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Nation Builder
John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic
Charles N. Edel
Harvard University Press, 2014

“America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”—John Quincy Adams’s famous words are often quoted to justify noninterference in other nations’ affairs. Yet when he spoke them, Adams was not advocating neutrality or passivity but rather outlining a national policy that balanced democratic idealism with a pragmatic understanding of the young republic’s capabilities and limitations. America’s rise from a confederation of revolutionary colonies to a world power is often treated as inevitable, but Charles N. Edel’s provocative biography of Adams argues that he served as the central architect of a grand strategy that shaped America’s rise. Adams’s particular combination of ideas and policies made him a critical link between the founding generation and the Civil War–era nation of Lincoln.

Examining Adams’s service as senator, diplomat, secretary of state, president, and congressman, Edel’s study of this extraordinary figure reveals a brilliant but stubborn man who was both visionary prophet and hard-nosed politician. Adams’s ambitions on behalf of America’s interests, combined with a shrewd understanding of how to counter the threats arrayed against them, allowed him to craft a multitiered policy to insulate the nation from European quarrels, expand U.S. territory, harness natural resources, develop domestic infrastructure, education, and commerce, and transform the United States into a model of progress and liberty respected throughout the world.

While Adams did not live to see all of his strategy fulfilled, his vision shaped the nation’s agenda for decades afterward and continues to resonate as America pursues its place in the twenty-first-century world.

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A Nation by Design
Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
Aristide R. Zolberg
Harvard University Press, 2006

According to the national mythology, the United States has long opened its doors to people from across the globe, providing a port in a storm and opportunity for any who seek it. Yet the history of immigration to the United States is far different. Even before the xenophobic reaction against European and Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth century, social and economic interest groups worked to manipulate immigration policy to serve their needs. In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building.

A Nation by Design argues that the engineering of immigration policy has been prevalent since early American history. However, it has gone largely unnoticed since it took place primarily on the local and state levels, owing to constitutional limits on federal power during the slavery era. Zolberg profiles the vacillating currents of opinion on immigration throughout American history, examining separately the roles played by business interests, labor unions, ethnic lobbies, and nativist ideologues in shaping policy. He then examines how three different types of migration--legal migration, illegal migration to fill low-wage jobs, and asylum-seeking--are shaping contemporary arguments over immigration to the United States.

A Nation by Design is a thorough, authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. With rich detail and impeccable scholarship, Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.

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A Nation Empowered, Volume 1
Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students
Susan G. Assouline, Nicholas Colangelo, Joyce VanTassel-Baska, Mary Sharp
University of Iowa Press, 2015
This new report, A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students builds on the momentum of the 2004 report, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students. A Nation Deceived initiated a critical dialogue about academic acceleration, an under-used intervention. A Nation Deceived exposed to the nation the inconsistencies between research and practice and brought acceleration to prominence in the field.

Volume 1 and 2 of A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students equips students, families, and educators with facts to refute biased excuses. A Nation Empowered shifts the impetus from conversation to action. Empowerement  galvanizes determination with evidence. Volume 1 portrays the determination of students, educators, and parents to strive for excellence. Volume 2 reveals the evidence that trumps the excuses that hold bright students back.
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A Nation Empowered, Volume 2
Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students
Susan G. Assouline, Nicholas Colangelo, Joyce VanTassel-Baska, and Ann Lupkowski-Shoplik
University of Iowa Press, 2015
This new report, A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students builds on the momentum of the 2004 report, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students. A Nation Deceived initiated a critical dialogue about academic acceleration, an under-used intervention. A Nation Deceived exposed to the nation the inconsistencies between research and practice and brought acceleration to prominence in the field.

Volume 1 and 2 of A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America's Brightest Students equips students, families, and educators with facts to refute biased excuses. A Nation Empowered shifts the impetus from conversation to action. Empowerement  galvanizes determination with evidence. Volume 1 portrays the determination of students, educators, and parents to strive for excellence. Volume 2 reveals the evidence that trumps the excuses that hold bright students back.
 
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A Nation Forged in War
How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along
Thomas A. Bruscino
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and this new book--the first in the Legacies of War series--explores one of the most significant changes it fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious tolerance. A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War helped to dissolve long-standing differences among white soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds.

Never before or since have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time: more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to 1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers' shared experiences--enduring basic training, living far from home, engaging in combat--transformed their views of other ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how specific military policies and practices worked to counteract old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder what it meant to be white in America.

Using the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias. Smith's defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy's victory some three decades later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar decades.

Extensively documented, A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.

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A Nation Fragmented
The Public Agenda in the Information Age
Jill Edy
Temple University Press, 2019

The transformation from an undifferentiated public to a surfeit of interest groups has become yet another distinguishing feature of the increasing polarization of American politics. Jill Edy and Patrick Meirick contend that the media has played a key role in this splintering. A Nation Fragmented reveals how the content and character of the public agenda has transformed as the media environment evolved from network television and daily newspapers in the late 1960s to today’s saturated social media world with 200 cable channels.

The authors seek to understand what happened as the public’s sense of shared priorities deteriorated. They consider to what extent our public agenda has “fallen apart” as attention to news has declined, and to what extent we have been “driven apart” by changes in the issue agendas of news. Edy and Meirick also show how public attention is limited and spread too thin except in cases where a highly consistent news agenda can provoke a more focused public agenda. 

A Nation Fragmented explores the media’s influence and political power and, ultimately, how contemporary democracy works.

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A Nation in the Making
The Philippines and the United States, 1899-1921
Peter W. Stanley
Harvard University Press, 1974

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Nation Making
Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia
Robert J. Foster, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997


In this theoretically sophisticated volume, contributors examine the process of nation making in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu- states that attained formal political independence between 1970 and 1980. The remarkable cultural diversity within these states demands close ethnographic study of different groups and their contesting definitions of nationhood and leads to highly original approaches.

The essays explore the political conditions and cultural assumptions that inform how Melanesians variously imagine a national community. The authors interpret a wide range of materials, from political speeches and official ceremonies of state to newspaper advertisements and life crisis rites. They demonstrate both how the legacies of divisive colonial rule, the weakness of the postcolonial state, and the exigencies of capitalist markets undermine the processes of nation making in contemporary Melanesia and how new forms of popular and consumer culture potentially shape an emergent national consciousness.

Comparative and historical in its orientation, this book will appeal to readers not only in anthropology but in political science, social history, and cultural studies. It will be of special value to those interested in comparative politics and history, Pacific studies, ethnicity and nationalism, and colonial and postcolonial studies.

Robert J. Foster is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester.

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A Nation of Agents
The American Path to a Modern Self and Society
James E. Block
Harvard University Press, 2002

In this sweeping reinterpretation of American political culture, James Block offers a new perspective on the formation of the modern American self and society. Block roots both self and society in the concept of agency, rather than liberty, and dispenses with the national myth of the "sacred cause of liberty"--with the Declaration of Independence as its "American scripture." Instead, he recovers the early modern conception of agency as the true synthesis emerging from America's Protestant and liberal cultural foundations.

Block traces agency doctrine from its pre-Commonwealth English origins through its development into the American mainstream culture on the eve of the twentieth century. The concept of agency that prevailed in the colonies simultaneously released individuals from traditional constraints to participate actively and self-reliantly in social institutions, while confining them within a new set of commitments. Individual initiative was now firmly bounded by the modern values and ends of personal Protestant religiosity and collective liberal institutional authority. As Block shows, this complex relation of self to society lies at the root of the American character.

A Nation of Agents is a new reading of what the "first new nation" did and did not achieve. It will enable us to move beyond long-standing national myths and grasp both the American achievement and its legacy for modernity.

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A Nation of Behavers
Martin E. Marty
University of Chicago Press, 1980
"National Book Award-winning author and historian Martin E. Marty's A Nation of Behavers is a characteristically perceptive new map of American religion. . . . Marty's years of astute observation of America's religious trends and developments have yielded six informal but clearly defined clusters around which people attempt to find not only basic group identity but also some kind of power. Anyone concerned about belief and its manifestations will be immensely aided by Marty's cogent comments on recent religious happenings."—Commonweal

"This is a book for everyone, more than for the scholar of American religion. . . . Its value is in breadth of vision and new interpretation."—Dean R. Hoge, Theology Today

"As a means of making sense out of the potpourri of competing groups that compose religious America today, A Nation of Behavers is a first-rate tool."—Edward A. Fiske, New York Times
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A Nation of Bookworms?
Czechs as Readers
Jirí Trávnícek
Karolinum Press, 2021
Nation of Bookworms takes an in-depth look at the reading culture of the Czech Republic--the country with the highest number of libraries per capita worldwide. Drawing on studies and oral interviews of Czech readers conducted by the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Institute of Czech Literature between 2007 and 2018, the book presents intriguing new research on Czech readership and society. Jiří Trávníček deftly sifts through hard data and first-person reportage, illuminating the myriad components that make up reading culture, such as print-reading, screen-reading, libraries, book sales, the social lives of readers, time spent reading, and reading preferences. Trávníček also takes a global look at literary love, exploring the parallels between the reading cultures of other countries and the Czechs’ unique fervor for the written word. Nation of Bookworms is essential reading for bibliophiles on every continent.
 
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A Nation of Counterfeiters
Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States
Stephen Mihm
Harvard University Press, 2007

Listen to a short interview with Stephen MihmHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a bewildering variety of denominations and designs--more than ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation.

Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of capitalism over which the federal government exercised little control. It was an era when responsibility for the country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative undertaking.

Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War. We learn how the federal government issued greenbacks for the first time and began dismantling the older monetary system and the counterfeit economy it sustained.

A Nation of Counterfeiters is a trailblazing work of history, one that casts the country's capitalist roots in a startling new light. Readers will recognize the same get-rich-quick spirit that lives on in the speculative bubbles and confidence games of the twenty-first century.

