New Books in American Politics

Throughout much of his career as an actor in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan identified as a passionate New Deal Democrat, yet by the time he turned to a career in politics in the 1960s he was a conservative Republican. In Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon (Potomac Books, 2019), Robert Mann charts the course of his transition and explores the factors behind it. Growing up in Illinois, Reagan adopted the politics of his father Jack, an Irish Democrat who administered welfare programs during the Great Depression. As an actor Reagan became known among his peers for his passion for politics, and he often campaigned for Democrats in national elections. As Mann explains, while Reagan’s time as president of the Screen Actors Guild was an important stage in his shift rightward, the key was his work in the 1950s as a spokesperson for General Electric. During his time with the famously conservative company, Reagan embraced their views and gradually crafted his presentation of them in speeches he gave throughout the country. It was a refined version of these speeches which he gave in a nationally televised address during the 1964 presidential campaign which launched his career in elected politics, one that culminated in his election to the highest office in the land less than two decades later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is the Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Birmingham-Southern College. Fifty years after the Supreme Court decision, Integration Now explores how studying the case Alexander v. Holmes (1969) enhances understandings of the history underlying school desegregation. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press.Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South’s public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion’s share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required “integration now,” and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools.Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Presidency scholars Bert A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige have compiled an excellent array of authors and essays in their edited volume, The Obama Legacy (University Press of Kansas, 2019). This book, with twelve chapters that explore multiple dimensions of Barack Obama’s Administration, provides readers with substantial analysis of policy, partisanship, historical and political context in considering both the administration itself and the legacy of Obama’s administration.This book is part of a series that has included retrospective evaluation and analysis of the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama. While this series on individual presidential legacies was initially published by other presses, it now resides at the University Press of Kansas as part of the book series on presidential appraisals and legacies.The Obama Legacy covers the domestic and foreign policy attempts, failures, and achievements in thoughtful chapters by Alyssa Julian, John D. Graham, and David Patrick Houghton, while also examining how Obama and his presidency contributed to shaping of the partisan landscape. Julia Azari’s chapter tracing the rise of even more acute partisanship and polarization and how the parties grappled with these dynamics is a key contribution to the presidential scholarship around party polarization. Each chapter of the book includes an assessment of partisanship and polarization because it is impossible to understand the Obama presidency and its legacy without this lens of analysis and interpretation. Alvin B. Tillery Jr. and Angela Gutierrez, Angela X. Ocampo, and Matt A. Barreto focus their respective chapters on Obama and his administration’s relationship with key demographic groups, particularly African Americans and Latino/Latina Americans. The book also pays specific attention to the Obama Administration’s relationship with the branches of government in chapters by Molly E. Reynolds, Sharice Thrower, and David A. Yalof. Rockman and Rudalevige have produced an accessible and important discussion of the Obama Administration, the impact of Obama’s two terms in the White House, and the historical context in which to consider Obama’s legacy as president.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Zoltan Hajnal examines the political impact of the two most significant demographic trends of last fifty years. Examining federal and local elections over many decades, as well as policy, Hajnal finds that race more than class or any other demographic factor shapes not only how Americans vote but also who wins and who loses. America has become a racial democracy, with non-Whites and especially African Americans regularly on the losing side. As worrisome, Hajnal shows that over time these divisions are worsening, yet also discovers that electing Democrats to office can make democracy more even and ultimately reduce inequality in well-being.Hajnal is professor of political science at UC-San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Goldman, who teaches political science at George Washington University, Washington DC, has written a powerfully impressive new book on the long history of the political theology that he describes as “Christian Zionism.” God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America takes some very unexpected routes through a subject that, in some respects, is well-known. Beginning his account with English puritans in the early seventeenth century, and tracing the impact of their expectation of the future restoration of Jewish people to the Promised Land, he shows how this discourse became increasingly and then distinctively American, and until some new religious movements, such as the Mormons, came to imagine the new world as itself the location within which end-times prophecies would be fulfilled. Only since the 1980s has the term “Christian Zionism” entered the political lexicon as a neologism that obscures as much as it reveals about the agendas of those it is used to describe. God’s Country is an expansive, often surprising and always insightful account of a political theology that continues to resonate in discussions of modern American politics and foreign policy.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Brandeis University Press, 2018), Professor Marc Dollinger who holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University, challenges widely held beliefs about the black-Jewish alliance in American politics. Dollinger shows how black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda - including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism. This book breaks new ground and charts new directions for understanding the relationship between black and Jewish politics in the twentieth century and beyond.Dr Max Kaiser teaches at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. Gerald Leonard, Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University, focus on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more 'democratic' vision premised on the exclusion of women and non-whites. It incorporates recent scholarship on topics ranging from judicial review to popular constitutionalism to place judicial initiatives like Marbury vs Madison in a broader, socio-legal context. The book recognizes the role of constitutional outsiders as agents in shaping the law, making figures such as the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten part of a cast of characters that has traditionally been limited to white, male elites such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall. Finally, it shows how the 'democratic' political party came to supplant the Supreme Court as the nation's pre-eminent constitutional institution.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, sheds new light on one of Chicano history’s most notorious figures in her new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Oropeza intervenes in the conventional historical scholarship on protest politics through her biography of Reies López Tijerina, a land grant activist and founder of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Tijerina was a living testament to the fact that individuals of Mexican descent were part and parcel of the monumental political changes in the United States during the 1960s and the challenge to the established racial order. But Tijerina was more than just another radical advocate of armed protest, he was also uniquely shaped by his extreme religious beliefs and his particular understanding of justice rooted in the restoration of land rights. As the author argues, Tijerina was the harbinger of an anti-colonial rhetoric that helped reframe Mexican American civil rights. Perhaps most importantly, Oropeza centers the experiences and treatment of women in Tijerina’s life as a lens with which to view his world and activism. Drawing from her experience as a former journalist and now academic historian, Oropeza investigates the lives of Tijerina’s wives and daughters through oral history in order to reveal that “the subordination of women was fundamental to his ideal community.” In the end, Reies López Tijerina was a man of intense conviction who sought to achieve his goals at any cost – often at the expense of those that once loved him most.Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. In order to unpack these complexities and mine underutilized sources of public opinion data, Steven White had written World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). White is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.White offers an extensive analysis of rarely used survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the White house response to civil rights. Intriguingly, he shows that the white public's racial policy opinions largely DID NOT liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany and Congress remained unwilling to act on a civil rights policy agenda. Painfully aware of this, civil rights advocates shifted venues to lobby for unilateral action by the president. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The United States Supreme Court operates to resolve disputes among lower courts and the other branches of government, allowing elected officials, citizens, and businesses to act without legal uncertainty. Yet a Court that prioritizes resolving many disputes sometimes will produce contradictory opinions or fail to provide a rationale for its decision at all. In either case, it produces an unreasoned judgment. When does the Court do this and is this on the rise?Matthew Hitt has written Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court (University of Michigan Press, 2019) to answer this question. Hitt is assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.In Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court, Hitt demonstrates that over time, institutional changes have substantially reduced unreasoned judgments in the Court’s output, coinciding with a reduction in the Court’s caseload. As such, though the Supreme Court historically emphasized dispute resolution, it has evolved into a Court that prioritizes the goal of logically consistent doctrine. Consequently, the Court today fails to resolve more underlying questions in law and society in order to minimize criticism of its output from other elites. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices