Since 1896, Ohio voters have failed to favor the next president only twice (in 1944 and 1960). Time after time, Ohio has found itself in the thick of the presidential race, and 2016 is shaping up to be no different. What about the Buckeye State makes it so special? In The Bellwether, Kyle Kondik, managing editor for the nonpartisan political forecasting newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball, blends data-driven research and historical documentation to explain Ohio’s remarkable record as a predictor of presidential results and why the state is essential to the 2016 election and beyond.
Part history, part journalism, this entertaining and astute guide proposes that Ohio has been the key state in the Electoral College for more than a century and examines what the idea of the swing state has come to mean. In discussing the evidence, Kondik uses the state’s oft-mentioned status as a microcosm of the nation as a case study to trace the evolution of the American electorate, and identifies which places in Ohio have the most influence on the statewide result. Finally, he delves into the answer to the question voting Ohioans consider every four years: Will their state remain a bellwether, or is their ability to pick the president on its way out?
On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why.
Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy.
By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.
Volume VI of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft follows the career of William Howard Taft upon his leaving the White House. It consists of two short publications from 1914 and 1915.
The first, The President and His Powers, is based on a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University and draws on Taft’s experience in the presidency and the executive branch. It speaks particularly to the nature of executive power and its place in the American system and is rooted in his disagreement with Theodore Roosevelt regarding presidential power. Taft believed all presidential power must be traced to some specific grant of power or be necessary to its exercise, while Roosevelt saw the presidency as a position of “steward of the people” limited only by some express provision of the Constitution.
The second, The United States and Peace, reflects Taft’s interest in foreign policy, which was intensified by his years as governor of the Philippines and as secretary of war, as well as by his presidency. Originally four lectures delivered in 1914, The United States and Peace discusses the Monroe Doctrine, the threat to peace presented by incidents of violence to foreigners in the United States, the maintenance of peace through international arbitration, and the trend toward federation in international affairs. Taft hoped to see the latter result in the establishment of an independent judiciary to resolve international disputes.
Taft’s reasoned arguments, supplemented by the commentaries of Professors McWilliams and Gerrity, will stimulate interest among historians, lawmakers, political activists, and the general public.
During the Civil War, Americans felt themselves to be on intimate terms with their commander in chief, sending President Abraham Lincoln between two hundred and five hundred pieces of mail every day—letters that expressed the concerns, aspirations, grievances, and obsessions of the nation. Ranging from weighty political tomes to greetings accompanying homespun gifts, the letters reflect the pulse of the country in a time of upheaval. This illuminating collection includes straightforward correspondence from ordinary Americans requesting autographs and favors as well as pleas from the influential, such as the anguished open letter from New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley imploring Lincoln to end his “remiss” policy of caution on emancipation. This new paperback edition, featuring twenty-two illustrations, portrays a president clearly eager to review and respond to the advice, criticism, and requests of the nation’s citizens.
The image of a prison with a revolving door helped George Bush win the presidency in 1988, but did negative advertising damage the electoral process itself? Why did campaign ’88 represent an all-time low in the minds of many voters? These are some of the questions that impel this thought-provoking analysis of the 1988 presidential election, sponsored by the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation.
Using extensive empirical studies of the candidates, the media, and the voters, Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Markle Commission on the Media and the Electorate, traces the roots of popular dissatisfaction with the 1988 election. Buchanan argues that the campaign drifted too far from popular ideals of how democratic processes ought to work—that the substitution of negative advertising and quickie “sound bites” for reasoned debate on national problems and issues alienated much of the electorate, causing the lowest voter turnout in sixty-four years.
Negative campaigning, however, cannot bear the full blame for the 1988 election. While the Markle Commission offers specific recommendations for improvements in candidate and media performance, the great need, says Buchanan, is for voters to reclaim the electoral process, to insist that candidates and the media give enough information about positions and programs for voters to make informed choices. Voters need to be educated out of the idea that democratic elections and representative government can somehow occur without the participation of ordinary citizens.
At a time when the American democratic process is being used as a model by newly independent nations around the world, it is particularly appropriate to ask how well it works at home. Electing a President does just that.
As president, Abraham Lincoln received between two hundred and five hundred letters a day—correspondence from public officials, political allies, and military leaders, as well as letters from ordinary Americans of all races who wanted to share their views with him. Here, and in his critically acclaimed volume Dear Mr. Lincoln, editor Harold Holzer has rescued these voices—sometimes eloquent, occasionally angry, at times poetic—from the obscurity of the archives of the Civil War. The Lincoln Mailbag includes letters written by African Americans, which Lincoln never saw, revealing to readers a more accurate representation of the nation’s mood than even the president knew. This first paperback edition of The Lincoln Mailbag includes a new index and fourteen illustrations, and Holzer’s introduction and annotations provide historical context for the events described and the people who wrote so passionately to their president in Lincoln's America.
Over the past century, three nationally significant histories have vied for space and place in Independence, Missouri. Independence was declared Zion by Joseph Smith, served as a gathering and provisioning point for trails west, and was called home by President Harry S. Truman for sixty-four years. Historian Jon E. Taylor has integrated research from newspapers, public documents, oral histories, and private papers to detail how the community has preserved and remembered these various legacies.
Truman’s legacy would appear to have been secured in Independence via three significant designations—his presidential library opened there in 1957, his neighborhood was designated a national historic landmark in 1972, and his home was declared a national historic site in 1982. However, Taylor argues that Truman’s seeming dominance in the community’s memory is in fact endangered by competition from the other aspects of the town’s historical heritage.
Taylor considers the role Mormon history has played in the city's history and chronicles how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints returned to Independence to fulfill Joseph Smith's dream of creating Zion in the city, a situation that impacted neighborhoods near the Truman home. Taylor also examines the city's fascination with the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails, detailing how that history was lost and remembered and is now immortalized on the Independence square and in the National Frontier Trails Museum.
In the 1980s, the city council reduced the size of the Truman Heritage District, created to maintain Truman’s association with his neighborhood, after church opposition. At the same time, city officials pushed to make Independence a major tourist destination, a move largely dependent upon the city capitalizing on its association with Truman. These inconsistent policies and incongruous goals have led to innumerable changes in the landscape Truman enjoyed during his legendary morning walks.
A President, a Church, and Trails West chronicles one city’s struggle to preserve its history and the built environment. Taylor places the role of preservation in Independence not only within the larger context of preservation in the United States but also within the context of American environmental history. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in public history, historic preservation, history and memory, and local history.
The 1960 West Virginia presidential primary is arguably the most storied contest in modern American politics. And yet John F. Kennedy traveled the path so quickly from dynamic presidential candidate to martyred national icon that many forget his debt to West Virginia in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. In The Primary That Made a President, author Robert O. Rupp returns to 1960 West Virginia, reviewing the momentous contest for signs of the political changes to come.
Besides propelling Kennedy to the Democratic nomination, the West Virginia primary changed the face of politics by advancing religious tolerance, foreshadowing future political campaigns, influencing public policy, and drawing national attention to a misunderstood region. It meant the end of a taboo that kept the Catholic faith out of American politics; the rise of the primary as a political tool for garnering delegate support; the beginning of a nationwide confrontation with Appalachian stereotypes; and the seeds for what would become Kennedy’s War on Poverty. Rupp explores these themes and more to discuss how a small Appalachian state, overwhelmingly poor and Protestant, became a key player in the political future of John F. Kennedy.
The first of its kind among Kennedy biographies or histories of the 1960 election, this book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of the 1960 West Virginia presidential primary and its far-reaching significance for the political climate in the US.
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