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Best known today as “the other speaker at Gettysburg” alongside Abraham Lincoln, Edward Everett had a distinguished and revealing career in American politics between the 1820s and the Civil War. He served as a member of both houses of Congress, governor of Massachusetts, U.S. representative to Britain, president of Harvard, and Secretary of State. On the strength of his crusade to save Mount Vernon as a shrine to the Union, Everett also appeared as a vice presidential candidate in the momentous presidential election of 1860. He was unrivalled as an orator and statesman for Union. This study of Everett’s political career illuminates vital themes at the state, national, and international levels of American politics, across several decades. Everett was deeply committed both to vision of moral and material reform and to preserving the Union by tying Americans’ hearts to a shared history. But the issue of slavery constantly threatened to derail all of Everett’s nation-building efforts. This political biography, by tracing Everett’s movement along the antislavery spectrum, exemplifies how most Northerners considered slavery within a larger context of competing priorities that alternately furthered or blocked antislavery action. Everett’s moderate position on slavery and perennial efforts to preserve the sacred Union connected him with masses of his fellow Americans. The emotional popular response to his appeals illustrates the ongoing power of Unionism even as the nation’s sectional divide worsened. This account of Everett’s career thus helps us see the coming of the Civil War as a three-sided, not a two-sided, contest.

This book demonstrates that early utopian visions for England’s American colonies had a lasting impact. Those early plans not only influenced the future form of American cities, but they shaped the American political landscape as well. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the most powerful politicians in England when he and seven other noblemen founded the Province of Carolina. At an early stage in planning the colony, Ashley Cooper enlisted the assistance of John Locke in preparing its constitution, settlement strategy, and urban-regional design guidelines. Together they left an indelible imprint on the colony and America. Combined with other influences, notably Caribbean slave society, Carolina went on to influence the development of southern political culture. That unique political culture is rooted in ancient hierarchical traditions that stand in sharp contrast to America’s Enlightenment tradition (ironically also shaped in part by the later Locke). The book concludes with an appeal to urbanists, environmentalists, scientists, and others grounded in the Enlightenment paradigms of equality and reason to understand the powerful attraction of pre-Enlightenment political culture. Doing so, the book argues, requires understanding America’s utopian colonial origins.

As the most populated country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest communist dissident movement, Poland proved crucial in understanding Eastern Europe's transition from communism to democracy. While the Cold War waned, both the United States and the Soviet Union watched to see how their competing influences would shape the post-communist Polish nation. This book examines America's policy toward Poland and its support of the moderate over the radical revolutionaries while also addressing the Soviet and European influences on the Polish revolution. Considering figures such as Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbechev, and Pope John Paul II, the book charts the United States' influence on anti-communist opposition groups, particularly Solidarity, the underground movement led by future president Lech Walesa, using archival research and interviews with Polish and American government officials and opposition leaders. While arguing that Soviet leaders allowed radical, pro-democratic change in Poland through their international policies, the book also analyses the global impact on the Polish pro-democracy movement and identifies Poland as a laboratory for the Soviets' own future political and social reforms.

In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons. Their smiling faces were used to sell everything, including war. This book offers an unprecedented account of how Soviet and American leaders used emotionally-charged images of children to attempt to create compliance among their citizenry for their policies at home and abroad. In the end, however, no one could control these ubiquitous images or the meanings that they conveyed. Groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain pushed visions of napalmed, abandoned, and segregated children to indictthe state and its policies. Commonly, the Cold War is viewed as an ideological divide between the capitalist West and the communist East. Yet despite their differences, the book demonstrates a deep symmetry in how Soviet and American propagandists mobilized similar images to similar ends. Based on extensive research spanning fourteen archives and three countries, the book tells a new story of the Cold War, seeing the conflict not as a divide between East and West, but as a struggle between the producers of culture and their target audiences.

