A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1371 start with P start with P
McCall dramatizes some of the classic themes of the war memoir genre (war is hell, but memories fade!), but he sets riveting descriptions of decisive action against rarely seen views of mundane work and daily life, supported with maps, photographs, and fresh interpretations. Another distinction of this work is its attention to the action on Guam, a very unpleasant late-war “mopping up” that has received relatively little scholarly attention. In his portrait of the bitter island-hopping war in the Pacific, the author shows how both U.S. and Japanese soldiers were often eager innocents drawn to the cauldron of conflict and indoctrinated and trained by their respective governments. Reflecting on the action late in life, Jack (as well as several other Ninth veterans) came to a begrudging respect for the enemy.
In this study of Miles Poindexter, Insurgent Republican turned conservative, Howard W. Allen reaches beyond the traditional bounds of biography to present a history of the United States Congress during the Progressive era and the early years after World War I.
A congressman (1909–13)and a senator (1913–23), Miles Poindexter of Washington State was an outspoken, progressive reformer before World War I. He struggled to protect “the people” from “special interests,” particularly defending the interest of his section against eastern “colonialism.” A man with a penchant for absolute positions, Poindexter became caught up in the emotionalism of the Insurgent Republican revolt. At one time or another he championed Socialists, the IWW, the striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts—all unlikely causes for a middle-class lawyer from Spokane.
Regarding foreign policy, Poindexter was an uncompromising nationalist who, with Theodore Roosevelt, declared himself a member of the Progressive party in 1912.
After 1917 Poindexter actively tried to suppress opponents of the war. Following the war his targets were “Bolshevists” and other radicals. He also developed intense hostility toward Socialists, the IWW, and organized labor, fearing radicalism and labor. Reversing his former position, he allied himself with the eastern businessmen and regular Republicans in the Senate. Campaigning for the presidency in 1920, he appealed without success to the most conservative members of the party. He was defeated b a progressive Democrat in his 1922 bid for reelection to the Senate.
Allen examines the traditional sources—archival collections, newspaper files, and congressional reports. When he combines this material with a quantitative analysis of roll-call votes throughout Senator Poindexter’s years in Congress, he creates a remarkably useful method never before attempted in political biography.
As president of Harvard University, Neil Rudenstine has enjoyed a unique perspective on the state of higher learning, while exerting a significant influence on its recent and future course. Published to commemorate his decade-long tenure, this selection of Rudenstine’s talks and writings illuminates many of the ideas and issues that animate higher education today.
In a collection of more than fifty speeches and writings, Rudenstine eloquently explores topics both timely and timeless, from the educational importance of diversity to the enduring value of the humanities; from the teaching potential of new technologies to the profound benefits of basic research; from developments in the professions and public service to the singular power of education to transform lives.
Specially designed and printed in a limited edition, Pointing Our Thoughts features a foreword by Hanna Holborn Gray, President Emeritus of the University of Chicago and a member of the Harvard Corporation. As Gray remarks, “To read [Rudenstine’s] thoughtful and beautifully crafted speeches is to hear the voice of a teacher deeply committed to the vocation of opening minds to reflection and insight, listening intensely to his colleagues and entering with them into a continuing process of intellectual dialogue, sharing the convictions and perplexities of the search for understanding.” This volume is testament to that commitment. It represents an invaluable addition to the literature on higher education in America and around the world.
Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.
This work examines the introduction of grape juice into the celebration of Holy Communion in the late 19th century Methodist Episcopal Church and reveals how a 1,800-year-old practice of using fermented communion wine became theologically incomprehensible in a mere forty years. Through study of denominational publications, influential exegetical works, popular fiction and songs, and didactic moral literature, Jennifer Woodruff Tait charts the development of opposing symbolic associations for wine and grape juice. She argues that 19th century Methodists, steeped in Baconian models of science and operating from epistemological presuppositions dictated by common-sense realism, placed a premium on the ability to perceive reality accurately in order to act morally. They therefore rejected any action or substance that dulled or confused the senses (in addition to alcohol, this included “bad” books, the theatre, stimulants, etc., which were all seen as unleashing unchecked, ungovernable thoughts and passions incompatible with true religion).
The Poisoned Well offers vital strategies for citizens, community organizations, and public officials who want to fight the battle against pollutants.
The highly toxic PBB poisoning of Michigan remains the most widespread chemical contamination known in U.S. history. The Poisoning of Michigan is an investigative journalist's account of the contamination of Michigan's dairy cattle with the highly toxic chemical PBB (polybrominated biphenyl) in 1973. A near relation of PCB, this now-banned substance, designed as a fire retardant, was mistaken for a nutritional supplement at a chemical plant. It ended up in cattle feed that was distributed to farms throughout the state. By the time the error was discovered, virtually all nine million residents of Michigan had been ingesting contaminated milk and meat for almost a year.
A new introduction by the author and an afterword by three distinguished environmental scientists explain how the legacy of Michigan's poisoning lives on—and how equally toxic substitutes for PBB still invade our homes and lives. This new edition of Egginton's environmental classic—first published in 1980 and long out of print—tells how the tragedy affected both the farm community and the wider populace, and how federal and state authorities failed to respond. "We were mired in a swamp of ignorance," one state official admitted.
This difference in outcome doesn’t mean that poisonous women didn’t preoccupy Americans. In the decades following Andrew Jackson’s first presidential bid, Americans buzzed over women who used poison to kill men. They produced and devoured reams of ephemeral newsprint, cheap trial transcripts, and sensational “true” pamphlets, as well as novels, plays, and poems. Female poisoners served as crucial elements in the literary manifestos of writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to George Lippard and the cheap pamphleteer E. E. Barclay, but these characters were given a strangely positive spin, appearing as innocent victims, avenging heroes, or engaging humbugs.
The reason for this poison predilection lies in the political logic of metaphor. Nineteenth-century Britain strove to rein in democratic and populist movements by labeling popular print “poison” and its providers “poisoners,” drawing on centuries of established metaphor that negatively associated poison, women, and popular speech or writing. Jacksonian America, by contrast, was ideologically committed to the popular—although what and who counted as such was up for serious debate. The literary gadfly John Neal called on his fellow Jacksonian writers to defy British critical standards, saying, “Let us have poison.” Poisonous Muse investigates how they answered, how they deployed the figure of the female poisoner to theorize popular authorship, to validate or undermine it, and to fight over its limits, particularly its political, gendered, and racial boundaries.
Poisonous Muse tracks the progress of this debate from approximately 1820 to 1845. Uncovering forgotten writers and restoring forgotten context to well-remembered authors, it seeks to understand Jacksonian print culture from the inside out, through its own poisonous language.
