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Eager to turn the congressional election of 1918 into a confirmation of his foreign policy, President Woodrow Wilson was criticized for abandoning the spirit of the popular slogan “Politics adjourned!”

His predecessor, William Howard Taft, found Wilson difficult to deal with and took issue with his version of the League of Nations, which Taft felt was inferior to the model proposed by the League to Enforce Peace. Rather than join the massive Republican opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, however, Taft instead supported Wilson’s controversial decision to travel to Paris as the head of the American peace delegation, and he defended the critical tenth article in the covenant, which detractors saw as a surrender of American sovereignty. He also counseled Wilson to insert a clause concerning the Monroe Doctrine that would pacify the Senate’s group of “reservationists,” whose votes were essential to approval of the treaty.

Volume VII in The Collected Works of William Howard Taft consists of the Taft Papers on League of Nations originally published in 1920. This is a collection ofTaft’s speeches, newspaper articles, and complementary documents that reflect his consistent support for a league of nations and, eventually, for the Covenant of the League of Nations emanating from the Paris Peace Conference.

Although the failure of the treaty and its League of Nations can probably be laid at the feet of an obstinate Wilson and a wily Henry Cabot Lodge, William Howard Taft can be credited with rising above partisanship to emerge as the League’s most consistent supporter.

As in the rest of the Collected Works, Taft Papers on League of Nations provides a window on the machinations surrounding some of the most significant decisions of the era.

D. Gale Johnson, one of the world's foremost agricultural economists, has over the last five decades changed the conduct of research on agricultural economics and policy. The papers brought together in The Economics of Agriculture reveal the breadth and depth of his influence on the creation of modern agricultural economics.

Volume 1 collects for the first time in one source Johnson's most important work. These classic papers explore the consequences of government intervention in United States and world agriculture; the economics of agricultural supply and of rural labor and human capital issues; and the analysis of agricultural productivity in poor countries, including the centrally planned economies of China and Eastern Europe. Models of precise reasoning and powerful empirical research, the papers cover a wide range of topics—from U.S. commodity price policy to the economics of population control and farm policy reform in China. Volume 1 includes a definitive bibliography of Johnson's published writings.

Volume 2 presents twenty-two papers by Johnson's former students and colleagues. International in scope, these papers explore themes and topics inspired by Johnson's work, including agricultural policy and U.S. farm prices; European Common Agricultural Policy; and agricultural and rural development in the Third World. Contributors to Volume 2 are David G. Abler, John M. Antle, Richard R. Barichello, Andrew P. Barkley, Karen Brooks, David S. Bullock, Robert E. Evenson, B. Delworth Gardner, Bruce L. Gardner, Dale M. Hoover, Wallace E. Huffman, Paul R. Johnson, Yoav Kislev, Justin Yifu Lin, Yair Mundlak, John Nash, Keijuro Otsuka, Willis Peterson, Todd E. Petzel, Vernon W. Ruttan, Maurice Schiff, G. Edward Schuh, Theodore W. Schultz, James Snyder, Vasant Sukhatme, Daniel A. Sumner, Vinod Thomas, George Tolley, and Alberto Valdes.

Clarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell’s struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt’s policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs. Mitchell’s FEPC reports and memoranda chart the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The first two volumes of a projected five-volume documentary edition of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. illuminate the FEPC’s work as a federal affirmative-action agency and the government’s struggle to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination policy in industry, federal agencies, and labor unions.

Subsequent volumes will trace Mitchell’s successive enlistment of seven presidents in establishing and enforcing a permanent national nondiscrimination policy. Through his efforts, Congress passed the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, federal spending, and employment based on race, color, sex, and national origin; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Editor Denton L. Watson introduces and annotates Mitchell’s writings, providing context and insight for students and scholars of civil rights history, government, law, and sociology.

Clarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell’s struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt’s policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs. Mitchell’s FEPC reports and memoranda chart the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The first two volumes of a projected five-volume documentary edition of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. illuminate the FEPC’s work as a federal affirmative-action agency and the government’s struggle to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination policy in industry, federal agencies, and labor unions.

Subsequent volumes will trace Mitchell’s successive enlistment of seven presidents in establishing and enforcing a permanent national nondiscrimination policy. Through his efforts, Congress passed the 1957, 1960, and 1964 Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, federal spending, and employment based on race, color, sex, and national origin; the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Editor Denton L. Watson introduces and annotates Mitchell’s writings, providing context and insight for students and scholars of civil rights history, government, law, and sociology.

Volume V of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. records the successful effort to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act: the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875.