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A Nation of Family and Friends?
Sport and the Leisure Cultures of British Asian Girls and Women
Aarti Ratna
Rutgers University Press, 2024
In A Nation of Family and Friends, sociologist Aarti Ratna examines the complex and dynamic relationships between South Asian women and sporting and leisure cultures. Mining autobiographical insights (as a South Asian scholar living in the UK) she links the chapters of this innovative book using the sociological concepts of family and friends, particularly as they relate to an analysis of wider debates about the complexities of race, gender, and the nation. Ratna underscores the importance of studying informal spaces of sport and leisure as friendly, familial, sociable, and political spaces. She simultaneously highlights the role of earlier sociological research in disseminating myths about South Asian women as too physically weak to play competitive sports; culturally passive victims of South Asian cultures and religions; and as sexually exotic women requiring saving through colonial and imperial projects led by white men and women.

Ratna also examines two key cultural objects - the popular films "Bend it Like Beckham" and “Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal” - to examine in detail the gendered representation of South Asian soccer players’ engagement in amateur and elite levels of the sport. She critiques studies of women’s football fandom and sport that fail to acknowledge social differences relating to race, class, age, disability, and sexuality. By linking the social forces (across time and space) that differentially affect their sporting choices and leisure lifestyles, Ratna portrays the women of the South Asian diaspora as active agents in the shaping of their life courses and as skilled navigators of the complexities affecting their own identities. Ultimately Ratna examines the intersections of class, caste, age, generation, gender, and sexuality, to provide a rich and critical exploration of British Asian women's sport and leisure choices, pleasures, and lived realities.
 
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A Nation of Fliers
German Aviation and the Popular Imagination
Peter Fritzsche
Harvard University Press, 1992
From huge, fragile airships hanging in the sky to dashing young war pilots obsessed with death and destruction, this text describes Germany’s perilous romance with aviation, covering the bright idealism of flight and its darker service in total war.
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A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered
US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965
Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Hsu, Maria Garcia
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Scholars, journalists, and policymakers have long argued that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically reshaped the demographic composition of the United States. In A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered, leading scholars of immigration explore how the political and ideological struggles of the "age of restriction"--from 1924 to 1965--paved the way for the changes to come. The essays examine how geopolitics, civil rights, perceptions of America's role as a humanitarian sanctuary, and economic priorities led government officials to facilitate the entrance of specific immigrant groups, thereby establishing the legal precedents for future policies. Eye-opening articles discuss Japanese war brides and changing views of miscegenation, the recruitment of former Nazi scientists, a temporary workers program with Japanese immigrants, the emotional separation of Mexican immigrant families, Puerto Rican youth’s efforts to claim an American identity, and the restaurant raids of conscripted Chinese sailors during World War II.

Contributors: Eiichiro Azuma, David Cook-Martín, David FitzGerald, Monique Laney, Heather Lee, Kathleen López, Laura Madokoro, Ronald L. Mize, Arissa H. Oh, Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Lorrin Thomas, Ruth Ellen Wasem, and Elliott Young

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A Nation of Neighborhoods
Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America
Benjamin Looker
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility.

Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of “neighborhood” in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood’s significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres—Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children’s programming—Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.
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Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
Meredith Terretta
Ohio University Press, 2014

Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is the first extensive history of Cameroonian nationalism to consider the global and local influences that shaped the movement within the French and British Cameroons and beyond. Drawing on the archives of the United Nations, France, Great Britain, Ghana, and Cameroon, as well as oral sources, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence chronicles the spread of the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) nationalist movement from the late 1940s into the first postcolonial decade. It shows how, in the French and British Cameroon territories administered as UN Trusteeships after the Second World War, notions of international human rights, the promise of Third World independence, Pan-African federation, and national citizenship blended with local political and spiritual practices that resurfaced as the period of European rule came to a close. After French and British administrators banned the party in the mid-1950s, UPC nationalists adopted violence as a revolutionary strategy. In the 1960s, the nationalist vision disintegrated. The postcolonial regime labeled UPC nationalists “outlaws” and rounded them up for imprisonment or execution as the state shifted to single-party rule in 1966.

Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence traces the connection between local and transregional politics in the age of Africa’s decolonization and the early decades of the Cold War. Rather than stop at official independence as most conventional histories of African nationalist movements do, this book considers postindependence events as crucial to the history of Cameroonian nationalism and to an understanding of the postcolonial government that came to power on 1 January 1960. While the history of the UPC is a story that ends with the party’s failure to gain access to political power with independence, it is also a story of the postcolonial state’s failure to become a nation.

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A Nation of Politicians
Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland
Padhraig Higgins
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
Between the years 1778 and 1784, groups that had previously been excluded from the Irish political sphere—women, Catholics, lower-class Protestants, farmers, shopkeepers, and other members of the laboring and agrarian classes—began to imagine themselves as civil subjects with a stake in matters of the state. This politicization of non-elites was largely driven by the Volunteers, a local militia force that emerged in Ireland as British troops were called away to the American War of Independence. With remarkable speed, the Volunteers challenged central features of British imperial rule over Ireland and helped citizens express a new Irish national identity.
    In A Nation of Politicians, Padhraig Higgins argues that the development of Volunteer-initiated activities—associating, petitioning, subscribing, shopping, and attending celebrations—expanded the scope of political participation. Using a wide range of literary, archival, and visual sources, Higgins examines how ubiquitous forms of communication—sermons, songs and ballads, handbills, toasts, graffiti, theater, rumors, and gossip—encouraged ordinary Irish citizens to engage in the politics of a more inclusive society and consider the broader questions of civil liberties and the British Empire. A Nation of Politicians presents a fascinating tale of the beginnings of Ireland’s richly vocal political tradition at this important intersection of cultural, intellectual, social, and public history.
 
 
Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book, American Conference for Irish Studies
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A Nation of Realtors®
A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class
Jeffrey M. Hornstein
Duke University Press, 2005
How is it that in the twentieth century virtually all Americans came to think of themselves as “middle class”? In this cultural history of real estate brokerage, Jeffrey M. Hornstein argues that the rise of the Realtors as dealers in both domestic space and the ideology of home ownership provides tremendous insight into this critical question. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a group of prominent real estate brokers attempted to transform their occupation into a profession. Drawing on traditional notions of the learned professions, they developed a new identity—the professional entrepreneur—and a brand name, “Realtor.” The Realtors worked doggedly to make home ownership a central element of what became known as the “American dream.” Hornstein analyzes the internal evolution of the occupation, particularly the gender dynamics culminating in the rise of women brokers to predominance after the Second World War. At the same time, he examines the ways organized real estate brokers influenced American housing policy throughout the century.

Hornstein draws on trade journals, government documents on housing policy, material from the archives of the National Association of Realtors and local real estate boards, demographic data, and fictional accounts of real estate agents. He chronicles the early efforts of real estate brokers to establish their profession by creating local and national boards, business practices, ethical codes, and educational programs and by working to influence laws from local zoning ordinances to national housing policy. A rich and original work of American history, A Nation of Realtors® illuminates class, gender, and business through a look at the development of a profession and its enormously successful effort to make the owner-occupied, single-family home a key element of twentieth-century American identity.

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A Nation of Speechifiers
Making an American Public after the Revolution
Carolyn Eastman
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In the decades after the American Revolution, inhabitants of the United States began to shape a new national identity. Telling the story of this messy yet formative process, Carolyn Eastman argues that ordinary men and women gave meaning to American nationhood and national belonging by first learning to imagine themselves as members of a shared public.

She reveals that the creation of this American public—which only gradually developed nationalistic qualities—took place as men and women engaged with oratory and print media not only as readers and listeners but also as writers and speakers. Eastman paints vibrant portraits of the arenas where this engagement played out, from the schools that instructed children in elocution to the debating societies, newspapers, and presses through which different groups jostled to define themselves—sometimes against each other. Demonstrating the previously unrecognized extent to which nonelites participated in the formation of our ideas about politics, manners, and gender and race relations, A Nation of Speechifiers provides an unparalleled genealogy of early American identity.

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A Nation of Takers
America’s Entitlement Epidemic
Nicholas Eberstadt
Templeton Press, 2012
In A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic, one of our country’s foremost demographers, Nicholas Eberstadt, details the exponential growth in entitlement spending over the past fifty years. As he notes, in 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government’s total outlays. Today, entitlement spending accounts for a full two-thirds of the federal budget. Drawing on an impressive array of data and employing a range of easy-to-read, four-color charts, Eberstadt shows the unchecked spiral of spending on a range of entitlements, everything from Medicare to disability payments.  But Eberstadt does not just chart the astonishing growth of entitlement spending, he also details the enormous economic and cultural costs of this epidemic. He powerfully argues that while this spending certainly drains our federal coffers, it also has a very real, long-lasting, negative impact on the character of our citizens. 
Also included in the book is a response from one of our leading political theorists, William Galston. In his incisive response, he questions Eberstadt’s conclusions about the corrosive effect of entitlements on character and offers his own analysis of the impact of American entitlement growth.  
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A Nation of Villages
Riot and Rebellion in the Mexican Huasteca, 1750-1850
Michael T. Ducey
University of Arizona Press, 2004
During the period 1769-1850, republican national institutions slowly replaced colonial and monarchical rule. This was a turbulent time in rural Mexico. It was a period of political instability marked by violent peasant rebellions that were longer, more violent, and involved more people than those that occurred in the colonial era. Mexican villagers became skilled insurrectionists. In this book, Michael Ducey analyzes the peasant rebellions in Mexico’s Huasteca region over that time, beginning with short-lived colonial riots, progressing through a long and brutal insurrection associated with the war of independence and several region-wide uprisings, and culminating in the "Caste War of the Huasteca" of the 1840s.

He asks not just why villagers revolted but how their discontent fit into the political drama of early national Mexico. Ducey shows how the war offered opportunities for villagers to settle scores with members of the local elite as peasants discovered new ways of imagining the state. They were far from being the isolated traditionalists who occasionally rebelled against political or economic change described in older scholarship. At least until the 1848-1850 Caste War, political disputes were more important than land.

