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Vilja Hulden reveals how this tension provided the opening for pro-business organizations to shift public attention from concerns about inequality and dangerous working conditions to a belief that unions trampled on an individual's right to work. Inventing the term closed shop, employers mounted what they called an open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers at unionized workplaces join the union. Employer organizations lobbied Congress to resist labor's proposals as tyrannical, brought court cases to taint labor's tactics as illegal, and influenced newspaper coverage of unions. While employers were not a monolith nor all-powerful, they generally agreed that unions were a nuisance. Employers successfully leveraged money and connections to create perceptions of organized labor that still echo in our discussions of worker rights.

In 1831, Stevens T. Mason was named Secretary of the Michigan Territory at the tender age of 19, two years before he could even vote. The youngest presidential appointee in American history, Mason quickly stamped his persona on Michigan life in large letters. After championing the territory's successful push for statehood without congressional authorization, he would defend his new state's border in open defiance of the country's political elite and then orchestrate its expansion through the annexation of the Upper Peninsula---all before his official election as Michigan's first governor at age 24, the youngest chief executive in any state's history.

The Boy Governor tells the complete story of this dominant political figure in Michigan's early development. Capturing Mason's youthful idealism and visionary accomplishments, including his advocacy for a strong state university and legislating for the creation of the Soo Locks, this biography renders a vivid portrait of Michigan's first governor---his conflicts, his desires, and his sense of patriotism. This book will appeal to anyone with a love of American history and interest in the many, larger-than-life personalities that battled on the political stage during the Jacksonian era.

Long before “Cesar Chávez” and “Chicano” became commonly known, the word “bracero” had established itself in the language of American politics. The Mexican Farm Labor Program—or bracero program as it came to be known—was from its inception in 1942 a highly controversial issue. At international, national, and subnational levels, it remained the focal point of an intense interest-group struggle. This struggle and its group combatants provide the central concern of this study.

In the early 1940’s agribusiness interests had sought to contract Mexican laborers (“braceros”) for work on United States farms. With the entry of the United States into World War II, legislation was passed for contracting braceros on a large scale. What was originally a wartime measure soon became an institution. During twenty-two years, 4.2 million braceros were contracted. The United States, at the insistence of the Mexican government, became a partner in the program, ensuring that the braceros were provided housing, set wages, and other benefits.

The program was, however, detrimental to one group in the United States: the native farmworker. Not only was the bracero provided guarantees that the native could not demand, but the bracero also got the native’s job.

During the late forties and fifties, organized labor gathered its forces in Congress to oppose the program. Finally, an administration favorable to the native farmworker threw its support behind the native laborer, and through the Department of labor measures were passed that made it less attractive to hire foreign labor.

In the end, the anti-bracero forces won out in Congress and defeated extension of the Mexican Farm Labor program. At the same time, the United States government, by setting the working standards for foreign workers, brought about an improvement in the working conditions and wages of native farm laborers.

Besides the conflicts between domestic interests, Craig examines the international conflicts and issues involved, as well as the international agreements that were the basis of bracero contracting. He discusses with perception the program’s immediate and long-range effects on Mexico. His study analyzes and clarifies one of the most controversial domestic and international programs of the twentieth century.

Narrates how big business guided policy and expanded the state in early twentieth-century Britain.

During World War I, British businessmen streamed into government service. When Britain faced unprecedented economic challenges after the war’s end, civil servants turned to the same businessmen with whom they had worked. The result was a durable public-private network of both bureaucrats and executives: the business state.

In this book, Ian Kumekawa throws light on the previously obscured and hidden world of the business state and the economic thinking of its administrators. He breaks new methodological ground by treating the state and business together as a single entity. Twentieth-century states, he argues, were porous networks in which lines between business and governance were not clearly defined. In liberal democracies, the term “business-friendly” has long been understood as synonymous with laissez-faire. The Business State explores the historical limits of that assumption by focusing on Britain, the self-identified small, liberal state par excellence. In doing so, the book shows how a liberal democracy was effectively co-opted by private interests and explores how actively assisting big business became not just acceptable—but a political necessity.

