BiblioVault - Books about Demise

The Constitution Besieged

The Rise & Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence

Howard Gillman

Duke University Press, 1993

The Constitution Besieged offers a compelling reinterpretation of one of the most notorious periods in American constitutional history. In the decades following the Civil War, federal and state judges struck down as unconstitutional a great deal of innovative social and economic legislation. Scholars have traditionally viewed this as the work of a conservative judiciary more interested in promoting laissez-faire economics than in interpreting the Constitution. Gillman challenges this scholarly orthodoxy by showing how these judges were in fact observing a long-standing constitutional prohibition against "class legislation." Originally published in cloth by Duke University Press, this book received the 1994 C. Herman Pritchett Award for the "Best Book in the Field of Law and Courts," awarded by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.

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The Demise of Diversity

Loss and Extinction

Josef Reichholf

Haus Publishing, 2009

Maintaining the natural diversity of the countless species on Earth is of fundamental importance for the continued existence of life on this planet. Nevertheless, ecosystems are being destroyed, as the cultivation of land for agriculture, industry and housing is intensified and oceans continue to be exploited. The Demise of Diversity: Loss and Extinction deals with biodiversity on this planet and the vital importance of sustaining it—nothing less than the future of life on Earth.

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From Reform to Revolution

The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union

Minxin Pei

Harvard University Press, 1994

The demise of communism in the former Soviet Union and the massive political and economic changes in China are the stunning transformations of our century. Two central questions are emerging: Why did different communist systems experience different patterns of transition? Why did partial reforms in the Soviet Union and China turn into revolutions?

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The Long Emancipation

The Demise of Slavery in the United States

Ira Berlin

Harvard University Press, 2015

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women.

“Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States… The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.”
—Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

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The Quieted Voice

The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio

Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith. Foreword by Robert W. McChesney

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

How has American radio—once a grassroots, community-based medium—become a generic service that primarily benefits owners and shareholders and prohibits its listeners from receiving diversity of opinions, ideas, and entertainment through local programming? In The Quieted Voice: The Rise and Demise of Localism in American Radio, Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith blame the government’s continual deregulation of radio and the corporate obsession with the bottom line in the wake of the far-reaching and controversial Telecommunications Act of 1996. Fighting for greater democratization of the airwaves, Hilliard and Keith call for a return to localism to save radio from rampant media conglomeration and ever-narrowing music playlists—and to save Americans from corporate and government control of public information.

The Quieted Voice details radio’s obligation to broadcast in the public’s interest. Hilliard and Keith trace the origins of the public trusteeship behind the medium and argue that local programming is essential to the fulfillment of this responsibility. From historical and critical perspectives, they examine the decline of community-centered programming and outline the efforts of media watchdog and special interest groups that have vigorously opposed the decline of democracy and diversity in American radio. They also evaluate the implications of continuing delocalization of the radio medium and survey the perspectives of leading media scholars and experts.

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Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism

The Foundational Crisis of the Separation of Church and State

J. Judd Owen

University of Chicago Press, 2001

If liberalism is premised on inclusion, pluralism, and religious neutrality, can the separation of church and state be said to have a unitary and rational foundation? If we accept that there are no self-evident principles of morality or politics, then doesn't any belief in a rational society become a sort of faith? And how can liberalism mediate impartially between various faiths—as it aims to do—if liberalism itself is one of the competing faiths?

J. Judd Owen answers these questions with a remarkable critical analysis of four twentieth-century liberal and postliberal thinkers: John Dewey, John Rawls and, most extensively, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. His unique readings of these theorists and their approaches to religion lead him to conclusions that are meticulously constructed and surprising, arguing against the perception of liberalism as simple moral or religious neutrality, calling into question the prevailing justifications for separation of church and state, and challenging the way we think about the very basis of constitutional government.

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The Rise and Demise of the Myth of the Rus’ Land

Charles J. Halperin

Arc Humanities Press, 2023

The concept of the Rus’ Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia,” but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative “land” concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus’ Land. Although the Rus’ Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.

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