This dissertation examines the history of agricultural exchange between the United States and Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1928. It shows that Soviet and American agricultural specialists and policymakers sought solutions to the looming global farm crisis of the 1920s through visits, the organization of reconstruction projects, and seed exchange. In doing so, this work advances three arguments. First, the development of post-World War I agriculture, including concepts of large-scale farming, industrialization of agricultural, and rationalization of food production, should be understood within an international context. As the First World war reshaped patterns of agricultural production and showed the inextricable link between food and political stability, experts and policymakers from many countries began to search for solutions to the farm problem not only through national policies but also abroad. As this dissertation shows, this search would take different shapes and forms: from the use of international food aid programs to help domestic food production to the usage of another country’s space to conduct large-scale farming experiments. These experiences in agricultural exchange allowed its participants to acquire new knowledge, technologies, and expertise.

Second, by examining post-WWI patterns of agricultural exchange, this dissertation reconsiders the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union with regard to the flow of technology and expertise. Rather than considering a one-directional movement of American technology and expertise to Soviet Russia and perceiving the latter as a passive recipient, this work portrays an active multi-directional exchange. It shows that both countries perceived each other as research laboratories that were capable of giving solutions to farm problems in their respective countries. Moreover, both American and Soviet agricultural experts believed that this exchange would benefit the reconstruction of international agriculture.

Finally, this dissertation expands the definition of “agricultural exchange.” Scholars have demonstrated that, historically, agricultural exchange, including the movement of plants, seeds, and agricultural knowledge and expertise, is not a new event. The flow of people and animal species brought new plant varieties and agricultural technologies to new places, thus, changing existing environments, economic and social structures. While these transfers knew no borders, since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they had become more institutionalized and regulated by the international community of scientists and policymakers. During this period, many national governments introduced new laws and regulations that controlled the import and export of agricultural commodities. What is often left out in this historiography is the political nature of agricultural exchange. This dissertation shows that participants of agricultural exchange used their experience and expertise that they cultivated through visits and travel to achieve more powerful positions with local and central state institutions. Yet, this experience came at a price. By the late 1920s, with the shifting political climate in the Soviet Union, the participation in agricultural exchange became one of the tools for the ostracization of these experts from powerful positions.

This dissertation studies the meaning of workplace democracy by examining San Francisco Class B Longshoremen whose status came into existence in 1958 as part of the automation and containerization plan agreed upon by the waterfront employers and the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). The B-men who toiled at the point of production as second class workers in this transitional period were in a unique position to see problems emerging from the mechanization plan and understand the exploitive nature of new work processes that arose from the abandonment of the old work rules. Although the main motivation for the waterfront employers and the longshoremen’s union behind the recruitment of B-men was to create a flexible but disciplined labor force that would make a smooth transition to automation, by organizing themselves for equal status and better working conditions, the B-men challenged the roles imposed upon them. By focusing on the black longshoremen who disproportionally filled the ranks of B-men and who lost their jobs without just cause and subsequently organized various actions for their reinstatement, this study provides a lens for viewing structural racism in the process of automation and demonstrates the irrepressible self-activism of working people for respect, equality, and control over their working conditions.

This dissertation seeks to provide a biography of the cultural worker in modern American thought. The primary modality employed is that of intellectual history, guided by methodologies borrowed from legal, labor, and economic history, Black Studies, literary studies, critical theory, and interdisciplinary cultural studies. Following an extensive introduction that attempts to adequately set the historiographical table, we commence with a detailed examination of nineteenth-century debates regarding the productivity of cultural work, focusing in on the legal intellectuals Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Eaton Drone, the publisher George Haven Putnam, and the political economist John Bates Clark. Reading these writings closely, we argue that the idea of artistic and intellectual production as forms of productive labor is not as new as is sometimes alleged, and that modern understandings of cultural labor were shaped within the crucible of an emergent corporate capitalism, in which new conceptualizations of intellectual property drove a new discourse on cultural work. We next turn our focus to the African American intellectual James Weldon Johnson, whose writings provide a window into the world of turn-of-the-century African American cultural work and the intersection of cultural work and politics in the years between the end of Reconstruction and World War I. An examination of Joseph Freeman’s An American Testament reveals a forgotten itinerary of left writings on cultural work in the nineteen teens and twenties. A careful study of Freeman allows us to reconsider the intellectual history of the Communist left in the United States in the early Soviet era, and to attend to the special significance of cultural work to the young radicals of that moment. In the dissertation’s second half, we investigate several attempts to organize cultural workers in labor organizations in the 1930s: Heywood Broun’s American Newspaper Guild, John Howard Lawson’s Screen Writers Guild, and a variety of endeavors by musicians to fight technological unemployment. Inspired by the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to draft codes of fair competition to govern each industry, cultural workers seized the moment and articulated a variety of novel political projects that might reverse exploitative conditions in white collar industries. While not always successful in the short run, these initiatives are worth studying for the wealth of information they provide regarding the changing status of the cultural worker, the influence of left-wing theory on the mainstream labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and for the tensions regarding cultural workers’ allegiances to white-collar managerial workers, on the one hand, and to blue-collar proletarians, on the other. The final section of the dissertation looks at some of the sources of the containment of cultural workers’ politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on legal intellectuals like Zechariah Chafee, Jr., we observe that the Cold War increasingly framed cultural workers’ quest for autonomy as both a potential security threat and a fetter on national productivity. In our conclusion, we look at various mutations of the idea of cultural worker in the 1960s and up to the struggles of today’s digital laborers and content creators.