This region’s peasants were both remarkably diverse and politically astute. Villagers adapted colonial political culture and later republican ideas to fashion local institutions that fit their own needs. Over the course of a hundred years, peasant tactics and political discourse evolved in a constant dialogue with the changing political climate, shifting from rhetorical statements of loyalty to the king to proclamations of federalism and their rights as citizens. A Nation of Villages ably demonstrates that rural villagers were more aware of elite ideologies than urban rulers were of the villagers’ political ideas. This long-term analysis of one region illuminates how rural people helped shape the republican state.
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A Nation of Widening Opportunities
The Civil Rights Act at 50
Ellen D. Katz and Samuel R. Bagenstos, editors
Michigan Publishing Services, 2015
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an extraordinary achievement of law, politics, and human rights. On October 11, 2013, a diverse group of civil rights scholars met at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor to assess the interpretation, development, and administration of civil rights law in the five decades since President Johnson signed the Act. This volume comprises edited versions of the papers that these scholars presented, enriched by lively discussions at and after the conference, and it contributes to the continuing debates regarding the civil rights project in the United States and the world.
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Nation on Board
Becoming Nigerian at Sea
Lynn Schler
Ohio University Press, 2016

In the 1940s, British shipping companies began the large-scale recruitment of African seamen in Lagos. On colonial ships, Nigerian sailors performed menial tasks for low wages and endured discrimination as cheap labor, while countering hardships by nurturing social connections across the black diaspora. Poor employment conditions stirred these seamen to identify with the nationalist sentiment burgeoning in postwar Nigeria, while their travels broadened and invigorated their cultural identities.

Working for the Nigerian National Shipping Line, they encountered new forms of injustice and exploitation. When mismanagement, a lack of technical expertise, and pillaging by elites led to the NNSL’s collapse in the early 1990s, seamen found themselves without prospects. Their disillusionment became a broader critique of corruption in postcolonial Nigeria.

In Nation on Board: Becoming Nigerian at Sea, Lynn Schler traces the fate of these seamen in the transition from colonialism to independence. In so doing, she renews the case for labor history as a lens for understanding decolonization, and brings a vital transnational perspective to her subject. By placing the working-class experience at the fore, she complicates the dominant view of the decolonization process in Nigeria and elsewhere.

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A Nation on the Line
Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines
Jan M. Padios
Duke University Press, 2018
In 2011 the Philippines surpassed India to become what the New York Times referred to as "the world's capital of call centers." By the end of 2015 the Philippine call center industry employed over one million people and generated twenty-two billion dollars in revenue. In A Nation on the Line Jan M. Padios examines this massive industry in the context of globalization, race, gender, transnationalism, and postcolonialism, outlining how it has become a significant site of efforts to redefine Filipino identity and culture, the Philippine nation-state, and the value of Filipino labor. She also chronicles the many contradictory effects of call center work on Filipino identity, family, consumer culture, and sexual politics. As Padios demonstrates, the critical question of call centers does not merely expose the logic of transnational capitalism and the legacies of colonialism; it also problematizes the process of nation-building and peoplehood in the early twenty-first century. 
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A Nation Rising
Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty
Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika'ala Wright, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
A Nation Rising chronicles the political struggles and grassroots initiatives collectively known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Scholars, community organizers, journalists, and filmmakers contribute essays that explore Native Hawaiian resistance and resurgence from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Photographs and vignettes about particular activists further bring Hawaiian social movements to life. The stories and analyses of efforts to protect land and natural resources, resist community dispossession, and advance claims for sovereignty and self-determination reveal the diverse objectives and strategies, as well as the inevitable tensions, of the broad-tent sovereignty movement. The collection explores the Hawaiian political ethic of ea, which both includes and exceeds dominant notions of state-based sovereignty. A Nation Rising raises issues that resonate far beyond the Hawaiian archipelago, issues such as Indigenous cultural revitalization, environmental justice, and demilitarization.

Contributors. Noa Emmett Aluli, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Kekuni Blaisdell, Joan Conrow, Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, Edward W. Greevy, Ulla Hasager, Pauahi Ho'okano, Micky Huihui, Ikaika Hussey, Manu Ka‘iama, Le‘a Malia Kanehe, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Keala Kelly, Jacqueline Lasky, Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, Nalani Minton, Kalamaoka'aina Niheu, Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Leon No'eau Peralto, Kekailoa Perry, Puhipau, Noenoe K. Silva, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat, Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Mehana Blaich Vaughan, Kuhio Vogeler, Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright
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The Nation Takes Shape
1789-1837
Marcus Cunliffe
University of Chicago Press, 1960
Marcus Cunliffe, whom the Washington Post and Times Herald calls "a master historian capable of seeing his subject whole," has written a cogent and revealing study of America's first half-century under the federal Constitution. Bounded by the first Washington Administration and the last Jackson Administration, this is the period in which democracy grew and shaped the nation. It witnessed the launching of the federal government; the expansion of the frontier; the establishment of a party system; the enunciation of a foreign policy; the manufacture of the symbols of nationalism; and the forging of the arguments of sectionalism. Most important, Mr. Cunliffe writes, "the American character seems to have been formed in essence within a generation of George Washington's accession to the Presidency."

"An urbane, stimulating, and admirably proportioned analysis. . . ."—Alexander DeConde, Wisconsin Magazine of History

"What [Mr. Cunliffe] has done is to weave together and show the fertile interplay of the American dream and the American reality—and show how much the dream modified the reality. . . . an acute and elegant performance."—Times Literary Supplement
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The Nation That Never Was
Reconstructing America's Story
Kermit Roosevelt III
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Our idea of the Founders' America and its values is not true. We are not the heirs of the Founders, but we can be the heirs of Reconstruction and its vision for equality.

There’s a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.
 
We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.
 
America today is not the Founders’ America, but it can be Lincoln’s America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country’s history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.
 
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A Nation Under Lawyers
How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society
Mary Ann Glendon
Harvard University Press, 1994
Mary Ann Glendon’s A Nation Under Lawyers is a guided tour through the maze of the late-twentieth-century legal world, in which even lawyers themselves can lose their bearings. Glendon depicts the legal profession as a system in turbulence, where a variety of beliefs and ideals are vying for dominance. Dramatizing issues and events through stories of lawyers and laypersons caught up in the currents of change, she provides a frank assessment of the people and ideas that are transforming our law-dependent culture.
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A Nation under Our Feet
Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Steven Hahn
Harvard University Press, 2003

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people—an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration.

Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework—looking out from slavery—to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.

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A Nation Wholly Free
The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson
Carl Lane
Westholme Publishing, 2014
The Only Time America Was Free of Debt—and How It Led to the Two-Party Political System
“An engaging treatment of a topic of perennial concern and frequent misunderstanding, this lucid tale of the brief moment when the United States was debt-free should be on every Congress member’s bedside table.”—Peter J.Woolley, Professor of Comparative Politics, Fairleigh Dickinson University
When President James Monroe announced in his 1824 message to Congress that, barring an emergency, the large public debt inherited from the War for Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812 would be extinguished on January 1, 1835, Congress responded by crafting legislation to transform that prediction into reality. Yet John Quincy Adams,Monroe’s successor, seemed not to share the commitment to debt freedom, resulting in the rise of opposition to his administration and his defeat for reelection in the bitter presidential campaign of 1828. The new president, Andrew Jackson, was thoroughly committed to debt freedom, and when it was achieved, it became the only time in American history when the country carried no national debt. In A Nation Wholly Free: The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson, award-winning economic historian Carl Lane shows that the great and disparate issues that confronted Jackson, such as internal improvements, the “war” against the Second Bank of the United States, and the crisis surrounding South Carolina’s refusal to pay federal tariffs, become unified when debt freedom is understood as a core element of Jacksonian Democracy.
The era of debt freedom lasted only two years and ten months. As the government accumulated a surplus, a fully developed opposition party emerged—the beginning of our familiar two-party system—over rancor about how to allocate the newfound money. Not only did government move into an oppositional party system at this time, the debate about the size and role of government distinguished the parties in a pattern that has become familiar to Americans. The partisan debate over national debt and expenditures led to poorly thought out legislation, forcing the government to resume borrowing. As a result, after Jackson left office in 1837, the country fell into a major depression. Today we confront a debt that exceeds $17 trillion. Indeed, we have been borrowing ever since that brief time we freed ourselves from an oversized debt. A thoughtful, engaging account with strong relevance to today, A Nation Wholly Free is the fascinating story of an achievement that now seems fanciful.
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A Nation within a Nation
Voices of the Oneidas in Wisconsin
L. Gordon McLester III
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2010
For the first time, the Oneidas of Wisconsin tell their own story in this richly diverse, authoritative contemporary history. A Nation within a Nation gathers first-person accounts, biographical essays, and scholars’ investigations in a sweeping and provocative consideration of the period of 1900-1969.
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Nation Within
The History of the American Occupation of Hawai'i
Tom Coffman
Duke University Press, 2009
In 1893 a small group of white planters and missionary descendants backed by the United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and established a government modeled on the Jim Crow South. In Nation Within Tom Coffman tells the complex history of the unsuccessful efforts of deposed Hawaiian queen Lili‘uokalani and her subjects to resist annexation, which eventually came in 1898. Coffman describes native Hawaiian political activism, the queen's visits to Washington, D.C., to lobby for independence, and her imprisonment, along with hundreds of others, after their aborted armed insurrection. Exposing the myths that fueled the narrative that native Hawaiians willingly relinquished their nation, Coffman shows how Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt conspired to extinguish Hawai‘i's sovereignty in the service of expanding the United States' growing empire.
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Nation Work
Asian Elites and National Identities
Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
As increasing attention is drawn to globalization, questions arise about the fate of "the nation," a political and social unit that for centuries has seemed the common-sense way to organize the world. In Nation Work, Timothy Brook and André Schmid draw together eight essays that use historical examples from Asian countries--China, India, Korea, and Japan--to enrich our understandings of the origin and growth of nations.
Asia provides fertile ground for this inquiry, the volume argues, because in Asia the history of the modern nation has been inseparable from global influences in the form of Western imperialism. Yet, while the impetus for building a modern national identity may have come from the need to fashion a favorable place in a world system dominated by Western nations, those engaged in nationalist enterprises found their particular voices more often in relation to tensions within Asia than in relation to more generic tensions between Asia and the West.
With topics ranging from public health measures in nineteenth-century Japan through textual scholarship of Tamil intellectuals, the willful division of Korea's history from China's, the development of China's cotton industry, and the meaning of "postnational-ism" for Chinese artists, the essays reveal the fascinating array of sites at which nation work can take place.
This will be essential reading for historians and social scientists interested in Asia.
Timothy Brook is Professor of History, Stanford University. André Schmid is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.
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The Nation Writ Small
African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988
Susan Z. Andrade
Duke University Press, 2011
In The Nation Writ Small, Susan Z. Andrade focuses on the work of Africa’s first post-independence generation of novelists, explaining why male writers came to be seen as the voice of Africa’s new nation-states, and why African women writers’ commentary on national politics was overlooked. Since Africa’s early female novelists tended to write about the family, while male authors often explicitly addressed national politics, it was assumed that the women writers were uninterested in the nation and the public sphere. Challenging that notion, Andrade argues that the female authors engaged national politics through allegory. In their work, the family stands for the nation; it is the nation writ small. Interpreting fiction by women, as well as several feminist male authors, she analyzes novels by Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria); novellas by Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal); and bildungsromans by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), and Assia Djebar (Algeria). Andrade reveals the influence of Africa’s early women novelists on later generations of female authors, and she highlights the moment when African women began to write about macropolitics explicitly rather than allegorically.
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National Abjection
The Asian American Body Onstage
Karen Shimakawa
Duke University Press, 2002
National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness” through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection—a process that demands that Americanness be defined by the exclusion of Asian Americans, who are either cast as symbolic foreigners incapable of integration or Americanization or distorted into an “honorary” whiteness. She examines how Asian Americans become culturally visible on and off stage, revealing the ways Asian American theater companies and artists respond to the cultural implications of this abjection.

