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Examines both the legal and illegal uses of the death penalty in American history.
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we...
"Why is The Making of New Deal Democrats so significant? One of the major controversies in the study of American elections has to do with the nature of electoral realignments. One school argues that a realignment involves a major shift of voters from one party to another, while another school argues that the process consists largely of mobilization of previously inactive voters. The debate is crucial for understanding the nature of the New Deal realignment. Almost all previous work on the subject has dealt with large-scale national patterns which make it difficult to pin down the precise processes by which the alignment took place. Gamm's work is most remarkable in that it is a close analysis of shifting voter alignments on the precinct and block level in the city of Boston. His extremely detailed and painstaking work of isolating homogeneous ethnic units over a twenty-year period allows one to trace the voting behavior of the particular ethnic groups that ultimately formed the core of the New Deal realignment."—Sidney Verba, Harvard University
Successful businessman David M. Parry wrote The Scarlet Empire in 1906, a time when dystopian and utopian novels were sufficiently popular in the United States and Great Britain that dozens were published in each country. Utopian fiction described perfect societies, usually socialistic and communitarian. Dystopian novels depicted degenerate societies, often occurring from the same approaches. In their introduction to this reprint, historians Jerome M. Clubb and Howard W. Allen argue that Parry's novel and others like it display the opinions, feelings, and reactions of different sects of society at the turn of the century. Rapid changes in the United States caused mixed emotions about the fut...
"This is an important book. In the latter nineteenth century, diverse and influential elements in white America combined forces to settle the 'Indian question' through assimilation. . . . The results were the essentially treaty-breaking Dawes Act of 1887, related legislation, and dubious court decisions. Schoolteachers and missionaries were dispatched to the reservations en masse. Eventual 'citizenship' without functional rights was given Native Americans; the Indians lost two-thirds of reservation land as it had existed before the assimilationist campaign. . . . With insight and skill that go well beyond craft, Hoxie has admirably defined issues and motives, placed economic/political/social...
Allegations that widespread voter fraud is threatening to the integrity of American elections and American democracy itself have intensified since the disputed 2000 presidential election. The claim that elections are being stolen by illegal immigrants and unscrupulous voter registration activists and vote buyers has been used to persuade the public that voter malfeasance is of greater concern than structural inequities in the ways votes are gathered and tallied, justifying ever tighter restrictions on access to the polls. Yet, that claim is a myth. In The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite presents the results of her meticulous search for evidence of voter fraud. She concludes that whi...
This collection of essays questions whether the theory of electoral realignment, referring originally to a major shift in party preference within the general public, can explain electoral developments in the USA, both of the post-1968 period and of earlier political eras.
The Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates of 1858 marked a significant crossroads in the political career of Abraham Lincoln. Though he lost the Unites States senate seat for Illinois to Stephen A. Douglas, the debates launched Lincoln into political prominence and eventually contributed to his successful run for the presidency. This work reveals Lincoln's political evolution during the debates through a narrative approach, evaluating his debate strategy and seemingly inconsistent views on slavery and racial inequality. Organized chronologically, the book examines each of the seven debates individually, acknowledging Lincoln's disappointing turns at Jonesboro and Charleston but celebrating his powerful comeback at Alton in the final senatorial debate.