You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The modern, centralized American state was supposedly born in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Kimberley S. Johnson argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Cooperative federalism was not born in a Big Bang, but instead emerged out of power struggles within the nation's major political institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining the fifty-two years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression, Johnson shows that the "first New Federalism" was created during this era from dozens of policy initiatives enacted by a modernizing Congress. The expansion of national power took the shape of policy instruments that reflected the ...
Making the Modern American Fiscal State chronicles the rise of the US system of direct and progressive taxation.
In this eye-opening book, Professor James Bennett guides readers through centuries of one of the most underrated yet widely used aspects of American life—roads. Relying on history and economic data—and with a humorous and oftentimes sharp tongue—Bennett explains how important America's highways and byways have been to everything from policymaking to everyday life. Crafting America's roads took persuasion, planning—and more taxes than any politician could have dreamed of. And far too often their realization, thanks, in Bennett's view, to flawed interpretations of the power of eminent domain, required destruction, sometimes on a massive scale, of long-established neighborhoods and impo...
The Kinzua Dam has cast a long shadow on Seneca life since World War II. The project, formally dedicated in 1966, broke the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794, flooded approximately 10,000 acres of Seneca lands in New York and Pennsylvania, and forced the relocation of hundreds of tribal members. Hauptman offers both a policy study, detailing how and why Washington, Harrisburg, and Albany came up with the idea to build the dam, and a community study of the Seneca Nation in the postwar era. Although the dam was presented to the Senecas as a flood control project, Hauptman persuasively argues that the primary reasons were the push for private hydroelectric development in Pennsylvania and state tran...
Blames the government's deregulation of radio and the corporate obsession with the bottom line in the wake of the controversial Telecommunications Act of 1996. Fighting for greater democratization of the airwaves, the authors call for a return to localism to save Americans from corporate and government control of public information.
Unearths an unexpected bloom of liberty in an ex-slave's journal.
Providing the first historical study of New Deal public works programs and their role in transforming the American economy, landscape, and political system during the twentieth century. Reconstructing the story of how reformers used public authority to reshape the nation, Jason Scott Smith argues that the New Deal produced a revolution in state-sponsored economic development. The scale and scope of this dramatic federal investment in infrastructure laid crucial foundations - sometimes literally - for postwar growth, presaging the national highways and the military-industrial complex. This impressive and exhaustively researched analysis underscores the importance of the New Deal in comprehending political and economic change in modern America by placing political economy at the center of the 'new political history'. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Smith provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the relationship between the New Deal's welfare state and American liberalism.
Stradling shows how New York's varied landscape and abundant natural resources have played a fundamental role in shaping the state's culture and economy.