Shimakawa looks at the origins of Asian American theater, particularly through the memories of some of its pioneers. Her examination of the emergence of Asian American theater companies illuminates their strategies for countering the stereotypes of Asian Americans and the lack of visibility of Asian American performers within the theater world. She shows how some plays—Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A, Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman, and The Year of the Dragon—have both directly and indirectly addressed the displacement of Asian Americans. She analyzes works attempting to negate the process of abjection—such as the 1988 Broadway production of M. Butterfly as well as Miss Saigon, a mainstream production that enacted the process of cultural displacement both onstage and off. Finally, Shimakawa considers Asian Americanness in the context of globalization by meditating on the work of Ping Chong, particularly his East-West Quartet.

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National Accounts and Environmentally Sustainable National Income
Roefie Hueting and Bart de Boer
Eburon Academic Publishers, 2019
Our planet is threatened by a mistaken confidence in erroneously calculated growth. The term “economic growth” can only mean an increase in human welfare, but it is often wrongly identified with production growth that may in fact be destructive to the environment. Thus, while the measures of standard National Income (NI) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are useful for many purposes, they are inadequate in guiding environmental policy making. This book develops the corrective concept of an environmentally Sustainable National Income (eSNI). eSNI is defined as the maximally attainable level of production, using the technology of the year under review, whereby the vital environmental functions (possible uses) of the not-human-made physical surroundings remain available for future generations. In order to accurately judge environmental sustainability, the authors show, NI and eSNI must be addressed jointly. Drawing on data from the Netherlands from 1990 to 2015, the authors demonstrate the effectiveness of eSNI and argue that national statistical bureaus around the world should provide this measure to their own policymakers, so that policymaking across the globe might be informed by sound information about both national economies and the global environment.
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A National Acoustics
Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Brian Currid
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
A sound track of Germany in the early twentieth century might conjure military music and the voice of Adolf Hitler rising above a cheering crowd. In A National Acoustics, Brian Currid challenges this reductive characterization by investigating the transformations of music in mass culture from the Weimar Republic to the end of the Nazi regime. 

Offering a nuanced analysis of how publicity was constructed through radio programming, print media, popular song, and film, Currid examines how German citizens developed an emotional investment in the nation and other forms of collectivity that were tied to the sonic experience. Reading in detail popular genres of music—the Schlager (or “hit”), so-called gypsy music, and jazz—he offers a complex view of how they played a part in the creation of German culture. 

A National Acoustics contributes to a new understanding of what constitutes the public sphere. In doing so, it illustrates the contradictions between Germany’s social and cultural histories and how the technologies of recording not only were vital to the emergence of a national imaginary but also exposed the fault lines in the contested terrain of mass communication. 

Brian Currid is an independent scholar who lives in Berlin.
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The National Balance Sheet of the United States, 1953-1980
Raymond W. Goldsmith
University of Chicago Press, 1982
In what constitutes a landmark in the field of national accounts, Raymond W. Goldsmith gives detailed estimates of the nation's assets and liabilities year by year from 1953 through 1975 and for the benchmark years of 1900, 1929, and 1980. Special features of this work include presentation of data sector by sector, which casts light on the changing roles of financial institutions, and Goldsmith's expression of data in the form of ratios rather than in absolute dollar values, a device that makes the material both more informative and easier to absorb.

The most comprehensive and extensive study of national wealth ever attempted, The National Balance Sheet will be a rich resource for researchers and users of national accounts.
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National Bolshevism
Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956
David Brandenberger
Harvard University Press, 2002

During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist “national Bolshevism” into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

Beginning with national Bolshevism’s origins within Stalin’s inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and mass culture—from textbooks and belletristic literature to theater, opera, film, and the arts. Brandenberger then turns to the popular reception of this propaganda, uncovering glimpses of Stalin-era public opinion in letters, diaries, and secret police reports.

Controversial insofar as Soviet social identity is commonly associated with propaganda promoting class consciousness, this study argues that Stalinist ideology was actually more Russian nationalist than it was proletarian internationalist. National Bolshevism helps to explain not only why this genre of populism survived Stalin’s death in 1953, but why it continues to resonate among Russians today.

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National Camera
Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment
Roberto Tejada
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
In National Camera, Roberto Tejada offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect—a place Tejada calls the shared image environment.

The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the Agustín Víctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists.

From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.
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The National Collegiate Athletic Association
A Study in Cartel Behavior
Arthur A. Fleisher III, Brian L. Goff, and Robert D. Tollison
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Intercollegiate sports is an enterprise that annually grosses over $1 billion in income. Some schools receive more than $20 million from athletic programs, perhaps as much as $10 million simply from the sale of football tickets.

Probing the history and business practices of the most powerful sports organization of colleges and universities in the United States, the authors present a persuasive case that the NCAA is in fact a cartel, its members engaged in classically defined restrictive practices for the sole purpose of jointly maximizing their profits.

This fresh perspective on the NCAA's institutional structure helps to explain why illicit payments to athletes persist, why non-NCAA organizations have not flourished, and why members have readily agreed on certain suspect rules.

Offering a valuable case study for sports analysts and students of economics and cartel behavior, this book is a revealing glimpse inside the embattled NCAA program.
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National Communism in the Soviet Union, 1918-28
Baruch Gurevitz
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
The Jewish Communist Workers' Party, the Poale Zion, provides a unique perspective on the question of how Marxism and the early Soviet Union dealt with issues of nationalism. According to Bolshevik ideology, when anti-Semitism disappeared in the new Socialist society, Jews would assimilate. In reality, such assimilation would be a very long, slow process. The Poale Zion supported the socialist struggle against oppression and exploitation of classes and nations, but it called for the formation of an international organization that would recognize the right of Jews to emigrate freely to Palestine and work for the creation of a democratic republic where people could retain their national identities and have both autonomy and representation in the union. Gurevitz analyzes the Soviet Poale Zion as representative of Jewish communism as nationalism in its purest form, and he traces the complex contradictions between Jewish nationalism and the Communist ideal of assimilation in the early years of the Soviet Union.
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National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics
Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment
Weihsin Gui
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics: Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment by Weihsin Gui argues that postcolonial literature written within a framework of globalization still takes nationalism seriously rather than dismissing it as obsolete. Authors and texts often regarded as cosmopolitan, diasporic, or migrant actually challenge globalization’s tendency to treat nations as absolute and homogenous sociocultural entities.
While social scientific theories of globalization after 1945 represent nationalism as antithetical to transnational economic and cultural flows, National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics contends that postcolonial literature represents nationalism as a form of cosmopolitical engagement with what lies beyond the nation’s borders. Postcolonial literature never gave up on anticolonial nationalism but rather revised its meaning, extending the idea of the nation beyond an identity position into an interrogation of globalization and the neocolonial state through political consciousness and cultural critique.
The literary cosmopolitics evident in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Derek Walcott, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Preeta Samarasan, and Twan Eng Tan distinguish between an instrumental national identity and a critical nationality that negates the subordination of nationalism by neocolonial regimes and global capitalism. Through their formal innovations, these writers represent nationalism not as a monolithic or essentialized identity or body of people but as a cosmopolitcal constellation of political, social, and cultural forces.
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National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Hans Rogger
Harvard University Press
This is the first intensive study of the developing national consciousness in 18th-century Russian life and letters. Historians have paradoxically argued a lack of national consciousness in this period both from Russia's backwardness and its imitativeness. As Hans Rogger points out, however, “neither the dearth nor the excess of Western influence, neither too little Enlightenment nor too much French frivolity are adequate formulations of the question for Russia”; and he demonstrates convincingly that the impact of European attitudes was already forcing Russians to articulate a national cultural identity well before the 19th century.
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National Conversations
Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe
Edited by Gavan Titley, Karina Horsti, and Gunilla Hultén
Intellect Books, 2014
Public service broadcasting is in the process of evolving into “public service media” as a response to the challenges of digitalization, intensive competition, and financial vulnerability. While many commentators regard public service as being in transition, a central dimension of its mission—to integrate and unify the nation while respecting and representing plurality—is being reemphasized and relegitimated in a political climate where the politics of migration and cultural diversity loom large in public debate. Through a series of thematic chapters and in-depth national case studies, National Conversations examines the reshaping of public service media and the concomitant development of new guiding discourses, policies, and program practices for addressing difference and lived multiculturalism in Europe. 
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A National Crime
The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986
John S. Milloy
University of Manitoba Press, 1999

