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Offers a new way of understanding the tortured relationship between race and democracy in the United States

Racial discrimination embodies inequality, exclusion, and injustice and as such has no place in a democratic society. And yet racial matters pervade nearly every aspect of American life, influencing where we live, what schools we attend, the friends we make, the votes we cast, the opportunities we enjoy, and even the television shows we watch.

Before the Civil War, slaveholders made themselves into the most powerful, most deeply rooted, and best organized private interest group within the United States. Not only did slavery represent the national economy's second largest capital investment, exceeded only by investment in real estate, but guarantees of its perpetuation were studded throughout the U.S. Constitution. The vast majority of white Americans, in North and South, accepted the institution, and pro-slavery presidents and congressmen consistently promoted its interests. 

In Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War, James Brewer Stewart explains how a small group of radical activists, the abolitionist movement, played a pivotal role in turning American politics against this formidable system. He examines what influence the movement had in creating the political crises that led to civil war and evaluates the extent to which a small number of zealous reformers made a truly significant political difference when demanding that their nation face up to its most excruciating moral problem. In making these assessments, Stewart addresses a series of more specific questions: What were the abolitionists actually up against when seeking the overthrow of slavery and white supremacy? What motivated and sustained them during their long and difficult struggles? What larger historical contexts (religious, social, economic, cultural, and political) influenced their choices and determined their behavior? What roles did extraordinary leaders play in shaping the movement, and what were the contributions of abolitionism's unheralded “foot soldiers”? What factors ultimately determined, for better or worse, the abolitionists' impact on American politics and the realization of their equalitarian goals?

An innovative analysis of the Enlightenment’s effects on the anti-slavery movement

Echoes of Thomas Paine and Enlightenment thought resonate throughout the abolitionist movement and in the efforts of its leaders to create an antislavery reading public. In Abolition’s Public Sphere Robert Fanuzzi critically examines the writings of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and their massive abolition publicity campaign—pamphlets, newspapers, petitions, and public gatherings—geared to an audience of white male citizens, free black noncitizens, women, and the enslaved. Including provocative readings of Thoreau’s Walden and of the symbolic space of Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Abolition’s Public Sphere demonstrates how abolitionist public discourse sought to reenact eighteenth-century scenarios of revolution and democracy in the antebellum era.

Abraham Lincoln drew upon history in his political career and particularly when crafting the rhetorical masterpieces that still resonate in the present day. Jesse Derber explores how Lincoln’s views of the limits of human understanding drove a belief in--and untiring pursuit of--historical truth.

Lincoln embraced the traditional ideas that good history made good statesmanship and that an understanding of the past informed decision-making in the present. Seeing history as a source of wisdom, Lincoln strove for accuracy through a combination of research, reasoning ability, emotional maturity, and a willingness to admit his mistakes and challenge his biases. His philosophy flowed from an idea that authentic history could enlighten people about human nature. Though he revered precedents, Lincoln understood the past could be imperfect, and that progress through change was an ineffable part of building a better nation.

Perceptive and revealing, Abraham Lincoln, Statesman Historian looks at how the Lincoln practiced history and applied its lessons to politics and leadership.

The notion of academic freedom dates back to the creation of universities and has long been understood to be central to their vocation. This freedom has come under attack by different actors throughout its history. In the current context, rising threats to democracy and human liberties, the corporatization of research, concerns about diversity and increased societal polarization, are putting a considerable pressure on its exercise. However, academic freedom is also a concept that suffers from persistent ambiguities associated with the general notion of freedom as well as debates about the function of universities.
This edited collection addresses the question of academic freedom by situating it in its broader global context. More conceptual treatments contribute to an understanding of academic freedom as distinct and separate from, although related to, freedom of expression, or student rights. These conceptual treatments are combined with studies of actual struggles over the scope of academic freedom in specific universities. The contributions come from a broad variety of sites seek to deprovincialize the conversation beyond North America or the English-speaking world.

A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

Armed with a command of Danish that enabled rudimentary communication, Liese began learning from neighbors who spoke an ancient Norwegian dialect—how to feed the animals, milk by hand, and supervise her first lambing. The farm was run in the old way: horses and wagons instead of tractors, haymaking in the rain, and hikes into the mountains to check on the sheep that ranged free over those wild peaks all summer. And, she was quick to discover, the farm was on the brink of ruin, for Johannes was a heartless man who had abused his animals and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades.

Although her employer had alienated his neighbors, they immediately welcomed the American newcomer and offered her help. As “a month or so” stretched to a year and Liese struggled for the survival of the farm, she joined this tight-knit enclave of farmers, learning their stories and history, adopting their dialect, and growing intimately familiar with the grass-based farming practices that had sustained them for generations.

From moments of levity, such as sampling a neighbor’s fruit wines, Christmas parties, and skiing; to soul-battering challenges, including the directive to kill a fox, sending sheep to slaughter, rotten silage, and vicious weather; to the yearnings of a young woman awash in a sea of masculinity, Accidental Shepherd is a candid account of Liese’s year in a remote farmhouse. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, she tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.

A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

Armed with a command of Danish that enabled rudimentary communication, Liese began learning from neighbors who spoke an ancient Norwegian dialect—how to feed the animals, milk by hand, and supervise her first lambing. The farm was run in the old way: horses and wagons instead of tractors, haymaking in the rain, and hikes into the mountains to check on the sheep that ranged free over those wild peaks all summer. And, she was quick to discover, the farm was on the brink of ruin, for Johannes was a heartless man who had abused his animals and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades.