In The Polarizers, Sam Rosenfeld details why bipartisanship was seen as a problem in the postwar period and how polarization was then cast as the solution. Republicans and Democrats feared that they were becoming too similar, and that a mushy consensus imperiled their agendas and even American democracy itself. Thus began a deliberate move to match ideology with party label—with the toxic results we now endure. Rosenfeld reveals the specific politicians, intellectuals, and operatives who worked together to heighten partisan discord, showing that our system today is not (solely) a product of gradual structural shifts but of deliberate actions motivated by specific agendas. Rosenfeld reveals that the story of Washington’s transformation is both significantly institutional and driven by grassroots influences on both the left and the right.
The Polarizers brilliantly challenges and overturns our conventional narrative about partisanship, but perhaps most importantly, it points us toward a new consensus: if we deliberately created today’s dysfunctional environment, we can deliberately change it.
Authors John Radzilowski and Ann Hetzel Gunkel look at family life among Polish immigrants, their role in the economic development of the state, the working conditions they experienced, and the development of their labor activism. Close-knit Polish American communities were often centered on parish churches but also focused on fraternal and social groups and cultural organizations. Polish Americans, including waves of political refugees during World War II and the Cold War, helped shape the history and culture of not only Chicago, the “capital” of Polish America, but also the rest of Illinois with their music, theater, literature, food.
With forty-seven photographs and an ample number of extensive excerpts from first-person accounts and Polish newspaper articles, this captivating, highly readable book illustrates important and often overlooked stories of this ethnic group in Illinois and the changing nature of Polish ethnicity in the state over the past two hundred years. Illinoisans and Midwesterners celebrating their connections to Poland will treasure this rich and important part of the state’s history.
One of the most vibrant and influential ethnic groups in Michigan, Poles have a long history of migration and settlement in the Great Lakes State. From Michigan’s earliest Polish marriage (in 1762) to the most recent post-Cold War migrations, each successive wave of settlement has enriched and enlivened Michigan culture. Yet, Paczki Day and Polish festivals represent a relatively small portion of the Polish experience. Commitments both to religious and ethnic identity, and a belief in the American vision of landownership and success, have combined to create a mainstream ethnic community abundant in ethnic pride. Poles’ success in Michigan continues to attract Polish immigrants from Europe, just as Polonia continues to make its mark on Michigan’s culture.
In this all-new addition to the People of Wisconsin series, author Susan Mikos traces the history of Polish immigrants as they settled in America’s northern heartland. The second largest immigrant population after Germans, Poles put down roots in all corners of the state, from the industrial center of Milwaukee to the farmland around Stevens Point, in the Cutover, and beyond. In each locale, they brought with them a hunger to own land, a willingness to work hard, and a passion for building churches.
Included is a first person memoir from Polish immigrant Maciej Wojda, translated for the first time into English, and historical photographs of Polish settlements around our state.
"This book is about the ramifications of raw corporate power going unchecked." -- John Conyers, Michigan congressman
"Racial class is a fundamental problem in America. But Poletown demonstrates that economic class is even more fundamental." -- Rev. Jesse Jackson
As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. In Police in the Hallways, Kathleen Nolan explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience.
Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, Nolan offers a rich and nuanced account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. She documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers.
Nolan follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, she shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation.
Police in the Hallways also examines the prevalent forms of oppositional behavior through which students express their frustrations and their deep sense of exclusion. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has on the real lives of low-income students of color—and, in turn, on us all.
"Read him his rights." We all recognize this line from cop dramas. But what happens afterward? In this book, Richard Leo sheds light on a little-known corner of our criminal justice system--the police interrogation.
Incriminating statements are necessary to solve crimes, but suspects almost never have reason to provide them. Therefore, as Leo shows, crime units have developed sophisticated interrogation methods that rely on persuasion, manipulation, and deception to move a subject from denial to admission, serving to shore up the case against him. Ostensibly aimed at uncovering truth, the structure of interrogation requires that officers act as an arm of the prosecution.
Skillful and fair interrogation allows authorities to capture criminals and deter future crime. But Leo draws on extensive research to argue that confessions are inherently suspect and that coercive interrogation has led to false confession and wrongful conviction. He looks at police evidence in the court, the nature and disappearance of the brutal "third degree," the reforms of the mid-twentieth century, and how police can persuade suspects to waive their Miranda rights.
An important study of the criminal justice system, Police Interrogation and American Justice raises unsettling questions. How should police be permitted to interrogate when society needs both crime control and due process? How can order be maintained yet justice served?
But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.
“With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
“This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University
In this work, Dorothy Guyot asks: What makes a good police department? In analyzing the transformation of the police department in Troy, New York. she explains a set of standards by which the quality of police service can be judged and illustrates a way to improve services over the long run. Throughout her case study and analysis, Guyot asks penetrating questions about the performance of police departments. She maintains that when police officers are treated as professionals by their department, they will act professionally toward citizens. This examination of fifteen years of policymaking within a single department looks at policing as a complex social service in an urban environment.
Rather than accepting the traditional "chain of command" authoritarian model of police administration, Guyot draws an analogy to hospital organization and suggests that the practitioner, whether a physician or a cop on the beat, performs the service with a tremendous amount of discretion. It follows that better management tactics at the police chief level as well as better employment policies will result in more responsible and dedicated policing by officers. The author demonstrates how, under the leadership of George W. O’Connor, the Troy P.D. changed from a backward department to one that promotes competence, as well as concern for citizens, among its individual officers.
The book is organized by issues and provides a full picture of how upgrading can be achieved through clear and specific goals. Throughout this case study, Guyot provides many examples of the behavior of police officers on the street, to illustrate the differences made by restructuring the department.
Manning begins by developing a model of policing as drama—a way of communicating various messages to the public in an effort to enforce moral boundaries. Unexpected outcomes, or contingencies, continually rewrite the plot of this drama, requiring officers to adjust accordingly. New information technologies, media scrutiny and representations, and community policing also play important roles, and Manning studies these influences in detail. He concludes that their impacts have been quite limited, because the basic structure of policing—officer assessments based on encounters during routine patrols—has remained unchanged. For policing to really change, Manning argues, its focus will need to shift to prevention.
Written with precision and judiciously argued, Policing Contingencies will be of value to scholars of sociology, criminology, information technology, and cultural theory.
In November 1999, fifty-thousand anti-globalization activists converged on Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Meeting. Using innovative and network-based strategies, the protesters left police flummoxed, desperately searching for ways to control the emerging anti-corporate globalization movement. Faced with these network-based tactics, law enforcement agencies transformed their policing and social control mechanisms to manage this new threat.
Policing Dissent provides a firsthand account of the changing nature of control efforts employed by law enforcement agencies when confronted with mass activism. The book also offers readers the richness of experiential detail and engaging stories often lacking in studies of police practices and social movements. This book does not merely seek to explain the causal relationship between repression and mobilization. Rather, it shows how social control strategies act on the mind and body of protesters.
