The article probes the impact of prison on Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party. Incarcerated for three years in various locations in California, Newton descended into cocaine addiction and criminality soon after his 1970 release. The current literature fails to account for the impact of solitary confinement on Newton’s life and consequently misinterprets his descent into criminality. The article suggests that the immense pressures placed on Newton in prison and after freedom were related to the decline of the rehabilitative experiment in California’s prison system. It reveals the psychological effect of prison on Newton before linking his fragile mental state to his drug addiction. It concludes by demonstrating how Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) surveillance unwittingly took advantage of Newton’s fragility to compound his psychological stress, indicating the extent to which prison successfully prevented Newton reclaiming his position as a significant force in the African American political struggle.

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.

This article examines the dynamic interactions between Mexican women who sought to circumvent their sexual regulation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and U.S. immigration officials who enforced these regulations and policed these women's bodies in the early twentieth century. Using the transcripts of the board of special inquiry (BSI)—a panel that deliberated over the admission of excludable immigrants and oversaw accompanying interrogations—I contend that, while the BSI operated to encode corporeally Mexican female immigrants as sexually deviant, it simultaneously served as a stage for them to respond with their own performances of crossing. In the interrogation room, women performed a slew of admissible identities, including the devoted mother, aggrieved woman, and hard-working laborer. When those attempts to cross failed, women did not simply return home. Instead, many re-crossed until they reached their intended destination. Thus, the BSI served as a site for Mexican female border crossers to both uphold and challenge the production of heteropatriarchal notions of marriage. These findings contribute to the growing literature on U.S. border enforcement in the early twentieth century and uncover the (dis)order of a growing U.S. bureaucratic infrastructure based on sexual and gendered regulation.

This article examines the dynamic interactions between Mexican women who sought to circumvent their sexual regulation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and U.S. immigration officials who enforced these regulations and policed these women's bodies in the early twentieth century. Using the transcripts of the board of special inquiry (BSI)—a panel that deliberated over the admission of excludable immigrants and oversaw accompanying interrogations—I contend that, while the BSI operated to encode corporeally Mexican female immigrants as sexually deviant, it simultaneously served as a stage for them to respond with their own performances of crossing. In the interrogation room, women performed a slew of admissible identities, including the devoted mother, aggrieved woman, and hard-working laborer. When those attempts to cross failed, women did not simply return home. Instead, many re-crossed until they reached their intended destination. Thus, the BSI served as a site for Mexican female border crossers to both uphold and challenge the production of heteropatriarchal notions of marriage. These findings contribute to the growing literature on U.S. border enforcement in the early twentieth century and uncover the (dis)order of a growing U.S. bureaucratic infrastructure based on sexual and gendered regulation.

This article is the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue of Pacific Historical Review titled “The Carceral West.” Whereas scholarship on the carceral state has traditionally focused on the U.S. South, the urban North, and post-war Los Angeles, scholars have more recently begun to focus on the long history of incarceration throughout the U.S. West. The West provides a rich environment for examining the carceral state, especially as it relates to race and immigration. Additional articles in this special issue include Elliott Young on immigrant incarceration at McNeil Federal Penitentiary between 1880 and 1930, Benjamin Madley interpreting the Spanish Mission system as a carceral regime, and Mary Mendoza examining the U.S.-Mexico border fence as a carceral environment that locks undocumented immigrants both in and out.

Border fences have a long history in the United States, and that history is deeply entangled with the rise of the carceral state. As fences along the U.S.-Mexico border grew over the course of the twentieth century, they increasingly restricted the mobility of migrants both as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico divide and once they were within U.S. territory. This article analyzes how fear of being apprehended, arrested, detained, or deported has forced migrants to remain in the shadows; and it argues that as border fences expanded in length and height, they transformed the United States into a massive, carceral state.

