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In their productive outpouring, the scholarly literatures on “the state” in American history and political development have advanced myriad working assumptions about the state without reconciling those assumptions within a coherent rubric. This introductory essay makes a preliminary case for addressing this challenge by focusing research on the boundary conditions of state formation, where the limits of government authority reveal the principles of its operation. Focusing on boundary conditions allows us to move beyond a merely refractory view of the state to probe the ways in which public power has been constitutive of politics and indeed of social categories themselves. This approach has the added advantage of accounting for the dynamism and flexibility of American power, whereas more established scholarly approaches centered on bureaucratic autonomy or elite networks paint a more static portrait. It would appear that these boundaries are not simply limits or loci of visibility for American government, but are themselves generators of new quanta of power, providing sites for the transformation of social into public power.

Chicagoans have participated in block clubs for a century. Block clubs are small, geographically-based, voluntary organizations dedicated to improving the physical environment and regulating public behavior. Through extensive archival work in fragmented sources, this book reconstructs block clubs’ history. Block clubs are common in Chicago, the focus of this study, but have also appeared in many other American cities. Although the National Urban League, an African American organization, pioneered the form in black neighborhoods in the early twentieth century, after World War II Chicagoans of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds readily joined block clubs across the city. These organizations conduct a variety of locally-directed activities, including cleaning up streets and alleys, transforming vacant lots into gardens and playgrounds, throwing parties, and preventing crime. Block clubs make it possible to trace the contours of urbanites’ relationships with local government and to discover how residents manage spaces that they do not legally control. Finally, this book concludes that “neighboring” should be considered a key analytical category of urban scholarship.

Newton Minow's long engagement with the world of television began nearly fifty years ago when President John F. Kennedy appointed him chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. As its head, Minow would famously dub TV a “vast wasteland,” thus inaugurating a career dedicated to reforming television to better serve the public interest. Since then, he has been chairman of PBS and on the board of CBS and elsewhere, but his most lasting contribution remains his leadership on televised presidential debates. He was assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson when Stevenson first proposed the idea of the debates in 1960; he served as cochair of the presidential debates in 1976 and 1980; and he helped create and is currently vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized the debates for the last two decades. This book offers a genuinely inside look into the origins of the presidential debates and the many battles—both legal and personal—that have determined who has been allowed to debate and under what circumstances. The book does not dismiss the criticism of the presidential debates in recent years but does come down solidly in favor of them, arguing that they are one of the great accomplishments of modern American electoral politics. As they remind us, the debates were once unique in the democratic world and are now emulated across the globe.

In 1915, western farmers created the starkest challenge to party politics in twentieth-century America. Their movement—the Nonpartisan League (NPL)—deployed novel tactics that challenged existing institutions. In an effort to empower average citizens, the League drove a brief but powerful electoral insurgency. At its peak, almost 250,000 paying members lived in thirteen states and two Canadian provinces. As a result, the NPL dramatically shaped North American politics in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Too often overlooked, the League’s perspective and tactics offer real possibilities for politics today.

This book tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and set in motion changes that eventuated in the rise of the Republican Party, and ultimately, the Civil War and the abolition of American slavery. Because of the longstanding bifurcation between studies of the antislavery movement and studies of the sectional conflict, political abolitionists’ vital role in both has been too frequently overlooked. This book corrects this disconnect and shows how political abolitionists, working first through the Liberty Party and then the Free Soil Party, reshaped national politics. Savvy third-party leaders pioneered and disseminated the politically critical but often-misunderstood Slave Power concept, which this book reframes as an argument about party politics. Identifying the Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats as the mainstay of the Slave Power’s supremacy, political abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could overthrow the Slave Power’s control of the federal government. Through a series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics, the Liberty and Free Soil Parties wielded power far beyond their numbers and helped reorient national political debate around slavery. Focusing especially on the U.S. Congress, political abolitionists popularized their Slave Power argument and helped generate controversy over slavery’s westward expansion to destroy the Second Party System and erect the Republican Party as the first major party independent of the Slave Power.