This dissertation examines the politics of price inflation in the United States from the 1930s through the onset of the crisis of stagflation in the 1970s. During this period, which encompassed the rise and fall of what historians have called the “New Deal Order,” inflation stood as one of the most contentious economic issues, affecting agricultural, industrial, and financial policymaking. While much scholarly attention has been directed at the resolution of the crisis of stagflation in the late 1970s, few have explored how political struggles over the issue shaped the contours of liberalism in the United States in the preceding decades. By placing inflation at the center of the debate over the character of the New Deal Order, this study seeks to enrich our understanding of the structural tensions that beset that reform effort from the outset.

In particular, the dissertation traces the career of a tradition that emerged out of the left of the New Deal and which offered an analysis of inflation that emphasized the importance of corporate power over the investment and price-making functions. Blending older insights from institutional economics with theoretical innovations associated with Keynes, this tradition can be called Institutional Keynesianism. Institutional Keynesianism was born in the early New Deal Department of Agriculture, and its adherents went on to play significant roles elsewhere in the federal government and in the industrial union movement. In contrast to the “commercial Keynesians” who have loomed large in the historiography on twentieth-century U.S. history, the Institutional Keynesians sought to equip macroeconomic theory with empirically sound micro-economic foundations. This attentiveness to economic structure enabled the Institutional Keynesians to identify fundamental contradictions in corporate capitalism, including its tendency towards both price inflation and economic stagnation, and led them to propose broad social democratic reforms. Recovering this forgotten left-liberal tradition can add texture to our understanding of the fate of the New Deal Order, as well as the origins of what displaced it.

Child protective services are the primary agencies authorized by federal law and state policies to intervene with substance using pregnant women and new mothers. This dissertation argues that growing public acceptance of child welfare authority over American families (1950-1980) enabled legislators to expand professional surveillance of substance-using pregnant women (1980-2000). Drawing on archival, survey, legal, and professional journal data, the dissertation demonstrates how administrative shifts in the 1950s-1970s transformed child welfare from a sparsely staffed system broadly focused on a wide range of children’s issues into a sprawling multi-billion-dollar network of agencies narrowly focused on child maltreatment. As their focus narrowed, child welfare workers became increasingly concerned with assessing and preventing risk of child maltreatment. Combined with mandated reporting requirements and funding incentives that favored child removal over family preservation and poverty relief, a focus on risk functioned as a funnel effect, drawing multiple issues into the jurisdictionally contracted purview of child welfare over child maltreatment. As reports of substance-exposed infants grew in the late 1980s, an emphasis on risk assessment and maltreatment prevention enabled a professional framing of the substance-exposed infant as the paradigmatic case of a child at risk. Existing scholarship links regulation of prenatal substance use to the criminalization of poverty or to conservative anti-abortion efforts. These findings confound this narrative, showing that by the 1990s, public and professional opposition had doomed criminalization efforts to failure. Instead, both liberal and conservative legislators harnessed child welfare’s legitimation as a protective authority, committed to reducing maltreatment risks, with substance-exposed infants a paradigmatic example of a child at risk. Building on this bipartisan framing, legislators expanded child welfare authority in substance-exposed infant cases, while reframing family surveillance and child removal as supportive social service interventions.

