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Neil Kraus evaluates both the influence of public opinion on local policy-making and the extent to which public policy addresses economic and social inequalities. Drawing on several years of fieldwork and multiple sources of data, including surveys and polls; initiatives, referenda, and election results; government documents; focus groups; interviews; and a wide assortment of secondary sources, Kraus presents case studies of two Midwestern cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Gary, Indiana. Specifically, he focuses on several major policy decisions in recent decades concerning education, law enforcement, and affordable housing in Minneapolis; and education and riverboat casino development in Gary.

Kraus finds that, on these issues, local officials frequently take action that reflects public opinion, yet the resulting policies often fail to meet the needs of the disadvantaged or ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty. In light of citizens’ current attitudes, he concludes that if patterns of inequality are to be more effectively addressed, scholars and policymakers must transform the debate about the causes and effects of inequality in urban and metropolitan settings.

2023 Wall Award Finalist, Theatre Library Association

How a Hollywood gem transformed the national discourse on post-traumatic stress disorder.

Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives became an immediate success. Life magazine called it “the first big, good movie of the post-war era” to tackle the “veterans problem.” Today we call that problem PTSD, but in the initial aftermath of World War II, the modern language of war trauma did not exist. The film earned the producer Samuel Goldwyn his only Best Picture Academy Award. It offered the injured director, William Wyler, a triumphant postwar return to Hollywood. And for Harold Russell, a double amputee who costarred with Fredric March and Dana Andrews, the film provided a surprising second act.

Award-winning author Alison Macor illuminates the film’s journey from script to screen and describes how this authentic motion picture moved audiences worldwide. General Omar Bradley believed The Best Years of Our Lives would help “the American people to build an even better democracy” following the war, and the movie inspired broad reflection on reintegrating the walking wounded. But the film’s nuanced critique of American ideals also made it a target, and the picture and its creators were swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s. In this authoritative history, Macor chronicles the making and meaning of a film that changed America.

The United States has always fancied itself a nation apart—"exceptional" in its values, traditions, and way of life. For most of the country's history, ideas about what made America distinctive generally were framed in terms of a liberal idealism rooted in the thought of John Locke and articulated by Jefferson, Madison, and other Founders. While some commentators also observed that the United States was a land of plenty, it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that material abundance emerged as the principal standard of American “greatness,” as measured by a host of new economic indicators.

Beginning in earnest in the wake of World War II, opinion-shapers in politics, business, academia, the media, the schools, and public diplomacy gloried in the nation's booming economy. Where “plenty” had once been a largely abstract concept, it was now quantifiable, thanks to new national income accounting and other economic data collection and analysis techniques. One could tally up production and consumption of an ever-expanding cornucopia of goods and services that made up the gross national product (GNP), the king of postwar statistics. American preeminence and American identity were increasingly linked with this measurable prosperity, presented in the language of a newly influential economics profession. 

In Measuring America, Andrew L. Yarrow explores this history, telling two parallel, interlocking stories—of how economic ideas came to have vastly greater influence on American culture after World War II, and how those ideas dovetailed with a growing belief that the meaning and value of the United States resided in its material output. How and why this new way of “measuring America” developed, how it was expressed, and what it has meant and means for Americans today are the subject of this well-researched and insightful book.

Mis(s) Communication: Stigma and the Miss America Organization explores the one-hundred-year history of the Miss America Organization (MAO) as a site of stigma management. Through five years of ethnographic, archival, and interview-based research, Rebecca J. Meisenbach shows how pageant participation is both valorized and stigmatized—making MAO a key lens for studying stigma as a dynamic, power-laden communication process. The book examines stigma across individual, organizational, and societal levels, focusing on moments like Rule Seven, which once barred nonwhite participants, and the 1968 protest by the New York Radical Women alongside the first Miss Black America pageant. Meisenbach also investigates how contestants navigate stigma tied to intelligence, body image, and the sexualization of women. She analyzes MAO’s 2018 elimination of the swimsuit competition as a stigma management move and its recent shift to a for-profit model under Miss America Opportunity. The book ultimately argues for understanding stigma as communicative and deeply intersectional.

In the contemporary Western imagination, Asian people are frequently described as automatons, which disavows their humanity. In Model Machines, Long Bui investigates what he calls Asian roboticism or the ways Asians embody the machine and are given robotic characteristics. 

Bui offers the first historical overview of the overlapping racialization of Asians and Asian Americans through their conflation with the robot-machine nexus. He puts forth the concept of the “model machine myth,” which holds specific queries about personhood, citizenship, labor, and rights in the transnational making of Asian/America. 

The case studies in Model Machines chart the representation of Chinese laborers, Japanese soldiers, Asian sex workers, and other examples to show how Asians are reimagined to be model machines as a product of globalization, racism, and colonialism. Moreover, it offers examples of how artists and everyday people resisted that stereotype to consider different ways of being human. Starting from the early nineteenth century, the book ends in the present with the new millennium, where the resurgence of China presages the “rise of the machines” and all the doomsday scenarios this might spell for global humanity at large.

A new perspective on how beliefs about abortion and gay rights reshaped American politics.

Many believe that religious and partisan identities undergird American public opinion. However, when it comes to abortion and gay rights, the reverse may be closer to the truth.

Drawing on wide-ranging evidence, Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp show that views on abortion and gay rights are just as durable and politically impactful—and often more so—than political and religious identities. Goren and Chapp locate the lasting strength of stances on abortion and gay rights in the automatic, visceral emotions that the media has primed since the late 1980s. Moral Issues examines how attitudes toward these moralized issues affect, and can sometimes even disrupt, religious and partisan identities. Indeed, over the last thirty years, these attitudes have accelerated the rise of the religious “nones,” who have no religious affiliation, and promoted moral sorting into the Democratic and Republican parties.

The early twenty-first century has experienced an unrivaled dissemination of information and misinformation about Islam, its prophet Muhammad, and its followers, largely facilitated by the fact that the tragedy of 9/11 roughly coincided with the advent of the digital age. In the first collection of its kind, Ruqayya Khan has compiled essays that treat Muhammad and the core elements of Islam as focal points in an exploration of how the digital era—including social media and other expressions—have both had an effect on and been affected by Islam.

Scholars from a variety of fields deal with topics such as the 2005 cartoon controversy in Denmark and the infamous 2012 movie trailer “Innocence of Muslims” that some believe sparked the attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, as well as how the digitization of ancient texts have allowed the origins of Islam to be studied in new ways. Other essays examine how Muhammad’s wives have been represented in various online sources, including a web comic; the contrasting depictions of Muhammad as both a warrior and peacemaker; and how the widespread distribution of “the look” of Islamic terrorists has led to attacks on Sikhs, whose only point of resemblance to them may be a full beard. These findings illuminate the role of the Internet in forms of representation, advocacy, and engagement concerning Islam and Muslims in our world today.