Results by title
1066 books match the query 'Political' and 34 start with d
Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion
An American StoryDaniel Bullen
Westholme Publishing, 2024
Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story by Daniel Bullen tells the history of the crisis from the protesters’ perspective. Through five months of nonviolent protests, the farmers kept courts throughout Massachusetts from hearing foreclosures, facing down threats from the government, which escalated to the point that Governor James Bowdoin ultimately sent an army to arrest them. Even so, the people won reforms in an electoral landslide.
Thomas Jefferson called these protests an honorable rebellion, and hoped that Americans would never let twenty years pass without such a campaign, to rein in powerful interests. This riveting and meticulously researched narrative shows that Shays and his fellow protesters were hardly a dangerous rabble, but rather a proud people who banded together peaceably, risking their lives for justice in a quintessentially American story.
Daniel Webster, “The Completest Man”
Documents from The Papers of Daniel WebsterEdited by Kenneth E. Shewmaker and Daniel Webster
Brandeis University Press, 1993
Dark Side of the Light
Slavery and the French EnlightenmentLouis Sala-Molins
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Translated into English for the first time, Dark Side of the Light scrutinizes Condorcet’s Reflections on NegroSlavery and the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot side by side with the Code Noir (the royal document that codified the rules of French Caribbean slavery) in order to uncover attempts to uphold the humanist project of the Enlightenment while simultaneously justifying slavery. Wielding the pen of both the ironist and the moralist, Sala-Molins demonstrates the flawed nature of these attempts and the reasons given for this denial of rights, from the imperatives of public order to the incomplete humanity of the slave (and thus the need for his progressive humanization through slavery), to the economic prosperity that depended on his labor. At the same time, Sala-Molins uses the techniques of literature to give equal weight to the perspective of the “barefooted, the starving, and the slaves” through expository prose and scenes between slave and philosopher, giving moral agency and flesh-and-blood dimensions to issues most often treated as abstractions.
Both an urgent critique and a measured analysis, Dark Side of the Light reveals the moral paradoxes of Enlightenment philosophies and their world-changing consequences.
Louis Sala-Molins is a moral and political philosopher and emeritus professor at the University of Toulouse. He is the author of many books, including Le Code Noir, ou Le calvaire de Canaan and L’Afrique aux Amériques.
John Conteh-Morgan is associate professor of French and Francophone, African-American, and African studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction.
Data Equals
Democratic Equality and Technological HierarchyColin Koopman
University of Chicago Press, 2025
When we gave algorithms power over our world, we hoped that the apparent neutrality of machine thinking would create a more egalitarian age. Yet we are more divided than ever, staring down threats to democracy itself. In Data Equals, Colin Koopman argues that data technologies fail us so often because we built them around a deficient notion of equality.
It is not enough, Koopman explains, that algorithms engage everyone’s data with the same measuring stick. The data themselves are all too often structured in ways that obscure and exacerbate stratifying distinctions. Koopman contends that we must also work to ensure that those people subject to computational assessment enter data systems on equal terms. Part philosophical argument, part practical guide (replete with case studies from education technology), Data Equals offers novel methods for realizing democratic equality in a digital age.
Data Equals
Democratic Equality and Technological HierarchyColin Koopman
University of Chicago Press, 2025
An expansive vision for data equality that goes beyond algorithmic fairness.
When we gave algorithms power over our world, we hoped that the apparent neutrality of machine thinking would create a more egalitarian age. Yet we are more divided than ever, staring down threats to democracy itself. In Data Equals, Colin Koopman argues that data technologies fail us so often because we built them around a deficient notion of equality.
It is not enough, Koopman explains, that algorithms engage everyone’s data with the same measuring stick. The data themselves are all too often structured in ways that obscure and exacerbate stratifying distinctions. Koopman contends that we must also work to ensure that those people subject to computational assessment enter data systems on equal terms. Part philosophical argument, part practical guide (replete with case studies from education technology), Data Equals offers novel methods for realizing democratic equality in a digital age.
Data from the Decade of the Sixties
A NovelThanassis Valtinos
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Just as Greece today struggles to adapt to a shifting political landscape, so Greece in the 1960s was convulsed by the collision of tradition and cultural transformation. In Data from the Decade of the Sixties, Valtinos assembles voices, stories, and news clips that capture the transformation of Greece, the monarchy giving way to a republic via dictatorship, the industrialization of its agricultural society, and the replacement of arranged marriages with love matches.
