New Books in American Studies

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. There has been a lot written about the financial crisis of the late 2000s, but little with the attention to important concepts from political science. Wallach investigates the various federal strategies to address the meltdown of the financial sector from the perspective of legitimacy, seeking to understand what we can learn about this idea from the unprecedented expansion of federal power. From efforts to save the failing investment banks, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, to the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), federal officials applied a largely ad-hoc approach that Wallach deems "adhocracy" often substituting expedience for legal authority. While this worked in the short-term, Wallach probes where this leaves the country and speculates about what will come in the future.

Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll. That's the stereotypical view of the 1960s. But in her memoir, Ithaca Diaries, Coming of Age in the 1960s (Cambridge Common Press, 2014), journalist and writer Anita M. Harris tells a more nuanced story about her tumultuous undergraduate years at Cornell University.    

The historiography of the southern Civil Rights Movement has long focused on the tactic of non-violence. With only a few notable exceptions, most scholarship locates the use of armed self-defense and other forms of armed resistance in northern cities while temporally, we usually think of these strategies as rising to prominence only later in the movement. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, tells us this common narrative omits a long and rich history of armed resistance in the southern Black Freedom Struggle. His new book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York University Press, 2013), traces the roots of this armed resistance in Mississippi. His book shows black Mississippians had a long tradition of armed self-defense extending well before the iconic Civil Rights campaigns in the state. Moreover, when the movement came, self-defense remained. The book shows armed self-defense co-existed with non-violence–sometimes cooperatively, sometimes uneasily, and often both–throughout the period usually strongly associated with non-violence, such as during Freedom Summer. We Will Shoot Back goes on to examine the growing prominence of armed resistance in the mid to late 1960s. He shows the many different forms armed resistance took. Some of those forms were advocated by small groups or were short-lived, while others were quite successful. In this episode of the podcast, Umoja discusses how he came to study this topic and his research process, including many oral histories. He also explains the importance of broadening our understanding of Civil Rights activism to include this longer history of armed resistance.

Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock professor of history at Davidson College. In her book Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford University Press, 2015) McMillen has given us a rich biography of the life and times of the abolitionist and women's rights advocate Lucy Stone. Born in 1818 into a farming community in Massachusetts, Stone a precocious and determined girl set her sights not on marriage but on education and self-development leading her to a earning a degree from Oberlin College. Against her parents' wishes for their daughter, she chose to pursue a career as a public speaker on behalf of abolition and women's rights. Rising from relative obscurity she became known as a passionate and persuasive speaker crisscrossing the country and speaking to thousands. Her gender, her confident demeanor, and the unpopular views brought both admiring and hostile audiences. Along the way, she forged political alliances and personal friendships with the leading abolitionists and women's rights advocates including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and Wendell Phillips. Her many associations including significant contributions to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, American Equal Rights Association, and founding the American Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman's Journal framed her 50-year career. McMillen also provides a private portrait of a principled Lucy Stone battling bouts of self-doubt, exhaustive travel, and difficult financial and political challenges within and without the suffrage movement. As the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell and the wife of Henry Browne Blackwell, her partner- in-arms, she undertook a domestic life that stood against the marital customs of her day. Avoiding self-promotion and refusing to participate in building her historical legacy she was left out of the national Memorial Sculpture to women's rights at the U.S. Capitol rotunda diminishing her place among Mott, Stanton and Anthony. McMillen recovers not only a committed advocate but also one who against societal norms lived out her ideals of an independent, full, and self-directed life for women.

[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today's guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the history of capitalism and U.S. foreign relations across the twentieth century. Amongst other topics, Jenifer Van Vleck tells us how the airline industry helped solve various political and logistical challenges for the U.S. government during World War II and how the airlines relied on the government and vice-versa. Jenifer Van Vleck is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. She is author of Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Harvard University Press, 2013).

With a 2016 presidential election likely to cost several billions dollars, is there any way to prevent money from completely overwhelming US politics? Public financing of campaigns has offered one solution and is the focus of Michael G. Miller's new book, Subsidizing Democracy: How Public Funding Changes Elections and How it Can Work in the Future (Cornell UP, 2014). In several states – Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine – implemented full public funding plans in the early 2000s. These state-level efforts allow Miller to test several assumptions about public funding, including an argument that they could increase the quality of candidates in competitive races, free candidates to meet more registered voters, and possible increase turnout. The empirical findings from Miller's research provide convincing evidence that many of these goals have been met. Miller is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College.

Americans believe they have a number of protections on the job, which are common in other democracies (free speech and privacy, defense against capricious firing, etc.). They are wrong. And in her fascinating new book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the legal historian Sophia Z. Lee wants to understand why. She explores two major campaigns, stretching roughly from the 1920's to the 1980's, to establish constitutional safeguards in the workplace, uncovers their remarkable successes, and ultimate failures. It is a story of unlikely bedfellows: black, pro-union labor activists like C.W. Rice and Charles Houston fighting if not quite alongside then at least parallel to anti-union, right-to-work corporate leaders like Cecil B. DeMille and William T. Harrison for a similar goal to contrary ends. Lee finds that, contrary to what many think, civil rights groups like the NAACP were actively pursuing employment safeguards in the postwar era, using the "exclusive representation" granted by the New Deal to unions to make creative arguments for "state action" on the basis of the "duty of fair representation." At the same time, conservatives sought to roll back the dramatic expansion of organized labor during the late 1930's and especially World War II (to a third of the non-agricultural workforce) by arguing that "closed shop" rules forced men to join unions and to pay for such things as lobbying. Initially, the courts rejected these latter petitions, during a time when corporations suffered from its Great Depression reputation. But in the late 1950's, as Congress uncovered corruption in select unions and the civil rights movement steadily grew, businessmen and liberal Republicans had far more success allying themselves with discrimination cases. The Supreme Court, for its part, was caught between not wanting to uphold segregation in labor, or to establish safeguards that would force integration on the entire private sector. Free marketers had nightmares about the racial and economic implications of a workplace Constitution, and unions did, too, for different reasons. With this deadlock, administrative agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission became fertile arenas for legal expansions. The result is a tale of absorbing complexity–thankfully, lucidly and beautifully written.

This book is a ton of fun. To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press) taps the deep and colorful collection of Southern California restaurant menus archived by the Los Angeles Public Library. Author Josh Kun, a professor in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California, presides over beautiful pages showing a century of menus, ranging from the Art Deco high points of the Brown Derby (purportedly where the Cobb Salad was invented) to the low points of "Southern" style joints whose menus used stereotype Aunt Jemima-type depictions of African American women to draw in customers. My favorites include a menu for the Hangman's Tree Café, a joint in the San Fernando Valley that seemed to be working the theme of serving last meals. Fun? Kun uses the images to spin a narrative about class, race and, of course, food in the history of Los Angeles. Enjoy.

In this podcast I discuss Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940  (Yale University Press, 2013) with author Nicholas R. Parrillo, professor of law at Yale University. Parrillo's book was winner of the 2014 Law and Society Association James Willard Hurst Book Prize and the 2014 Annual Scholarship Award from the American Bar Association's Section on Administrative Law. Per the book jacket, "in America today, a public official's lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently provided for officials to make money on a profit-seeking basis. Prosecutors won a fee for each defendant convicted. Tax collectors received a percentage of each evasion uncovered. Naval officers took a reward for each ship sunk. Numerous other officers were likewise paid for 'performance.' This book is the first to document the American government's for-profit past, to discover how profit-seeking defined officialdom's relationship to the citizenry, and to explain how lawmakers–by ultimately banishing the profit motive in favor of the salary–transformed that relationship forever." Parrillo's intricate analysis adds nuance to the American story of government compensation and explains why government officials made money in ways that today would be deemed necessarily corrupt. Some of the topics we cover are: –The ways American lawmakers made the absence of a profit motive a defining feature of government –The two non-salary forms of payment for government officials that initially predominated in the US –How these two forms of payment tended to give rise to very different social relationships between officials and the people with whom they dealt –Why the flight to salaries was an admission of law's weakness and failure

In Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), Kevin M. Schultz has given us a lively and colorful narrative history that captures the character of two complex men and the times in which they lived. Juxtaposing a conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and the radical Norman Mailer against a liberal establishment brings into sharp relief what the men shared and the source of their conflict. Both men agreed that there was something amiss of about American society and sought to build a movement against the entrenchment of liberal bureaucratic control and the threat of totalitarianism. With clashing visions for a new national politic, they were both surprised by the constituency that they each attracted and grew more alike as they responded to the movements they had fomented. Through their writings, public and private encounters, and an overlapping network of friends and political acquaintances we get a glimpse in the elite power dynamics that shaped the sixties. By attending to a flurry of lectures, debates, parties, letters, and the striking personalities of these two men, Schultz shows us was right and wrong with America at mid-century and the transition from a rules based to a rights based society. The relationship of Buckley and Mailer not only reflected the nation's struggles in the sixties, but also captures the continual conflict over the future of America. Kevin M. Shultz is an associated professor of history at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at New York University. There has been a lot written about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but little with the sophistication and personal touch of Gould-Wartofsky's new book. What emerged in the fall of 2011 in Lower Manhattan had roots in similar protests going on across Europe, but soon spread to over a thousand US cities. As a participant observer from the very earliest days of the movement, Gould-Wartofsky blends writing styles and perspectives as he deepens what we know about social movements, in general. He maps the various tactics, factions, and motivations that drove the movement, but also what it felt like to be in Zuccotti Park.