Although her employer had alienated his neighbors, they immediately welcomed the American newcomer and offered her help. As “a month or so” stretched to a year and Liese struggled for the survival of the farm, she joined this tight-knit enclave of farmers, learning their stories and history, adopting their dialect, and growing intimately familiar with the grass-based farming practices that had sustained them for generations.

From moments of levity, such as sampling a neighbor’s fruit wines, Christmas parties, and skiing; to soul-battering challenges, including the directive to kill a fox, sending sheep to slaughter, rotten silage, and vicious weather; to the yearnings of a young woman awash in a sea of masculinity, Accidental Shepherd is a candid account of Liese’s year in a remote farmhouse. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, she tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.

A troubling portrait of democracy in US state legislatures.

State legislatures hold tremendous authority over key facets of our lives, ranging from healthcare to marriage to immigration policy. In theory, elections create incentives for state legislators to produce good policies. But do they?

Drawing on wide-ranging quantitative and qualitative evidence, Steven Rogers offers the most comprehensive assessment of this question to date, testing different potential mechanisms of accountability. His findings are sobering: almost ninety percent of American voters do not know who their state legislator is; over one-third of incumbent legislators run unchallenged in both primary and general elections; and election outcomes have little relationship with legislators’ own behavior.

Rogers’s analysis of state legislatures highlights the costs of our highly nationalized politics, challenging theories of democratic accountability and providing a troubling picture of democracy in the states.

Activating Emancipation boldly interrogates our knowledge of the history of slavery, emancipation, race, and Islam in Mauritania, where slavery was abolished only in 1981 and criminalized in 2007. It centers on the voices and stories of Ḥrāṭīn peoples, a complex and ambiguous social category encompassing people with mixed free and servile ancestral backgrounds. The stigma of enslavement, along with their racialized status as Black, has placed them at the bottom of a social hierarchy dominated by Arab and Amazigh elites, racialized as “White.” 

In this groundbreaking study, Ḥrāṭīn historian Khaled Esseissah mobilizes oral and written sources to confront a long tradition in which Ḥrāṭīn are rendered invisible or shown as passive victims of oppression and narrates a new history of Ḥrāṭīn contributions to the building of modern Mauritania. Despite being emancipated or born free, Ḥrāṭīn men and women continued to face “White” threats to reenslave them or subject them to economic, religious, and sexual exploitation. Esseissah demonstrates that only by “activating their emancipation” have the Ḥrāṭīn challenged Arab dominance. He unravels complex and varied Ḥrāṭīn strategies, including engaging with French colonizers through collaboration and revolt, appealing to the Qur’an and Ḥadith, acquiring wealth, building political power, engaging in nationalist struggle, and exercising communal agency to support others, garner respectability, and assert their autonomy during the colonial period. He also illuminates Ḥrāṭīn adwaba, or villages of emancipation, as critical sites of slave liberation and freedom. In so doing, Activating Emancipation reframes the story of abolition in colonial Mauritania that is often either ignored or told from the French colonial perspective, which sees abolition merely as a legal event. The Ḥrāṭīn experience of emancipation is long and complex, challenging simple binaries between bondage and free labor, between colonial and anticolonial. 

Activating Emancipation reorients academic studies and international media coverage of Ḥrāṭīn communities, demonstrating the broad range of Ḥrāṭīn historical experiences that are not understood, or even visible, to many in Mauritania, Africa, and beyond. It provides a grounded historical analysis that moves us beyond both the orientalist and apologetic Muslim discourses that have long characterized journalistic, popular, and even scholarly debates about slavery, Islam, and Ḥrāṭīn experience in Mauritania.

Local democracy doesn’t work as it should, declares Brian Adams in Activism, Majority Rule, and Local Democracy. Local politics is where citizens have the most opportunity for direct participation, control, and influence, but that activism doesn’t necessarily translate into majority rule.

While greater local engagement can produce policy that better reflects activists’ strong preferences, Adams explains that activists are not representative of the public-at-large and states that a reconceptualization of how the public should be able to influence local officials is required. Based on interviews with activists in San Diego, California, Adams concludes that activism can be beneficial, but we need to view it as distinct from majority rule, with a focus on managing the tension between the two.

Improving local democracy is not just a matter of generating more activism. It requires articulating when we want policy to reflect majority preferences and when we want activists to hold sway.

Administering Justice examines the leadership role of chief justices in the American states, including how those duties require chief justices to be part of the broader state political environment. Vining and Wilhelm focus extensively on the power of chief justices as public spokespersons, legislative liaisons, and reform leaders. In contrast to much existing research on chief justices in the states, this study weighs their extrajudicial responsibilities rather than intracourt leadership. By assessing the content of State of the Judiciary remarks delivered over a period of sixty years, Vining and Wilhelm are able to analyze the reform agendas advanced by chief justices and determine what factors influence the likelihood of success. These analyses confirm that chief justices engage with state politics in meaningful ways and that reactions to their proposals are influenced by ideological congruence with other political elites and the scope of their requests. Administering Justice also examines the chief justice position as an institution, provides a collective profile of its occupants, and surveys growing diversity among court leaders.