After years of divided government, countless Republicans campaigned on a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Yet when they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2017—after six years that included more than fifty symbolic votes and innumerable pledges—they failed to repeal the bulk of the law. Pundits were shocked, and observers and political scientists alike were stuck looking for an explanation. What made Obamacare so hard to repeal? And in a larger sense: What explains why some laws are repealed, and yet others endure in spite of considerable efforts? Are repeals different from law-making or do they mirror one another? Why are repeals more likely at some times than others? What theories of legislative behavior and policymaking explain when repeals happen?
 
Congress in Reverse is the first book to attempt to answer these questions. Jordan M. Ragusa and Nathaniel A. Birkhead examine when and why existing statutes are successfully “undone,” arguing that repeals are most common when the parties are united on the issue—which was not the case when it came to Obamacare for the Republican Party—and the majority party wins control of Congress after a long stint in the minority. By shifting focus from the making of laws to their un-making, Congress in Reverse opens up a new arena for studying legislative activity in Congress.
 

Convened following Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the Congress of Vienna is remembered as much for the pageantry of the royals and elites who gathered there as for the landmark diplomatic agreements they brokered. Historians have nevertheless generally dismissed these spectacular festivities as window dressing when compared with the serious, behind-the-scenes maneuverings of sovereigns and statesmen. Brian Vick finds this conventional view shortsighted, seeing these instead as two interconnected dimensions of politics. Examining them together yields a more complete picture of how one of the most important diplomatic summits in history managed to redraw the map of Europe and the international system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Congress of Vienna investigates the Vienna Congress within a broad framework of influence networks that included unofficial opinion-shapers of all kinds, both men and women: artists and composers, entrepreneurs and writers, hosts and attendees of fashionable salons. In addition to high-profile negotiation and diplomatic wrangling over the post-Napoleonic fates of Germany, Italy, and Poland, Vick brings into focus other understudied yet significant issues: the African slave trade, Jewish rights, and relations with Islamic powers such as the Ottoman Empire and Barbary Corsairs. Challenging the usual portrayal of a reactionary Congress obsessed with rolling back Napoleon’s liberal reforms, Vick demonstrates that the Congress’s promotion of limited constitutionalism, respect for religious and nationality rights, and humanitarian interventions was influenced as much by liberal currents as by conservative ones.

James Holt offers a new answer to the question "What happened to progressivism in the Republican party?" The battles over the Payne-Aldrich tariff, the powers of Speaker Cannon, military preparedness, the elections of 1912 and 1916, and Wilson's New Freedom are used to exemplify the attempts of insurgent Republican Senators to reconcile progressive ideals with party commitment. But these men, Robert La Follette, Albert Cummins, George Norris, and William Borah among them, found that on the national level their efforts aided only the Democrats and that a third party was precluded by their own partisanship and their dependence on Republican constituencies.

Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 brought with it a major shift in the composition of the U.S. Congress for the first time in several decades. The subsequent introduction of an enormous amount of new legislation sparked debate among many political observers that a new coalition was being built in American politics and that a significant change in the issues on the agenda before Congress heralded a Republican realignment.

Barbara Sinclair's study is a major contribution to our understanding of realignment politics in the House of Representatives. It also provides important insight into the changes in American political life in the late twentieth century.

Congressional Realignment poses three basic, related questions: What are the sources of agenda change? What determines congressional voting alignments and alignment change? Under what conditions are the barriers to major policy change overcome? Sinclair's answers are impressive both in their scholarship and in the depth and intelligence of her insights.

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres like science fiction and horror. In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films’ evolving treatment of romantic relationships.

Winner, Best Book Prize, LASA Ecuadorian Studies Section
The First English-Language Book on the History of Public Health in Ecuador during the Early and Mid-Twentieth Century 

The Ecuadorian Public Health Service was founded in 1908 in response to the arrival of bubonic plague to the country. A. Kim Clark uses this as a point of departure to explore questions of social history and public health by tracing how the service extended the reach of its broader programs across the national landscape and into domestic spaces. Delving into health conditions in the country—especially in the highlands—and efforts to combat disease, she shows how citizens’ encounters with public health officials helped make abstract ideas of state government tangible. By using public health as a window to understand social relations in a country deeply divided by region, class, and ethnicity, Conjuring the State examines the cultural, social, and political effects of the everyday practices of public health officials. 

An interdisciplinary consideration of how eastern Mediterranean cultures in the first millennium BCE were meaningfully connected.
 
