Coolidge and the Historians

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNancy Christie teaches history at the University of Western Ontario. Her work centers on the cultural, political, legal, and social history of eighteenth-century Quebec, with a particular emphasis on the impact of British colonialism after the Conquest of 1763. Winner of numerous scholarly awards, in particular for Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada, she is the author of a major forthcoming volume, A Northern Bastille: The Formal and Informal Politics of Colonialism in Post-conquest Quebec, 1760–1837.Jason Dawsey is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he teaches courses in modern European history. Currently, he is completing a monograph on Günther Anders’s critique of technology.Michael Gauvreau teaches history at McMaster University. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of Canada and Quebec from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is the author of the prize-winning The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970, and his new research centers on Quebec in the age of revolutions.Aaron G. Jakes is assistant professor of history in the Department of Historical Studies at the New School. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. He is the author of “Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt’s Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914,” Antipode (2016), and he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled State of the Field: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism in Egypt, 1882–1914.Ahmad Shokr is a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and an assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, the political economy of empire and decolonization, and the history of capitalism. He is a contributor to several volumes, including Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (Verso, 2012).Kristoffer Smemo is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught courses on twentieth-century American social and political history. His dissertation examines how social struggle shaped the rise and fall of the liberal wing of the Republican Party during the mid-twentieth century. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History and Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas.Samir Sonti is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught the history of capitalism and labor studies. His dissertation focuses on the politics of inflation in the twentieth-century United States.Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. He has taught twentieth-century American history, the history of capitalism, and African American history. He is completing a dissertation on the transformation of the labor market and the emergence of the health care economy in Pittsburgh in the second half of the twentieth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 4, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691061 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A richly detailed and valuable portrait of an American community in the making... Few historians have been more diligent than Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats in reconstructing an American community by linking together a mass of data on its citizens, mapping its neighborhoods, and analyzing political life. -- American Historical ReviewBourke and DeBats weave data from a real treasure-trove... to produce one of the finest social histories of politics ever written... The authors explore the effects of a variety of social and economic variables upon voters' degrees of partisanship and depth of political participation. Any summary fails to do justice to the complexity of their findings... is beautifully written, set up to be read in such a way that a conflict between two of the settlers which resulted in a murder trial can be viewed as an allegory for the county's political development. In short, it uniquely integrates electoral and social history. will have widespread appeal, both to professional historians and laypeople.--Register of the Kentucky Historical SocietyBourke and DeBats have identified a magnificent subject--together with wonderful sources--and they have developed an original interpretation that is splendidly suited to make the most of their material. Even more important, Washington County is sure to have a major influence upon the writing of nineteenth-century American social and political history, geography, and political science.--Richard L. McCormick, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillIn the 1850s, Washington County, Oregon, gathered together a broad cross-section of antebellum America. More than that, however, it left for historians a rareopportunity to explore political, social, and cultural trends in American history due to its unique practice of viva voce voting--announcing individual ballots publicly rather than recording them in secret. Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats tap into this remarkable resource to reveal how individual political identities developed and political choices were made. It is one of the significant contributions of this book that the research tool of viva voce voting permits the individual data from poll books to be linked to political behavior of various dimensions as well as to other measurable aspects of individual behavior, whether religion or economic status. The authors painstakingly develop these materials into a finely grained snapshot of Washington County... Throughout, Washington County scintillates with suggestive insights that make it an important contribution to American history.--Reviews in American HistoryThis is a major work of scholarship which, in closely looking at a single county on the distant Pacific coast, nevertheless poses some absolutely fundamental questions. offers the closest and most satisfying analysis of individual partisanship in the mid-nineteenth century available. The larger implications of their conclusions are sure to be debated for some time to come.--William E. Gienapp, Harvard University

This chapter offers an overview over the relationship between political science and political history after the Second World War. The pioneers of the contemporary politics in the 1960s and 1970s had sufficient historical perspectives, as they developed a general theory from the observation of the historical phenomenon. However, the divergence between political science and history has progressively grown. On the one hand, political science had gradually lost its historical perspective in the name of "scientification." On the other hand, when "the end of history" was widely publicised coinciding with the conclusion of the Cold War, political history as a subfield of political science seemed to lose its significance and relevancy. In the 21st century, authoritarianism is far from disappearing and liberal democracy is disturbed. In other words, the time of crisis has returned. This chapter explores the possibility of a new integral approach combining political science and political history, particularly in light of the current political context being characterised by the resurgence of authoritarianism. In order to grasp the current historical phase of politics, an integral approach is needed, which builds bridges between the study of contemporary politics and political history.

