Drawing on organizational records, the progressive press, and oral history archives, this article explores the development of a multiracial, coalition-backed boycott of Coors beer in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the boycott’s expansion from a localized labor dispute in the San Francisco Bay Area to a national, politicized campaign. It argues that the Coors boycott and its array of backers, representing labor, Chicana/o, queer, black, Native American, and leftist circles, demonstrate the vibrancy, creativity, and evolution of activism in the decades following the civil rights movements. Instead of seeing the move to coalition and consumer movements as conservative, this article identifies the Coors boycott as an example of ongoing grassroots efforts to forge solidarity and oppose business conservatives and the New Right.

In 1958, In-Ho Oh, a foreign student from South Korea, was beaten to death in West Philadelphia by a group of black youths. The brutal murder shocked people all over the nation who wrote hundreds of letters to the newspapers and the mayor about the incident. Some letter writers focused on the implications of the murder for Cold War diplomacy, while some believed there were moral lessons to be learned from the generous actions of Oh’s family. Yet other letter writers focused on race and juvenile delinquency and constructed an idealized “model” minority in the Korean student, contrasting him to the young suspects. The death of In-Ho Oh came to have different meanings to different groups and challenged America’s self-perception about racial equality and exceptionalism.

This article analyzes how officials from the U.S., Australia, and Canada represented Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s psychology in diplomatic contexts between 1947 and 1964. Nehru was the representative of a newly sovereign state, whose people were often stereotyped as mystical, spiritual, and irrational. In this article, we show how Nehru was constructed as “irrational,” “primitive,” “effeminate,” and racially resentful by Western diplomats. He was, conversely, also seen as a “Harrovian realist” or “transplanted Englishman” with an attendant air of “superiority.” Cold War imperatives gave these ambivalent cultural and psychological projections a special salience, particularly as each confronted the implications of Nehru’s non-alignment and his global profile as a proponent of Third World nationalism. The ambivalent representations of Nehru that we trace within U.S., Australian, and Canadian foreign policy-making also reveal a shared belief in the “Anglosphere”—the purported transnational unity of white, English-speaking nations—was sustained beyond the decline of the British Empire. Nehru’s “Britishness” demonstrates how he could be tethered to the English-speaking world while simultaneously being seen as its irrational, non-white Other. This ambivalent connection helped to re-draw the boundaries of the transnational Anglosphere in the era of decolonization and to define Cold War assumptions about race, rationality, and foreign policy.

Launched by Mexican farmworkers against Japanese farmers in Los Angeles, the 1933 El Monte Berry Strike became one of California’s largest labor conflicts. The strike evolved from a local conflict into an international problem in which anti-Japanese sentiment travelled across the U.S.-Mexico border, merged with Mexican nationalism, and forced Japanese residents in Mexico to issue an unexpected pro-strike statement against their co-ethnics in Los Angeles. Using Japanese diplomatic documents and local ethnic newspapers, this article details the process by which Mexican nationalism trumped ethnic solidarity among Japanese immigrants in the transpacific borderlands, where local and international concerns of Japan, Mexico, and the United States intersected. The exacerbating situation in Mexico, rather than in California, played a decisive role in the settlement of the strike.