The early first millennium BCE marks one of the most culturally diverse periods in the history of the eastern Mediterranean. Surveying the region from Greece to Iraq, one finds a host of cultures and political formations, all distinct, yet all visibly connected in meaningful ways. These include the early polities of Geometric period Greece, the Phrygian kingdom of central Anatolia, the Syro-Anatolian city-states, the seafaring Phoenicians and the biblical Israelites of the southern Levant, Egypt’s Twenty-first through Twenty-fifth Dynasties, the Urartian kingdom of the eastern Anatolian highlands, and the expansionary Neo-Assyrian Empire of northern Mesopotamia. This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the social and political significance of how interregional networks operated within and between Mediterranean cultures during that era.
 

This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also connected the continent more closely to other parts of the world. The present work challenges dominant notions of the ‘fixed,’ immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented here chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. The chapters underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Political, Economic, and Cultural Consequences of China’s Influence in Latin America and the Caribbean  

A long history of migration, trade, and shared interests links China to Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the past twenty years, China has increased direct investment and restructured trade relations in the region. In addition, Chinese public sector enterprises, private companies, and various branches of the central government have planned, developed, and built a large number of infrastructure projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as dams, roads, railways, energy grids, security systems, telecommunication networks, hospitals, and schools. These projects have had a profound impact on local environments and economies and help shape the lived experiences of individuals. Each chapter in this volume examines how the impact of these infrastructure projects varies in different countries, focusing on how they produce new forms of global connectivity between various sectors of the economy and the resulting economic and cultural links that permeate everyday life

Thousands of ordinary people in Israel and Palestine have engaged in a dazzling array of daring and visionary joint nonviolent initiatives for more than a century. They have endured despite condemnation by their own societies, repetitive failures of diplomacy, harsh inequalities, and endemic cycles of violence.

Connecting with the Enemy presents the first comprehensive history of unprecedented grassroots efforts to forge nonviolent alternatives to the lethal collision of the two national movements. Bringing to light the work of over five hundred groups, Sheila H. Katz describes how Arabs and Jews, children and elders, artists and activists, educators and students, garage mechanics and physicists, and lawyers and prisoners have spoken truth to power, protected the environment, demonstrated peacefully, mourned together, stood in resistance and solidarity, and advocated for justice and security. She also critiques and assesses the significance of their work and explores why these good-will efforts have not yet managed to end the conflict or occupation. This previously untold story of Palestinian-Israeli joint nonviolence will challenge the mainstream narratives of terror and despair, monsters and heroes, that help to perpetuate the conflict. It will also inspire and encourage anyone grappling with social change, peace and war, oppression and inequality, and grassroots activism anywhere in the world.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, ominous portents like columns of fire and dense fog were seen above the skies of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital fell under siege by the Ottomans. Allegedly, similar signs appeared a few decades later and seven thousand miles away, forecasting the fall of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan—Tlatelolco to the Spanish and their indigenous allies. After both cities had fallen, some Greeks and Mexica turned to poetry and song to express their anguish at the birth of what has come to be called the “modern” era.

This study probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems, the “Lament for Constantinople,” the “Huexotzinca Piece,” and the “Tlaxcala Piece.” Composed by anonymous authors soon after the conquest of the two cities, these texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic. They are the workings of creators who draw on tradition and historical particulars to articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace.

Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification.

Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a “spirit” of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars.

Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

The colonial society and economy of Latin America were based on local communities of three principal types: Spanish towns, Indian villages, and landed estates or haciendas. Of these, it was the latter that provided the economic foundations for the aristocratic social system. This book tells how and why the Spaniards who settled the Peruvian coastal valleys originally came to establish their estates. Some of the questions it attempts to answer are: Why did the hacienda system arise in the second half of the sixteenth century? Was it primarily a product of Spanish history and culture? Was it an inevitable result of the conquest? What did it owe to Indian customs and traditions? To local geography? To economic and social conditions?

Concentrating on seven major valleys of the central coast, the author investigates varying local conditions and circumstances as they appear in wills, bills of sale, contracts, and other notarial documents. The story begins with the indigenous coastal societies before the conquest and concludes with the consolidation of the hacienda system in the early seventeenth century.