678 Rhetoric & Public Affairs the Gaither Committee would be useful for laying the political groundwork for such spending. However, the problem was that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the explosion by the Soviets of a hydrogen bomb, and the launching of Sputnik in late 1957, the public didn't need much persuasion about the danger of the Soviet threat—quite the opposite. Ultimately, the president ended up opposing some of the more extreme recommendations of the Gaither Committee, including a $25 billion dollar expenditure for bomb shelters (total outlays for the entire Federal Government in 1957 were $76 billion). In turn, the Committee's findings were promptly leaked to the press and became the basis for the (unfounded) missile "gap" claim made by Senator John Kennedy in his 1960 race for the presidency. No wonder President Eisenhower in 1961 finished his term railing against the military-industrial complex, many members of which were at the core of the Gaither Committee. Professor Snead has written a well-documented, if sometimes dry account of this very important moment in American history. I am not always sure that the author is able to completely back away from the minutiae of his account to garner the true significance of what was going on at the time. The Gaither Committee, it appears to me, was less important for what it did than what it represented. Whether or not Eisenhower, in the main, approved or disapproved of the Gaither Committee's Report (a point of minor dispute among period scholars) is not as important as the enthusiastic reception and almost unquestioned acceptance of the Committee's findings. This was a significant departure from the American tradition of general military demobilization at the end of a war. What followed the report was the most massive peacetime military buildup in American history. From that point onward, the U.S. was committed to a high level of military preparedness that is still the norm today—even ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Other than that minor problem of interpretation, the author does a fine job of documenting the tenor of the times in regard to the transformation of defense policy under the Eisenhower administration. As such, this book becomes essential reading for understanding how we have arrived at the defense policy we are still committed to today. In that regard, the book also tells us something about how defense policy can change. Perhaps the next president should appoint a task force to look into the matter? Daniel P. Franklin Georgia State University No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest. Edited by Kathleen M. Blee. New York: New York University Press, 1998; pp. 1 + 315. $18.95. The mission of sociologist Kathleen M. Blee's No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest is a familiar one in feminist scholarship: making women visible where they have traditionally been invisible. At issue is radical politics, which Blee Book Reviews 679 loosely characterizes as militant actions occurring outside of mainstream political processes. She argues that radicalism needs to be redefined because traditional scholarship is both incomplete and inaccurate. It is incomplete because the focus on "male-dominated activism (such as labor unions) or on the male leadership of mixed-gender movements (such as the anti-Vietnam war movement)" (2) fails to acknowledge or explain the "full range of women's radical action" (3). It is inaccurate because the scholarship that does exist about women's radical activism "lead[s] to an identification of women's radicalism exclusively with left-wing and feminist politics. . .[ignoring] women as active agents of right-wing, racist, or reactionary politics" (2). No Middle Ground aims to correct the record, and thereby broaden the definition of radicalism, by bringing together essays that recall a variety of cases of women's political activism in the U.S. from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s. Through the narratives of such diverse protagonists as civil rights workers and neoNazis , the authors challenge traditional notions of radical activism by identifying "gender-specific social circumstances, opportunities, barriers, and associations" (5) and examining how these factors shape and are shaped by militant woman across the ideological spectrum. By specifically addressing...

Grounded in extensive historical research, this eye-opening survey reveals the long-undervalued role secret societies have played in American history. Americans are fascinated by secret societies and have devoured exaggerated claims for their influence. At the same time, scholarly assessments of covert groups that have shaped American social, cultural, and political history have often undervalued their role or even questioned their existence. This survey challenges both the exaggerators and the deniers. Freemasons? They may not be the hidden rulers of the world, but a significant number of America’s founders were Masons. The Know Nothings? Two American presidents joined the movement. The Bohemian Grove? Republican politicians and corporate leaders really did engage in strange behavior under the redwood trees through the 20th century. Revealing fascinating facts about some of the most talked-about covert societies, including the Mafia, the Skull and Bones and the Ku Klux Klan, Secret Societies and Clubs in American History exposes the truth about the subcultures that made their mark on some of the most important events in the nation’s history and contributed to the shaping of the country itself.