Using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, recently opened archival collections, and interviews with the actual participants, Immerman provides us with a definitive, powerfully written, and tension-packed account of the United States' clandestine operations in Guatemala and their consequences in Latin America today.

What’s your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can’t protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA’s image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s.

The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA’s role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency’s and its officers’ involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image.

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is a modern classic of critical philosophy and political economy, renowned for its depth and comprehensive research. It provides a step by step diagnosis of the continuing economic collapse in the US and Europe and has had an enormous influence on new visions of economic alternatives.

John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the ‘social immune response’ required to fight the ‘macro cancer’, something which has already been shown in developments such as the Occupy movement and the democratic social transformation of Latin America.

In an official global culture increasingly destructive of life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to life and nature.

How the transition from physical trading floors to automated ones changed central business districts and urban policy.

Wall Street is defined by the New York Stock Exchange’s headquarters, while the Chicago Board of Trade’s iconic building anchors LaSalle Street in the city’s Loop. These buildings have not moved in a century, but their trading floors have experienced dramatic changes over the past sixty years. While thousands of commuters still work in and around Wall Street, most stocks are traded via computer. Not even the NYSE’s servers are onsite.

The Capitals of Capital charts the rise and dematerialization of stock-exchange trading floors in New York and Chicago, demonstrating how the finance industry has long been entwined with urban planning and development. Aaron Shkuda shows in detail how the industry came to dominate cities both economically and spatially, tracing the demands of firms like Chase Manhattan Bank and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for larger central facilities, better tax breaks, and other accommodations—until technological developments shifted their priorities from spaces for people to capacity for machines. Shkuda’s history of trading floors reveals financial institutions as change agents in urbanism; through their evolving construction proposals, they forced elected officials, urban planners, architects, and voters to consider the value of trading floors, their significance to a city and its people, and what kind of resources they deserved. Today, as Wall Street towers are converted to apartments and server farms, The Capitals of Capital sheds light on the ever-shifting relationship between the finance industry and urban spaces.

A penetrating look into the hidden networks of wartime capture, circulation, and detainment by United States military personnel

The Capture Chain offers a detailed history of the United States’ detention practices and the evolving infrastructure designed for the apprehension, control, and transportation of people during times of war. Spanning eight decades and several major conflicts, this work examines the hidden spaces and logistical networks connecting the front lines and prisoner-of-war camps—sites that exist at the fraught intersection of life maintenance and death distribution.

Detailing the routes, protocols, research methods, and technical systems that constitute what Richard Nisa terms the global capture chain, this book underscores how such military architectures have become increasingly sophisticated and technologically advanced since the dawn of the Cold War. Drawing on declassified military documents, diplomatic records from the Geneva Conventions, and memoirs written by soldiers and prisoners, The Capture Chain offers unprecedented insight into this shifting geography of psychological and physical violence.

Using archival research to draw links between behavioral science studies during the Korean War, Vietnam-era computation, and post-9/11 rendition networks and digital biometrics, The Capture Chain introduces new ways of understanding urgent contemporary debates around autonomous warfare, mass surveillance, and detainment. By introducing the capture chain as both a historical object and a methodological lens, Nisa highlights the legal and moral grey area that constitutes the ongoing militarized maintenance of human life.

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How digital technologies entrench state power—and a new vision for resistance

As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power.

Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order.

Tracing today’s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD’s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp.

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Vasili Rukhadze examines the factors that contributed to post-uprising leadership durability in the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia in 2004–12, after these countries underwent their so-called “Color Revolutions.” Using structured, focused comparison and process tracing, he argues that the key independent variable influencing post-mobilization leadership durability is ruling coalition size and cohesion. He demonstrates that if the ruling coalitions are large and fragmented, as in the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, the coalitions disintegrate, thus facilitating the downfall of the governments. Alternatively, if the ruling coalition is small and cohesive, as in Georgia, the coalition maintains unity, hence helping the government to stay in power.