Hans Queisser tells the exciting story behind the birth of a new industry and a new knowledge that has resulted not only in a restructuring of science, technology, and industry but also in major rearrangements of political and economic power. Queisser observed at first hand the hectic growth, the triumphs and defeats, during the early days of this new era. His fascinating book provides a unique perspective that readers--even those without technical knowledge--will find extraordinarily informative.

Spanning nine time zones from Norway to the Bering Strait, the immense Russian Arctic was mostly unexplored before the twentieth century. This changed rapidly in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union implemented plans for its conquest. The Conquest of the Russian Arctic, a definitive political and environmental history of one of the world’s remotest regions, details the ambitious attempts, from Soviet times to the present, to control and reshape the Arctic, and the terrible costs paid along the way.

Paul Josephson describes the effort under Stalin to assimilate the Arctic into the Soviet empire. Extraction of natural resources, construction of settlements, indoctrination of nomadic populations, collectivization of reindeer herding—all was to be accomplished so that the Arctic operated according to socialist principles. The project was in many ways an extension of the Bolshevik revolution, as planners and engineers assumed that policies and plans that worked elsewhere in the empire would apply here. But as they pushed ahead with methods hastily adopted from other climates, the results were political repression, destruction of traditional cultures, and environmental degradation. The effects are still being felt today. At the same time, scientists and explorers led the world in understanding Arctic climes and regularities.

Vladimir Putin has redoubled Russia’s efforts to secure the Arctic, seen as key to the nation’s economic development and military status. This history brings into focus a little-understood part of the world that remains a locus of military and economic pressures, ongoing environmental damage, and grand ambitions imperfectly realized.

For thirty dramatic years, England ruled a great swath of France at the point of the sword—an all-but-forgotten episode in the Hundred Years’ War that Juliet Barker brings to vivid life in Conquest.

Following Agincourt, Henry V’s second invasion of France in 1417 launched a campaign that would place the crown of France on an English head. Buoyed by conquest, the English army seemed invincible. By the time of Henry’s premature death in 1422, nearly all of northern France lay in his hands and the Valois heir to the throne had been disinherited. Only the appearance of a visionary peasant girl who claimed divine guidance, Joan of Arc, was able to halt the English advance, but not for long. Just six months after her death, Henry’s young son was crowned in Paris as the first—and last—English king of France.

Henry VI’s kingdom endured for twenty years, but when he came of age he was not the leader his father had been. The dauphin whom Joan had crowned Charles VII would finally drive the English out of France. Barker recounts these stirring events—the epic battles and sieges, plots and betrayals—through a kaleidoscope of characters from John Talbot, the “English Achilles,” and John, duke of Bedford, regent of France, to brutal mercenaries, opportunistic freebooters, resourceful spies, and lovers torn apart by the conflict.

The definitive story of a top Chinese politician’s ill-fated quest to reform the Communist Party.

When Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, throngs of mourners converged on the Martyrs’ Monument in Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. Following Hu’s 1987 ouster by party elders, Chinese propaganda officials had sought to tarnish his reputation and dim his memory, yet his death galvanized the nascent pro-democracy student movement, setting off the dramatic demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre.

The Conscience of the Party is the comprehensive, authoritative biography of the Chinese Communist Party’s most avid reformer and its general secretary for a key stretch of the 1980s. A supremely intelligent leader with an exceptional populist touch, Hu Yaobang was tapped early by Mao Zedong as a capable party hand. But Hu’s principled ideas made him powerful enemies, and during the Cultural Revolution he was purged, brutally beaten, and consigned to forced labor. After Mao’s death, Hu rose again as an ally of Deng Xiaoping, eventually securing the party’s top position. In that role, he pioneered many of the economic reforms subsequently attributed to Deng. But Hu also pursued political reforms with equal vigor, pushing for more freedom of expression, the end of lifetime tenure for CCP leaders, and the dismantling of Mao’s personality cult. Alarmed by Hu’s growing popularity and increasingly radical agenda, Deng had him purged again in 1987.

Historian and former intelligence analyst Robert L. Suettinger meticulously reconstructs Hu’s life, providing the kind of eye-opening account that remains impossible in China under state censorship. Hu Yaobang, a decent man operating in a system that did not always reward decency, suffered for his principles but inspired millions in the process.

This book examines the model developed in the Scandinavian countries for handling labor market relations between employers and employees—a model that has secured flexible and well-functioning labor market relations with comparatively high remuneration in case of sickness or unemployment. Consensual—and comparatively efficient—policies have likewise been pursued in agricultural, industrial, environmental policies, and in many policies related to public services.