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A National Crime
The Canadian Government and the Residential School System 2nd edition
John S. Milloy
University of Manitoba Press, 2017

front cover of National Deconstruction
National Deconstruction
Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia
David Campbell
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
Book of the Year--Foundation Bosnian-Herzegovinian Book and the Journal Human Rights Review How did Bosnia, once a polity of intersecting and overlapping identities, come to be understood as an intractable ethnic problem? David Campbell pursues this question--and its implications for the politics of community, democracy, justice, and multiculturalism--through readings of media and academic representations of the conflict in Bosnia. National Deconstruction is a rethinking of the meaning of "ethnic/nationalist" violence and a critique of the impoverished discourse of identity politics that crippled the international response to the Bosnian crisis. Rather than assuming the preexistence of an entity called Bosnia, Campbell considers the complex array of historical, statistical, cartographic, and other practices through which the definitions of Bosnia have come to be. These practices traverse a continuum of political spaces, from the bodies of individuals and the corporate body of the former Yugoslavia to the international bodies of the world community. Among the book's many original disclosures, arrived at through a critical reading of international diplomacy, is the shared identity politics of the peacemakers and paramilitaries. Equally significant is Campbell's conclusion that the international response to the Bosnian war was hamstrung by the poverty of Western thought on the politics of heterogeneous communities. Indeed, he contends that Europe and the United States intervened in Bosnia not to save the ideal of multiculturalism abroad but rather to shore up the nationalist imaginary so as to contain the ideal of multiculturalism at home. By bringing to the fore the concern with ethics, politics, and responsibility contained in more traditional accounts of the Bosnian war, this book is a major statement on the inherently ethical and political assumptions of deconstructive thought-and the reworkings of the politics of community it enables. "David Campbell has provided not only the first book-length poststructuralist study of the Bosnian war and the international policy toward it, but also the formulation of a deconstructivist ethics of international relations. National Deconstruction is not only a well-argued formulation of a deconstructivist international ethics, it is also a wide-ranging and relentless critique that will leave few unprovoked." --Ethics & International Affairs David Campbell is professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle, UK, and the author of Writing Security.
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National Duties
Custom Houses and the Making of the American State
Gautham Rao
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dollars of debt by the war, the nascent federal government created a system of taxes on imported goods and installed custom houses at the nation’s ports, which were charged with collecting these fees. Gradually, the houses amassed enough revenue from import merchants to stabilize the new government. But, as the fragile United States was dependent on this same revenue, the merchants at the same time gained outsized influence over the daily affairs of the custom houses. As the United States tried to police this commerce in the early nineteenth century, the merchants’ stranglehold on custom house governance proved to be formidable.

In National Duties, Gautham Rao makes the case that the origins of the federal government and the modern American state lie in these conflicts at government custom houses between the American Revolution and the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues that the contours of the government emerged from the push-and-pull between these groups, with commercial interests gradually losing power to the administrative state, which only continued to grow and lives on today.
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National Elections and the Autonomy of American State Party Systems
James G. Gimpel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Traditional theories of party organization have emphasized two-party electoral competition as the force behind party unity in state politics. V. O. Key first advanced this theory in Southern Politics, where he concluded that party factionalism in the South was mainly attributable to the one-party character of the region. But this traditional theory does not fit all states equally well. In the states of the West, especially, parties are competitive, but political activity is centered on candidates, not parties. The theory of candidate-centered politics allows Gimpel to explain why party factionalism has persisted in many regions of the United States in spite of fierce two-party competition. Using interviews, polling data, elections returns, and demographic information, Gimpel contends that major upheavals in the two-party balance of presidential voting may leave lower offices untouched.
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National Growth and Economic Change in the Upper Midwest
James M. Henderson
University of Minnesota Press, 1965

This volume constitutes the final, general report of the comprehensive research conducted by the Upper Midwest Economic Study, a joint undertaking of the Upper Midwest Research and Development Council and the University of Minnesota. The authors present a detailed analysis of the economy of the Upper Midwest, the region coincident with the Ninth Federal Reserve District, which includes Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, twenty-six counties in northwestern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 

The present study analyzes the region’s past economic growth, its current structure, and possible future development. The region’s initial economic growth was based upon its natural resources—land, forest, and minerals. Today productivity growth is increasing more rapidly than demand in most of these sectors. Hence, total employment opportunities in resource-based industries are declining. Future employment growth generally must be based on the region’s advantage in human resources. This is the challenge for economic growth in the Upper Midwest. The same challenge exists on a nation-wide basis, but the severity of transition away from natural resources industries is greater in the Upper Midwest because of its above-average reliance on such industries. 

The authors analyze economic change in the region from 1950 to 1960 and possible future development through 1975, with projections of employment, income, population, and migration for 1975. The projections, based on an assumption of no new action to facilitate economic growth in the region, serve mainly as a departure point for the analysis of regional policy and action.

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The National Guard in Politics
Martha Derthick
Harvard University Press

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National Healing
Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition
Claude Hurlbert
Utah State University Press, 2013

In National Healing, author Claude Hurlbert persuasively relates nationalism to institutional racism and contends that these are both symptoms of a national ill health afflicting American higher education and found even in the field of writing studies. Teachers and scholars, even in progressive fields like composition, are unwittingly at odds with their own most liberatory purposes, he says, and he advocates consciously broadening our understanding of rhetoric and writing instruction to include rhetorical traditions of non-Western cultures.

Threading a personal narrative of his own experiences as a student, professor, and citizen through a wide ranging discussion of theory, pedagogy, and philosophy in the writing classroom, Hurlbert weaves a vision that moves beyond simple polemic and simplistic multiculturalism. National Healing offers a compelling new aesthetic, epistemological, and rhetorical configuration.
 

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National Health Insurance and Health Resources
The European Experience
Jan Blanpain
Harvard University Press, 1978

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National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada
Race, Territory, and the Roots of Difference
Gerard W. Boychuk
Georgetown University Press, 2008

After World War II, the United States and Canada, two countries that were very similar in many ways, struck out on radically divergent paths to public health insurance. Canada developed a universal single-payer system of national health care, while the United States opted for a dual system that combines public health insurance for low-income and senior residents with private, primarily employer-provided health insurance—or no insurance—for everyone else. In National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada, Gerard W. Boychuk probes the historical development of health care in each country, honing in on the most distinctive social and political aspects of each country—the politics of race in the U.S. and territorial politics in Canada, especially the tensions between the national government and the province of Quebec.

In addition to the politics of race and territory, Boychuk sifts through the numerous factors shaping health policy, including national values, political culture and institutions, the power of special interests, and the impact of strategic choices made at critical junctures. Drawing on historical archives, oral histories, and public opinion data, he presents a nuanced and thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two systems, compares them as they exist today, and reflects on how each is poised to meet the challenges of the future.

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National History and the World of Nations
Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States
Christopher L. Hill
Duke University Press, 2008
Focusing on Japan, France, and the United States, Christopher L. Hill reveals how the writing of national history in the late nineteenth century made the reshaping of the world by capitalism and the nation-state seem natural and inevitable. The three countries, occupying widely different positions in the world, faced similar ideological challenges stemming from the rapidly changing geopolitical order and from domestic political upheavals: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the Civil War in the United States, and the establishment of the Third Republic in France. Through analysis that is both comparative and transnational, Hill shows that the representations of national history that emerged in response to these changes reflected rhetorical and narrative strategies shared across the globe.

Delving into narrative histories, prose fiction, and social philosophy, Hill analyzes the rhetoric, narrative form, and intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century texts that contributed to the creation of national history in each of the three countries. He discusses the global political economy of the era, the positions of the three countries in it, and the reasons that arguments about history loomed large in debates on political, economic, and social problems. Examining how the writing of national histories in the three countries addressed political transformations and the place of the nation in the world, Hill illuminates the ideological labor national history performed. Its production not only naturalized the division of the world by systems of states and markets, but also asserted the inevitability of the nationalization of human community; displaced dissent to pre-modern, pre-national pasts; and presented the subject’s acceptance of a national identity as an unavoidable part of the passage from youth to adulthood.

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National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives
Donald E. Pease
Duke University Press, 1994
National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity."
This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake.

Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O'Donnell, Daniel O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

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National Identity
Anthony D. Smith
University of Nevada Press, 1993
Why do people feel loyalty to a nation, as well as to family, region, class, and religion? When is a healthy sense of national identity transformed into virulent nationalism? What are the ethnic roots of so many contemporary conflicts? Can nations be created by design when colonial or multiethnic empires collapse? And what, exactly, is a nation? Such controversial questions are analyzed in this stimulating new text. Smith asks why the first modern nation-states developed in the West and considers how ethnic origins, religion, language, and shared symbols provide a sense of nation—even to the Basques, Kurds, and Tamils who are without states of their own. He illuminates his argument with a wealth of detailed examples: the divisions in the former Soviet Union, ethnic separatism within Europes, pan-Arab and pan-African movements, the successes and failures of nation-building on every continent. Throughout National Identity Smith stresses the positive as well as the pernicious aspects of strong national allegiances. A provocative final chapter considers the prospects of a post-national world. This will be of particular interest to ethnographers, students of international studies, historical sociologists, and political scientists.
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National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987
By Sumita S. Chakravarty
University of Texas Press, 1993

Although Indian popular cinema has a long history and is familiar to audiences around the world, it has rarely been systematically studied. This book offers the first detailed account of the popular film as it has grown and changed during the tumultuous decades of Indian nationhood. The study focuses on the cinema’s characteristic forms, its range of meanings and pleasures, and, above all, its ideological construction of Indian national identity.

Informed by theoretical developments in film theory, cultural studies, postcolonial discourse, and “Third World” cinema, the book identifies the major genres and movements within Bombay cinema since Independence and uses them to enter larger cultural debates about questions of identity, authenticity, citizenship, and collectivity. Chakravarty examines numerous films of the period, including Guide (Vijay Anand, 1965), Shri 420 [The gentleman cheat] (Raj Kapoor, 1955), and Bhumika [The role] (Shyam Benegal, 1977). She shows how “imperso-nation,” played out in masquerade and disguise, has characterized the representation of national identity in popular films, so that concerns and conflicts over class, communal, and regional differences are obsessively evoked, explored, and neutralized.