This article examines the 1967–1971 political prisoner solidarity movement for Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton as a case study of multiracial radical alliances in the San Francisco Bay Area. In contrast to the predominant trope of “unlikely allies,” I argue that the activists examined in this article who formed alliances with Newton and the Panthers were predisposed to collaborative activism through their common anti-imperialist orientation, expressed as anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti–U.S. military interventionism. In addition, I show that earlier alliances laid the foundation for alliances with later movements and organizations, creating what I term “genealogies of alliance” within the Free Huey Movement that demonstrate a persistent desire for collaborative activism throughout this era. This article prompts a reconsideration of Sixties radicalism; in contrast to scholarly and popular interpretations that focus on activists’ sectarianism and divisiveness, the Free Huey Movement illuminates how activists theorized and endeavored to work toward the collective liberation of all people.

This article examines the Mexican grassroots base of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and PLM members who belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It suggests that a grassroots perspective, one that is also multilingual and transnational, reframes both the PLM and the IWW. Eschewing an institutional approach, this perspective suggests that the organizational underbelly for much of this work rested with Mexican social networks that formed the labor crews, strikes, foci, and union locals. PLM supporters prepared for a Mexican revolution. Some of them did so while organizing IWW locals. Within the context of the intense migration of the period, labor and revolutionary foci moved across binational space, facilitating the spread of ideas, organizing, strikes, and revolutionary forays that were, in effect, binational “circularities of struggle.” These Wobblies of the PLM challenged industrial capitalism, questioned U.S. imperialism and racism, and helped launch the first social revolution in Mexico. This perspective reframes the IWW as one part of a spectrum of organizations attempting to counteract dispossession; yet it simultaneously reveals the organization as more expansive, diverse, multilingual, and transnational than previously presented. By decentering the United States and Europe, this Mexican perspective contributes to a re-envisioned transnational internationalist Left that includes the Americas and opens interpretative frameworks that cross gender, racial, ethnic, and national categories.

This paper contends that Aldo Leopold’s pursuit of unpeopled wilderness had a disturbing corollary—a disdain for human population growth that culminated in a critique of providing food and medical aid to developing nations. Although Leopold never fully shared these ideas with the public, he explored them in multiple unpublished manuscripts, and he submitted a first draft of one of these essays to a press. Leopold also exchanged these views with the most popular environmental Malthusian of his day, William Vogt, whose exposition of nearly identical arguments won him national fame. By revealing connections between wilderness thought and callous proposed social policy, this paper identifies a new dimension of what environmental historian William Cronon called the “Trouble with Wilderness.” This manuscript further calls into question whether the concept of wilderness is inherently exclusionary and misanthropic.

In the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) managed the Navajo Reservation's feral dog population by scheduling semi-annual “dog shoots.” After one gruesome dog shoot resulted in seventeen slaughtered dogs in Chinle, Arizona, community members pressed local BIA authorities to reform reservation dog control, an effort that pitted the interethnic community against an authoritarian form of settler-colonial governance. Because citizenship on the reservation—for Navajo and non-Navajo alike—was effectively rendered inferior to that of citizens outside the reservation, substantive changes to local BIA policies required an alliance with a constituency beyond the reservation’s borders, one with full access to state power—in this case, the National Dog Welfare Guild. This article thus demonstrates Native American grass-roots activism and boundary politics against oppressive federal authority.

Dr. Leo Stanley served as San Quentin's chief surgeon for nearly four decades. Between 1913 and 1951, he oversaw the modernization of its medical regime, shifting from Lombrosian eugenic criminology through biomedical explanations for crime, and finally into psychological treatments in the postwar period. Throughout, Stanley fixated on curing various crises of manhood. Under Stanley's scalpel, prisoners became subjects in a series of eugenic treatments ranging from sterilization to implanting "testicular substances" from executed prisoners---and also goats---into San Quentin inmates. Stanley was convinced that his research would rejuvenate aged men, control crime, and limit the reproduction of the unfit. His medical practice revealed an underside to social hygiene in the modern state, where the lines between punishment, treatment, and research were blurred.