Policing Immigrants traces the transition of immigration enforcement from a traditionally federal power exercised primarily near the US borders to a patchwork system of local policing that extends throughout the country’s interior. Since federal authorities set local law enforcement to the task of bringing suspected illegal immigrants to the federal government’s attention, local responses have varied. While some localities have resisted the work, others have aggressively sought out unauthorized immigrants, often seeking to further their own objectives by putting their own stamp on immigration policing. Tellingly, how a community responds can best be predicted not by conditions like crime rates or the state of the local economy but rather by the level of conservatism among local voters. What has resulted, the authors argue, is a system that is neither just nor effective—one that threatens the core crime-fighting mission of policing by promoting racial profiling, creating fear in immigrant communities, and undermining the critical community-based function of local policing.
America’s first anti–sex trafficking law, the 1910 Mann Act, made it illegal to transport women over state lines for prostitution “or any other immoral purpose.” It was meant to protect women and girls from being seduced or sold into sexual slavery. But, as Jessica Pliley illustrates, its enforcement resulted more often in the policing of women’s sexual behavior, reflecting conservative attitudes toward women’s roles at home and their movements in public. By citing its mandate to halt illicit sexuality, the fledgling Bureau of Investigation gained entry not only into brothels but also into private bedrooms and justified its own expansion.
Policing Sexuality links the crusade against sex trafficking to the rapid growth of the Bureau from a few dozen agents at the time of the Mann Act into a formidable law enforcement organization that cooperated with state and municipal authorities across the nation. In pursuit of offenders, the Bureau often intervened in domestic squabbles on behalf of men intent on monitoring their wives and daughters. Working prostitutes were imprisoned at dramatically increased rates, while their male clients were seldom prosecuted.
In upholding the Mann Act, the FBI reinforced sexually conservative views of the chaste woman and the respectable husband and father. It built its national power and prestige by expanding its legal authority to police Americans’ sexuality and by marginalizing the very women it was charged to protect.
The NYPD is America’s largest and most celebrated law enforcement agency. This book examines the history of policing in New York City, from colonial days and the formation of the NYPD at the turn of the twentieth century, through 1930s battles with the Mafia to the Zero Tolerance of the 1990s. Jules Stewart explores political influence, corruption, reform, and community relations through stories of the NYPD’s commissioners and the visions they had for the force and the city, as well as at the level of cops on the beat.
This book is an indispensable chronicle for anyone interested in policing and the history of New York.
A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year
Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize
Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
Winner of the Order of the Coif Award
Winner of the Sidney M. Edelstein Prize
Winner of the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History
Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize
“From traffic stops to parking tickets, Seo traces the history of cars alongside the history of crime and discovers that the two are inextricably linked.”
—Smithsonian
When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept—and expect—pervasive police power, a radical transformation with far-reaching consequences.
Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But in a society dependent on cars, everyone—law-breaking and law-abiding alike—is subject to discretionary policing. Seo challenges prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s due process revolution and argues that the Supreme Court’s efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than limit police intervention. Policing the Open Road shows how the new procedures sanctioned discrimination by officers, and ultimately undermined the nation’s commitment to equal protection before the law.
“With insights ranging from the joy of the open road to the indignities—and worse—of ‘driving while black,’ Sarah Seo makes the case that the ‘law of the car’ has eroded our rights to privacy and equal justice…Absorbing and so essential.”
—Paul Butler, author of Chokehold
“A fascinating examination of how the automobile reconfigured American life, not just in terms of suburbanization and infrastructure but with regard to deeply ingrained notions of freedom and personal identity.”
—Hua Hsu, New Yorker
In Policing Victimhood, Corinne Schwarz interviewed with service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.
Taking a cue from anti-carceral feminist critiques and critical trafficking studies, Schwarz argues that ongoing anti-trafficking efforts in the US expand the punitive arm of the state without addressing the role of systemic oppression in perpetuating violence. The violence inherent to the carceral state—and required for its continued expansion—is the same violence that perpetuates the exploitation of human trafficking. In order to solve the “problem” of human trafficking, advocates, activists, and scholars must divest from systems that center punishment and radically reinvest their efforts in dismantling the structural violence that perpetuates social exclusion and vulnerability, what she calls the “-isms” and “-phobias” that harm some at the expense of others’ empowerment. Policing Victimhood encourages readers to imagine a world without carceral violence in any of its forms.
With a new vision of non-coercive police work and crime prevention, Progressive reformers exerted political and social pressure to create positions for female officers dedicated to guiding and protecting juveniles and women. Women reformers pointed to changing sexual mores among working-class female youth to emphasize the need for a new approach to policing.
The policewomen who undertook the work of counseling sexually active teenage girls and their families saw themselves as helping young people achieve moral equilibrium during a period in which standards of context were in flux. In the Los Angeles Police Department, the first to hire women, this social work was primarily the responsibility of the City Mother's Bureau; in other major cities, policewomen's roles were similarly constructed as maternalistic. Scrutinizing case records, public statements, and departmental policies governing policewomen, Appier shows how female officers handled the complex gender politics of their work with the public and within their departments.
Appier reveals that many of these pioneering policewomen succeeded in expanding the scope of policework and carving out a rewarding professional niche, despite continued attempts to oust them or limit their sphere of action. But this advancement was short-lived; within a generation a masculinized model of crime fighting took hold, and policewomen's authority eroded.
Mueller analyzes key issues: the actual shallowness of public support for war; the effect of public opinion on the media (rather than the other way around); the use and misuse of polls by policy makers; the American popular focus on Hussein's ouster as a central purpose of the War; and the War's short-lived impact on voting. Of particular interest is Mueller's conclusion that Bush succeeded in leading the country to war by increasingly convincing the public that it was inevitable, rather than right or wise.
Throughout, Mueller, author of War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, an analysis of public opinion during the Korean and Vietnam wars, places this analysis of the Gulf crisis in a broad political and military context, making comparisons to wars in Panama, Vietnam, Korea, and the Falklands, as well as to World War II and even the War of 1812. The book also collects nearly 300 tables charting public opinion through the Gulf crisis, making Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War an essential reference for anyone interested in recent American politics, foreign policy, public opinion, and survey research.
Health care delivery in the United States is an enormously complex enterprise, and its $1.6 trillion annual expenditures involve a host of competing interests. While arguably the nation offers among the most technologically advanced medical care in the world, the American system consistently under performs relative to its resources. Gaps in financing and service delivery pose major barriers to improving health, reducing disparities, achieving universal insurance coverage, enhancing quality, controlling costs, and meeting the needs of patients and families.
Bringing together twenty-five of the nation’s leading experts in health care policy and public health, this book provides a much-needed perspective on how our health care system evolved, why we face the challenges that we do, and why reform is so difficult to achieve. The essays tackle tough issues including: socioeconomic disadvantage, tobacco, obesity, gun violence, insurance gaps, the rationing of services, the power of special interests, medical errors, and the nursing shortage.
Linking the nation’s health problems to larger political, cultural, and philosophical contexts, Policy Challenges in Modern Health Care offers a compelling look at where we stand and where we need to be headed.
