I am studying the history of America’s troubled teen industry—the networks of parent-pay bootcamps, drug-rehabs, therapeutic boarding schools, and wilderness programs as well as the referral agents and youth transporter companies that serviced those institutions. This history can help us understand relationships between big domains of science, race, culture, juvenile justice, and education. In addition to learning about institutional histories, first-hand accounts, and lived experiences, my curiosity focuses on political and professional developments, international exchanges of information, and the US military influences on the industry’s development since WWII. Hopefully, these histories will be relevant to a wide range of scholars in academia and to people in the real world. To me, they are especially valuable for their relevance to preventing institutional child maltreatment and for explaining historical patterns of racial disparities in America’s juvenile justice and educational systems.