Racial Rule

2018 ◽  
pp. 158-216
Author(s):  
David A. Bateman ◽  
Ira Katznelson ◽  
John S. Lapinski

This chapter turns to home rule, in particular southern evaluations of prospects for a new national labor policy and attention to voting rights protections. Southern success in defeating a renewed consideration of the franchise established the terms of the broad national accommodation that came to characterize American policy and politics for the first half of the twentieth century. The South would be left alone to determine the contours of black citizenship, while the economic program of the Republican Party would be placed on a stable political foundation. When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, the region's representatives provided fifteen of the nineteen votes cast against the initial war resolution in the House. Yet despite the region's anti-imperialist sentiment, the war with Spain became an occasion to affirm the South's definitive return to the Union.

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.


Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan

Bursting into fame toward the end of the Great Depression, Harold Stassen—elected governor of Minnesota at age thirty-one in 1938--excited a new generation of Republicans who enthusiastically supported his run for the presidency. After failing to win the nomination in 1948—a goal he believed his early successes merited—he repeatedly chased the nomination over the next generation. He became a figure of mockery as a perennial also-ran on the margins of the history of the twentieth century. He sought the Republican nomination for president of the United States twelve times between 1944 and 1992. Given his youth and enthusiasm, it was not surprising that he attracted supporters who were college age and younger. He broke with Republican Party leadership to engage in grassroots campaigning, bringing a corps of youthful admirers into his fold. He was a vigorous and articulate spokesman for a new generation ready to take over a demoralized party in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to an unprecedented third term in the White House.


2006 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Provasnik

A considerable body of scholarship has examined the history of compulsory attendance in the United States in an effort to explain why compulsory attendance laws were enacted, what effects they had on school attendance rates, and what made enforcement of these laws effective eventually. Recent research has revealed that some long-standing assumptions and conclusions about compulsory attendance warrant reconsideration. For example, the assumptions that educators promoted compulsory attendance and that compulsory attendance laws were enacted when state legislators responded to educators' demands disregard the historical reality that educators and state teachers' associations generally did not support compulsory attendance and that the biggest proponent of compulsory attendance legislation was a faction of the Republican Party. Similarly, the conventional periodization of compulsory attendance laws into two phases—“symbolic” and “bureaucratic”—obscures several facts. The conventional periodization holds that before the 1890s compulsory attendance laws were merely symbolic because the laws enacted were “unenforced and probably unenforceable.” During the bureaucratic phase, between the 1890s and 1920s, new compulsory attendance laws —“strong laws” with teeth—were passed, which finally made compulsory attendance effective. This periodization obscures the facts that (1) compulsory attendance did not develop in any linear or progressive fashion as much as in a “two steps forward, one step back” manner; (2) the state had limited power to enforce even “enforceable” compulsory attendance laws in the early twentieth century when most funding was local not state funding; and (3) compulsory attendance laws were not tremendously effective, accounting for no more than 5 percent of the increase in school attendance in the first half of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
William W. Franko ◽  
Christopher Witko

The authors conclude the book by recapping their arguments and empirical results, and discussing the possibilities for the “new economic populism” to promote egalitarian economic outcomes in the face of continuing gridlock and the dominance of Washington, DC’s policymaking institutions by business and the wealthy, and a conservative Republican Party. Many states are actually addressing inequality now, and these policies are working. Admittedly, many states also continue to embrace the policies that have contributed to growing inequality, such as tax cuts for the wealthy or attempting to weaken labor unions. But as the public grows more concerned about inequality, the authors argue, policies that help to address these income disparities will become more popular, and policies that exacerbate inequality will become less so. Over time, if history is a guide, more egalitarian policies will spread across the states, and ultimately to the federal government.


Author(s):  
Franklin E. Zimring

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw a passing fashion for “Aztec” dancing in the vaudeville theaters of the United States. Russian classical dancers Kosloff and Fokine tapped the orientalist currents of the Ballets Russes, adopting the Aztec as superficial signs of the American. Conversely, works by Shawn and film director Cecil B. DeMille, which served as points of reference for the Russians, represented a continuation of equally orientalist attitudes toward Mexico's past, forged during the realization of the United States’ policy of Manifest Destiny. The emergence of a cadre of trained dancers from Mexico, trained by students of Kosloff and Shawn, would bring a distinctively different perspective on the presentation of their heritage to the dance stage, one that was no longer based in the imagination of an expansionist America.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.


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