To investigate these questions, Policy Dynamics draws on the most extensive data set yet compiled for public policy issues in the United States. Spanning the past half-century, these data make it possible to trace policies and legislation, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions over time and across institutions. Some chapters analyze particular policy areas, such as health care, national security, and immigration, while others focus on institutional questions such as congressional procedures and agendas and the differing responses by Congress and the Supreme Court to new issues.
Policy Dynamics presents a radical vision of how the federal government evolves in response to new challenges-and the research tools that others may use to critique or extend that vision.
Rapid and controversial, the spread of school choice initiatives across the United States has radically changed political debate about public education. In this book, Michael Mintrom explores the complex world of open-enrollment policies, charter schools and voucher plans to reveal how and why school choice has become a major issue, and he draws important conclusions about how innovative individuals can spur significant change in the policy arena.
Policy entrepreneurs—individuals who take up a cause and make it part of the political agenda—have largely remained background figures without clear definition in the policymaking literature. This book is the first comprehensive and systematic treatment of the concept of policy entrepreneurship, providing an important foundation for explaining how policy proposals are initiated, considered, and adopted.
Mintrom uses the emergence of school choice in state politics to examine how policy change originates. He shows how policy entrepreneurs have been instrumental in placing school choice onto state legislative agendas, despite the lack of compelling evidence about its merits, and how they use social networks, reframe policy issues, and attempt to shift the sites of policy debate.
Blending innovative theory with both qualitative and quantitative investigation, Mintrom explains how energetic individuals made school choice a real choice. In doing so, he changes our broader understanding of how policy is formed.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face the same family issues as their heterosexual counterparts, but that is only the beginning of their struggle. The LGBT community also encounters legal barriers to government recognition of their same-sex relationships and relationships to their own children. Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families addresses partner recognition, parenting, issues affecting children of LGBT parents, health care, discrimination, senior care and elder rights, and equal access to social services.
Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias provide up-to-date, accurate analysis of the major policies affecting LGBT people, their same-sex partners, and their children. This valuable resource offers literature reviews of demographic research as well as original research based on the U.S. Census same-sex couple sample. It also provides a look at the 30-year history of right-wing anti-gay activism and the intra-community intellectual debates over the fight for marriage.
"The sheer diversity of gay people and opinion shines through Cahill and Tobias's fact-packed depiction of same-sex couples and their kids, their needs and day-to-day challenges, and the movement for fairness and the freedom to marry. The disparate personal stories and struggles in this informative book underscore the importance of ending discrimination in marriage and ensuring that no family is left behind."
—Evan Wolfson, Founder and Executive Director of the Freedom to Marry Project
"A concise, comprehensive guide to gay-family issues that combines an impassioned progressive sensibility with a firm respect for facts."
—Jonathan Rauch, senior writer and columnist for National Journal,Atlantic Monthly correspondent, and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America
"Cahill and Tobias offer readers a thorough and immensely readable guide to the legal problems faced by LGBT families."
—Ellen Andersen, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis
"For an account of policy issues that frame lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) family lives here in the United States, one need look no further. Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias supply accurate and up-to-date information about the legal and policy contexts of LGBT lives across the country. This book is sure to be a valuable resource for students and scholars, as well as for others seeking to understand and challenge discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity."
—Charlotte J. Patterson, University of Virginia
Sean Cahill is Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.
Sarah Tobias is a feminist theorist and LGBT activist who earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. She has taught Political Theory at colleges in New York and New Jersey, and currently works as Senior Policy Analyst in the Democracy program at Demos, a New York City–based think tank.
This work analyzes the mixed performance of past agricultural support programs, reviews the current debate concerning farm policies, and critically assesses the often staunch political resistance to much-needed policy reforms. Casting a keen eye toward the most recent developments on both national and international fronts, the authors consider the ramifications of the 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act as well as multilateral efforts to gain agricultural reform during the Uruguay Round of GATT. Their prognosis hinges upon both the continued growth and competitiveness of the world market and, perhaps more importantly, the ongoing commitment of congressional reform advocates.
Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing. Today, policy regimes of “accountability” shape education reform programs such as Common Core in K-12 and Dual Enrollment in postsecondary institutions. This book reopens the conversation between policy makers and writing teachers, empirically describing the field’s institutional/historical relationship to policy and the ways teachers work on a daily basis to carry out policy. Federal and state accountability policy significantly shapes classrooms before teachers even enter them, but Branson argues the classroom is where teachers leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing to bridge, partner with, support, and sometimes resist education policies.
Branson deftly blends policy critique, archival analysis, and participant observation to offer the first scholarly treatment of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Washington Task Force as well as a rare empirical study of a dual enrollment course offered in a high school. This book’s macro-and-micro-level analysis of education policy reveals how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can strengthen their commitments to successfully teaching their students across all levels of education, while deepening their understanding of the ways education policy helps—and hinders—those commitments.
The steady accretion of public policies over the decades has fundamentally changed how America is governed. The formulation and delivery of policy have emerged as the government’s entire raison d’être, redefining rights and reconfiguring institutional structures. The Policy State looks closely at this massive unnoticed fact of modern politics and addresses the controversies swirling around it. Government has become more responsive and inclusive, but the shift has also polarized politics and sowed a deep distrust of institutions. These developments demand a thorough reconsideration of historical governance.
“A sterling example of political science at its best: analytically rigorous, historically informed, and targeted at questions of undeniable contemporary significance… Orren and Skowronek uncover a transformation that revolutionized American politics and now threatens to tear it apart.”
—Timothy Shenk, New Republic
“Wherever you start out in our politics, this book will turn your sense of things sideways and make you rethink deeply held assumptions. It’s a model of what political science could be, but so rarely is.”
—Yuval Levin, National Review
“A gripping narrative…opening up new avenues for reflection along methodological, conceptual, and normative lines.”
—Bernardo Zacka, Contemporary Political Theory
It was not long ago that scientists proclaimed victory over polio, the dread disease of the 1950s. More recently polio resurfaced, not conquered at all, spreading across the countries of Africa. As we once again face the specter of this disease, along with other killers like AIDS and SARS, this powerful book reminds us of the personal cost, the cultural implications, and the historical significance of one of modern humanity's deadliest biological enemies. In Polio and Its Aftermath Marc Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.
Polio and Its Aftermath conveys the widespread panic that struck as the disease swept the world in the mid-fifties. It captures an atmosphere in which polio vied with the Cold War as the greatest cause of unrest in North America--and in which a strange and often debilitating uncertainty was one of the disease's salient but least treatable symptoms. Polio particularly afflicted the young, and Shell explores what this meant to families and communities. And he reveals why, in spite of the worldwide relief that greeted Jonas Salk's vaccine as a miracle of modern science, we have much more to fear from polio now than we know.
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann mines seven decades' worth of thoughts expressed by Ameryka-Echo readers to chronicle the ethnic press's role in the immigrant experience. Open and unedited debate harkened back to homegrown journalistic traditions, and Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann opens up the nuances of an editorial philosophy that cultivated readers as content creators. As she shows, ethnic publications in the process forged immigrant social networks and pushed notions of education and self-improvement throughout Polonia. Paryski, meanwhile, built a publishing empire that earned him the nickname ""The Polish Hearst.""
