In this article, the authors offer an interpretation of the history of the "Healthy People" initiative showing that the outcomes remain largely the same, with appropriate decennial adjustment of the proliferating numerical targets and increased delineation of objectives for special populations. But the strategies by which those outcomes are to be pursued and achieved are increasingly akin to what contemporaries in schools of public health and other graduate programs in the 1960s and 1970s were being taught public health education or community health education was supposed to do: namely to address not only the individual but also social determinants of health through processes of community mobilization and policy advocacy. The authors also show how the concept of health promotion was defined as an elaboration of the social-determinant dimensions of health education after the Office of Health Information and Health Promotion was created by Public Law 94-317 in 1976, and further elaborated in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion at the first International Conference on Health Promotion in 1986.