing nations across Africa and Asia, undermining U.S. claims to lead the free world. This exposed Washington’s liability and motivated federal policymakers, becoming a key driver of civil rights victories and landmark decisions, such as school desegregation.

    These dynamics had the potential to threaten U.S. support for South Africa. After all, how could the self-proclaimed leader of the free world maintain its alliance with a government built on white supremacy? The answer, for most of the Cold War, was to turn a blind eye. And in the early Cold War years, domestic pressure campaigns to halt support for apartheid South Africa faced charges of communist subversion, severely blunting their impact and reach. While the Cold War opened the door to domestic civil rights gains, its politics in the early years also stymied avenues of resistance that could force Washington’s hand.

    Yet cracks eventually began to show. The rising tide of decolonization further exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. support for South Africa. In 1960 alone, 17 African nations gained independence from European colonial rule. Another turning point was the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which South African police killed 69 Black protesters, shocking international opinion and placing the evils of the apartheid state on full display. In turn, African leaders frequently criticized apartheid at the United Nations, placing Washington on the defensive. South Africa faced mounting international isolation, and Washington had to decide between its Cold War alliance with white-led South Africa on the one hand and its credibility with the decolonizing world on the other.

    The Nixon and Ford administrations resolved that tension by drawing Washington ever closer to South Africa’s white minority in the 1970s. Even as demands mounted from groups like the Congressional Black Caucus and the blossoming anti-apartheid movement for mandatory economic sanctions and a formal severing of U.S. ties to the regime, Washington remained steadfast. They concluded that gradual, constructive change, which they claimed to desire, could only come from white South Africans themselves not from U.S. pressure. It was an argument that conveniently absolved Washington of any responsibility to pressure Pretoria—and revealed U.S. policymakers’ views that Black South Africans were not credible leaders of their own liberation. Washington’s continued support became more exposed when, in 1974, South Africa was expelled from the United Nations General Assembly.

    Following the June 1976 Soweto massacre, where South African police killed over a hundred protesting students, international opinion grew more outraged, adding urgency to calls for sanctions. Winds of change arrived, albeit briefly, when the Carter administration initially took an aggressive approach to apartheid, aligning U.S. foreign policy with an interest in promoting human rights abroad. That agenda changed in the 1980s. President Reagan rejected calls for economic sanctions, instead endorsing “constructive engagement,” the argument that crippling the South African economy would hurt rather than liberate Black South Africans. Critics such as Desmond Tutu rejected this logic, arguing that Black South Africans had repeatedly called for sanctions. The U.S. Congress was also unconvinced. On October 2, 1986, a bipartisan majority overrode Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, imposing economic sanctions and severing Washington’s formal ties to the regime.

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    Following decades of pressure, South Africa held its first multiracial elections in April 1994, bringing the ANC and Nelson Mandela to power. Washington warmly welcomed a democratic South Africa, which it now saw as a model for a peaceful transition to majority rule. In a post-Cold War world, the strategic rationale for supporting white South Africa largely disappeared; the U.S. no longer needed its defense against Soviet expansion.

    But the Trump administration’s hostile stance today is a signal that the Cold War relationship with South Africa was never purely animated by military necessity; a willingness to accept white minority rule undergirded the U.S.-South African relationship and was consistently reflected in policy. Now, those racial politics have become far more visible. The “white genocide” myth, Afrikaner refugee exception and hostility toward South African diplomats are driven by racial politics and a consistent willingness to privilege the concerns of South Africa’s white minority, unmediated by Cold War necessity.

    Whether or not the U.S.-South African relationship can be improved remains to be seen. Sport, which often reaches audiences that diplomacy cannot, also serves as a potential arena for reconciliation. The history of democratic South Africa suggests that sport has, more than once, progressed more rapidly than politics. The 1995 Rugby World Cup was perhaps the most celebrated example, when Mandela used the tournament to signal reconciliation, a moment immortalized in the Clint Eastwood film Invictus.

    South Africa’s first participation in the World Cup since it hosted in 2010, on American soil no less, symbolizes that potential. And yet, until Washington reckons with the racial politics driving its relationship with South Africa, both past and present, the World Cup is more likely to highlight the divide than to heal it.

    Mattie Webb, PhD, is an assistant professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and a Nonresident Fellow with the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ shines a light on the complex history of Mormon women

    ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ shines a light on the complex history of Mormon women

    To the surprise of many, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (SLOMW) has met raging success, with Season 5 being filmed for release this fall. ABC cast SLOMW star Taylor Frankie Paul as the most recent lead of The Bachelorette, and two castmembers of Mormon Wives in its recent, widely viewed season of Dancing with the Stars. SLOMW’s Whitney Leavitt also headlined a record-breaking run in a Broadway production of Chicago.

    To a degree not seen since Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, or the smash hit musical The Book of Mormon, it seems like Mormons are having a moment. But notably, this moment belongs to Mormon women.

    Most Americans know very little about Mormon women, and what is known is often based on sensational stories about narrowly circumscribed gender roles and stereotypes about polygamy. The women of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives challenge these assumptions, projecting an image of influence, ambition, and agency that sits uneasily alongside popular assumptions about Mormon womanhood. As SLOMW reflects, there have been times in Mormon history when women have exercised substantial power and influence, often drawing on core doctrines that emphasize equality. Yet, Mormon women have also seen their opportunities revoked or diminished in tandem with political and cultural moments in the U.S. at large.

    Members of the faith credit Joseph Smith, Jr. as the prophet who formally established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—commonly known as the Mormon Church—in 1830. At this time, the rights of women in the U.S. were broadly restricted. In most cases, women could not vote or run for political office, and married women were legally barred from owning property or keeping their own wages.