This is a difficult book to review, because I am uncertain for whom it is intended. In 297 pages Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, deftly and succinctly surveys the major bases of U.S. history--political, economic, social, and cultural developments. It is a small masterpiece of compression, and this, unfortunately, might be its weakness as far as high school and college classroom use is concerned. For students largely unfamiliar with this nation's history, the sweeping generalities encountered here will come across as just that, generalizations with no human flesh and blood attached.

A scholarly article by authors William Patrick O'Brien, Maceo Crenshaw Dailey, and James Riding In published in The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations: Annual Review

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the flourishing of an American counterculture that affected many walks of society. The movement's music provided the soundtrack for this bellwether time in American cultural history. Such performers as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, The Doors, John Lennon, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead ushered in new sounds, as well as new attitudes and philosophies for an emerging generation. With vibrant narrative chapters on the role of music in the anti-war movement, the Black power movement, the women's movement, political radicalism, drug use, and the counterculture lifestyle, James Perone details the emerging issues explored by performers in the Sixties and Seventies. A chapter of biographical sketches provides an easily accessible resource on significant performers, recordings, and terminology. Also included are chapter bibliographies, a timeline, and a subject index. The American History through Music series examines the many different styles of music that have played a significant part in our nation's history. While volumes in this series show the multifaceted roles of music in culture, they also use music as a lens through which readers may study American social history. The authors present in-depth analysis of American musical genres, significant musicians, technological innovations, and the many connections between music and the realms of art, politics, and daily life. Chapters present accessible narratives on music and its cultural resonations, music theory and technique is broken down for the lay reader, and each volume presents a chapter of alphabetically arranged entries on significant people and terms.

Reviewed by: The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton by William E. Leuchtenburg Daryl A. Carter The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. By William E. Leuchtenburg. ( New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 886. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-19-517616-2.) There are many people and institutions that can impact society. Private actors, such as protesters, researchers, and businesspeople, can push and pull society. Institutions, such as Congress, the courts, and universities, can bring both progress and regression. Since the beginning of the twentieth century no entity has arguably been as influential as the American presidency. The modern presidency has often been at the center of important moments in American history. Its importance has been seen in both domestic affairs and international relations. In this new addition to the literature on twentieth-century American [End Page 723] political history, the preeminent historian William E. Leuchtenburg underscores the importance of the American presidency in the life of the United States. In the 1960s, historians began focusing on other aspects of history. Social and cultural history—from the bottom up—replaced much of the focus academic historians had given to great white men and politics. Over the next several decades studies in gender, race, social movements, civil rights, and world history reflected a growing shift in focus and in employment opportunities. As political scientists became obsessed with quantitative research and increasingly jettisoned political theory, political history went out of vogue. But over the course of the last twenty years political history has begun a comeback. And the growing political instability over the last ten years, both in the United States and globally, has brought attention back to the importance of politics, especially the role of the American president. Leuchtenburg has performed a valuable service to the historical profession with this volume. The author began this work after attending a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. After a colleague approached him about writing a history of the American presidency, Leuchtenburg agreed and devised a two-volume study. Currently he is working on the second volume, which will cover the Constitutional Convention through the end of the nineteenth century. The main undercurrent of this work is the author's contention that American presidents shaped the twentieth century. Leuchtenburg examines every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton in detail. The book is designed to appeal to a broad audience. In doing so, the author presents a highly readable and informative history of the twentieth century. Leuchtenburg proceeds in a chronological fashion, beginning with the assassination of President William McKinley in September 1901. The death ushered in a new president whose political prowess defined the presidency for a generation: Theodore Roosevelt. The author notes that Republican Party power broker Mark Hanna thought it was a "mistake" nominating Roosevelt to be vice president because of his reputation for political troublemaking (p. 23). When Roosevelt became president, the nation was entering not only a new century but also a new era in which American power would be increasingly on display. Consequently, the office of the president would have to modernize, too. By noting the developing importance of the chief executive, Leuchtenburg underscores the fact that as industrialization and modernity transformed the United States, the nation's highest leader would have to be transformed as well. Every subsequent president built a myth around himself and sought to push a national agenda. The only exceptions were the Republican presidents of the 1920s—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. The author explains how Woodrow Wilson expanded on the developments in the changing nation. He held a Ph.D. and had been a professor, president of Princeton University, and governor of New Jersey. Wilson brought a certain idealism attractive to Progressives. Yet President Wilson's achievements, such as the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Nineteenth Amendment, and others, failed to inspire confidence as World War I and the restraints [End Page 724] brought on by the war and domestic tensions drove a great many Americans into the Republican camp by 1920. Leuchtenburg notes correctly the vast importance of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Americans' shifting dependence...