The many voices in this tour de force coalesce in a bricolage of documents: personal letters between friends and family, news reports, advertisements, and other written ephemera. As governments fall, sexologists, fortune-tellers, garage owners, and lonely matrons advertise their specialties and fantasies in want ads, while the young and lonely find escape within the cheap novels, movies, and gossip columns that enliven their barren existence.
Together these testimonies illuminate the tumult of 1960s Greece, where generations and values clash and Greek society struggles to adapt. Valtinos captures the pulse of a decade, portraying the spirit of the century in Greece and throughout the world.
Dawn Clark Netsch
A Political LifeCynthia Grant Bowman
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Illinois Democratic politics has recently produced the most skilled and inspirational politician in memory . . . and has also reminded us of the need for further reform. It is fitting, then, that the latest installment of the Chicago Lives series turns to Dawn Clark Netsch, a leading reformer of Illinois politics since the 1950s and the first woman major party nominee for governor of Illinois.
Netsch was a pioneer, or the first of her gender, in almost every endeavor she undertook. From the very beginning of her career, when she led the move to desegregate Northwestern University's undergraduate dorms, her passion for social justice extended beyond the rights of women to rights for racial minorities and those of all sexual orientations. Bowman charts Dawn Clark Netsch's remarkable political career, from her work behind the scenes as assistant to Governor Otto Kerner and as a participant in the 1970 Constitutional Convention to her later service in elected office, first as Illinois state senator for eighteen years and later as Illinois comptroller, and culminating in her historic run for governor in 1994. Throughout, Netsch lost neither her genteel yet unpretentious demeanor, nor her passion for progressive politics as exemplified by her early mentor, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson.
Death and the Dervish
Mesa Selimovic
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Hugely successful when published in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish is an enduring classic made into a feature length film in 1974.
Decolonizing Dialectics
Geo Maher
Duke University Press, 2017
Deep South Dynasty
The Bankheads of AlabamaKari Frederickson
University of Alabama Press, 2022
WINNER OF THE GULF SOUTH HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION'S MICHAEL V. R. THOMASON BOOK AWARD
Family, influence, and the making of Southern power.
From Reconstruction through the end of World War II, the Bankheads served as the principal architects of the political, economic, and cultural framework of Alabama and the greater South. As a family, they were instrumental in fashioning the New South and the twentieth century American political economy, but now the Bankhead name is largely associated only with place names.
Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama is a deeply researched epic family biography that reflects the complicated and evolving world inhabited by three generations of the extremely accomplished—if problematic—Bankhead family of northwest Alabama. Kari Frederickson’s expertly crafted account traces the careers of five members of the family—John Hollis Bankhead; his sons, John Hollis Bankhead Jr. and William Brockman Bankhead; his daughter, Marie Bankhead Owen; and his granddaughter, Tallulah Brockman Bankhead.
A Confederate veteran and son of a slaveholder, John Hollis Bankhead held political office almost continuously from 1865 until his death in 1920, first in state-level positions and ultimately in Congress–in the House then in the Senate–for thirty-three years. Two of his three sons, John Jr. and William, followed in their father’s political footsteps. John Jr., a successful corporate attorney, was elected to the state legislature and then to the US Senate in 1930; William was elected to the House of Representatives in 1916 and chosen Speaker of the House in 1936. Together, father and sons played key roles in crafting and maintaining a conservative political culture, legal code, and economic system that facilitated economic opportunities for cotton farmers, coal barons, and emerging industries in Alabama and across the South while perpetuating White supremacy.
Daughter Marie Bankhead Owen extended the family’s cultural power during her thirty-five-year tenure as director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. From this position and through her work with groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she embraced and disseminated a historical narrative steeped in Lost Cause mythology that validated the power and privilege of White elites and naturalized the second-class status of African Americans. William’s daughter, actress Tallulah Bankhead, benefited from her family’s rich political bloodlines and in turn lent them a touch of glamour and made the Bankheads modern. Frederickson’s meticulously researched examination of this once-powerful but now largely forgotten southern family is a sweeping and complex story of the region and its relationship with the wider world over the course of eight decades, from the wreckage of the Civil War to the dawn of the nuclear age.
Democracy Ancient and Modern
Finley, M. I.
Rutgers University Press, 2019
This classic study of democratic principles is thus now more relevant than ever. A renowned historian of antiquity and political philosophy, Sir M.I. Finley offers a comparative analysis of Greek and modern conceptions of democracy. As he puts the ancient Greeks in dialogue with their contemporary counterparts, Finley tackles some of the most pressing issues of our day, including public apathy, partisanship, consensus politics, distrust of professional politicians, and the limits of free speech.