This study advances the debate on regime changes. By drawing a clear distinction between political leaderships that come to power as a result of popular uprisings and governments that take power through normal democratic processes, military coup, or any other means, the research offers one of the first studies on post-mobilization leadership. Rukhadze helps scholars differentiate between the factors that affect durability of post-uprising leadership from those factors that impact durability of all other political leadership, in turn equipping researchers with new tools to study power politics.

Threats to American unity are not unique to modern times. In the 1960s, the assassination of President Kennedy, the tension of racial strife, the political extremes of the Radical Right with its John Birchers and the Radical Left with its threat of Communism all raised critically urgent questions relative to our national unity, to our political stability, and to our vaunted respect for the rule of law. The Challenges to Democracy is an assessment of the foundations of political unity in the United States.

The American consensus, as Murray Clark Havens defines it, emphasizes a set of values and procedures that most Americans, since the adoption of the Constitution, have accepted in principle: religious tolerance, individual freedom in intellectual and cultural matters, the importance of education and intellectual effort, settlement of internal conflict through peaceful and political processes, the supremacy of law, a high and generally rising standard of living, and, since the Civil War, racial compatibility.

Never in our history have the ideals of this consensus been fully achieved, but as long as the majority of our citizens accept the validity of those ideals and the democratic procedures for realizing them, the basic American political unity is not threatened. However, when citizens who cannot accept the elements of the American consensus become influential enough to block the democratic process, then that consensus is threatened.

Havens shows how such threats have come to us all through our history—the Civil War, racial and religious bigotry, the Ku Klux Klan, Huey Long, Father Coughlin and other extremists of the desperate thirties, McCarthyism. He discusses contemporary dangers to American unity such as those connected with the acceptance of the African American, religious friction in politics and government, the Radical Right and the Radical Left, and our foreign policy as an expression of the American consensus.

The broad conclusions of this study are that our national unity is continuously in jeopardy, with frequent recurrences of serious questions as to the permanence of some of the patterns we have always associated with American government, but that our democracy is possessed of considerable potential for survival because of our deep national commitment to democracy and because of our even deeper nationalism.

Have Americans become more or less tolerant of racial discrimination? More or less supportive of abortion? Is a new tax revolt underway? Did a "new conservative mood" dominate elections and policy discussions in the early 1980s? Popular and academic discussions about the past and future of American politics often turn on the question of whether and how public opinion has changed. Yet for all the talk about such matters, observes political scientist William G. Mayer, there is surprisingly little hard evidence on many of these questions. The Changing American Mind is designed to fill that gap, by presenting a comprehensive history of American public opinion over the last three decades: how it changed, why it changed, and what difference that makes for American politics. The Changing American Mind is important reading for all who are interested in American politics and public opinion. Its appendices, which include the results of more than 250 survey questions that have been asked regularly of national samples over the last three decades, make it an indispensable reference source for everyone who studies or participates in American politics.

As the number of women in the U.S. Senate grows, so does the number of citizens represented by women senators. At the same time, gender remains a key factor in senators’ communications to constituents as well as in news media portrayals of senators. Focusing on 32 male and female senators during the 2006 congressional election year, Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney examine in detail senators’ official websites, several thousand press releases and local news stories, and surveys of 18,000 citizens to discern constituents’ attitudes about their senators.

The authors conclude that gender role expectations and stereotypes do indeed constrain representational and campaign messages and influence news coverage of both candidates and elected senators. Further, while citizens appear to be less influenced by entrenched stereotypes, they pay more attention to female senators’ messages and become more knowledgeable about them, in comparison to male senators.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

An eye-opening analysis of collegiate activism and its effects on the divisions in contemporary American politics. 

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.
 