In his introductory essay to this volume, Peter Stearns suggests that conservatism is likely to prevail for a while and that social history in the United States needs some strategy sessions. Indeed, recent controversies over funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian Museum's Enola Gay Exhibition, and the National History Standards, issued by the National Center for History in the Schools, indicate growing resistance to efforts to create a more inclusive history of the United States. These are large issues and a great deal is at stake, but this is also a good moment to reflect on past efforts to broaden the scope of U. S. history. The struggle for a broader U. S. history is deeply rooted in American immigraS tion, ethnic, labor, and women's history, but it is perhaps most apparent in the field of African American history. Even a cursory consideration of the African American experience is instructive, because it highlights the ongoing connecv tion between the struggle for a fuller history and the fight for a more inclusive, just, and democratic society. A brief examination of the African American experience also suggests the need for a more sensitive treatment of the obstacles that its founders faced, the choices that they made, and the histories that they wrote. l Research on the African American experience emerged in the teeth of slavery, the fall of Reconstruction, and the rise of Sim Crow. The earliest writers, the 19th-century pioneers, confronted the expansion and consolidation of human bondage. As the slavery system moved from the tobacco-growing regions of the upper south to the cotton-producing areas of the deep south, the nation moved away from a tenuous commitment to emancipation following the American Revolution to a new commitment to slavery, as a right guaranteed by the constitution and sanctioned by God and nature. Jurists, scholars, and the clergy not only sanctioned the subordination of blacks as slaves, but justified the disfranchisement of all women, the brutal removal of Native Americans from their land, and the military conquest of Mexican territories. George Bancroft and other early chroniclers of the nation's history explicitly used religious beliefs and moral judgments to guide their narratives. They defined the enslavement of blacks, the disfranchisement of women, and the conquest of Mexicans and Native Americans as the white man's manifest destiny. As such, early l9th-century historians excused social injustice and crafted a narrow white male nationalist history of the United States. As George Bancroft put it in his multivolume History of the United States, Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, language of my country, take possession of the North American continent! Gladden waste places with every tone that has been rightly struck on the English lyre, with every English word that has been spoken well for liberty and for man!2

David Arnold is Professor of History at Columbia Basin College where he teaches courses in US, Native American, and African American history. His first book, The Fishermen's Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska (University of Washington Press, 2008) is a social and environmental history of Indian and non-Indian fishermen from precontact to present.Matthew M. Babcock is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas at Dallas and author of Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule. He received his PhD at Southern Methodist University, and he focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest.Rosie C. Bermudez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana grassroots activism, social movements, and women of color feminisms. Bermudez is currently writing a book about Chicana activist Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization.Dea H. Boster is Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, Ohio. She has published several works on the history of American medicine and disability, including African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South (Routledge, 2012).Heather D. Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Curtis received her doctorate in American Religion from Harvard University. Her research explores how religion has shaped responses to racial injustice, humanitarian disasters, and bodily illness from the late nineteenth century to the present.Justene Hill Edwards is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021).David G. García earned his PhD in US History at UCLA and is Associate Professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (University of California Press, 2018).Lyrianne E. González is a History PhD student minoring in Latino Studies at Cornell University. She is a mid-twentieth-century historian with focuses in US labor history, US foreign labor relations, US–Mexico relations, and im/migration. Her research investigates the racial and generational legacies of US agricultural guestworker programs.José G. Moreno is a full-time senior lecturer in ethnic studies and sociology and the Associate Director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Northern Arizona University. He has published various peer review articles, critical essays, and book reviews in academic publications.Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He thanks the University of Edinburgh Development Trust Research Fund, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and the Leverhulme Trust for the financial support that made this article possible.Lucy E. Salyer is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Under the Starry Flag (Harvard University Press, 2018), Laws Harsh as Tigers (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and numerous articles on the history of immigration and citizenship policy.Ryan E. Santos is a lecturer in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education program at California State University, Long Beach and in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles. His research and teaching emphasize educational history with an emphasis on race, community resistance, and the law.Cameron Tardif is a PhD student who studies twentieth-century US history at Cornell University. His research focuses on how the relationship of slavery and freedom between the United States and Canada impacts the experiences of transnational black athletes. His work has been published in the Journal of Sport History.Lila Teeters is Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. She received her PhD in American History from the University of New Hampshire in 2021. Her dissertation is entitled “Native Citizens: The Fight for and against Native American Citizenship, 1887–1924.”Tara J. Yosso is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside. Her research seeks to recover counter-narratives of race, schooling, inequality, and the law. Her extensively cited publications examine the ways people of color utilize community cultural wealth to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination.Hao Zou is an independent scholar based in San Francisco. His research interests include Asian American history, immigration history, race and ethnicity, and the history of the American West.