Including three lectures that Finley delivered at Rutgers University, plus two additional essays that further illuminate his thinking, Democracy Ancient and Modern explores the dramatic differences between the close-knit civil society of the ancient Greeks and our own atomized mass societies. By mapping out democracy’s past and its present manifestations, this book helps us plot a course for democracy’s future.
Democracy and the Ethical Life
A Philosophy of Politics and Community (Second Edition, Expanded)Claes G. Ryn
Catholic University of America Press, 1990
Derrida and the Time of the Political
Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds.
Duke University Press, 2009
The volume opens with a substantial introduction in which Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac survey Derrida’s entire corpus and position his later work in relation to it. The remaining essays address the concerns that arise out of Derrida’s analysis of politics and the conditions of the political, such as the meaning and scope of democracy, the limits of sovereignty, the relationship between the ethical and the political, the nature of responsibility, the possibility for committed political action, the implications of deconstructive thought for non-Western politics, and the future of nationalism in an era of globalization and declining state sovereignty. The collection is framed by original contributions from Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler.
Contributors. Étienne Balibar, Geoffrey Bennington, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Pheng Cheah, Hélène Cixous, Rodolphe Gasché, Suzanne Guerlac, Marcel Hénaff, Martin Jay, Anne Norton, Jacques Rancière, Soraya Tlatli, Satoshi Ukai
Desire and Imitation in International Politics
Jodok Troy
Michigan State University Press, 2021
Diaspora-in-Place
Grant Farred
Temple University Press, 2027
“I was gone before I left,” writes Grant Farred in his compelling philosophical meditation, Diaspora-in-Place. Building on a concept he introduced in his critique The Perversity of Gratitude, Farred rethinks diaspora as not just physical deracination and relocation, but also a state of being in exile at home while remaining, visibly, in place. Partially the consequence of growing up in South Africa during apartheid, Farred extends the concept to “the Palestinian condition” of living in/out of place in Gaza.
Divided into a series of witty fragments, evocative epigrams, and sobering aphorisms, Diaspora-in-Place builds on thinkers ranging from Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, to the poetry of Olivia Elias, to musicians Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane to examine how individuals process their national identity and subjecthood in a place where they feel out of place.
Farred writes eloquently about this expansive but not universal contradiction as being “a mobile immobility” or “an immobile mobility.” In doing so, he offers an entirely new and provocative way of conceiving how we understand diaspora.
Dies Irae
Jean-Luc Nancy
University of Westminster Press, 2019
Edited by Angela Condello, Carlo Grassi and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
With an introduction by Carlo Grassi
Translated by Cadenza Academic Translations and Angela Condello
What does it mean to judge when there is no general and universal norm to define what is right and what is wrong? Can laws be absent and is law always necessary?
This is the first English translation published of Jean- Luc Nancy’s acclaimed consideration of the law’s most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws. In a world where it is impossible to imagine the realisation of an ideal of justice that corresponds to every person’s ideal of justice, Nancy probes the limits of legal normativity. Moreover, the question is asked: how can legal normativity be legitimised? A legal order based on performativity and formal validity is questionable and other forces than juridical normativity are at the heart of Dies Irae. Such leads inevitably to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that characterise contemporary juridical systems and those issues of identity, hostility and self-representation central to contemporary political and legal debates
Digital Technology and Democratic Theory
Edited by Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich
University of Chicago Press, 2021
To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.
Dirty Waters
Confessions of Chicago's Last Harbor BossR. J. Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In 1987, the city of Chicago hired a former radical college chaplain to clean up rampant corruption on the waterfront. R. J. Nelson thought he was used to the darker side of the law—he had been followed by federal agents and wiretapped due to his antiwar stances in the sixties—but nothing could prepare him for the wretched bog that constituted the world of a Harbor Boss. Dirty Waters is the wry, no-holds-barred memoir of Nelson’s time controlling some of the city’s most beautiful spots while facing some of its ugliest traditions. Nelson takes us through Chicago's beloved “blue spaces” and deep into the city’s political morass, revealing the different moralities underlining three mayoral administrations and navigating the gritty mechanisms of the city’s political machine. Ultimately, Dirty Waters is a tale of morality, of what it takes to be a force for good in the world and what struggles come from trying to stay ethically afloat in a sea of corruption.
