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American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignme...
Today, the word "neoliberal" is used to describe an epochal shift toward market-oriented governance begun in the 1970s. Yet the roots of many of neoliberalism's policy tools can be traced to the ideas and practices of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he terms "supply-side liberalism," a powerful and enduring orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and economists, and urban and rural economic planners. Beginning in the late 1930s, New Dealers tied expansive aspirations for social and, later, racial progress to a variety of economic development ...
Of Limits and Growth offers new perspectives on environmentalism, post-1945 international history, and the origins of sustainability.
A major history of America's political parties from the Founding to our embittered present America’s political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today’s parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass po...
How a woman-led citizens’ group beat a Southern political machine by enlisting federal bureaucrats and judges to protect their neighborhood from unchecked economic development This social history of local political activism tells the story of the decades-long fight to save Green Springs, Virginia, illuminating the economic tradeoffs of protecting the environment, the origins of NIMBYism, the changing nature of local control, and the surprising power of history to advance public policy. Rae Ely faced long odds when she launched a campaign in 1970 to stop a prison, then a strip mine, in Green Springs. The local political machine supported both projects, promising jobs for impoverished Louisa...
Renowned environmental and natural resource legal scholar Christine Klein is joined by Shannon Roesler, the Charlotte and Frederick Hubbell Professor of Environmental and Natural Resources Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, on the third edition of Property: Cases, Problems, and Skills. This comprehensive casebook combines the core, doctrinal elements of a 1L Property course with larger, more nuanced social, environmental, and ethical perspectives. This book offers a versatile, middle position in the Property market: it is straightforward and tightly-organized while also avoiding oversimplification. Property: Cases, Problems, and Skills offers a wealth of doctrinal, policy, and the...
An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives. Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—c...
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Winner of the PROSE Award in United States History Hagley Prize in Business History Finalist A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year “Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.” —New York Times Book Review From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated. After the Great Depression, g...
In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South. Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing m...
A Potent Moment assesses the current state of cannabis laws in the United States in the context of broader discussions about drug policy and advances a framework for future efforts to use cannabis legalization to advance social equity. It describes the racist origins of cannabis criminalization and the ways in which the prosecutors of the War on Drugs have disproportionately harmed people of color. It also offers numerous detailed case studies to identify both the successes and failures of the more recent movement to legalize cannabis at the state level, particularly in terms of their efficacy at using cannabis policy to redress social inequality. At the same time, the author considers the difficulty of crafting effective policies in the face of ongoing cannabis criminalization at the federal level, a theme which is present throughout the book as well as in a chapter dedicated to weighing the benefits—but also real dangers—of various proposals for national legalization. A Potent Moment ends with a forceful call to reorient American drug policy away from fear, stigma, and punishment and toward evidence-driven approaches that are applied with compassion.