The rise and decline of American civic life has provoked wide-ranging responses from all quarters of society. Unfortunately, many proposals for improving our communities rely on renewed governmental efforts without a similar recognition that the inflexibility and poor accountability of governments have often worsened society's ills. The Voluntary City investigates the history of large-scale, private provision of social services, the for-profit provision of urban infrastructure and community governance, and the growing privatization of residential life in the United States to argue that most decentralized, competitive markets can contribute greatly to community renewal.

Among the fascinating topics covered are: how mutual-aid societies in America, Great Britain, and Australia provided their members with medical care, unemployment insurance, sickness insurance, and other social services before the welfare state; how private law, known historically as the law merchant, is returning in the form of arbitration; and why the rise of neighborhood associations represents the most comprehensive privatization occurring in the United States today.

The volume concludes with an epilogue that places the discoveries of The Voluntary City within the theory of market and government failure and discusses the implications of these discoveries for theories about the private provision of public goods. A refreshing challenge to the position that insists government alone can improve community life, The Voluntary City will be of special interest to students of history, law, urban life, economics, and government.

David T. Beito is Associate Professor of History, University of Alabama. Peter Gordon is Professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and Department of Economics, University of Southern California. Alexander Tabarrok is Vice President and Research Director, the Independent Institute.

A unique collection of scholarly essays and primary documents, Votes for Women! brings into sharp focus the suffrage battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only does the book examine the struggle at the national level but it looks in depth at how the drama played out in the South and in Tennessee, which in 1920 became the pivotal thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment—thereby making woman suffrage the law of the land.

The volume contains six essays by leading scholars on topics ranging from the strategies suffragists used to raise the national consciousness to the participation of African-American women in the movement. Also included are discussions of anti-suffragist beliefs and literature, the obstacles to woman suffrage in the South posed by white supremacy and state’s rights, and the ways in which women have used their political power since receiving the vote.

A special feature of the book is its compilation of primary materials—articles, speeches, cartoons, and broadsides—representing the viewpoints of suffragists and anti suffragists alike. Among these documents are the previously unpublished memoirs of the Tennessee anti-suffrage leader Josephine Anderson Pearson and a chapter on Tennessee from the 1923 book by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Roger Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, which contains a fascinating firsthand account of the final, no-holds-barred battle over woman suffrage in Nashville during the summer of 1920.

Published to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the suffragists’ victory, this book, at once stirring and thoughtful, commemorates the courage of those involved in the suffrage movement and recaptures the intensity of emotions and ideology on both sides.

The dramatic struggle over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election presented judges with an extraordinary political challenge, as well as a historic political temptation. In The Votes That Counted Howard Gillman offers a comprehensive yet critical assessment of how well courts coped with the competing expectations for impartial justice and favorable partisan results.

Lively and authoritative, the book documents how the participants, the press, the academic community, and the public responded during these tension-filled thirty-six days. Gillman also provides a serious yet accessible overview of the legal strategies and debates-from briefs and oral arguments to final decisions. However, in explaining the behavior of courts, he moves beyond an analysis of law to also take into account the influences of partisanship, judicial ideology, and broader political and historical contexts.

Appropriately, Gillman pays special attention to the judges whose behavior generated the most controversy—the battling justices of the Florida and United States Supreme Courts. After carefully reviewing the arguments for and against their decisions, he concludes that the five justices behind the Bush v. Gore decision acted outside what should be considered the acceptable boundaries of judicial power. Gillman ends with an analysis of why they chose such an unprecedented course of action and an assessment of whether their partisan intervention will have any lasting effect on the Supreme Court's reputation and authority.

Voting is an examination of the factors that make people vote the way they do. Based on the famous Elmira Study, carried out by a team of skilled social scientists during the 1948 presidential campaign, it shows how voting is affected by social class, religious background, family loyalties, on-the-job relationships, local pressure groups, mass communication media, and other factors. Still highly relevant, Voting is one of the most frequently cited books in the field of voting behavior.

This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. The contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates. Voting the Gender Gap analyzes trends in voting while probing how women's political empowerment and gender affect American politics and the electoral process.

Contributors are Susan J. Carroll, Erin Cassese, Cal Clark, Janet M. Clark, M. Margaret Conway, Kathleen A. Dolan, Laurel Elder, Kathleen A. Frankovic, Steven Greene, Leonie Huddy, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Barbara Norrander, Margie Omero, and Lois Duke Whitaker.