Disagreement
Politics And PhilosophyJacques Ranciere
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
“Is there any such thing as political philosophy?” So begins this provocative book by one of the foremost figures in Continental thought. Here, Jacques Rancière brings a new and highly useful set of terms to the vexed debate about political effectiveness and “the end of politics.”
What precisely is at stake in the relationship between “philosophy” and the adjective “political”? In Disagreement, Rancière explores the apparent contradiction between these terms and reveals the uneasy meaning of their union in the phrase “political philosophy”—a juncture related to age-old attempts in philosophy to answer Plato’s devaluing of politics as a “democratic egalitarian” process.
According to Rancière, the phrase also expresses the paradox of politics itself: the absence of a proper foundation. Politics, he argues, begins when the “demos” (the “excessive” or unrepresented part of society) seeks to disrupt the order of domination and distribution of goods “naturalized” by police and legal institutions. In addition, the notion of “equality” operates as a game of contestation that constantly substitutes litigation for political action and community. This game, Rancière maintains, operates by a primary logic of “misunderstanding.” In turn, political philosophy has always tried to substitute the “politics of truth” for the politics of appearances.
Disagreement investigates the various transformations of this regime of “truth” and their effects on practical politics. Rancière then distinguishes what we mean by “democracy” from the practices of a consensual system in order to unravel the ramifications of the fashionable phrase “the end of politics.” His conclusions will be of interest to readers concerned with political questions from the broadest to the most specific and local.
Disalienation
Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar FranceCamille Robcis
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.
Discourses on Livy
Niccolò Machiavelli
University of Chicago Press, 1998
"[Machiavelli] found in Livy the means to inspire scholars for five centuries. Within the Discourses, often hidden and sometimes unintended by their author, lie the seeds of modern political thought. . . . [Mansfield and Tarcov's] translation is careful and idiomatic."—Peter Stothard, The Times
"Translated with painstaking accuracy—but also great readability."—Weekly Standard
"A model of contemporary scholarship and a brave effort at Machiavelli translation that allows the great Florentine to speak in his own voice."—Choice
Distributions of the Sensible
Rancière, between Aesthetics and PoliticsEdited by Scott Durham and Dilip Gaonkar With an afterword by Jacques Rancière
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Jacques Rancière’s work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics”? Specifically, the book explores the implications of Rancière’s rethinking of the relationship of aesthetic to political democracy from a wide range of critical perspectives.
Distributions of the Sensible contains original essays by leading scholars on topics such as Rancière’s relation to political theory, critical theory, philosophical aesthetics, and film. The book concludes with a new essay by Rancière himself that reconsiders the practice of theory between aesthetics and politics.
Divest
An Essay on Political MasochismSteven Swarbrick
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A manifesto for liberating desire from the grip of capital and colonial violence in Palestine
Could a psychoanalytic theory of masochism help us to understand the politics of protest? A socially engaged psychoanalysis of 2024’s widespread student uprisings in support of Palestine, Divest posits that masochism, as theorized by Freud in his later years, is a fundamental structure at the heart of anticapitalist and anticolonial resistance. Conceptualizing masochism as a radical form of divestment, Steven Swarbrick theorizes the affective economies of solidarity, self-sacrifice, and collective struggle. Through vivid film readings and sharp critique of state and university violence, Swarbrick explores the emancipatory potential of masochism in the protest movement and the sadistic machinery of capitalist governance it has laid bare.
Divest is both a politically urgent manifesto and a theoretical companion to the global movement for Palestinian liberation. Asserting that the politics of left-wing solidarity must reckon with the libidinal investments that sustain both power and resistance, this bold volume argues that divestment from global capitalism may begin with a revolution in our psychic attachments.
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Dividing the Union
Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri CompromiseMatthew W. Hall
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
In 1820 the Missouri controversy erupted over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It fell to Jesse Burgess Thomas (1777–1853), a junior U.S. senator from the new state of Illinois, to handle the delicate negotiations that led to the Missouri Compromise. Thomas’s maturity, good judgment, and restraint helped pull the country back from the brink of disunion and created a compromise that held for thirty-four years. In Dividing the Union, Matthew W. Hall examines the legal issues underlying the controversy and the legislative history of the Missouri Compromise while focusing on the aspects of Thomas’s life and character that gave him such influence. The first in-depth biography of Thomas, Hall’s work demonstrates how the legislative battle over the Compromise reflected the underlying nuances of the larger struggle over slavery.