A century after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most compelling and complicated figures ever to occupy the Oval Office. A political outsider, Wilson brought to the presidency a distinctive, strongly held worldview, built on powerful religious traditions that informed his idea of America and its place in the world. This book presents a detailed analysis of how Wilson's religious beliefs affected his vision of American foreign policy, with repercussions that lasted into the Cold War and beyond. Framing Wilson's intellectual development in relationship to the national religious landscape, and paying attention to the role of religion, the book shows how Wilson's blend of Southern evangelicalism and social Christianity became a central part of how America saw itself in the world, influencing seemingly secular policy decisions in subtle, lasting ways. Ultimately, the book makes a case for Wilson's religiosity as one of the key drivers of the emergence of the public conception of America's unique, indispensable role in international relations.

Picturing Political Power analyzes images of political power from the nation’s founding through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Building on scholarship that focuses on antislavery and civil rights imagery, the book demonstrates the centrality of visual politics—the strategic use of images to promote a cause or candidate—to women’s rights campaigns over the long nineteenth century. Powerful opponents of women’s rights printed popular satirical pictures to reinforce dominant gender norms and women’s relationships with the state. In response, reformers distributed portraits and propaganda to contest them. Suffragists found that they needed to engage in this visual conversation to change widespread perceptions of political women and win support. Unlike their lectures and pamphlets that reached select audiences, Americans encountered these pictures everywhere. Illustrated newspapers, decorative parlor prints, and photographic portraits prompted the rise of visual culture, which facilitated shared understandings of the nation. Popular pictures constructed dominant ideas about race and gender. Individual leaders initially incorporated visual strategies from other movements and, ultimately, professionals coordinated innovative national campaigns that laid the foundations for modern ones. While many suffrage histories analyze the movement’s internal politics, this book situates reformers within the context of public political conversations. Anti-suffragists dominated, even without a national organization, during the nineteenth century. Therefore, they prove central to this broader visual debate about gender and politics. This wide lens captures a broader range of women’s activism, organizations, and important leaders. Black women—including Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Church Terrell—stand out as public image innovators.

For decades, Woodrow Wilson has been remembered as either a paternalistic liberal or reactionary conservative at home and as a naïve idealist or cynical imperialist abroad. He won two US elections by promising a deliberative democratic process that would ensure justice and political empowerment for all, yet under Wilson, Jim Crow persisted, interventions in Latin America increased, and a humiliating peace settlement was forced upon Germany. A generation after Wilson, stark inequalities and injustices still plagued the nation, myopic nationalism hindered its responsible engagement in world affairs, and a second vastly destructive global conflict threatened the survival of democracy worldwide—leaving some Americans today to wonder what, exactly, the buildings and programs bearing his name are commemorating. This book argues that there is more to the story of Wilson than these sad truths. The book makes the case that Wilson was not a “Wilsonian,” as that term has come to be understood, but a principled pragmatist in the tradition of William James. He did not seek to stamp American-style democracy on other peoples, but to enable the gradual development of a genuinely global system of governance that would maintain justice and facilitate peaceful change—a goal that, contrary to historical tradition, the American people embraced. This book gives us a new vision of Wilson, as well as a model of how to think about the complex relationship between the world of ideas and the worlds of policy and diplomacy.

A revolution is a discontinuity: one political order replaces another, typically through whatever violent means are available. Modern theories of revolutions tend neatly to bracket the French Revolution of 1789 with the fall of the Soviet Union two hundred years later, but contemporary global uprisings—with their truly multivalent causes and consequences—can overwhelm our ability to make sense of them. Arjomand reaches back to antiquity to propose a unified theory of revolution. Revolution illuminates the stories of premodern rebellions from the ancient world, as well as medieval European revolts and more recent events, up to the Arab Spring of 2011. Arjomand categorizes revolutions in two groups: ones that expand the existing body politic and power structure, and ones that aim to erode—but paradoxically augment—their authority. The revolutions of the past, he tells us, can shed light on the causes of those of the present and future: as long as centralized states remain powerful, there will be room for greater, and perhaps forceful, integration of the politically disenfranchised.