Disputes over the definitions or legality of 'rights' and 'rationing' in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and vocal members of their constituency have strong convictions about the state of our current national health care system and where it is going. Far fewer, however, understand how our current state of affairs is the product of a quite recent and contingent history, which is precisely what Beatrix Hoffman's Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 (University of Chicago, 2012) sets out to explain. While Hoffman's scope is the U.S. as a whole, she draws out the local consequences of sweeping wartime and post-war reform by focusing on various cities, notably Chicago. Using a framework that addresses the reciprocal roles of rights and rationing as articulated by physicians, policymakers, and patients throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, she presents a concise history that speaks to far greater questions. Throughout Health Care for Some, we learn much about the institutional transformations of modern U.S. healthcare: how the expansive yet exclusive county hospital system was not inevitable but fell in line with other infrastructural imperatives, while war-wrecked European nations actually improved primary care coverage through austerity policies; how doctors increasingly struggled with poor state management and strictures that, despite being legally sanctioned, discouraged providing care to the most needy; how Medicare and Medicaid were motivated as much by the civil rights movement as arguments for dignity of old age as a social right. Importantly, the human dimensions of care are never hidden from sight, as Hoffman unravels narratives of entangled structures and subjectivities that evince the personal damage wrought by a system too diffuse to overhaul. Her book is an engaging, informative, and concise read, as capable of becoming a valuable reference as it is of fomenting thought and action.

Greg Siegel's new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating forensic knowledge of accident causation as a key to solving the accident, and treating this knowledge as the source for the future improvement of both technology and civilization. Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Duke University Press, 2014) argues that accidents, forensics, and media have been central to the emergence and evolution of this tendency. The chapters of the book trace the forms of media (graphic, photographic, electronic, and digital) that have been crucial forensic mediation since the nineteenth century, a period when the accident became "technologically modern" and the relationship between progress and catastrophe was transformed by the rise of "forensic rationality." A series of fascinating case studies guides readers through the nature and implications of this transformation by introducing the rise of the forensic engineer, the inscribing apparatus of Charles Babbage, the "black box" technology of the flight-data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, and the high-speed cinematography that offered a way of mapping and making sense of vehicle collision in the 1950s. There are some extremely moving moments nestled in the narratives of these cases, including a must-read discussion of last words and cockpit voice recorders in Chapter 3. Forensic Media is not only a gripping read, but will make a great addition to the syllabi for upper-level courses that treat any combination of STS, technology studies, media studies, and studies of modernity

In recent decades, as Democrats and Republicans have grown more and more polarized ideologically, and gridlock has becoming increasingly standard in Congress, there has been a noticeable pining for the good old days when bipartisanship was common, and strongmen like Lyndon B. Johnson occupied the White House, ready to twist a few arms or trade a little pork when narrow interests threatened the general welfare. Liberals have perhaps been most vulnerable to this myth of late, with journalists repeatedly calling on Obama to bust through the unprecedented obstruction of the last few years by channeling the spirit of LBJ, who delivered more progressive legislation than anyone, save FDR. But as the eminent political historian Julian E. Zelizer writes in his new book The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015), this view of the past falls short on a number of counts. When LBJ first took over, he faced the same "do-nothing" Congress that had imprisoned domestic reform under JFK, Eisenhower, Truman, and the late New Deal, too. The South, an increasingly small part of the national population (counting the millions who could not vote), nonetheless dominated the old committee system, thanks to mass incumbency in the one-party region, America's uncommon deference to seniority in the legislature and its local delegation of voter law. Leaguing frequently with the GOP's right wing, Southern chairmen prevented a host of reforms from escaping the drafting stage and reaching a floor vote, even where legislation had popular support. A golden age of bipartisanship. Johnson understood, where many have forgotten, that it was these giants of Congress, not the White House, which held all the power. And these legislators boasted as much, often protected by districts with vanishingly small electorates. What opened the floodgates to the Great Society was not LBJ, "master of the Senate," famed author of "The Treatment," but the liberal supermajority of the "Fabulous eighty-ninth" Congress. When these votes disappeared in the midterm, a standard historical pattern, reform came to a screeching halt. (One reason Johnson urged House terms–the shortest in the democratic world–be extended to four years.) Liberals had major advantages in the 1960s that they have since lost: huge unions with crucial manpower and funding, a massive civil rights groundswell, "modern" Republican allies, brain-trust and whip organizations in Congress that Zelizer here thankfully recovers from obscurity. But one thing that has not changed is America's uniquely divided governmental system. Reformers dream of Great Men and focus on the White House, not Capitol Hill and the built-in features of gridlock, to their peril.

For as long as Herman Melville's Moby Dick has been a staple of the American literary canon, one element often goes unnoticed. The ship commanded by the monomanacial Ahab on his quest to slay the great white whale is named the Pequod, just one letter of difference from Pequot, a Native nation living within what is now southern New England. Perhaps Mellville was just participating in the widespread romantic nostalgia of the age, when many corporate enterprises and vessels took the name of the supposedly disappearing and noble Indians. Or, maybe he was simply gesturing at the reality of the industry. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when Moby Dick takes place, Native men from New England constituted a huge portion of the whaling workforce, some spending decades at sea, encountering diverse peoples across two oceans, and invigorating their economically marginalized reservations with vital income. These forgotten seamen finally have a chronicler in Nancy Shoemaker, professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Author or editor of seven books, her latest is Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).