The text of the Missouri Compromise originated from the Northwest Ordinance. Article VI of the Ordinance purported to prohibit slavery in the Northwest Territory, but paradoxically, a provision that assured property rights in another article was used to protect slavery. People in some parts of the Northwest sought to circumvent Article VI by formulating indenture laws and various state constitutional provisions addressing slavery. Pro- and antislavery activists eventually developed quite different interpretations of the relevant language in these documents, making negotiations over slavery in the new territory extremely complicated.
As Hall demonstrates, Thomas was perfectly situated geographically, politically, and ideologically to navigate the Missouri controversy. He was the first speaker of the Indiana Territorial General Assembly, one of the first territorial judges in the Illinois Territory, and the president of the Illinois State Constitutional Convention in 1818. Because the drive for statehood in Illinois was strong, the convention managed to skirt the divisive issue of slavery, due in large part to Thomas’s efforts. That he was never required to clearly articulate his own views on slavery allowed Thomas to maintain a degree of neutrality, and his varied political career gave him the experience necessary to craft a compromise.
Thomas’s final version of the Compromise included shrewdly worded ambiguities that supported opposing interests in the matter of slavery. These ambiguities secured the passage of the Compromise and its endurance until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. By weaving Thomas’s life story into the history of the Missouri Compromise, Hall offers new insight into both a pivotal piece of legislation and an important, previously overlooked figure in nineteenth-century American politics.
Dixie Heretic
The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. KennedyTennant McWilliams
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy
Drawn from some 5,000 letters, six decades of daily-diary writings, and extensive interviews, Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy offers a life-and-times biography of the Alabama Black Belt minister, Renwick C. Kennedy (1900–1985). Here, Tennant McWilliams gives an unvarnished account of Kennedy’s tortuous efforts to make his congregants and other southern whites “better Christians.”
Kennedy came from “upcountry” South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians—people of biblical infallibility and individual piety and salvation. In 1927, after a life-changing theology education at Princeton, he moved to Camden, Alabama, county seat of Wilcox County. There, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to change the “Half Christian” conservative, and the often violent, racial behaviors around him. As a neo-orthodox Protestant, Kennedy never rejected literal approaches to the Bible. Still, out of the “Full Christian” Social Gospel, he urged changed racial behavior. Ultimately this led him to publish confrontational short stories and essays in Christian Century and New Republic—most set in fictitious “Yaupon County.”
In World War II, Kennedy served as a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital. He came home hoping the Allied victory would spur Americans to fight racial segregation just as they had fought racial fascism in Europe. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement dashed these hopes, turning much of his neo-orthodox optimism to cynicism. His hope found fleeting resurgence in the civil rights movement, and saw Kennedy quietly leading desegregation of Troy University, where he was an administrator. But the era’s assassinations, combined with George Wallace and the rise of southern white Republicans, regularly returned him to the frustrated hopes of 1948 and fostered a pessimism about truly changed hearts that he took to his grave in 1985.
Do All the Good You Can
How Faith Shaped Hillary Rodham Clinton’s PoliticsGary Scott Smith
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Methodism in the public and private lives of the politician
After more than forty contentious years in the public eye, Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the best-known political figures in the nation. Yet the strong religious faith at the heart of her politics and personal life often remains confounding, if not mysterious, to longtime observers. Even many of her admirers would be surprised to hear Clinton state that her Methodist outlook has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.”
Gary Scott Smith’s biography of Clinton’s journey in faith begins with her Methodist upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she faithfully attended worship services, Sunday school, and youth group meetings. Like many mainline Protestants, Clinton’s spiritual commitment developed gradually throughout childhood, while her combination of missionary zeal and impressive personal talents has informed her career from the time of her pro bono work at Yale on behalf of children to the present.
Her Methodist faith has been very important to many of Clinton’s high-profile endeavors and in helping her cope with the prominent travails brought on by two presidential campaigns, never-ending conservative rancor, and her husband’s infidelity. Smith’s account examines Clinton’s faith in the context of work ranging from her 1990s pursuit of healthcare reform to a “Hillary doctrine” of foreign policy focused on her longtime goal of providing basic human rights for children and women--a project she saw as essential to United States security. The result is an enlightening reconsideration of an extraordinary political figure who has defied private doubts and public controversy to live by John Wesley’s dictum: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
Dog Eat Dog
A NovelNiq Mhlongo
Ohio University Press, 2012
Don't Let the Fire Go Out!