Historians of ideas have long considered the mixed economies established after World War II to be characterized by a form of “commercial Keynesianism” in which the shape of growth was left to the “indirect” controls of government budgets and credit policy. In this history, the political conflict between organized workers and business cartels that defined the North-Atlantic world during the period between the world wars is said to have given way to the consensual management of national economies characterized by a “postcapitalist” debates over social, racial, and gender inclusion. Considerable scholarship argues that the politics of the era that followed World War II were conditional on the rapid economic growth of postwar reconstruction and expanding world trade. The collapse of North Atlantic growth rates after 1973 thus explains the fate of post-World War II social, political, and economic history, as demands for inclusion in a political economy in which employment and incomes rose more slowly than before became increasingly difficult for institutions to mediate.But what explains the collapse of North Atlantic growth during the 1970s? There are two dominate explanations: the expansion of national budgets to accommodate the social-democratic responsibilities of postwar welfare states and the overcapacity of industrial manufacturing. Neither explanation acknowledges the national experiments in income planning that emerged within the OECD nations during the early 1960s, when the difficulties of maintaining full employment in a world of liberal trade and capital movements first appeared. In the US, such income planning represents a continuity with the interwar struggle over the “problem of monopoly” and “structural reform” that characterized the New Deal. Rather than departing from these efforts at “direct” controls over centers of accumulation and employment, the guiding concepts of the US political-economy after World War II accelerated their orbit around a set of ideas about the role of the state in guiding and structuring economic life, ideas that had emerged earlier during the 1930s. Price manipulation and wage restraint were necessary accoutrements of fiscal-monetary stabilization policy in these postwar decades. This domain of policymaking is entirely absent from existing histories of post-World War II economic policy in the US. This pattern was the particular manifestation in the US of what scholars of comparative political economy describe as “corporatism.” The first half of this dissertation explores the development of this North American corporatism between World War II and the Korean War. It argues that the fusion of corporatism in the US with military mobilization complicated the politics of macroeconomic stabilization, hiving off fiscal policy from wider democratic control over the composition of demand. In the scale of values associated with this order, fiscal expansion and high employment were tied to military production, price-and-wage control to social sacrifice necessary to constrain civilian consumption. This order produced the racial politics of the US South and the migration of African Americans to industrial cities, as the wing of the Democratic party dominate in the legislature came to oppose expansions of social insurance and employment that jeopardized the Jim Crow society of their home states and the social order of the nation’s largest cities. This historically variegated political economy created large wage differentials that threated to destabilize production costs in times of rising employment. As employment expanded and wages increased in the unorganized service sector during the Vietnam-war boom of 1965-73, organized workers in the industrial and construction industries fought to maintain historic income differences, raising production costs and turning the inflationary wage-price spiral. Thus, the imperative of stabilization exacerbated the instability of the managed economy. At the OECD, the understanding that effective national planning of wages and profits required renewed democratic legitimacy produced two decades of experiments in “incomes policy” to reconcile the imperatives of economic stability and high employment. The second half of this dissertation examines the fate of the idea of an “incomes policy” in the US context. During the Vietnam War, the Johnson and Nixon administrations vacillated between informal guidelines and compulsory controls over corporation profits and union-negotiated wages. As continued international payments imbalances threatened the role of the dollar as world reserve asset, and as the geopolitical and ideological motivation for military production waned, so did the legitimacy of the US stabilization apparatus. US industrial-relations thinking formed in the era of military Keynesianism failed to adapt to the era of détente. The consequences for the development of the US mixed economy were profound.

Animal tracking tags are a useful tool in the study of wild animals and ecological systems, but the process of tagging an animal is costly and often traumatic for the animal. For many types of tags, the lifetime of the tag is determined by battery life. The Energy Scavenging Collar for Animal Physiology and Ecology (ESCAPE) project investigates several methods for reducing overall power consumption in wildlife tracking tags. This work develops and tests several algorithms for reducing GPS uptime in these tags, using Extended Kalman Filters to guide uncertainty-suppression GPS scheduling. These algorithms use less costly sensors such as accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyrometers to augment GPS in estimating locations during tracking. We implement and test these algorithms in tests on human subjects. This work also includes analysis of several proposed techniques for scavenging energy in the field, such as harvesting excess kinetic and thermal energy from the animal. Our analyses provide upper bounds on expected power returns from these strategies, providing useful metrics for determining whether such strategies are viable regions of the tag design space. The findings of the ESCAPE project contribute to future tag research and development by highlighting strategies with potential for improving tag lifetimes, and discouraging other strategies.

This dissertation explores developments in three discrete but interconnected areas of transportation – mechanization and modernization in West Coast longshoring, motor carrier deregulation, and innovations and development in warehousing and logistics – that collectively revolutionized the movement of goods in the United States broadly. Together, these developments radically improved productivity in longshoring, compressed time spent in transportation bottlenecks, reduced transportation costs, enabled supply and demand modeling and forecasting, and reshaped the geography of movement of goods infrastructure in transportation hubs. In this way, these innovations effectively annihilated space by time. This geographic reordering is perhaps best represented in developments in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the warehouses and distribution centers in the Inland Empire. Far from deterministic, each of these three narrative strands were a series of choices mediated through social negotiation. Aside from transforming the movement of goods industry in the United States, these developments enabled a disaggregation of the production process across vast expanses of time and space which holds global implications for the perennial labor question: who works, for whom, and under what conditions.