While domestic issues loom large in voters' minds during American presidential elections, matters of foreign policy have consistently shaped candidates and their campaigns. From the start of World ...War II through the collapse of the Soviet Union, presidential hopefuls needed to be perceived as credible global leaders in order to win elections -- regardless of the situation at home -- and voter behavior depended heavily on whether the nation was at war or peace. Yet there is little written about the importance of foreign policy in US presidential elections or the impact of electoral issues on the formation of foreign policy.
InUS Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy, a team of international scholars examines how the relationship between foreign policy and electoral politics evolved through the latter half of the twentieth century. Covering all presidential elections from 1940 to 1992 -- from debates over American entry into World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War -- the contributors correct the conventional wisdom that domestic issues and the economy are always definitive. Together they demonstrate that, while international concerns were more important in some campaigns than others, foreign policy always matters and is often decisive. This illuminating commentary fills a significant gap in the literature on presidential and electoral politics, emphasizing that candidates' positions on global issues have a palpable impact on American foreign policy.
In the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the United States suffered the most sustained and extensive wave of job destruction since the Great Depression. When families in need sought help from the safety ...net, however, they found themselves trapped in a system that increasingly tied public assistance to private employment. InThe Workfare State, Eva Bertram recounts the compelling history of the evolving social contract from the New Deal to the present to show how a need-based entitlement was replaced with a work-conditioned safety net, heightening the economic vulnerability of many poor families.
The Workfare Statechallenges the conventional understanding of the development of modern public assistance policy. New Deal and Great Society Democrats expanded federal assistance from the 1930s to the 1960s, according to the standard account. After the 1980 election, the tide turned and Republicans ushered in a new conservative era in welfare politics. Bertram argues that the decisive political struggles took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when Southern Democrats in Congress sought to redefine the purposes of public assistance in ways that would preserve their region's political, economic, and racial order. She tells the story of how the South-the region with the nation's highest levels of poverty and inequality and least generous social welfare policies-won the fight to rewrite America's antipoverty policy in the decades between the Great Society and the 1996 welfare reform. Their successes provided the foundation for leaders in both parties to build the contemporary workfare state-just as deindustrialization and global economic competition made low-wage jobs less effective at providing income security and mobility.
The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country ...in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines.
Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.
In the years after the Civil War, black and white Union soldiers who survived the horrific struggle joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)--the Union army's largest veterans' organization. In ...this thoroughly researched and groundbreaking study, Barbara Gannon chronicles black and white veterans' efforts to create and sustain the nation's first interracial organization.According to the conventional view, the freedoms and interests of African American veterans were not defended by white Union veterans after the war, despite the shared tradition of sacrifice among both black and white soldiers. InThe Won Cause, however, Gannon challenges this scholarship, arguing that although black veterans still suffered under the contemporary racial mores, the GAR honored its black members in many instances and ascribed them a greater equality than previous studies have shown. Using evidence of integrated posts and veterans' thoughts on their comradeship and the cause, Gannon reveals that white veterans embraced black veterans because their membership in the GAR demonstrated that their wartime suffering created a transcendent bond--comradeship--that overcame even the most pernicious social barrier--race-based separation. By upholding a more inclusive memory of a war fought for liberty as well as union, the GAR's "Won Cause" challenged the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory.
Most Americans know that the state of Texas was once the Republic of Texas—an independent sovereign state that existed from 1836 until its annexation by the United States in 1846. But few are aware ...that thousands of Americans, inspired by Texas, tried to establish additional sovereign states outside the borders of the early American republic. In Breakaway Americas, Thomas Richards, Jr., examines six such attempts and the groups that supported them: patriots who attempted to overthrow British rule in Canada; post-removal Cherokees in Indian Territory; Mormons first in Illinois and then the Salt Lake Valley; Anglo-American overland immigrants in both Mexican California and Oregon; and, of course, Anglo-Americans in Texas.
Though their goals and methods varied, Richards argues that these groups had a common mindset: they were not expansionists. Instead, they hoped to form new, independent republics based on the American values that they felt were no longer recognized in the United States: land ownership, a strict racial hierarchy, and masculinity.
Exposing nineteenth-century Americans' lack of allegiance to their country, which at the time was plagued with economic depression, social disorder, and increasing sectional tension, Richards points us toward a new understanding of American identity and Americans as a people untethered from the United States as a country. Through its wide focus on a diverse array of American political practices and ideologies, Breakaway Americas will appeal to anyone interested in the Jacksonian United States, US politics, American identity, and the unpredictable nature of history.
The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars.All Bound Up Togetherexplores the roles ...black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women, Jones explains, often organized within already existing institutions--churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, Jones demonstrates that their approach was not unanimous or monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote. Through a far-ranging look at politics, church, and social life, Jones demonstrates how women have helped shape the course of black public culture.
Days after taking the White House, Donald Trump signed three executive orders-these authorized the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids. These orders would define his administration's approach ...toward noncitizens. An essential primer on how we got here, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary shows that such barriers to immigration are embedded in the very foundation of the United States. A. Naomi Paik reveals that the forty-fifth president's xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. She deftly demonstrates that attacks against migrants are tightly bound to assaults against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, and queer and gender nonconforming people. Against this history of barriers and assaults, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary mounts a rallying cry for a broad-based, abolitionist sanctuary movement for all.
From the nation's leading expert, an indispensable analysis of key threats to the integrity of the 2020 American presidential election As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is ...widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In this timely and accessible book, Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about "stolen" elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans. Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years-most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections-Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.
An insider's view of the U.S. government's response to the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, as recounted by the people who made the key decisions In 2008, the world's financial system stood on the ...brink of disaster. The United States faced an unprecedented crisis when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, setting off a global panic. Faced with the prospect of a new Great Depression, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and other agencies took extraordinary measures to contain the damage and steady the financial system and the economy. Edited by three of the policymakers who led the government's response to the crisis, with chapters written by the teams tasked with finding policy solutions, this book provides a comprehensive accounting of the internal debates and controversies surrounding the measures that were taken to stabilize the financial system and the economy. Offering previously untold insight into the key choices (including rejected options) and a frank evaluation of successes and failures, this volume is both an important historical document and an indispensable guide for confronting future financial calamities.
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