Jean Carnahan
University of Missouri Press, 2004
Down and Dirty Down South
Politics and the Art of RevengeRoger Glasgow
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2016
While pursuing a race for district prosecutor in the 1970s, Glasgow had run afoul of the local political machine. The machine later decided to teach Glasgow a lesson even though he’d lost the race. Down and Dirty Down South is Glasgow’s story of how he attempted to clear his name and also track down the people who had set him up for charges of smuggling illegal drugs into the United States.
Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy
A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American RevolutionJohn A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2013
Dr. Koop
The Many Lives of the Surgeon GeneralNigel M. de S. Cameron
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025
The first full biography of Reagan's famous Surgeon General, who put science before politics—cutting smoking by 25%, leading the fight against AIDS, and shocking both liberals and conservatives on abortion.
When Ronald Reagan chose C. Everett Koop to be Surgeon General of the United States in 1981, liberal politicians, women's groups, and even the public health community opposed the nomination because of his conservative social views and strong anti-abortion beliefs. By the time he left office in 1989, the same people who had vilified him as “Dr. Kook” were singing his praises, and many conservative politicians and activists who had championed his nomination were criticizing him as a traitor. He had also become “the only surgeon general [who was] a household name,” according to the Associated Press, because of his ubiquitous media exposure around the HIV/AIDS crisis, his unique look, and his savvy with the press. How had Koop remade himself and this once major government office, which sounded grand but in the 1960s had been stripped to a minor advisory role?
As Nigel M. de S. Cameron shows, Koop was, above all, guided in his decisions by his unwavering physician’s commitment to saving lives. Even in the face of political pressures and what many expected to be his personal beliefs, he focused on science and public health. On smoking, abortion, and AIDS he openly defied Republican politicians and alienated New Right conservatives because his reading of the science did not support their ideologies. It was this adherence to science, health, and office that led him to refuse to campaign on abortion, seek compromise on the disabled “Baby Doe” case, relentlessly go after Big Tobacco, and finally reach out to the gay community as AIDS and fear of AIDS exploded. Both supporters and detractors consistently misjudged him.
This first full biography of Koop draws on thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and colleagues to tell the story of the precocious boy from Brooklyn who was already the world’s most celebrated pediatric surgeon when he became Surgeon General and one of the most recognizable public figures in late-20th century America. Koop remains a sterling example—to both left and right—of how public officials should conduct themselves.
Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom
Rousseau's Philosophic LifeLaurence D. Cooper
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom reveals what could be thought of as the capstone of Rousseau’s thought, even if that capstone has been nearly invisible to readers. Despite criticizing philosophy for its corrosive effects on both natural goodness and civic virtue, Rousseau, argues Laurence D. Cooper, held the philosophic life as an ideal. Cooper expertly unpacks Rousseau’s vivid depiction of the philosophic life and the case for that life as the most natural, the freest, or, in short, the best or most choice-worthy of lives. Cooper focuses especially on a single feature, arguably the defining feature of the philosophic life: the overcoming of the ordinary moral consciousness in favor of the cognitivist view of morality. Cooper shows that Rousseau, with his particular understanding and embrace of the philosophic life, proves to be a kind of latter-day Socratic. Thorough and thought-provoking, Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom provides vital insight into Rousseau.
Duncan Upshaw Fletcher
Dixie’s Reluctant ProgressiveWayne Flynt
University of Alabama Press, 2026
A Southern senator at the crossroads of change.
Duncan Upshaw Fletcher: Dixie’s Reluctant Progressive is the definitive portrait of one of Florida’s most influential yet overlooked political figures. Serving in the U.S. Senate from 1909 to 1936, Fletcher bridged the gap between Wilsonian progressivism and Roosevelt’s New Deal, shaping landmark legislation such as the Federal Farm Loan Act, the Shipping Act, and major banking reforms. Far from a demagogue, Fletcher was a methodical, pragmatic leader who championed moderation, urban progressivism, and economic development while resisting racial and religious extremism.
Wayne Flynt’s deeply researched biography illuminates Fletcher’s paradoxical career—a Unitarian in a fundamentalist state, a reformer who later embraced conservatism, and a Southern Democrat who became a loyal New Dealer. Through vivid analysis of Florida’s turbulent political landscape, the book explores themes of coalition-building, economic modernization, and the South’s evolving role in national politics. This work will captivate readers interested in Southern history, political biography, and the roots of modern progressivism. Scholars of the New Deal, reform movements, and Florida history will find it indispensable, while general readers will appreciate its lucid style and insights into a leader whose story resonates with today’s debates over moderation, governance, and social change.
Duty to Respond
Mass Crime, Denial, and Collective ResponsibilityNenad Dimitrijevic
Central European University Press, 2011