    Early Mormon history suggests possible openings for women’s power in the church and in doctrine. For one, the LDS Church recognized a feminine divine, taught about by Joseph Smith in the 1830s and 1840s. Some scholars have suggested that in the 1840s when Smith developed temple liturgies in LDS temples, he incorporated “elements that suggest he viewed women as holders of a form of priesthood.” This vision of ordained women was not realized, yet they held spiritual roles: women prophesied, performed blessings, and participated in their own rituals of “washing and anointing” before giving birth.

    In 1842, Smith’s first wife Emma Smith and others established the Relief Society, a women-only organization to “seek out and relieve the distressed.” It provided a platform for women to serve in church leadership capacities, fundraise and manage their own budgets, and publicly speak about religion. The confidence and community organizing skills Mormon women gained through the Relief Society set the stage for their entry into national political life.

    At the turn of the 20th century, Mormon women carried that same organizational energy into the women’s suffrage movement. White women in Utah were the first in the nation to vote in 1870, 50 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. Initially, women’s suffrage in Utah was directly tied to the common practice of plural marriage—Mormon women believed they could use their vote to support polygamy and show that they were not “oppressed, helpless, and enslaved” as anti-polygamists claimed. Relief Society leaders developed education programs about the political process and civic engagement and sent Utah delegates to represent them at national suffrage conventions.

    The Relief Society that had been first established in the early 19th century became a key source of Mormon women’s activism, especially around voting rights, operating independently and managing its own funds. Emmeline B. Wells, one of Utah’s national suffrage delegates, served as Relief Society president and simultaneously edited the Relief Society magazine the Woman’s Exponent. Writing in a Relief Society handbook, Wells argued that “woman must be instrumental in bringing about the restoration of the equality which existed when the world was created.”

    However, Wells’ release from service as Relief Society president in 1921, “marked the beginnings of decades of declining institutional power for Mormon women,” as scholars of Mormon feminism have argued. Facing suspicion from other Christians, LDS church leaders emphasized alignment with conservative American values at mid-century, defining women primarily as mothers and homemakers rather than as independent spiritual practitioners as they had been in the early years of the church.

    Revised Church policies reflected this shift. Women’s blessings that began in Joseph Smith’s time ended in 1946. In 1954, motherhood was redefined as the counterpart to men’s priesthood, validating women’s exclusion from the priesthood. By 1967, women were no longer allowed to pray in weekly congregational Sacrament Meetings. And in 1970, the Relief Society lost financial independence to the male-run Church under the Priesthood Correlation program.

    Efforts to constrain women in narrowly defined roles grew in tandem with postwar national trends. Following World War II, cultural pressures mounted for working women to return to domestic life, with marriage, motherhood, and homemaking recast as women’s primary obligations—a retrenchment that would spur new feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

    By the early 1970s, when Congress moved to pass the Equal Rights Amendment—which would have upheld equality regardless of sex—the Mormon Church funded an effort to ensure its defeat. It organized speakers and published oppositions to it in official LDS communications. Many women supported the Church’s anti-ERA stance, concerned that the amendment might expand abortion access and LGTBQ rights—policies that in their view went against LDS principles.

    Alternatively, some Mormon women believed the church’s progressive doctrine regarding women and their own advocacy for women’s educational and political advancements were closely aligned with the aims of the ERA. Sonia Johnson, a fifth generation Mormon and feminist activist, formed the “Mormons for ERA” group. They protested the church‘s anti-ERA position, notably chaining themselves to the gates of the Seattle Temple Open House in 1980, while urging Americans to bar missionaries from their homes until the church changed course.

    Johnson testified to a Senate subcommittee regarding Mormon theology and the ERA. But she was officially excommunicated from the church in 1979 for “spreading false doctrine and working against both the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its leaders.”

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    The church and its membership continue to battle between changing with the times and hewing to traditionalism, with advancements and setbacks on both fronts.

    For example, the priesthood and temple ban on members with African ancestry was lifted in 1978, the BYU’s Women Research Institute began organizing a women’s conference in 1984, temple marriage ceremony language changed for women from “obeying their husbands” to “hearkening their husbands” in 1990, and Chieko Okazaki became the first woman of color appointed to the General Relief Society Presidency also in 1990.

    Yet, the church also deepened its commitment to rigid gender hierarchy. In 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley declared that God’s commandment to “multiply and replenish the earth remains in force,” sex should explicitly be between a lawfully wedded man and woman, children are entitled to be born “within the bonds of matrimony,” and that God divinely wants fathers to “preside over” their families and mothers are “primarily responsible” for nurturing their children. Hinckley’s declaration provided religious justification to keep women out of formal employment, focusing instead on maternal, homemaking, child-rearing responsibilities.

    In a surprising move, the Church lowered the missionary age for women from 21 to 19 in 2012, more than doubling the number of women serving missions. While service remains optional for women, the policy change gave young women more access to similar spiritual training and church leadership opportunities predominantly accessed by men while serving a full-time mission before fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers. That a single policy change could so dramatically reshape women’s participation reveals just how much institutional gatekeeping, rather than women’s desire or capacity, had long determined the boundaries of their religious lives.

    Although discredited by Church officials,The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives may be expressing a form of power and independence that Mormon doctrine claims to support—but which the institution struggles to grant in practice. Mormon women are not flat, oppressed, one-dimensional characters. SLOMW highlights this dichotomy for global audiences—with messaging coming directly from the women themselves rather than from the patriarchal and tightly controlled organization.

    Mallory Hutchings-Tryon is an educator and historian at the University of Washington whose work sits at the intersection of gender equality, education policy, and religious autonomy.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.