The preconditions for these policies are strong civil societies, that is, strong capacities for collective mobilization and collective action among groups, relatively strong unitary states, and high levels of generalized trust. The institutional apparatus of these consensual policies has been labeled corporatism. Scandinavian corporatism has implied consent to a norm of affected interests. Groups that are supposedly affected by state policies have access to the processes leading up to political decision-making and are involved in the implementation of policies. This access often has public commissions or committees charged with preparing political decisions and delivering advice, as well as policy implementation committees.

Corporatist and consensual policymaking come at a price. The exchange between interest groups (in pursuit of policy influence) and state actors (in pursuit of information and political support from groups) tends to be time-consuming and confined to solutions that are accepted by all actors. Corporatist policies are consequently not very conducive to more radical reforms. After the heyday of corporatist policymaking in the 1970s, all the Scandinavian countries have loosened their corporatist structures to pave the way for reforms.

This collection of essays addresses a number of questions regarding the role of consent in marriage and in sexual relations outside of marriage in ancient and medieval societies. Ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to the Byzantine Empire and Western Medieval Europe, the contributors examine rape, seduction, and the role of consent in establishing the punishment of one or both parties; the issue of marital debt and spousal rape; and the central question of what is perceived as coercion and what may be the validity or value of coerced consent. Other concepts, such as honor and shame, are also investigated.

Because of the wide range--in time and place--of societies studied, the reader is able to see many different approaches to the question of consent and coercion as well as a certain evolution, in which Christianity plays an important role.

What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It began quietly in homes and schoolrooms across the colonies in the reading lessons women gave to children. Just as the Protestant revolt originated in a practice of individual reading of the Bible, so the theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America that would come to form in the United States. Gillian Brown takes us back to the basics to understand why Americans value the right to individual self-determination above all other values. It all begins with children.

Locke crucially linked consent with childhood, and it is his formulation of the child's natural right to consent that eighteenth-century Americans learned as they learned to read through Lockean-style pedagogies and textbooks. Tracing the Lockean legacy through the New England Primer and popular readers, fables, and fairy tales, Brown demonstrates how Locke's emphasis on the liberty--and difficulty--of individual judgment became a received notion in the American colonies.

After the revolution, American consent discourse features a different prototype of individuality; instead of wronged children, images of seduced or misguided women predominate postrevolutionary culture. The plights of these women display the difficulties of consent that Locke from the start realized. Individuals continually confront standards and prejudices at odds with their own experiences and judgments. Thus, the Lockean legacy to the United States is the reminder of the continual work to be done to endow every individual with consent and to make consent matter.

What emerged in America was a new and different attitude toward authority in which authority does not belong to the elders but to the upcoming generations and groups. To effect this dramatic a change in the values of humankind took a grassroots revolution. That's what this book is about.

Many assume that the conservation movement was a part of the population uprising against control by the business community—"the people" versus "the interests." Hays’s special perspective shows that it came about rather as an attempt by scientists and technicians to apply their skills to the development and use of natural resources. The resulting conflicts, far from being concerned with unequal distribution of wealth, were struggles for policy control among groups of resource users.

This book defines two conflicting political processes: the demand for an integrated, controlled development guided by an elite group of scientists and technicians and the demand for looser system allowing grassroots control through elected government representatives.

Listen to a short interview with Donald CritchlowHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Despite significant losses in the 2006 midterm elections, the Republican Right remains a powerful and defining force in American politics. Donald Critchlow, a leading historian of American conservatism, shows that time and again the GOP Right appeared defeated, only to rebound with explosive force. The ascendancy of the GOP Right was not preordained, nor was its political triumph inevitable. Rather, the history of the postwar Right was one of fierce political warfare as moderate Republicans battled right-wing Republicans for control of their party, and conservatives battled liberals for control of government. In the struggle against the dominant New Deal state, conservatives gained control of the Republican party, but their advance against liberalism and the Democratic party proved less steady. At each point the accident of historical circumstance precluded a predictable outcome.

In this provocative history of the Right in modern America, Critchlow finds a deep dilemma inherent in how conservative Republicans expressed their anti-statist ideology in an age of mass democracy and Cold War hostilities. As the Right moved forward with its political program, partisanship intensified and ideological division widened--both between the parties and across the electorate. This intensified partisanship reflects the vibrancy of a mature democracy, Critchlow argues, and a new level of political engagement despite its disquieting effect on American political debate.

