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This book introduces the intrepid temperance advocates who formed America's longest-living minor political party - the Prohibition Party - drawing on the party's history to illuminate how American politics came to exclude minor parties from governance. Lisa M. F. Andersen traces the influence of pressure groups and ballot reforms, arguing that these innovations created a threshold for organization and maintenance that required extraordinary financial and personal resources from parties already lacking in both. More than most other minor parties, the Prohibition Party resisted an encroaching Democratic-Republican stranglehold over governance. When Prohibitionists found themselves excluded from elections, they devised a variety of tactics: they occupied saloons, pressed lawsuits, forged utopian communities, and organized dry consumers to solicit alcohol-free products.
Carry A. NationRetelling the Life Fran Grace The story of one of America's most notorious and misunderstood women. Carry Nation was 54 when she "smashed" her first saloon, but her life before she started her infamous hatchet crusade has been little known until now. In this first scholarly biography of Nation, Fran Grace unfolds a story that often contrasts with the image of Nation as "Crazy Carry," a bellicose, blue-nosed, man-hating killjoy. Using newly available archival materials and placing Nation in her various historical and cultural contexts, Grace "retells" the crusader's tumultuous life. Brought up in antebellum Kentucky, Nation lived through the devastation of the Civil War and end...
The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent America's great political upheaval is brilliantly explored...
As a rare and fascinating record of one person's rise through the American judicial system, this book is an indispensable addition to the libraries of all lawyers, legal scholars, legal and constitutional historians, and political scientists.
Formally, Kansas still operates under a constitution dating from 1959. However, its present day basic law differs importantly from the original text. In The Kansas State Constitution, Francis H. Heller offers an unprecedented explanation of Kansas's experience with "incremental revision." In The Kansas State Constitution, Francis H. Heller carefully traces the history and development of the Kansas state constitution. Heller includes the constitutional text in its entirety and offers accompanying descriptions of specific constitutional provisions. These descriptions provide readers with important information about the origins each provision, as well as ways in which the courts and other gover...
Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a se...
"She was my idol," said columnist Mary McGrory. McGrory, in writing of women, referred to Doris Fleeson as "incomparably the first political journalist of her time." Fleeson was, in fact, the first woman in the United States to become a nationally syndicated political columnist. In 1945, with the encouragement of Henry Mencken, she launched her column. In her career she would write some 5,500 columns during the next twenty-two years. Fleeson's appearance could be disarming. Once at a party Lady Bird Johnson exclaimed, "What a gorgeous dress, Doris. It makes you look just like a sweet, old-fashioned girl." The wife of Senator Stuart Symington interjected, "Yes, just a sweet old-fashioned girl...
Kansas Trivia is the who, what, when, where, and how book of the great state of Kansas. Filled with interesting questions and answers about well-known and not-so-well-known facts of this colorful and historic state, Kansas Trivia will provide hours of entertainment and education. Designed for use in a wide variety of settings - home, office, school, parties - it focuses on the history, culture, people, and places of the fascinating Sunflower State.
It seems to be a tenet of the human condition to perceive “others” as “different” and potentially hostile. In nearly all societies stereotypes are developed to stigmatize suspected enemies within and without. The American case is particularly interesting in this respect because American society consists of nothing but “others”; to be open to “others” and welcome those who are “different” is one of the basic tenets of the country. However, this principle often conflicts with the need to integrate all these “strangers” into a homogeneous, governable society, which causes the formation of hostile stereotypes of certain ethnic groups that do not “fit in.” The authors in this volume look at the development of these “enemy images,” which form a fairly consistent pattern, from the period of the American Revolution to the post–World War II era. In doing so, they focus on the question of to what extent these enemy images influence the formulation and outcome of foreign, domestic, and immigration policies.