This project investigates people of mixed African, European, and sometimes Native American ancestry, commonly referred to as "mulattoes," in English colonial North America and the early United States republic. This research deconstructs nascent African American stratification by examining various types of privilege that allowed people of mixed heritage to experience upward social mobility, with a special focus on access to freedom from slavery and servitude in the colonies and states of the southeast Atlantic Coast. Additionally, this work provides a framework for understanding U.S. mixed-race ideologies by following the trajectory of how people of mixed descent and their families viewed themselves and how they were perceived by the broader societies in which they lived. This study contributes to historiographical and contemporary discussions associated with mixed-heritage peoples, ideas of racial mixture, "whiteness," and African American identity.

California Hard Core is a narrative history of the pornographic film industry in California from 1967 to 1978, a moment when Americans openly made, displayed, and watched sexually explicit films. Two interrelated questions animate this project: Who moved the pornographic film from the margins of society to the mainstream of American film culture? What do their stories tell us about sex and sexuality in the U.S. in the last third of the twentieth century?

The earlier academic literature concentrates on pornographic film and political debates surrounding it rather than industry participants and their contexts. The popular literature, meanwhile, is composed almost entirely of book-length oral histories and autobiographies of filmmakers and models. California Hard Core helps to close the divide between these two literatures by documenting not only an eye-level view of work from behind the camera, on the set, and in the movie theater, but also the ways in which consumers received pornographic films, placing the reader in the viewing position of audience members, police officers, lawyers, judges, and anti-pornography activists.

I argue that in the late 1960s a small group of sexual entrepreneurs, motivated by profit and inspired by the sexual revolution, moved pornographic film from the illicit to the mainstream of American film culture. Hard core film put sex on display, both reflecting and advancing the central tenet of the sexual revolution, which sought to increase the visibility of sex above all else. This movement, however, was mediated by a give and take relationship with the state, a relationship that, in turn, rendered pornographic films relatively tame in comparison to the sexual fluidity that marked the personal and professional lives of industry participants. Their stories demonstrate that when it came to sexual behavior, the sexual revolution was more easily lived in the private realm than the public sphere because the state seemed to have far less influence in private spaces. Paradoxically, however, it was in those private spaces that the state ultimately had the most control over sexual behavior because the individual was unaware of its quiet internalizing, regulatory presence.

"These Separate Schools: Black Politics and Education in Washington, D.C., 1900-1930," chronicles the efforts of black Washingtonians to achieve equitable public funding and administrative autonomy in their public schools and at Howard University. This project argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, black Washingtonians came to understand their two-pronged goals of administrative autonomy and equitable allocation of resources in both their public schools and at Howard in terms of civil rights. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans in Washington defended their educational institutions as venues for individually demonstrating their own good citizenship and respectability, in other words as means to social and economic uplift. By the 1910s and 1920s, however, they spoke about equal educational opportunity as a civil right, guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution. Also, while these struggles for educational equality began in the public schools, they were soon taken up by leaders at Howard University and its law school.

In addition to educational equality, administrative autonomy was another key part of black Washingtonians' rights agenda. Black Washingtonians were able to carve out a nearly autonomous space first in the segregated public schools in the 1900s and 1910s and then at Howard University in the 1920s, and they considered this degree of independence critical to improving and maintaining the quality of their schools. Although they fully acknowledged and abhorred the fact that racial segregation was intended to subjugate their race, by persistently pressing for autonomy, black Washingtonians imbued the institution of racial separation in Washington's black schools and black university with new meaning. Rather than solely symbolizing oppression, through their efforts racial separation became a marker of leadership and power. Taken together, the battle for equalizing primary, secondary, and higher education was a critical component of the black civil rights agenda in this period, even within the context of racial segregation.

