scholarly journals Farewell to the “Party Period”: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard R. John

Historians of the United States have long contended that the study of governmental institutions, including the history of public policy, is no longer central to the teaching and writing of American history. Some lament this development; others hail it as a sign that other worthy topics are finally getting the attention they deserve. Yet is it true? The recent outpouring of scholarship on the relationship between the state and the market, or what an earlier generation would have called political economy, raises questions about this venerable conceit. Indeed, if one were to pick a single word to characterize the state of the field in the history of American political economy, it might well be “robust.”

Author(s):  
David Vogel

This chapter, which begins by exploring California's early history, demonstrates the critical role played by both geography and public policy in shaping the state's early economic development, the environmental impacts of that development, and the state's efforts to address those impacts. The discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills in 1848 literally created the state of California. However, the geography of those foothills and the valley into which their rivers flowed also made gold mining one of the most environmentally destructive natural resource activities in nineteenth-century America. It sharply divided the business interests of northern California, leading to a prolonged and bitter battle between mining companies and farmers in the Sacramento Valley. This conflict was finally resolved by a federal court decision in 1884 that banned hydraulic mining—the first important environmental ruling issued by a federal court. This decision was issued in San Francisco by a California judge, illustrating the important role played by the state in the history of pollution control in the United States.


Author(s):  
Brian Neve

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 589-607
Author(s):  
Alice O’Connor

This essay explores two critical moments in the recent history of US inequality, when economic measures drew attention to gaping disparities in the American political economy: the early 1960s, when popularized social statistical reporting led to the “discovery” of, and declaration of “war” on, poverty; and the 2010s, when the “1 percent” became a potent symbol of the increasingly extreme concentration of wealth. Despite pronounced differences, both moments reveal how even the most dramatic of measurements could be, and were, used as much to minimize as to reveal the broader dimensions of inequality, in ways that help us to understand the limited political response.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Max Ajl

AbstractThis review-essay looks at a recent trilogy of works on Israeli history, the political history of the relationship between the United States and Israel, and the effect of the Israel lobby on the relationship between the two states. While the books attempt to construct a narrative that essentially blame the lobby for close to one hundred years of American malfeasance in the Middle East, they falter due to their idealism, their weak grasp of regional political economy and American capital accumulation, and their conspiracism. Instead, this review proposes a reinterpretation of regional political economy, materially grounding the lobby and the Special Relationship while situating the two within the patterns of accumulation pushed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘weapondollar-petrodollar coalition’, the main determinant of American foreign policy in the Middle East.


Author(s):  
John Comaroff

In the wake of the economic “meltdown” of 2008, there arose considerable public debate across the planet over the fates and futures of neoliberalism. Had it reached its “natural” end? What, historically, was likely to become of “it”? How might the crisis in the Euro-American economies of the period transform the relationship between economy and the state? This article addresses these questions. It argues against treating neoliberalism as a common noun, a fully formed, self-sustaining ideological project and makes the case that its adjectival and adverbial capillaries alive, well, and, if in complicated ways, central to the unfolding history of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the article offers a reflection on the ways in which twenty-first-century states have become integral to the workings of finance capital, with important consequences for the conception of political economy.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 275-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anver M. Emon

This article repositions historigraphically a particular thesis in Islamic legal studies that characterizes Islamic law as utterly incompatible with codification, and by implication the modern administrative state. This article departs from that argument by situating codification efforts in Muslim majority polities alongside other efforts at codification, specifically 19th century Germany and the United States. The article shows that the thesis of incompatibility relies on a constricted reading of the “Islamic”, an overdetermined conception of the state, and an under-appreciation of the populist-cum-democratic ideology that animates the thesis in the first place. A more fruitful way forward is to reify the “state” rather than rarefy it as a theophanic specter. To better appreciate the relationship between Islamic law and codification, the argument suggests, requires that scholars attend to the “state” while resituating the history of the “Islamic” in terms of a history of the “legal”.


Author(s):  
Terence Young ◽  
Alan MacEachern ◽  
Lary Dilsaver

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.


Author(s):  
Danylo Kravets

The aim of the Ukrainian Bureau in Washington was propaganda of Ukrainian question among US government and American publicity in general. Functioning of the Bureau is not represented non in Ukrainian neither in foreign historiographies, so that’s why the main goal of presented paper is to investigate its activity. The research is based on personal papers of Ukrainian diaspora representatives (O. Granovskyi, E. Skotzko, E. Onatskyi) and articles from American and Ukrainian newspapers. The second mass immigration of Ukrainians to the US (1914‒1930s) has often been called the «military» immigration and what it lacked in numbers, it made up in quality. Most immigrants were educated, some with college degrees. The founder of the Ukrainian Bureau Eugene Skotzko was born near Western Ukrainian town of Zoloczhiv and immigrated to the United States in late 1920s after graduating from Lviv Polytechnic University. In New York he began to collaborate with OUN member O. Senyk-Hrabivskyi who gave E. Skotzko task to create informational bureau for propaganda of Ukrainian case. On March 23 1939 the Bureau was founded in Washington D. C. E. Skotzko was an editor of its Informational Bulletins. The Bureau biggest problem was lack of financial support. It was the main reason why it stopped functioning in May 1940. During 14 months of functioning Ukrainian Bureau in Washington posted dozens of informational bulletins and send it to hundreds of addressees; E. Skotzko, as a director, personally wrote to American governmental institutions and foreign diplomats informing about Ukrainian problem in Europe. Ukrainian Bureau activity is an inspiring example for those who care for informational policy of modern Ukraine.Keywords: Ukrainian small encyclopedia, Yevhen Onatsky, journalism, worldview, Ukrainian state. Keywords: Ukrainian Bureau in Washington, Eugene Skotzko, public opinion, history of journalism, diaspora.


Author(s):  
Katherine Eva Maich ◽  
Jamie K. McCallum ◽  
Ari Grant-Sasson

This chapter explores the relationship between hours of work and unemployment. When it comes to time spent working in the United States at present, two problems immediately come to light. First, an asymmetrical distribution of working time persists, with some people overworked and others underemployed. Second, hours are increasingly unstable; precarious on-call work scheduling and gig economy–style employment relationships are the canaries in the coal mine of a labor market that produces fewer and fewer stable jobs. It is possible that some kind of shorter hours movement, especially one that places an emphasis on young workers, has the potential to address these problems. Some policies and processes are already in place to transition into a shorter hours economy right now even if those possibilities are mediated by an anti-worker political administration.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Joseph Prud'homme

The contemporary social moment in the United States has affirmed the critical importance of racial justice, and especially claims to justice informed by the contributions of structural and institutional forces connected with the nation’s original sin of slavery. In this paper, I examine the contributions of strict church–state separationism to the maintenance of slavery in the antebellum South in comparison to the contributions various forms of religious establishment made to the successful abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Developing a deeper historical understanding of the ways the relationship between religious and governmental institutions influenced the abolition and maintenance of slavery can assist the contemporary quest for racial justice.


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