This AHA session presents research examining the historical uses of surveillance as a method of creating knowledge about social and political conditions. While long dominated by histories of state security and its imperial entanglements, more recent scholarship on surveillance has demonstrated the ways that non-state actors also developed sophisticated surveillant systems to pursue a staggering variety of diverse goals. Some wedded information gathering to commerce, creating new forms of market research and surreptitious customer surveys, others rifled through wastebaskets and intercepted mail to reveal the activities of their political opponents, while still others deployed citizen surveillers onto the streets to see, know, and ultimately reform American cities and those who governed them.

This more recent scholarship invites us to re-evaluate the coherence of surveillance as a category of historical analysis. Perhaps the term should be reserved exclusively for histories of the state? We might then look for new descriptive language among scholars of contemporary surveillance studies, where theorists are grappling with a new vocabulary to capture the novel flows of knowledge and power in the digital era. From this group some historians have borrowed the term sousveillance, finding in it an apt inversion of the assumed direction of the state surveiller’s gaze. Might this then be a better term to describe the activities of citizens when they use these tools to interrogate, resist, or assist state power? Looking further afield, are there other terms that historians could use to historicize the changing ways that surveillance data has been turned into power?

The papers in this session explore these and related questions. Matthew Guariglia’s paper on the American Business Consultants connects Cold War politics to the expanding literature on surveillance capitalism, demonstrating the market value of personal data in an era of expanding background, “loyalty” and security checks. Oftentimes the subjects of political surveillance were Communist Party members and the “fellow travelers” who defended them, and Dolores Janiewski’s research uncovers how members of a California legal network were able to employ counter-surveillance strategies in the late 1930s to defend clients such as labor leader Harry Bridges, seen by his enemies as a lynchpin of the CP on the West Coast. Finally, Simon Judkins’ paper on civic reformers in 1930s Los Angeles shows that, as early as 1937, citizens recognized that technologies of vision such as photography could be used to record the activities of police officers who abused their power. As they further realized, such images could be woven into compelling disinformation narratives with the persuasive power to remake their city.

Our session will present these histories via focused, 15-minute research presentations followed by comments and discussion, suggesting new approaches for this growing and vital historiography.