These findings will be of interest to film and area specialists, as well as general readers in film studies.

[more]

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National Insecurity
U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War
edited by Craig Eisendrath, foreword by Tom Harkin
Temple University Press, 2000
A drastic reform of intelligence activities is long overdue. The Cold War has been over for ten years. No country threatens this nation's existence. Yet we still spend billions of dollars on covert action and espionage.

In National Insecurity ten prominent experts describe, from an insider perspective, what went wrong with U.S. intelligence and what will be necessary to fix it. Drawing on their experience in government administration, research, and the foreign service, they propose a radical rethinking of the United States' intelligence needs in the post-Cold War world. In addition, they offer a coherent and unified plan for reform that can simultaneously protect U. S. security and uphold the values of our democratic system.

As we now know, even during the Cold War, when intelligence was seen as a matter of life and death, our system served us badly. It provided unreliable information, which led to a grossly inflated military budget, as it wreaked havoc around the world, supporting corrupt regimes, promoting the drug trade, and repeatedly violating foreign and domestic laws. Protected by a shroud of secrecy, it paid no price for its mistakes. Instead it grew larger and more insulated every year.

Taking into consideration our strategic interests abroad as well as the price of covert operations in dollars, in reliability, and in good will, every American taxpayer can be informed by and will want to read this book. National Insecurity is essential for readers interested in contemporary political issues, international relations, U.S. history, public policy issues, foreign policy, intelligence reform, and political science.
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The National Joker
Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire
Todd Nathan Thompson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Abraham Lincoln’s sense of humor proved legendary during his own time and remains a celebrated facet of his personality to this day. Indeed, his love of jokes—hearing them, telling them, drawing morals from them—prompted critics to dub Lincoln “the National Joker.” The political cartoons and print satires that mocked Lincoln often trafficked in precisely the same images and terms Lincoln humorously used to characterize himself. In this intriguing study, Todd Nathan Thompson considers the politically productive tension between Lincoln’s use of satire and the satiric treatments of him in political cartoons, humor periodicals, joke books, and campaign literature. By fashioning a folksy, fallible persona, Thompson shows, Lincoln was able to use satire as a weapon without being severely wounded by it.
 
In his speeches, writings, and public persona, Lincoln combined modesty and attack, engaging in strategic self-deprecation while denouncing his opponents, their policies, and their arguments, thus refiguring satiric discourse as political discourse and vice versa. At the same time, he astutely deflected his opponents’ criticisms of him by embracing and sometimes preemptively initiating those criticisms. Thompson traces Lincoln’s comic sources and explains how, in reapplying others’ jokes and stories to political circumstances, he transformed humor into satire. Time and time again, Thompson shows, Lincoln engaged in self-mockery, turning negative assumptions or depictions of him—as ugly, cowardly, jocular, inexperienced—into positive traits that identified him as an everyman while attacking his opponents’ claims to greatness, heroism, and experience as aristocratic or demagogic. Thompson also considers how Lincoln took advantage of political cartoons and other media to help proliferate the particular Lincoln image of the “self-made man”; underscores exceptions to Lincoln’s ability to mitigate negative, satiric depictions of him; and closely examines political cartoons from both the 1860 and 1864 elections. Throughout, Thompson’s deft analysis brings to life Lincoln’s popular humor.
 
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The National Labs
Science in an American System, 1947-1974
Peter J. Westwick
Harvard University Press, 2003

The national laboratories--Livermore, Berkeley, Los Alamos, Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven--have occupied a central place in the landscape of American science for more than fifty years. Responsible for the development of nuclear weapons, reactors, and other technologies that shaped American policy and culture in the Cold War, scientists from these labs also pursued physical and biomedical research that fundamentally changed our understanding of nature. But all of this has come at great cost, in terms of finance, facilities, and manpower, and has forced major adjustments in the framework of American science.

Deeply researched and lucidly written, The National Labs is the first book to trace the confluence of diverse interests that created and sustained this extensive enterprise. Peter J. Westwick takes us from the origins of the labs in the Manhattan Project to their role in building the hydrogen bomb, nuclear power reactors, and high-energy accelerators, to their subsequent entry into such fields as computers, meteorology, space science, molecular biology, environmental science, and alternative energy sources. By showing us that the national laboratory system developed as a reflection of American ideals of competition and decentralization in the Cold War, Westwick also demonstrates how scientific institutions reflect the values of their surrounding political system and culture.

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National Language Planning and Language Shifts in Malaysian Minority Communities
Speaking in Many Tongues
Edited by Dipika Mukherjee and Maya Khemlani David
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Malaysia has long been a melting pot of various cultures and ethnicities, including the three largest populations, the Malay, Chinese, and Indians. Despite this, efforts to implement multilingualism, advocated by language educators and policy makers, have been marred by political and religious affiliations. Drawing on two decades of field research, this timely analysis of language variation in Malaysia is an important contribution to the understanding not only of linguistic pluralism in the country, but also of the Indian Diaspora, and of the effects of language change on urban migrant populations. The research presented here will be of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian and South Asian Studies.

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National Manhood
Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men
Dana D. Nelson
Duke University Press, 1998
National Manhood explores the relationship between gender, race, and nation by tracing developing ideals of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the 1850s. Through an extensive reading of literary and historical documents, Dana D. Nelson analyzes the social and political articulation of a civic identity centered around the white male and points to a cultural moment in which the theoretical consolidation of white manhood worked to ground, and perhaps even found, the nation.
Using political, scientific, medical, personal, and literary texts ranging from the Federalist papers to the ethnographic work associated with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the medical lectures of early gynecologists, Nelson explores the referential power of white manhood, how and under what conditions it came to stand for the nation, and how it came to be a fraternal articulation of a representative and civic identity in the United States. In examining early exemplary models of national manhood and by tracing its cultural generalization, National Manhood reveals not only how an impossible ideal has helped to form racist and sexist practices, but also how this ideal has simultaneously privileged and oppressed white men, who, in measuring themselves against it, are able to disavow their part in those oppressions.
Historically broad and theoretically informed, National Manhood reaches across disciplines to engage those studying early national culture, race and gender issues, and American history, literature, and culture.


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National Monuments
Heid E. Erdrich
Michigan State University Press, 2008

Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments—in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains—monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent.
     As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into wondering how we make our own meanings when the present is so immediately confronted by the past (or vice versa). The language of the scientists that Erdrich sometimes quotes in epigraphs seems reductive in comparison to the richness of tone and meaning that these poems—filled with puns, allusions, and wordplay—provide.
     Erdrich's poetry is literary in the best sense of the word, infused with an awareness of the poetic canon. Her revisions of and replies to poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others offer an indigenous perspective quite different from the monuments of American literature they address.

[more]

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National Myths in the Middle East
Representations, Revisions, and Critiques, Volume 2003
Adina Back , Magnus T. Bernhardsson, Mansour Bonakdarian, and Sally Charnow, eds.
Duke University Press
This issue examines some of the ways in which myths and cultural traditions influence nation building in the Middle East.
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National Parks and Rural Development
Practice And Policy In The United States
Edited by Gary E. Machlis and Donald R. Field; Foreword by Senator Craig Thomas
Island Press, 2000
Protecting land in parks is often seen as coming at the expense of rural economic development. Yet recent events such as the contentious debate over the development of Canyon Forest Village on the south rim of the Grand Canyon suggest just the opposite: healthy natural systems can be enormously valuable to rural economies.National Parks and Rural Development offers a thorough examination of the interdependent roles of national parks and the economies of rural communities in the United States. Bringing together the thinking and views of economists, historians, sociologists, recreation researchers, and park managers, the book considers how those roles can be most effectively managed, as it offers: a wide-ranging review of history and important concepts in rural development and parks management five case studies of rural development near national parks that identify lessons learned, principles applied, mistakes committed, and advances made personal essays from leaders in the parks management field For each section, the editors offer introductory discussions that provide context and highlight key points. The editors also provide a detailed conclusion which summarizes policy implications and presents specific recommendations for improving rural development and park management policies.Case studies include: Cape Cod National Seashore, Alaskan parks and wilderness areas, Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, and three parks in the Pacific Northwest (Mt. Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades).ational Parks and Rural Development is a unique synthesis and guide to solving conflicts between the needs of human communities and nature near federal lands. It will be an important work for agency personnel, nongovernmental organizations, and students and scholars of rural economic development, public policy, environmental economics, and related fields.
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National Parks Forever
Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence
Jonathan B. Jarvis and T. Destry Jarvis
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past fifty years—and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.
 
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
 
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.
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National Parks Forever
Fifty Years of Fighting and a Case for Independence
Jonathan B. Jarvis and T. Destry Jarvis
University of Chicago Press, 2022

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Two leaders of the National Park Service provide a front-row seat to the disastrous impact of partisan politics over the past fifty years—and offer a bold vision for the parks’ future.
 
The US National Parks, what environmentalist and historian Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea,” are under siege. Since 1972, partisan political appointees in the Department of the Interior have offered two conflicting views of the National Park Service (NPS): one vision emphasizes preservation and science-based decision-making, and another prioritizes economic benefits and privatization. These politically driven shifts represent a pernicious, existential threat to the very future of our parks.
 
For the past fifty years, brothers Jonathan B. and T. Destry Jarvis have worked both within and outside NPS as leaders and advocates. National Parks Forever interweaves their two voices to show how our parks must be protected from those who would open them to economic exploitation, while still allowing generations to explore and learn in them. Their history also details how Congress and administration appointees have used budget and staffing cuts to sabotage NPS’s ability to manage the parks and even threatened their existence. Drawing on their experience, Jarvis and Jarvis make a bold and compelling proposal: that it is time for NPS to be removed from the Department of the Interior and made an independent agency, similar to the Smithsonian Institution, giving NPS leaders the ability to manage park resources and plan our parks’ protection, priorities, and future.