In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.  
 

"A Texas governor has only two happy days: the day he is inaugurated and the day he retires."

So spoke Joseph D. Sayers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, in an analysis of the Texas governorship by Fred Gantt, Jr., the reader learns why Governor Sayers' remark remains true many years after it was uttered: the office has come to be so demanding that the reader may ask why anyone would want it. Price Daniel described a typical day: "The governor's job is a night-and-day job; I usually get up in the morning about seven and start answering the telephone, and then look over the mail that has come in late the day before. I sign mail before going over to the office and then have interviews most of the day. . . . In the evening at the Mansion I take calls and messages until late in the night."

The Chief Executive in Texas is much more than a book full of interesting facts: It is a discerning political commentary built on a broad historical foundation that places events and persons in a perspective perhaps not previously considered by the reader.

The office of chief executive in other states also is explored, as well as the decline and rise of executive power as it has been limited in various constitutions in Texas and as it has developed through custom. The account of the governor's relationship with the Legislature is historically valuable. Especially interesting to many readers will be the discussions of the political roles of individual Texas governors, whose ranks include "Ma" and "Pa" Ferguson and "Pappy" O'Daniel. These studies are personally revealing, and they attest that polities in Texas apparently can never be dull.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr’s book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended.

Most proponents of democracy, Niebuhr claimed, were “children of light,” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. They needed, he believed, to absorb some of the wisdom and strength of the “children of darkness,” whose ruthless cynicism and corrupt, anti-democratic politics should otherwise be repudiated. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society that took the measure of every group’s self-interest and was chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power. It is in the foreword to this book that he wrote, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Gaudiopolis (The City of Joy) was a pedagogical experiment that operated in a post–World War II orphanage in Budapest. This book tells the story of this children’s republic that sought to heal the wounds of wartime trauma, address prejudice and expose the children to a firsthand experience of democracy. The children were educated in freely voicing their opinions, questioning authority, and debating ideas.

The account begins with the saving of hundreds of Jewish children during the Siege of Budapest by the Lutheran minister Gábor Sztehlo together with the International Red Cross. After describing the everyday life and practices of self-rule in the orphanage that emerged from this rescue operation, the book tells how the operation of the independent children’s home was stifled after the communist takeover and how Gaudiopolis was disbanded in 1950.

The book then discusses how this attempt of democratization was erased from collective memory. The erasure began with the banning of a film inspired by Gaudiopolis. The Communist Party financed Somewhere in Europe in 1947 as propaganda about the construction of a new society, but the film’s director conveyed a message of democracy and tolerance instead of adhering to the tenets of socialist realism. The book breaks the subsequent silence on “The City of Joy,” which lasted until the fall of the Iron Curtain and beyond.

Weston Agor’s carefully documented analysis of the organization and workings of the Chilean Senate is the first of its kind and fills a long-standing need in the comparative study of the internal structure of legislative bodies.

Making eclectic use of role, power, and exchange theories, Agor bases his discussion on personal interviews with senators and staff as well as on extensive observation of the Senate in action during 1967–1968. He also analyzes in detail relevant documents, committee reports, and floor debates. Focused primarily on the formal decision-making structure within the Senate and on internal norms, both formal and informal, that hold that structure together, Agor’s study fruitfully compares the Chilean Senate with its peers, including the United States Senate, to which it bears surprising resemblance in form and function.

Agor examines the role of compromise and informal rules of the game in achieving a majority vote in the Senate, the power of committees and committee presidents, and political party control over Senate members. The influence of the executive, particularly in the passage of executive legislation, and its effect on the Senate’s internal system of checks and balances—both stated and understood—are examined in terms of their effect on the political strength of the Senate.

The Chilean Senate, unlike its counterparts in most other “developing countries,” has exercised genuine and effective influence in the national political system. In an epilogue to this study, Agor views events since 1968, including the election of Allende, that affected the future role of the Senate in Chilean politics.