by Dr. Samantha Iyer (Fordham University) The United States’s food stamp program is under attack again—again. The current government shutdown has left the nearly 42 million people who rely on the program—now called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP—in a state of uncertainty. Even more fundamentally, in July of this year, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which is bound to significantly reduce the number of people who can benefit from the program. That is because the bill increases the state and local costs for administering SNAP, expands the work requirements for receiving assistance, and excludes a range of non-citizens from eligibility. The contraction of government assistance programs is nothing new. It is most often associated with welfare reform under the administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. But family food assistance programs have followed a somewhat different trajectory than other government assistance. That trajectory makes the current cutbacks all the more dangerous. For as US policymakers have slashed other welfare programs, these food programs have come to serve as welfare of the last resort. I examine the distinct path of family food assistance programs in a recent article, ‘Agricultural Workers, Tenant Farmers, and the Midcentury U.S. […]

by the Past & Present editoral team Past and Present was delighted to learn that Dr. Daniel F. Banks has been awarded the Society for Italian Historical Studies’ Modern History Article Prize for his forthcoming Past & Present article “Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860”. In their citation to prize committee consisting of Prof. Giuliana Chamedes (chair), Prof. Michael Ebner and Prof. Steven Soper stated that: “This article reframes the history of Italian unification and helps us understand a new dimension of why Garibaldi’s campaign against the Bourbon army was successful. Taking us behind the scenes, Banks shows that the Garibaldi expedition was enabled by more than rag-tag idealists and good public relations propaganda; its victories were also made possible through a carefully planned logistical revolution, carried out by businessmen, traders, and economic non-state actors. Shedding new light on the history of capitalism, on Genoa as a geopolitical and revolutionary hub, and on the transnational dimensions of the Risorgimento in exile, we learn how committed radicals mobilized the structures of international capitalism in favor of their cause. Through a rich array of archival, primary, and secondary sources, Banks shows us how complex networks […]