The Conservative Ascendancy boldly captures the twists and turns of the GOP Right over the last sixty years, offering a story of how deeply held beliefs about the nature of the individual and the good society are translated into political power.

The Conservative Turn tells the story of postwar America’s political evolution through two fascinating figures: Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers. Born at the turn of the twentieth century, they were college classmates who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation.

A spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Chambers became the main witness in the 1948 trial of Alger Hiss, which ended in Hiss’s conviction for perjury. The trial advanced the careers of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy and marked the beginning of the Cold War mood in America. Chambers was also a major conservative thinker, a theorist of the postwar conservative movement.

Meanwhile, in the 1940s and 1950s, the literary critic Trilling wrote important essays that encouraged liberals to disown their radical past and to embrace a balanced maturity. Trilling’s liberal anti-communism was highly influential, culminating politically in the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism, crucially shaped by anti-communism. Taken together, these developments constitute a conservative turn in American political and intellectual life—a turn that continues to shape America’s political landscape.

Integrating women into special operations forces poses potential challenges for unit cohesion. The integration of women raises issues of effectiveness, in terms of physical standards and ensuring the readiness, cohesion, and morale essential to high-performing teams. This report assesses those challenges and provides analytical support for validating occupational standards for positions controlled by U.S. Special Operations Command.

Conspiracy is a thread that runs throughout the tapestry of Roman history. From the earliest days of the Republic to the waning of the Empire, conspiracies and intrigues created shadow worlds that undermined the openness of Rome's representational government. To expose these dark corners and restore a sense of order and safety, Roman historians frequently wrote about famous conspiracies and about how their secret plots were detected and the perpetrators punished. These accounts reassured readers that the conspiracy was a rare exception that would not happen again—if everyone remained vigilant.

In this first book-length treatment of conspiracy in Roman history, Victoria Pagán examines the narrative strategies that five prominent historians used to disclose events that had been deliberately shrouded in secrecy and silence. She compares how Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus constructed their accounts of the betrayed Catilinarian, Bacchanalian, and Pisonian conspiracies. Her analysis reveals how a historical account of a secret event depends upon the transmittal of sensitive information from a private setting to the public sphere—and why women and slaves often proved to be ideal transmitters of secrets. Pagán then turns to Josephus's and Appian's accounts of the assassinations of Caligula and Julius Caesar to explore how the two historians maintained suspense throughout their narratives, despite readers' prior knowledge of the outcomes.