In this intellectual history of the fraught relationship between race and poverty in the 1960s, Robin Marie Averbeck offers a sustained critique of the fundamental assumptions that structured liberal thought and action in postwar America. Focusing on the figures associated with “Great Society liberalism” like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, David Riesman, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Averbeck argues that these thinkers helped construct policies that never truly attempted a serious attack on the sources of racial inequality and injustice. In Averbeck’s telling, the Great Society’s most notable achievements--the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--came only after unrelenting and unprecedented organizing by black Americans made changing the inequitable status quo politically necessary. And even so, the discourse about poverty created by liberals had inherently conservative qualities. As Liberalism Is Not Enough reveals, liberalism’s historical relationship with capitalism shaped both the initial content of liberal scholarship on poverty and its ultimate usefulness to a resurgent conservative movement.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime," and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies. Michael S. Sherry argues that, by the 1990s, the "war on crime" had been successfully broadcast to millions of Americans at an enormous cost--to those arrested, imprisoned, or killed and to the social fabric of the nation--and that the currents of vengeance that ran through the punitive turn, underwriting torture at home and abroad, found a new voice with the election of Donald J. Trump. By 2020, the connections between war-fighting and crime-fighting remained powerful, evident in campaigns against undocumented immigrants and the militarized police response to the nationwide uprisings after George Floyd’s murder. Stoked by "forever war," the punitive turn endured even as it met fiercer resistance. From the racist system of mass incarceration and the militarization of criminal justice to gated communities, public schools patrolled by police, and armies of private security, Sherry chronicles the United States' slide into becoming a meaner, punishment-obsessed nation.

From the middle of the twentieth century, think tanks have played an indelible role in the rise of American conservatism. Positioning themselves against the alleged liberal bias of the media, academia, and the federal bureaucracy, conservative think tanks gained the attention of politicians and the public alike and were instrumental in promulgating conservative ideas. Yet, in spite of their formative influence on media and public opinion, little has been written on the history of these institutions. Right Moves is the first sustained investigation of the rise and historical development of the conservative think tank as a source of political and cultural power in the United States. What we now know as conservative think tanks--research and public relations institutions populated by conservative intellectuals--emerged in the postwar period as places for theorizing and “selling” public policies and ideologies to both lawmakers and the public at large. Right Moves traces the progression of think tanks from their outsider status in a world of New Deal and Great Society liberalism to their current prominence as a counterweight to progressive political institutions and thought in a “marketplace of ideas.” By examining the rise of the conservative think tank, Right Moves makes invaluable contributions to our historical understanding of conservatism, public policy formation, and capitalism.

From the days of steamship travel to Palestine to today's evangelical Christian tours of Jesus’s birthplace, the relationship between the United States and the Holy Land has become one of the world’s most consequential international alliances. While the political side of U.S.-Israeli relations has long played out on the world stage, the relationship, as Shalom Goldman shows in this illuminating cultural history, has also played out on actual stages. Telling the stories of the American superstars of pop and high culture who journeyed to Israel to perform, lecture, and rivet fans, Goldman chronicles how the creative class has both expressed and influenced the American relationship with Israel. The galaxy of stars who have made headlines for their trips includes Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Scarlett Johansson. While diverse socially and politically, they all served as prisms for the evolution of U.S.-Israeli relations, as Israel, the darling of the political and cultural Left in the 1950s and early 1960s, turned into the darling of the political Right from the late 1970s. Today, as relations between the two nations have only intensified, stars must consider highly fraught issues, such as cultural boycotts, in planning their itineraries.

Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies? In this classic book, originally published in 1980, Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political an social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order. Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed “stateless” societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.

In the late nineteenth century, Italians and Eastern European Jews joined millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations, including the United States. Many Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded these newcomers as biologically and culturally inferior--unassimilable--and by 1924, the United States had instituted national origins quotas to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Weaving together political, social, and transnational history, Maddalena Marinari examines how, from 1882 to 1965, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country’s immigration policy as they mobilized against the immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. Strategic alliances among restrictionist legislators in Congress, a climate of anti-immigrant hysteria, and a fickle executive branch often left these immigrants with few options except to negotiate and accept political compromises. As they tested the limits of citizenship and citizen activism, however, the actors at the heart of Marinari’s story shaped the terms of debate around immigration in the United States in ways we still reckon with today.

The Virgin Vote traces the experiences of children and young adults from the 1840s through 1900, an era in which the most enthusiastic participants in politics came from this young demographic. During these 60 years, political campaigns provided the most entertainment that the average American was likely to have all year--and with good reason: candidates hoped to win a man’s vote early. A man’s first, or “virgin,” vote represented the moment he became a true adult. Moreover, winning a man’s virgin vote came with a supposition that a political party had won his vote forever. Therefore, knowing that they were determining their supporter base for years to come, political candidates courted young voters in earnest. And even in an era where the vote was limited to men, Grinspan argues, popular politics were actually quite inclusive. Mothers were deeply involved in inculcating their children with the desired political ideas, and young women often flirted with young men in an effort to win them over to their chosen partisan side. Grinspan also examines the ways that African American young adults enthusiastically joined the fray after the Civil War.