Prior to the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP had faced an impenetrable wall of opposition from southerners in Congress. Basing their assertions on the court’s 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, legislators from the South maintained that their Jim Crow system was nondiscriminatory and thus constitutional. In their view, further civil rights laws were unnecessary. In ruling that legally mandated segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the Brown decision demolished the southerners’ argument. Mitchell then launched the decisive stage of the struggle to pass modern civil rights laws.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first comprehensive lobbying campaign by an organization dedicated to that purpose since Reconstruction. Coming on the heels of the Brown decision, the 1957 law was a turning point in the struggle to accord Black citizens full equality under the Constitution. The act’s passage, however, was nearly derailed in the Senate by southern opposition and Senator Strom Thurmond’s record-setting filibuster, which lasted more than twenty-four hours. Congress later weakened several provisions of the act but—crucially—it broke a psychological barrier to the legislative enactment of such measures.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 aimed to close loopholes in its 1957 predecessor that had allowed continued voter disenfranchisement for African Americans and for Mexicans in Texas.

In early 1959, the newly seated Eighty-Sixth Congress had four major civil rights bills under consideration. Eventually consolidated into the 1960 Civil Rights Act, their purpose was to correct the weaknesses in the 1957 law. Mitchell’s papers from 1959 to 1960 show the extent to which congressional resistance to the passage of meaningful civil rights laws contributed to the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and to subsequent demonstrations. The papers reveal how the repercussions of these events affected the NAACP’s work in Washington and how, despite their dislike of demonstrations, NAACP officials used them to intensify the civil rights struggle.

Among the act’s seven titles were provisions authorizing federal inspection of local voter registration rolls and penalties for anyone attempting to interfere with voters on the basis of race or color. The law extended the powers of the US Commission on Civil Rights and broadened the legal definition of the verb to vote to encompass all elements of the process: registering, casting a ballot, and properly counting that ballot. Ultimately, Mitchell considered the 1960 act unsuccessful because Congress had failed to include key amendments that would have further strengthened the 1957 act. In the House, representatives used parliamentary tactics to stall employment protections, school desegregation, poll-tax elimination, and other meaningful civil rights reforms. The fight would continue.

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. series is a detailed record of the NAACP leader’s success in bringing the legislative branch together with the judicial and executive branches to provide civil rights protections during the twentieth century.

During the last five months of 1782, Madison continued to advocate close co-operation with France. To assure the durability of the Confederation, he endeavored to induce delinquent states to pay their financial quotas, and advocated adoption of a proposed impost amendment.

During the first four months of 1783, when the United States was neither wholly at war nor wholly at peace, a cluster of difficult problems confronted James Madison and his fellow delegates in Congress. Faced with the interlocking issues of finance, demobilization, and foreign affairs, Congress held many contentious sessions early in the year. The sparseness of the official journal enhances the value of the notes on debates, recorded by Madison, for illuminating the discussions.

During the first six of the ten months covered by this volume, Madison completed his initial period of service as a delegate from Virginia in the Congress of the Confederation. His correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Randolph, as well as his other papers, reveal the mounting difficulties besetting him and his fellow nationalists who sought to preserve a union among the thirteen states. The major problems, which included demobilizing the discontented army, obtaining public revenue, funding the Confederation debt, pressing the British to evacuate their military posts, enforcing the preliminary articles of peace, creating a public domain in the West, locating a provisional or permanent capital of the Confederation, and negotiating commercial treaties with European powers, fostered sectionalism, factionalism, and an emphasis upon state sovereignty. As a prominent member of Congress, Madison sought legislative and constitutional remedies for this menacing divisiveness. To him the maintenence of the new nation embodied "the greatest trust ever confided to a political society," for it was "the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature."

Early in December, after an absence of over three years, Madison returned to Montpelier, his father's estate. There during the winter of 1783-1784, he studied law, renewed old friendships, and canvassed the residents of Orange County for support of his candidacy for election to the House of Delegates of the Virginia General Assembly.

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Lauri Karttunen has done groundbreaking work in theoretical and computational linguistics. The papers in this volume present new, state-of-the-art work building on his numerous contributions. The first part includes papers on formal semantics, the focus of Karttunen's early career to which he has returned in recent years. The second part provides a natural extension of his semantic work: the formal analysis of meaning and reasoning and the integration of the lexical and ontological components to enable reasoning by computational systems. The third part focuses on syntactic analyses, including the structure of non-finite clauses and sentence embedding predicates and factivity. The final part of the volume deals with finite state methods and grammars, reflecting Karttunen's extensive contributions to finite state theory and technology and its application to natural language.