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The view that a healthy diet was low in fats and high in carbohydrates became mainstream and widely accepted during the second half of the 20th century. But discussions about diet, disease, and health take place in a highly politicized arena, and this diet was the subject of considerable controversy. This chapter examines the period from the 1940s, when awareness of the increasing incidence of CHD began to grow, to 1985, the year the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) began its effort to sell the anti-fat, anti-cholesterol message to the nation. This campaign marked a victory for advocates of fat reduction over skeptics who continued to question the efficacy of low fat diets as a means of preventing disease.

This chapter traces the development of the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Formal epidemiological research in cardiovascular diseases took several forms, beginning in 1948. The prototype and icon of international investigations was the Framingham Heart Study. The explosion of prospective studies from 1948 onwards, the modern era of research from 1972 to the present, and conceptual evolution in CVD epidemiology are discussed.

Unitarian minister and abolitionist Moncure Daniel Conway's anecdote of the 4 July 1854 Framingham Grove gathering captures the testimonial posture that authorized the morally upright slave witness, Sojourner Truth, to critique the society in which she lived. This chapter discusses Truth's role in one of the nation's first penny-press scandals to reveal how such abolitionist appeals to the popular tribunal interlocked with the black subject's transformation in the shadow of American law in early antebellum print culture. It also analyzes the Matthias scandal, in which Isabella Van Wagenen testified against the Prophet Matthias, who was charged with embezzlement, fraud, murder, and assault following the collapse of the religious cult he had established in New York.

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.