Detailed and incisive, The Polish Hearst opens the door on the long-overlooked world of ethnic publishing and the amazing life of one of its towering figures.
While college initiates a major transition in all students’ lives, low-income and first-generation students attending elite schools are often entering entirely new worlds. Amid the financial and academic challenges of adapting to college, their emotional lives, too, undergo a transformation. Surrounded by peers from different classes and cultural backgrounds, they are faced with an impossible choice: turn away from their former lives to blend in or stay true to themselves and remain on the outside.
An ethnography that draws on in-depth interviews with one hundred and fifty first-generation and low-income students across eighteen elite institutions, Polished uncovers the hidden consequences of the promise of social mobility in today’s educational landscape. Sociologist Melissa Osborne reveals how the very support designed to propel first-generation students forward can unexpectedly reshape their identities, often putting them at odds with their peers and families. Without direct institutional support, this emotional journey can lead to alienation, mental health challenges, poor academic outcomes, and difficult choices between upward mobility or maintaining authenticity and community. Whether you're an educator, advocate, or student, Polished provides a powerful perspective on the uncharted challenges of social mobility and personal identity during college.
With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making.
The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.
Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans
The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context.
Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics
Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.
The culmination of one of the most famous long-term studies in American sociology, this examination of political attitudes among women who attended Bennington College in the 1930s and 1940s now spans five decades, from late adolescence to old age. Theodore Newcomb’s 1930s interviews at Bennington, where the faculty held progressive views that contrasted with those of the conservative families of the students, showed that political orientations are still quite malleable in early adulthood. The studies in 1959-60 and 1984 show the persistence of political attitudes over the adult life span: the Bennington women, raised in conservative homes, were liberalized in their college years and have remained politically involved and liberal in their views, even in their sixties and seventies.
Here the authors analyze the earlier studies and then introduce the 1984 data. Using data from National Election Studies for comparison, they show that the Bennington group is more liberal and hold its opinions more intensely than both older and younger Americans, with the exception of the generation that achieved political maturity in the 1960s. The authors point out that the majority of the Bennington women’s children are of this 1945–54 generation and suggest that this factor played an important role in the stability of the women’s political views. Within their own generation, the Bennington women also appear to hold stronger political views than other college-educated women.
Innovative in its methodology and extremely rich in its data, this work will contribute to developmental and social psychology, sociology, political science, women’s studies, and gerontology.
Case studies in this interdisciplinary volume include female mayors in Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Compton, and Washington, DC, among other cities, along with discussion of each official’s political context. Covering mayors from the 1960s to the present, Political Black Girl Magic identifies the most significant obstacles black women have faced as mayors and mayoral candidates, and seeks to understand how race, gender, or the combination of both affected them.
Contributors: Andrea Benjamin, Nadia E. Brown, Pearl K. Dowe, Christina Greer, Precious Hall, Valerie C. Johnson, Yolanda Jones, Lauren King, Angela K. Lewis-Maddox, Minion K.C. Morrison, Marcella Mulholland, Stephanie A. Pink-Harper, Kelly Briana Richardson, Emmitt Y. Riley, III, Ashley Robertson Preston, Taisha Saintil, Jamil Scott, Fatemeh Shafiei, James Lance Taylor, LaRaven Temoney, Linda Trautman, and the editor
Greenlee argues that two mechanisms account for the durability of motherhood politics. First, women experience attitudinal shifts when they become mothers. Second, “mother” is a broad-based identity, widely shared and ideologically unconstrained, that lends itself to appeals across the political spectrum to build support for candidates and policy issues.
Political Consultants in U.S. Congressional Elections answers two simple questions: What do professional political consultants do? and How successful are they? Medvic analyzes the way consultants shape political dialogue and uses empirical data to show the benefits—and limits—of a consultant's involvement in a campaign. He focuses on issues as diverse as vote shares, outcomes, and fundraising. Finally, the author demonstrates how the adversarial nature of campaigns fosters the kind of electioneering advocated by most political consultants and argues that this process may not be as harmful for the country as is often suggested.
A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief.
Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections.
The Political Development of American Debt Relief traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.
Eight analytical histories of the automobile, steel, semiconductor, lumber, wheat, and textile and apparel industries demonstrate that trade barriers rarely have unequivocal benefits and may be counterproductive. They show that criteria for awarding protection do not take into account the interests of consumers or other industries and that political influence and an organized lobby are major sources of protection.
Based on these findings, a final essay suggests that current policy fails to consider adequately economic efficiency, the public good, and indirect negative effects. This volume will interest scholars in economics, business, and public policy who deal with trade issues.
More than mere touts for the interests of Washington insiders, these groups encourage Congress to enact policies that are likely to succeed while avoiding those that have too great of a risk of failure. The surprising result is greater legislative efficiency. The Political Economy of Expertise illustrates that this system actually favors effective and informed decision making, thereby increasing the likelihood that new policies will benefit the American public.
If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy.
A Political Economy of Justice collects fourteen essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.
The income of blacks in most northern industrial states today is lower relative to the income of whites than in 1949.Fusfeld and Bates examine the forces that have led to this state of affairs and find that these economic relationships are the product of a complex pattern of historical development and change in which black-white economic relationships play a major part, along with patterns of industrial, agricultural, and technological change and urban development. They argue that today’s urban racial ghettos are the result of the same forces that created modern America and that one of the by-products of American affluence is a ghettoized racial underclass.
These two themes, they state, are essential for an understanding of the problem and for the formulation of policy. Poverty is not simply the result of poor education, skills, and work habits but one outcome of the structure and functioning of the economy. Solutions require more than policies that seek to change people: they await a recognition that basic economic relationships must be changed.
In The Political Economy of Third World Intervention, David Gibbs explores the factors that motivate intervention, especially the influence of business interests. He challenges conventional views of international relations, eschewing both the popular "realist" view that the state is influenced by diverse national interests and the "dependency" approach that stresses conflicts between industrialized countries and the Third World. Instead, Gibbs proposes a new theoretical model of "business conflict" which stresses divisions between different business interests and shows how such divisions can influence foreign policy and interventionism. Moreover, he focuses on the conflicts among the core countries, highlighting friction among private interests within these countries.
Drawing on U.S. government documents—including a wealth of newly declassified materials—he applies his new model to a detailed case study of the Congo Crisis of the 1960s. Gibbs demonstrates that the Crisis is more accurately characterized by competition among Western interests for access to the Congo's mineral wealth, than by Cold War competition, as has been previously argued.
Offering a fresh perspective for understanding the roots of any international conflict, this remarkably accessible volume will be of special interest to students of international political economy, comparative politics, and business-government relations.