JFK, Karl Marx, the Pope, Aristotle Onassis, Queen Elizabeth II, Howard Hughes, Fox Mulder, Bill Clinton--all have been linked to vastly complicated global (or even galactic) intrigues. In this enlightening tour of conspiracy theories, Mark Fenster guides readers through this shadowy world and analyzes its complex role in American culture and politics. Fenster argues that conspiracy theories are a form of popular political interpretation and contends that understanding how they circulate through mass culture helps us better understand our society as a whole. To that end, he discusses Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the militia movement, The X-Files, popular Christian apocalyptic thought, and such artifacts of suspicion as The Turner Diaries, the Illuminatus! trilogy, and the novels of Richard Condon. Fenster analyzes the "conspiracy community" of radio shows, magazine and book publishers, Internet resources, and role-playing games that promote these theories. In this world, the very denial of a conspiracy's existence becomes proof that it exists, and the truth is always "out there." He believes conspiracy theory has become a thrill for a bored subculture, one characterized by its members' reinterpretation of "accepted" history, their deep cynicism about contemporary politics, and their longing for a utopian future. Fenster's progressive critique of conspiracy theories both recognizes the secrecy and inequities of power in contemporary politics and economics and works toward effective political engagement. Probing conspiracy theory's tendencies toward scapegoating, racism, and fascism, as well as Hofstadter's centrist acceptance of a postwar American "consensus," he advocates what conspiracy theory wants but cannot articulate: a more inclusive, engaging political culture. "Fenster, a lone writer (the literary equivalent of a lone gunman, perhaps), segues from the novels of Thomas Pynchon to the Clinton Death List. . . . Conspiracy Theories is a dangerous book. I suspect 'they' (and you know who I mean, of course) will take care of this lone writer any day now."--Bookforum "Fenster makes a powerful argument for regarding conspiracism as an integral product of the political system, reflecting inadequacies the establishment itself is blind to and expressing strong desires for the realization of frustrated ideals. Conspiracy Theories is a fascinating look at an important, little-studied topic. Informative and thought-provoking." --Philadelphia City Paper "Fenster culls the liveliest counterintelligences out there--the Michigan Militia, religious millennialists, Chris Carter, even Oliver Stone--and sets them up as the last idealists. They might be obsessive and maniacal, but they're after a transparent political system, where big business and the government can be held accountable. Their 'paranoid style,' according to Fenster, is just old-school populism refitted for the media age." --Voice Literary Supplement "Fenster makes a powerful argument for regarding conspiracism as an integral product of the political system, reflecting inadequacies the establishment itself is blind to and expressing strong desires for the realization of frustrated ideals. Conspiracy Theories is a fascinating look at an important, little-studied topic. Informative and thought-provoking." Philadelphia City Paper "Fenster's careful examination of conspiratorial beliefs as evidence by right-wing groups, by various media, and even by those who devise such theories as a form of ludic or satiric endeavor (like Robert Anton Wilson) is revealing. And his articulation of the set of political-rather than pathological-reasons for their behavior is salutary." --American Book Review "Fenster's extensive and impressive research provided a means of coming to terms with the radical disjunction between the interpretive framework which I used to understand events such as the one at Littleton, and a framework at odds with my own which was now confronting me on a daily basis." --Canadian Journal of Communication "In this lively and wide-ranging critique, Fenster argues that conspiracy theories are attempts to engage in a more inclusive political culture." --Religious Studies Review "Mark Fenster has provided a solid and illuminating study of the public's fascination with conspiracy theories and sets forth a stimulating correlation between the popularity of such theories and the social and political values of our society. This is a comprehensive and intriguing analysis of our often obsessive interest in conspiracy theories." --Gerald Posner, author of Killing the Dream : James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Case Closed : Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK "I find the issue of conspiracy theory compelling and appreciate Fenster's fruitful approach to what has been mysteriously ignored by the academy." --Barbie Zelizer, author of Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory "Fenster shines a powerful light on the fantasies of secrecy that pervade American culture, illuminating both the way they originate and how they work. His analysis is theoretically acute, his criticism of previous scholarly studies is compelling, and he offers razor-sharp readings of an impressive array of movements, events, and cultural practices. He stands out, above all, for his ability to capture the power and appeal of conspiratorial understandings of politics even as he explains their fundamental political limitations. The only thing that can keep this book from having the impact it deserves is a vast, academic conspiracy." --Mark T. Reinhardt, Williams College Mark Fenster received his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois and his law degree from Yale University. He currently lives in Denver.

Ever since the Warren Commission concluded that a lone gunman assassinated President John F. Kennedy, people who doubt that finding have been widely dismissed as conspiracy theorists, despite credible evidence that right-wing elements in the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service—and possibly even senior government officials—were also involved. Why has suspicion of criminal wrongdoing at the highest levels of government been rejected out-of-hand as paranoid thinking akin to superstition?

Conspiracy Theory in America investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct—articulated in the Declaration of Independence—has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition. Lance deHaven-Smith reveals that the term “conspiracy theory” entered the American lexicon of political speech to deflect criticism of the Warren Commission and traces it back to a CIA propaganda campaign to discredit doubters of the commission’s report. He asks tough questions and connects the dots among five decades’ worth of suspicious events, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the attempted assassinations of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, the crimes of Watergate, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal, the disputed presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, the major defense failure of 9/11, and the subsequent anthrax letter attacks.

Sure to spark intense debate about the truthfulness and trustworthiness of our government, Conspiracy Theory in America offers a powerful reminder that a suspicious, even radically suspicious, attitude toward government is crucial to maintaining our democracy.

Conspiracy theory as a theoretical framework has emerged only in the last twenty years; commentators are finding it a productive way to explain the actions and thoughts of individuals and societies. In this compelling exploration of Latin literature, Pagán uses conspiracy theory to illuminate the ways that elite Romans invoked conspiracy as they navigated the hierarchies, divisions, and inequalities in their society. By seeming to uncover conspiracy everywhere, Romans could find the need to crush slave revolts, punish rivals with death or exile, dismiss women, denigrate foreigners, or view their emperors with deep suspicion. Expanding on her earlier Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, Pagán here interprets the works of poets, satirists, historians, and orators—Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, Terence, and Cicero, among others—to reveal how each writer gave voice to fictional or real actors who were engaged in intrigue and motivated by a calculating worldview.