[more]

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National Past-Times
Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China
Ann Anagnost
Duke University Press, 1997
In National Past-Times, Ann Anagnost explores the fashioning and refashioning of modern Chinese subjectivity as it relates to the literal and figurative body of the nation. In essays revealing the particular temporality of the modern Chinese nation-state, Anagnost examines the disparate eras of its recent past and its propensity for continually looking backward in order to face the future.
Using interviews and participant observation as well as close readings of official documents, propaganda materials, and popular media, Anagnost notes the discontinuities in the nation’s narrative—moments where this narrative has been radically reorganized at critical junctures in China’s modern history. Covering a broad range of issues relating to representation and power—issues that have presented themselves with particular clarity in the years since the violent crackdown on the student movement of 1989—National Past-Times critiques the ambiguous possibilities produced by the market, as well as new opportunities for "unfreedom" in the discipline of labor and the commodification of women. Anagnost begins with a retrospective reflection on the practice of "speaking bitterness" in socialist revolutionary practice. Subsequent essays discuss the culture debates of the 1980s, the discourse of social disorder, the issue of population control, the film The Story of Qiu Ju, and anomalies at the theme park "Splendid China."
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National Performances
The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In this book, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial, and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black, and white populations.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism, and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans—or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies.

Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.
[more]

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National Policy Issues
Politics, Perceptions, and Performance, Volume 28
Mark Schlesinger, ed.
Duke University Press

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National Politics in a Global Economy
The Domestic Sources of U.S. Trade Policy
Philip A. Mundo
Georgetown University Press, 1999

In our increasingly globalized world, U.S. trade policy stands at the intersection of foreign and domestic affairs. This book explains trade policy in terms of domestic politics, presenting a concise account of its origins and political significance.

Although trade policy is a component of foreign policy, Philip A. Mundo explains how it is rooted in the domestic policy process and carries with it enormous implications for domestic affairs. He reviews the growing importance of trade policy since World War II — particularly over the past twenty years — and shows how recent policies like NAFTA are shaped by the domestic agenda.

Mundo explains trade policy as the product of a three-stage process comprising agenda setting, program adoption, and implementation. He reviews this process in terms of the ideas that inform trade policy, the interests that seek to influence it, and the institutions that shape it. He also addresses the importance of specific measures, such as administrative relief and trade sanctions.

This book distills the essence of the trade policy process into a concise, innovative framework accessible to students and general readers. With the growing importance of trade policy, it makes explicit many of the subtleties surrounding policymaking while fully explicating the legal and international context in which trade operates.

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National Polity and Local Power
The Transformation of Late Imperial China
Min Tu-ki
Harvard University Press, 1989

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The National PTA, Race, and Civic Engagement, 1897–1970
Christine Woyshner
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
Founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers, the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) was open to African American members but excluded them in practice. In 1926, a separate black PTA was created to serve the segregated schools of the American South. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, black and white PTA leaders faced the difficult prospect of integrating all national, state, and local units, which resulted in a protracted unification process that lasted until 1970.
 
In The National PTA, Race, and Civic Engagement, 1897–1970, Christine Woyshner examines the PTA in relation to its racial politics and as a venue for women’s civic participation in educational issues. Her argument is that the PTA allowed for discussions about race and desegregation when few other public spaces, even the schools, did so during this time. The PTA, the largest voluntary educational association in the twentieth century, has over the course of one hundred years lobbied for national legislation on behalf of children and families, played a role in shaping the school curriculum, and allowed for participation of diverse community members in dialogue about the goals of public schooling.
 
 
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The National Question
Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Self-Determination in the Twentieth Century
edited by Berch Berberoglu
Temple University Press, 1995
The class forces that have come to play a central role in directing movements in different socio-political, temporal, and geographic settings are explored in case studies of * the political history of nationalist movements in Palestine, Kurdistan, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Puerto Rico, the Basque Country, and Quebec * the role of the state in ethnic conflicts in India, China, the former Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia *the role of women and issues of gender and class in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America.
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National Rhetorics in the Syrian Immigration Crisis
Victims, Frauds, and Floods
Clarke Rountree
Michigan State University Press, 2019
The Syrian refugee crisis seriously challenged countries in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. It provoked reactions from humanitarian generosity to anti-immigrant warnings of the destruction of the West. It contributed to the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” from the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. This book is a unique study of rhetorical responses to the crisis through a comparative approach that analyzes the discourses of leading political figures in ten countries, including gateway, destination, and tertiary countries for immigration, such as Turkey, several European countries, and the United States. These national discourses constructed the crisis and its refugees so as to welcome or shun them, in turn shaping the character and identity of the receiving countries, for both domestic and international audiences, as more or less humanitarian, nationalist, Muslim-friendly, Christian, and so forth. This book is essential reading for scholars wishing to understand how European and other countries responded to this crisis, discursively constructing refugees, themselves, and an emerging world order.
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National Saving and Economic Performance
Edited by B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven
University of Chicago Press, 1991
The past decade has witnessed a decline in saving throughout the developed world—the United States has the dubious distinction of leading the way. The consequences can be serious. For individuals, their own economic security and that of their families is jeopardized. For society, inadequate rates of saving have been blamed for a variety of ills—decreasing the competitive abilities of American industry, slowing capital accumulation, increasing our trade deficit, and forcing the sale of capital stock to foreign investors at bargain prices. Restoring acceptable rates of saving in the United States poses a major challenge to those who formulate national economic policy, especially since economists and policymakers alike still understand little about what motivates people to save.

In National Saving and Economic Performance, edited by B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven, that task is addressed by offering the results of new research, with recommendations for policies aimed to improve saving. Leading experts in diverse fields of economics debate the need for more accurate measurement of official saving data; examine how corporate decisions to retain or distribute earnings affect household-level consumption and saving; and investigate the effects of taxation on saving behavior, correlations between national saving and international investment over time, and the influence of economic growth on saving.

Presenting the most comprehensive and up-to-date research on saving, this volume will benefit both academic and government economists.
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The National Security Enterprise
Navigating the Labyrinth
Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof, Editors. Foreword by Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret.)
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Recent breakdowns in American national security have exposed the weaknesses of the nation’s vast overlapping security and foreign policy bureaucracy and the often dysfunctional interagency process. In the literature of national security studies, however, surprisingly little attention is given to the specific dynamics or underlying organizational cultures that often drive the bureaucratic politics of U.S. security policy.

The National Security Enterprise offers a broad overview and analysis of the many government agencies involved in national security issues, the interagency process, Congressional checks and balances, and the influence of private sector organizations. The chapters cover the National Security Council, the Departments of Defense and State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget. The book also focuses on the roles of Congress, the Supreme Court, and outside players in the national security process like the media, think tanks, and lobbyists. Each chapter details the organizational culture and personality of these institutions so that readers can better understand the mindsets that drive these organizations and their roles in the policy process.

Many of the contributors to this volume are long-time practitioners who have spent most of their careers working for these organizations. As such, they offer unique insights into how diplomats, military officers, civilian analysts, spies, and law enforcement officials are distinct breeds of policymakers and political actors. To illustrate how different agencies can behave in the face of a common challenge, contributors reflect in detail on their respective agency’s behavior during the Iraq War.

This impressive volume is suitable for academic studies at both the undergraduate and graduate level; ideal for U.S. government, military, and national security training programs; and useful for practitioners and specialists in national security studies.

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The National Security Enterprise
Navigating the Labyrinth, Second Edition
Roger Z. George
Georgetown University Press, 2017

This second edition of The National Security Enterprise provides practitioners’ insights into the operation, missions, and organizational cultures of the principal national security agencies and other institutions that shape the US national security decision-making process. Unlike some textbooks on American foreign policy, it offers analysis from insiders who have worked at the National Security Council, the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence community, and the other critical government entities. The book explains how organizational missions and cultures create the labyrinth in which a coherent national security policy must be fashioned. Understanding and appreciating these organizations and their cultures is essential for formulating and implementing it. Taking into account the changes introduced by the Obama administration, the second edition includes four new or entirely revised chapters (Congress, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury, and USAID) and updates to the text throughout. It covers changes instituted since the first edition was published in 2011, implications of the government campaign to prosecute leaks, and lessons learned from more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. This up-to-date book will appeal to students of US national security and foreign policy as well as career policymakers.

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National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria
Erika Thurner
University of Alabama Press, 1998
Nazi policy toward Gypsies during the Third Reich

In this first English translation of Erika Thurner's National Socialism and Gypsies in Austria, Gilya Gerda Schmidt makes available Thurner’s investigation of Camps Salzburg and Lackenbach, the two central areas of Gypsy persecution in Austria. Two factors made Thurner’s research especially difficult: the Roma and Sinti have more an oral tradition than a written one, and scholarship on the plight of the Gypsies is sparse. Through painstaking research, Thurner has been able to piece together fragments from Nazi documents, recollections of victims, accounts of bystanders and other eyewitnesses, and formal records to present her account. The result is a volume that truly enhances our understanding of the Gypsies’ experiences during this period.
 
The volume also focuses on broader aspects of the Gypsies’ ordeals: the ideological foundations and legal ordinances regarding Gypsies, the discrimination and persecution in Burgenland as a whole, the transports from Austria to Lodz and Chelmo, and the medical experimentation. The book has also been expanded, with a new study of Camp Salzburg, an updated bibliography, and numerous photographs, which were not included in the German edition.
 
The recent upsurge of anti-Gypsy violence in Austria illustrates both the horror of the treatment of Gypsy tribes and the timeliness of the subject of this volume.
 
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The National Stage
Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America
Loren Kruger
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The idea of staging a nation dates from the Enlightenment, but the full force of the idea emerges only with the rise of mass politics. Comparing English, French, and American attempts to establish national theatres at moments of political crisis—from the challenge of socialism in late nineteenth-century Europe to the struggle to "salvage democracy" in Depression America—Kruger poses a fundamental question: in the formation of nationhood, is the citizen-audience spectator or participant?