"This book is an extremely important contribution to the study of international relations theory; Gibbs' treatment of the Congo case is superb. He effectively takes the "statists" to task and presents a compelling new way of analyzing external interventions in the Third World."—Michael G. Schatzberg, University of Wisconsin
"David Gibbs makes an original and important contribution to our understanding of the influence of business interests in the making of U.S. foreign policy. His business conflict model provides a synthetic theoretical framework for the analysis of business-government relations, one which yields fresh insights, overcomes inconsistencies in other approaches, and opens new ground for important research. . . . [Gibbs] provides a sophisticated analysis of the conflicts within the U.S. business community and identifies the complex ways in which they interacted with agencies within the government to form U.S. foreign policy toward the Congo. . . . This is a well-crafted analysis of a critical case of U.S. postwar intervention which should be of general interest to scholars and others concerned with the domestic bases of foreign policy."—Thomas J. Biersteker, Director, School of International Relations, University of Southern California
In case studies of trade barriers imposed during the 1980s to help the steel, semiconductor, automobile, lumber, wheat, and textile and apparel industries, the contributors trace the evolution of efforts to obtain protection, protectionist measures, and their results. A chapter assessing the common themes that emerge from the studies concludes that the focus of current trade law is exclusively on the individual protection-seeking industries, with little regard for indirect effects on using industries or for consumers. Reform could usefully take these effects into account.
This volume will interest policymakers, business executives, and anyone interested in trade policy formulation and practice.
This insider's view of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, of the tumultuous presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and of the conflicts and factions of the president's staff has become a political classic since its original publication in 1972. In this reissue, Harry McPherson adds a new preface in which he reflects on changes in Washington since the Johnson era and on the lessons Bill Clinton could learn from the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
This book is unique among the histories of the Texas Republic: it is the first to examine the fledgling nation from the point of view of its dynamic political life. Policies with far-reaching results were formulated in the nine years of Texas' independence, and the author clearly presents the many thorny issues that were to plague Texas for generations.
The political history of the Republic is one of strong figures vying with each other for popular support of their divergent policies. The author details the personal feuds and animosities that resulted and shows the effects of these differences on the governing of the nation. Thoughtful use of diaries, memoirs, and other contemporary sources gives the reader an excellent understanding of the sense of personal concern the citizens of the Republic felt toward the political issues of the day.
Situating her in-depth studies of Chicago and San Jose in the broad context of data drawn from more than 240 cities over the course of a century, she finds that the answer—a resounding yes—illuminates the nature of political power. Both political machines and reform governments, she reveals, bias the system in favor of incumbents, effectively establishing monopolies that free governing coalitions from dependence on the support of their broader communities. Ironically, Trounstine goes on to show, the resulting loss of democratic responsiveness eventually mobilizes residents to vote monopolistic regimes out of office. Envisioning an alternative future for American cities, Trounstine concludes by suggesting solutions designed to free urban politics from this damaging cycle.
What leads us to respond politically to the deaths of some citizens and not others? This is one of the critical questions Heather Pool asks in Political Mourning. Born out of her personal experiences with the trauma of 9/11, Pool’s astute book looks at how death becomes political, and how it can mobilize everyday citizens to argue for political change.
Pool examines four tragedies in American history—the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the lynching of Emmett Till, the September 11 attacks, and the Black Lives Matter movement—that offered opportunities to tilt toward justice and democratic inclusion. Some of these opportunities were taken, some were not. However, these watershed moments show, historically, how political identity and political responsibility intersect and how racial identity shapes who is mourned. Political Mourning helps explain why Americans recognize the names of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland; activists took those cases public while many similar victims have been ignored by the news media.
Concluding with an afterword on the coronavirus, Pool emphasizes the importance of collective responsibility for justice and why we ought to respond to tragedy in ways that are more politically inclusive.
This collection reflects Peltzman's long career studying the interface between the private economy and the public sector. It will be essential to anyone who wishes to study government activity and voting behavior from an economic perspective.
Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis.
Among the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is perhaps best remembered for the innovative use of jazz rhythms in his writing. While his poetry and essays received much public acclaim and scholarly attention, Hughes’ dramas are relatively unknown. Only five of the sixty-three plays Hughes scripted alone or collaboratively have been published (in 1963).
Published here, for the first time, are four of Hughes’ most poignant, poetic, and political dramas, Scottsboro Limited, Harvest (also known as Blood on the Fields), Angelo Herndon Jones, and De Organizer. Each play reflects Hughes’ remarkable professionalism as a playwright as well as his desire to dramatize the social history of the African American experience, especially in the context of the labor movements of the 1930s and their attempts to attract African American workers. Hughes himself counted prominent members of these leftist groups among his close friends and patrons; he formed a theater group with Whittaker Chambers, prompting an FBI investigation of Hughes and his writing in the 1930s. These plays, while easily read as idealistic propaganda pieces for the left, are nonetheless reflective of Hughes’ other more influential and studied works.
The first scholar to offer a systematic study of Hughes’ plays, Susan Duffy provides an informed introduction as well as a detailed analysis of each of the four plays. Duffy also establishes that De Organizer, a collaboration with noted jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson (who also wrote its score) was indeed performed by the Labor Stage.
By making these forgotten texts available, and by presenting them within a scholarly discussion of 1930s leftist political movements, Duffy seeks to spark a renewed interest in Langston Hughes as an American playwright and political figure.
After a historical review of policing in the United States and Europe over the past century, Huggins reveals how the United States, in order to protect and strengthen its position in the world system, has used police assistance to establish intelligence and other social control infrastructures in foreign countries. The U.S.-encouraged centralization of Latin American internal security systems, Huggins claims, has led to the militarization of the police and, in turn, to an increase in state-sanctioned violence. Furthermore, Political Policing shows how a domestic police force—when trained by another government—can lose its power over legitimate crime as it becomes a tool for the international interests of the nation that trains it.
Pointing to U.S. responsibility for violations of human rights by foreign security forces, Political Policing will provoke discussion among those interested in international relations, criminal justice, human rights, and the sociology of policing.
Political Prairie Fire was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Political Prairie Fire was first published in 1955.
The farmers of North Dakota were ripe for revolt when the magnetic figure of A. C. Townley strode into their midst and offered them a new political formula to redress their grievances. Townley's plan was simple but revolutionary; it called for the formation of a Nonpartisan Political League dedicated to the election of candidates through the established two-party system and to a platform emphasizing public ownership of certain vital farm services and facilities, such as terminal grain elevators and hail insurance on crops.
Like the great prairie fires of the plains states, the political flames of the Nonpartisan League spread swiftly from one farm to the next across North Dakota and into the adjoining states. The League is regarded by many as the last of the great agrarian protest movements. It is historically significant because it achieved a measure of success well beyond that of most similar movements. It controlled the government of one state for some years, elected state officials and legislators in a number of midwestern and western states, and sent several congressmen to Washington. Its impact helped shape the destinies of a dozen states and the political philosophies of an important segment of the nation's voters. The League's methods of operation often serve today as a guide for political action.
This is the first detailed, unbiased history of the Nonpartisan League. Thoroughly documented for the specialist, it is nevertheless equally interesting for the general reader.