Delving into multiple genres, Pagán offers a powerful critique of how conspiracy and conspiracy theory can take hold and thrive when rumor, fear, and secrecy become routine methods of interpreting (and often distorting) past and current events. In Roman society, where knowledge about others was often lacking and stereotypes dominated, conspiracy theory explained how the world worked. The persistence of conspiracy theory, from antiquity to the present day, attests to its potency as a mechanism for confronting the frailties of the human condition.

The first full-scale biography of Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society and planted some of modern conservatism’s most insidious seeds.
 
Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right.

A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.
 

This study of the Roman Empire in the age of Constantine offers a thoroughly new assessment of the part Christianity played in the Roman world of the third and fourth centuries.

Timothy D. Barnes gives the fullest available narrative history of the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. He analyzes Constantine’s rise to power and his government, demonstrating how Constantine’s sincere adherence to Christianity advanced his political aims. He explores the whole range of Eusebius’ writings, especially those composed before Constantine became emperor, and shows that many attitudes usually deemed typical of the “Constantinian revolution” were prevalent before the new Christian empire came into existence. This authoritative political and cultural history of the age of Constantine will prove essential to students and historians of the ancient world.

At the age of twenty-two, Andronicus II became sole ruler of Byzantium. His father, Michael VIII, had been a dashing figure--a good soldier, brilliant diplomat, and the liberator of Constantinople from its fifty-seven-year Latin occupation. By contrast Andronicus seemed colorless and ineffectual. His problems were immense--partly as a result of his father's policies--and his reign proved to be a series of frustrations and disasters.

For forty-six years he fought to preserve the empire against constantencroachments. When he was finally deposed in 1328 by his grandson and co-emperor, Andronicus III, almost all of Asia Minor had been lost to the Turks, Westerners had taken over the defense of the Aegean, and the Catalan army he had invited to help him fight the Turks remained to fight the emperor.

In this penetrating account of Andronicus' foreign policy, Angeliki E. Laiou focuses on Byzantium's relations with the Latin West, the far-reaching domestic implications of the hostility of western Europe, and the critical decision that faced Andronicus: whether to follow his father's lead and allow Byzantium to become a European state or to keep it an Eastern, orthodox power.

The author, who argues that foreign policy cannot be understood without examining the domestic factors that influence, indeed create, it, devotes a large part of her study to domestic developments in Byzantium during Andronicus' reign-the decline of the power of the central government; the spread of semi-independent regional authorities; the state of finances, of the army, of the church.

She concludes that, contrary to common opinion, Andronicus II sincerely desired the union of the Greek and Latin churches, when, in the last years of his reign, he realized that the political situation made such a union necessary. Maintaining also that the conquest of Asia Minor by the Turks was not a foregone conclusion when Andronicus II came to the throne, she discusses at length the errors of policy and the manifold circumstances which combined to precipitate that loss.

Deno John Geanakoplos demonstrates the fusion of Byzantine and Latin cultural and ecelsiastical relations in the Renaissance.

In a remarkably innovative reconstruction of constitutional history, Robert Burt traces the controversy over judicial supremacy back to the founding fathers. Also drawing extensively on Lincoln’s conception of political equality, Burt argues convincingly that judicial supremacy and majority rule are both inconsistent with the egalitarian democratic ideal. The first fully articulated presentation of the Constitution as a communally interpreted document in which the Supreme Court plays an important but not predominant role, The Constitution in Conflict has dramatic implications for both the theory and the practice of constitutional law.

This acclaimed series serves as a biography of the U.S. Constitution, offering an indispensable survey of the congressional history behind its development. In a rare examination of the role that both the legislative and executive branches have played in the development of constitutional interpretation, The Constitution in Congress shows how the actions and proceedings of these branches reveal perhaps even more about constitutional disputes than Supreme Court decisions of the time.

The centerpiece for the fourth volume in this series is the great debate over slavery and how this divisive issue led the country into the maelstrom of the Civil War. From the Jacksonian revolution of 1829 to the secession of Southern states from the Union, legal scholar David P. Currie provides an unrivaled analysis of the significant constitutional events—the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and "Bleeding Kansas"—that led up to the war. Exploring how slavery was addressed in presidential speeches and debated in Congress, Currie shows how the Southern Democrats dangerously diminished federal authority and expanded states' rights, threatening the nation's very survival. 

Like its predecessors, this fourth volume of The Constitution in Congress will be an invaluable reference for legal scholars and constitutional historians alike.