The National Stage answers this question by tracing the relation between theatre institution and public sphere in the discourses of national identity in Britain, France, and the United States. Exploring the boundaries between history and theory, text and performance, this book speaks to theatre and social historians as well as those interested in the theoretical range of cultural studies.
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National Tax Journal, volume 75 number 4 (December 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 75 issue 4 of National Tax Journal. The goal of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) is to encourage and disseminate high quality original research on governmental tax and expenditure policies. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles that include economic, theoretical, and empirical analyses of tax and expenditure issues with an emphasis on policy implications. Each issue includes a Forum, which consists of invited papers by leading scholars that examine in depth a single current tax or expenditure policy issue. The NTJ has been published quarterly since 1948 under the auspices of the National Tax Association (NTA).
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National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 1 (March 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 76 issue 1 of National Tax Journal. The goal of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) is to encourage and disseminate high quality original research on governmental tax and expenditure policies. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles that include economic, theoretical, and empirical analyses of tax and expenditure issues with an emphasis on policy implications. Each issue includes a Forum, which consists of invited papers by leading scholars that examine in depth a single current tax or expenditure policy issue. The NTJ has been published quarterly since 1948 under the auspices of the National Tax Association (NTA).
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front cover of National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 2 (June 2023)
National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 2 (June 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 76 issue 2 of National Tax Journal. The goal of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) is to encourage and disseminate high quality original research on governmental tax and expenditure policies. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles that include economic, theoretical, and empirical analyses of tax and expenditure issues with an emphasis on policy implications. Each issue includes a Forum, which consists of invited papers by leading scholars that examine in depth a single current tax or expenditure policy issue. The NTJ has been published quarterly since 1948 under the auspices of the National Tax Association (NTA).
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front cover of National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 3 (September 2023)
National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 3 (September 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 76 issue 3 of National Tax Journal. The goal of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) is to encourage and disseminate high quality original research on governmental tax and expenditure policies. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles that include economic, theoretical, and empirical analyses of tax and expenditure issues with an emphasis on policy implications. Each issue includes a Forum, which consists of invited papers by leading scholars that examine in depth a single current tax or expenditure policy issue. The NTJ has been published quarterly since 1948 under the auspices of the National Tax Association (NTA).
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front cover of National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 4 (December 2023)
National Tax Journal, volume 76 number 4 (December 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 76 issue 4 of National Tax Journal. The goal of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) is to encourage and disseminate high quality original research on governmental tax and expenditure policies. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles that include economic, theoretical, and empirical analyses of tax and expenditure issues with an emphasis on policy implications. Each issue includes a Forum, which consists of invited papers by leading scholars that examine in depth a single current tax or expenditure policy issue. The NTJ has been published quarterly since 1948 under the auspices of the National Tax Association (NTA).
[more]

front cover of National Tax Journal, volume 77 number 1 (March 2024)
National Tax Journal, volume 77 number 1 (March 2024)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
This is volume 77 issue 1 of National Tax Journal. The goal of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) is to encourage and disseminate high quality original research on governmental tax and expenditure policies. The journal publishes peer reviewed articles that include economic, theoretical, and empirical analyses of tax and expenditure issues with an emphasis on policy implications. Each issue includes a Forum, which consists of invited papers by leading scholars that examine in depth a single current tax or expenditure policy issue. The NTJ has been published quarterly since 1948 under the auspices of the National Tax Association (NTA).
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front cover of National Thought in Europe
National Thought in Europe
A Cultural History
Joep Leerssen
Amsterdam University Press, 2007

Ranging widely across countries and centuries, National Thought in Europe critically analyzes the growth of nationalism from its beginnings in medieval ethnic prejudice to the romantic era’s belief in a national soul. A fertile pan-European exchange of ideas, often rooted in literature, led to a notion of a nation’s cultural individuality that transformed the map of Europe. By looking deeply at the cultural contexts of nationalism, Joep Leerssen not only helps readers understand the continent’s past, but he also provides a surprising perspective on contemporary European identity politics.

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front cover of National Thought in Europe
National Thought in Europe
A Cultural History - 3rd Revised Edition
Joep Leerssen
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
A topical history of nationalism provides also a surprising perspective on Europe's contemporary identity politics
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front cover of The National Uncanny
The National Uncanny
Indian Ghosts and American Subjects
Renée L. Bergland
Dartmouth College Press, 2000
Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.
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front cover of The National Wildlife Refuges
The National Wildlife Refuges
Coordinating A Conservation System Through Law
Robert L. Fischman
Island Press, 2003

The National Wildlife Refuges provides a comprehensive examination of the laws and policies governing management of the national wildlife refuges, offering for the first time a practical description and analysis of the management regime outlined in the 1997 National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act. The 1997 act is the first new statute governing a system of federal public lands enacted since the 1970s. The evolution of law governing the refuge system parallels broader trends in public land management and environmental protection, making the refuge system a valuable case study for those interested in environmental management, policy, and law. The book:

  • describes the National Wildlife Refuge System and its legal history
  • offers a detailed breakdown of the 1997 act, including its purpose, designated uses, comprehensive planning provisions, substantive management criteria, and public participation aspects
  • considers individual refuges and specific issues that apply to only certain refuges
  • discusses oil and gas development in refuges
  • offers observations about how well the refuge system law resolves historic tensions and achieves modern conservation goals

A separate chapter examines the special rules governing refuges in Alaska and considers the contentious debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Appendixes offer a reference of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology of the refuge system's development, key statutory provisions (including the full text of the 1997 act), and basic information about each national wildlife refuge.

With an approach to conservation that is increasingly prevalent around the world, the National Wildlife Refuge System is an important model for sustainable resource management, and the book's analyses of the refuge system's ecological management criteria, conflicts between primary and subsidiary uses, and tension between site-specific standards and uniform national goals all offer important lessons for environmental governance generally.

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front cover of National Will to Fight
National Will to Fight
Why Some States Keep Fighting and Others Don’t
McNerney
RAND Corporation, 2018
In this report, RAND researchers explore the factors, contexts, and mechanisms that shape a national government’s decision to continue or end military and other operations during a conflict (i.e., national will to fight). To help U.S. leaders better understand and influence will to fight, the researchers propose an exploratory model of 15 variables that can be tailored and applied to a wide set of conflict scenarios.
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front cover of Nationalism
Nationalism
Craig Calhoun
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

front cover of Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848
Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848
Dean Kostantaras
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This book addresses enduring historiographical problems concerning the appearance of the first national movements in Europe and their role in the crises associated with the Age of Revolution. Considerable detail is supplied to the picture of Enlightenment era intellectual and cultural pursuits in which the nation was featured as both an object of theoretical interest and site of practice. In doing so, the work provides a major corrective to depictions of the period characteristic of earlier ventures - including those by authors as notable as Hobsbawm, Gellner, and Anderson -- while offering an advance in narrative coherence by portraying how developments in the sphere of ideas influenced the terms of political debate in France and elsewhere in the years preceding the upheavals of 1789-1815. Subsequent chapters explore the composite nature of the revolutions which followed and the challenges of determining the relative capacity of the three chief sources of contemporary unrest -- constitutional, national, and social -- to inspire extra-legal challenges to the Restoration status quo.
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front cover of Nationalism and Sexuality
Nationalism and Sexuality
Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe
George L. Mosse, With a critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
This landmark work by George L. Mosse, first published in 1985, examines the history of sexuality through the lens of bourgeois respectability and nationalism. Using a daring breadth of German and English sources, Nationalism and Sexuality pioneered the use of gender stereotypes as a methodology for studying the history of sexuality in mainstream European history. Mosse’s innovative inquiries on gender remain central to discussions about modern constructions of national belonging and the workings of the state. This edition of Mosse’s classic volume includes a new critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts, whose books include What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France.
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front cover of Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community
Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community
Bernard Yack
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Nationalism is one of modern history’s great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community—and especially the moral psychology that animates it—that has made this question so difficult to answer.

Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments.

A brilliant and compelling book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

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front cover of Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec
Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec
Richard Handler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
Richard Handler’s pathbreaking study of nationalistic politics in Quebec is a striking and successful example of the new experimental type of ethnography, interdisciplinary in nature and intensively concerned with rhetoric and not only of anthropologists but also of scholars in a wide range of fields, and it is likely to stir sharp controversy.
    Bringing together methodologies of history, sociology, political science, and philosophy, as well as anthropology, Handler centers on the period 1976–1984, during which the independantiste Parti Québéois was in control of the provincial government and nationalistic sentiment was especially strong. Handler draws on historical and archival research, and on interviews with Quebec and Canadian government officials, as he addresses the central question: Given the similarities between the epistemologies of both anthropology and nationalist ideology, how can one write an ethnography of nationalism that does not simply reproduce—and thereby endorse—nationalistic beliefs? Handler analyzes various responses to the nationalist vision of a threatened existence. He examines cultural tourism, ideology of the Quebec government, legislations concerning historical preservation, language legislation and policies towards immigrants and “cultural minorities.” He concludes with a thoughtful meditation on the futility of nationalisms.
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front cover of Nationalism and the State
Nationalism and the State
John Breuilly
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Since its publication this important study has become established as a central work on the vast and contested subject of modern nationalism. Placing historical evidence within a general theoretical framework, John Breuilly argues that nationalism should be understood as a form of politics that arises in opposition to the modern state. In this updated and revised edition, he extends his analysis to the most recent developments in central Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also addresses the current debates over the meaning of nationalism and their implications for his position.

Breuilly challenges the conventional view that nationalism emerges from a sense of cultural identity. Rather, he shows how elites, social groups, and foreign governments use nationalist appeals to mobilize popular support against the state. Nationalism, then, is a means of creating a sense of identity. This provocative argument is supported with a wide-ranging analysis of pertinent examples—national opposition in early modern Europe; the unification movement in Germany, Italy, and Poland; separatism under the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires; fascism in Germany, Italy, and Romania; post-war anti-colonialism and the nationalist resurgence following the breakdown of Soviet power.

Still the most comprehensive and systematic historical comparison of nationalist politics, Nationalism and the State is an indispensable book for anyone seeking to understand modern politics.
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