"[A] first-rate analytical demonstration that the civil rights movement was the culmination of a long process of building institutions in the black community."—Raymond Wolters, Journal of American History
"A fresh, rich, and dynamic model to explain the rise and decline of the black insurgency movement in the United States."—James W. Lamare, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Enhanced with a new introduction and an updated bibliography, Political Repression in Modern America remains an essential record of the relentless intolerance that suppresses radical dissent in the United States.
The turbulent history of the United States has provided a fertile ground for conspiracies, both real and imagined. From the American Revolution to the present day, conspiracy discourse—linguistic and symbolic practices and artifacts revolving around themes, claims, or accusations of conspiracy—has been a staple of political rhetoric. Some conspiracy theories never catch on with the public, while others achieve widespread popularity. Whether successful or not, the means by which particular conspiracy theories spread is a rhetorical process, a process in which persuasive language, symbolism, and arguments act upon individual minds within concrete historical and political settings.
Conspiracy rhetoric was a driving force in the evolution of antebellum political culture, contributing to the rise and fall of the great parties in the nineteenth century. One conspiracy theory in particular—the "slave power" conspiracy—was instrumental in facilitating the growth of the young Republican Party's membership and ideology. The Political Style of Conspiracy analyzes the concept and reality of the "slave power" in the rhetorical discourse of the mid-nineteenth-century, in particular the speeches and writing of politicians Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. By examining their mainstream texts, Pfau reveals that, in addition to the "paranoid style" of conspiracy rhetoric that inhabits the margins of political life, Lincoln, Chase, and Sumner also engaged in a distinctive form of conspiracy rhetoric that is often found at the center of mainstream American society and politics.
In The Political Theory of “The Federalist,” David F. Epstein offers a guide to the fundamental principles of American government as they were understood by the framers of the Constitution. Epstein here demonstrates the remarkable depth and clarity of The Federalist’s argument, reveals its specifically political (not merely economic) view of human nature, and describes how and why the American regime combines liberal and republican values.
“While it is a model of scholarly care and clarity, this study deserves an audience outside the academy. . . . David F. Epstein’s book is a fine demonstration of just how much a close reading can accomplish, free of any flights of theory or fancy references.”—New Republic
“Epstein’s strength lies in two aspects of his own approach. One is that he reads the text with uncommon closeness and sensitivity; the other is an extensive knowledge of the European political thought which itself forms an indispensable background to the minds of the authors.”—Times Literary Supplement
Exploring who benefits and who pays when different narratives are accepted as true, Pride offers a step-by-step account of how Mobile's culture changed each time a new and more forceful narrative was used to justify inequality. More than a retelling of Mobile's story of desegregation, The Political Use of Racial Narratives promotes the value of rhetorical and narrative analysis in the social sciences and history.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms.
Historians have offered important new perspectives and evidence concerning the geographical expanse of slavery in the United States and the protracted process of abolishing it. They have also uncovered a wealth of new material on the political currents running through black communities from enslavement to the present day. Yet their scholarship has failed to dislodge familiar interpretive frameworks that may no longer make much sense of the past.
Based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom asks why this may be so and offers sweeping reassessments. It defines new chronological and spatial boundaries for American and African-American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. It suggests, with historical comparisons, that we may have missed a massive slave rebellion during the Civil War. And it takes a serious look at the development and appeal of Garveyism and the hidden history of black politics it may help to reveal. Throughout, it presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense among them.
In this provocative and engagingly written book, the authors argue that the reality is quite the opposite. In fact, when not facing election, contemporary presidents and members of Congress routinely ignore the public's policy preferences and follow their own political philosophies, as well as those of their party's activists, their contributors, and their interest group allies. Politicians devote substantial time, effort, and money to tracking public opinion, not for the purposes of policymaking, but to change public opinion—to determine how to craft their public statements and actions to win support for the policies they and their supporters want.
Taking two recent, dramatic episodes—President Clinton's failed health care reform campaign, and Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America"—as examples, the authors show how both used public opinion research and the media to change the public's mind. Such orchestrated displays help explain the media's preoccupation with political conflict and strategy and, the authors argue, have propelled levels of public distrust and fear of government to record highs.
Revisiting the fundamental premises of representative democracy, this accessible book asks us to reexamine whether our government really responds to the broad public or to the narrower interests and values of certain groups. And with the 2000 campaign season heating up, Politicians Don't Pander could not be more timely.
"'Polling has turned leaders into followers,' laments columnist Marueen Dowd of The New York Times. Well, that's news definitely not fit to print say two academics who have examined the polls and the legislative records of recent presidents to see just how responsive chief executives are to the polls. Their conclusion: not much. . . . In fact, their review and analyses found that public opinion polls on policy appear to have increasingly less, not more, influence on government policies."—Richard Morin, The Washington Post
Certain to provoke controversy, this interdisciplinary volume brings together policy experts to provide a coherent analysis of the most important economic policy changes of the 1980s. Through a detailed examination of voting patterns, monetary and fiscal policies, welfare spending, tax reform, minimum wage legislation, the savings and loan collapse, and international trade policy, the authors explore how politics can influence the direction of economic policymaking.
But despite the ubiquity of the idea of volunteerism in public policy debates, analysis of its role in American governance has been fragmented. Bringing together a diverse set of disciplinary approaches, Politics and Partnerships is a thorough examination of the place of voluntary associations in political history and an astute investigation into contemporary experiments in reshaping that role. The essays here reveal the key role nonprofits have played in the evolution of both the workplace and welfare and illuminate the way that government’s retreat from welfare has radically altered the relationship between nonprofits and corporations.
This third volume of Politics and the Constitution, which Crosskey began and William Jeffrey has finished, treats political activity in the period 1776-87, and is in many ways the heart of the work as Crosskey conceived it. In support of the lexicographic analysis of volumes 1 and 2, volume 3 shows that nationalist ideas and sentiments were a powerful force in American public opinion from the Revolution to the eve of the Constitutional Convention. The creation of a generally empowered national government in Philadelphia, it is argued, was the fruition of a long-active political movement, not the unintended or accidental result of a temporary conservative coalition.
This view of the political background of the Constitutional Convention directly challenges the Madisonian-Jeffersonian orthodoxy on the subject. In support of his interpretation, Crosskey amassed a wealth of primary source materials, including heretofore unexplored pamphlets and newspapers. This exhaustive research makes this unique work invaluable for scholars of the period, both for the primary sources collected as well as for the provocative interpretation offered.
In 1862, in the only instance of a Jewish expulsion in America, General Ulysses S. Grant banished Jewish citizens from the region under his military command. Although the order was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, it represented growing anti-Semitism in America. Convinced that assimilation was their best defense, Jews sought to Americanize by shedding distinctive dress, occupations, and religious rituals.