"These Separate Schools" challenges the notion that the battle for educational equality began in the 1930s and 1940s in the courtroom and demonstrates instead that it began in the early twentieth century with the activism of ordinary black citizens in Washington, D.C., which in this period was governed by Congress. Contrary to typical portrayals of African-American political participation during the Jim Crow Era, this project shows that black Washingtonians were deeply involved in early twentieth-century political life on multiple levels. Locally, they were instrumental in the District's unique educational politics; nationally, they shaped federal government race policy and Congressional legislation; and, ideologically, they were leaders in a national conversation about civil rights, black advancement, and the role of education in American democracy.

In this dissertation, I argue that recreation centers played a pivotal role in the black community as sites of racial uplift, political activism, and as a conduit to public service agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work links literature in urban history and African American history to demonstrate the unique circumstances the city landscape presented to African Americans and how they not only responded to those circumstances, but also how they shaped them, especially during World War II. In particular, the project examines the ways in which black-founded and black-directed recreation centers acted as an affirmative alternative to the confrontations and humiliations that awaited them at segregated recreational venues as well as public amusements and accommodations.

In addition, this work explores why, how, and with what consequences these black recreation centers contributed to the changing geography of the Bay Area. Creating their own agendas separate from white reformers and city officials, who believed structured recreation was a way to control and exercise surveillance over delinquent youth, black leaders viewed these recreational spaces as opportunities to provide community members with the necessary tools to challenge the racism they faced at work, school, and in the streets. The most significant scholarly intervention of this historical study is to center the lived experiences of African Americans: to explore thoroughly and critically how these recreational institutions operated in their lives and communities. Put another way, this dissertation uses the experiences of African Americans, both developing and participating in these institutions, as a lens to investigate and illuminate the broader concerns of African Americans living in the Bay Area from 1920 to 1960.

My dissertation, Out of Order: Radical Lawyers and Social Movements in the Cold War, analyzes how progressive lawyers coordinated the legal defense for organizations and activists, while at the same time defining and practicing their own politics and expectations. Through the lens of a particular organization, the National Lawyers Guild, I examine the trajectories of the labor movement, the struggle for social justice, and expressions of international solidarity, and show how these trajectories diverged and intersected throughout the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that the NLG served a significant function. It was an organizing space where lawyers and activists would discuss and develop legal strategies and political tactics and test the limitations of legal — and extra-legal — protest. Consequently, the NLG became a mirror that helped make and, in turn, reflected the political coalitions and ideological ruptures within the Left during this often tumultuous era. The variety of progressive and radical positions debated, as well as the numerous organizations that worked with and around the NLG, gave the organization a unique vantage point and a continuous ancillary role in the trajectory of social movements.

The global incorporation of a human rights platform during this period captured a significant measure of the energy and attention of radical lawyers. This development helped broaden the scope of civil and economic rights struggles. The continuing impact of this development on the ideological and practical construction of progressive litigation, community empowerment, and networks of solidarity during the late Cold War has been profound. In juxtaposition to the experience of lawyers in the United States, the final chapter looks at progressive attorneys in Mexico. This chapter analyzes the role lawyers played in regards to social movements in other legal systems and the broader impact human rights discourse had on domestic legal strategies in Mexico in particular. Critically, it stresses the international undercurrents of radicalism and social justice between the 1960s and 1980s.

This dissertation explains the decline of labor unions in the Southwest during the mid-twentieth century by studying Latina radicals’ political activities from strike wave that occurred after World War I through the first two years of the Korean War. Although working-class Latinas joined industrial labor unions in large numbers, labor leaders and reformers throughout the region failed to propose comprehensive fiscal, administrative, social, and political reforms during the 1930s. CIO affiliates consolidated their gains, won NLRB elections, and formed political action committees after the U.S. entered World War II, and industrial workers won equal pay, desegregated unions, and inched closer towards winning industry-wide bargaining after 1943. The colonial war against Korea and the deportation of Luisa Moreno caused the demise of industrial unionism, because these two events discouraged police officers from allying with other workers, made dismissals of Communist public employees possible, and isolated Sinophiles within the military.