American Jews recognized the benefit and urgency of bridging the divide between Reform and Orthodox Judaism to create a stronger alliance to face the challenges ahead. With Grant’s 1868 presidential campaign, they also realized they could no longer remain aloof from partisan politics. As they became a growing influence in American politics, both political parties courted the new Jewish vote.
Once in office, Grant took notice of the persecution of Jews in Romania and Russia, and he appointed more Jews to office than any president before him. Indeed, Simon Wolf, a Washington lawyer who became one of Grant’s closest advisers, was part of a new generation of Jewish leaders to emerge in the post–Civil War era—thoroughly Americanized, politically mature, and committed to the modernized Judaism of the Reform movement.
In Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism, Peter Adams recounts the history of the American Jewish Community’s assimilation efforts, organization, and political mobilization in the late 19th century, as political and cultural imperatives crafted a new, American brand of Judaism.
For well over a century the Catholic Church has articulated clear positions on many issues of public concern, particularly economics, capital punishment, foreign affairs, sexual morality, and abortion. Yet the fact that some of the Church's positions do not mesh well with the platforms of either of the two major political parties in the U.S. may make it difficult for Americans to look to Catholic doctrine for political guidance. Scholars of religion and politics have long recognized the potential for clergy to play an important role in shaping the voting decisions and political attitudes of their congregations, yet these assumptions of political influence have gone largely untested and undemonstrated.
Politics in the Parish is the first empirical examination of the role Catholic clergy play in shaping the political views of their congregations. Gregory Allen Smith draws from recent scholarship on political communication, and the comprehensive Notre Dame Study of Parish Life, as well as case studies he conducted in nine parishes in the mid-Atlantic region, to investigate the extent to which and the circumstances under which Catholic priests are influential in shaping the politics of their parishioners.
Smith is able to verify that clergy do exercise political influence, but he makes clear that such influence is likely to be nuanced, limited in magnitude, and exercised indirectly by shaping parishioner religious attitudes that in turn affect political behavior. He shows that the messages that priests deliver vary widely, even radically, from parish to parish and priest to priest. Consequently, he warns that scholars should exercise caution when making any global assumptions about the political influence that Catholic clergy affect upon their congregations.
"Politics in the Pews probes the internal dynamics of political decision making within the Black church."
---William E. Nelson, Jr., Research Professor, Department of African American and African Studies, Ohio State University
As Eric McDaniel demonstrates in his study of Black congregations in the U.S., a church's activism results from complex negotiations between the pastor and the congregation. The church's traditions, its institutional organization, and its cultural traditions influence the choice to make politics part of the church's mission. The needs of the local community and opportunities to vote, lobby, campaign, or protest are also significant factors.
By probing the dynamics of churches as social groups, McDaniel opens new perspectives on civil rights history and the evangelical politics of the twenty-first century. Politics in the Pews contributes to a clearer understanding of the forces that motivate any organization, religious or otherwise, to engage in politics.
Eric L. McDaniel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.
Now ask Tom Volgy. This former mayor of a major western city, who is also a political scientist, contends that most elected officials are the very opposite of what the public thinks: honest, hardworking people whose real work goes unnoticed by most of their constituents and the media.
Volgy has interviewed more than 300 elected officials—mayors, city council members, legislators—from all over the United States to offer a decidedly contrarian view of politics. He explores the lives and working conditions of elected officials at the local level— the area of democracy closest to the public— to show that officeholders are for the most part average citizens, not the slick lawyers or political pros we usually imagine them to be. Most are motivated by a sense of civic duty, and they often work for token salaries, yet once elected they give up their personal lives and fall prey to every conceivable brickbat of public and media outrage.
In Politics in the Trenches, Volgy shows what really happens behind the scenes of government. He contrasts perception with reality regarding the rewards and perks of office. He examines the process of experimentation in the political laboratory and shows how the news media distort it. He provides a case study of homelessness to illustrate the system's constraints and limitations. And he offers a chapter on a typical week in office that will be an eye-opener for most readers.
Although admittedly there are many flaws in the democratic political process, observes Volgy, all are correctable as long as citizens believe in the essential worth of the system itself. His book offers a fresh perspective on democratic governance and tackles tough issues such as campaign finance reform, urging citizens to understand the process before they condemn its players out of hand. More than that, this is a call to action, warning us that we could lose true democracy if we don't get involved.
In the 1890s, once-heavily courted corporations had become, in the eyes of many, outside "money interests" or "beasts" that exploited the wealth of the sparsely settled area. Arizona's anticorporate reformers condemned the giant corporations for mistreating workers, farmers, ranchers, and small-business people and for corrupting the political system. During a thirty-year struggle, Arizona reformers called for changes to ward off corporate control of the political system, increase corporate taxation and regulation, and protect and promote the interests of working people.
Led by George W.P. Hunt and progressive Democrats, Arizona's brand of Progressivism was heavily influenced by organized labor, third parties, and Socialist activists. As highly powerful railroad and mining corporations retaliated, conflict took place on both political levels and industrial backgrounds, sometimes in violent form.
Politics, Labor and the War on Big Business places Arizona's experience in the larger historical discussion of reform activity of the period, considering issues involving the role of government in the economy and the possibility of reform, topics highly relevant to current debates.
Jewish voting is distinctive and paradoxical. Stereotypes about the voting habits of American Jews include that they vote at unusually high levels, that they’re liberal, that they vote for Democratic candidates without regard to their self-interest, and that Israel is their most important issue. Not only are all of those claims wrong, but they obscure aspects of Jews’ voting behavior that are much more interesting.
The Politics of American Jews uncovers new perspectives on Jews’ political choices by analyzing the unprecedented amount of survey data that is now available, including surveys that permit contrasting the voting of Jews with that of comparable non-Jews. The data suggest several mysteries about Jewish voting. While more Jews are Democrats than are liberals, there has not been a previous exploration of why more politically conservative Jews are not Republicans.
A fresh picture of Jews’ political behaviors shows that Jews are no longer politically monolithic. They vote on the basis of their self-interest and their values, but not all Jews share the same self-interest or the same values. While most Jews have incorporated being Democratic and liberal into their political DNA, growing divisions in their ranks suggest a mutation could occur.
Analyzing fifty years of data, Jones and Baumgartner's book is the first study of American politics based on a new information-processing perspective. The authors bring together the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions into a single model that traces public policies, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions across multiple institutions.
The Politics of Attention offers a groundbreaking approach to American politics based on the responses of policymakers to the flow of information. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than looking to how individual preferences are realized through political action.
American state and Canadian provincial governments have dealt with rapidly rising auto insurance rates in different ways over the last two decades, a difference many attribute to variances in political pressure exerted by interest groups such as trial attorneys and insurance companies. Edward L. Lascher, Jr., argues that we must consider two additional factors: the importance of politicians’ beliefs about the potential success of various solutions and the role of governmental institutions.
Using case studies from both sides of the border, Lascher shows how different explanations of the problem and different political structures affect insurance reform. In his conclusion, Lascher moves beyond auto insurance to draw implications for regulation and policymaking in other areas.
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