What’s In and What’s Out Donald Critchlow (bio) Bartholomew H. Sparrow. From the Outside In: World War II and the American State. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. xv + 354 pp. Figures, tables, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $45.00. Historians beware: political history is being taken over by political scientists and sociologists, while many historians seem impervious to the important role the state has played in shaping the economy, welfare, labor relations, fiscal policy, and the military-industrial complex. What is perhaps most disturbing (and refreshing) is that political scientists have undertaken this task with astute analysis based on comprehensive archival research—once the domain of the traditional historian. Bartholomew H. Sparrow’s sophisticated study of the development of the American state during World War II is a case in point. This book surpasses previous studies of the state during World War II and arguably stands as the best study of the transformative role government played at this critical period in American history. This is a book rich in information, exciting intellectually, and pioneering in its approach to American state development. Sparrow, a political scientist at the University of Texas, argues that the emergence of the contemporary state during World War II marked a systematic break with previous governmental policies by redirecting political development in the United States. In doing so, he challenges interpretations that find developments in American politics and society during the war as incremental, even preordained. Using fifty-five archival collections, Sparrow examines in precise detail the consequences of the Second World War on the social security system, labor-management relations, tax policy, and military procurement policy by creating new institutional relationships and arrangements. Consistent with Max Weber’s perspective, Sparrow defines the state as consisting of three parts—bureaucracy, established relations between the government and individuals and organizations, and instruments of policy administration. While many historical discussions of the state leave the processes or mechanisms either unspecified or unclear, Sparrow frames his argument around the concept of “resource-dependency,” drawn from the work of [End Page 475] organizational theorists Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik and Richard Cyert and James G. March. 1 The resource dependence perspective, Sparrow writes, posits that organizations exist in external, uncertain environments. As a consequence organizational survival depends on “the continued securance of resources within a larger context of interdependent individuals and organizations. Seeking to stabilize their existence, organizations attempt to influence, negotiate with, and manage their external relations in ways that protect their budgets and staff” (pp. 17–18). By maintaining that organizations respond and adjust to their environments depending on the type of uncertainty and resource environment facing the organization, Sparrow avoids a mechanistic and deterministic explanation as to how the state developed during World War II. Thus, he examines the development of state-building during the war as a process of organizational change: change in the bureaucracies of government, change in the relation between government organizations and societal actors, and change in the means of administration. This model allows him to explore the agents of change, the form of change, and the persistence of change during this critical period in which the American state was transformed. This abstract model, however, does not distract from his lively historical account of the effects of World War II on American government. He begins by looking first at the social security program during the war. He notes that despite New Deal legislation establishing and then amending the social security system, and despite the wartime government’s desperate need for revenue, there were no significant social security programs set up during the war. Furthermore, social security rates, benefit levels, and employee coverage remained virtually unchanged because Congress refused to cooperate with both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations’ attempts on several occasions to expand the system. Given the slow expansion of social security coverage and the small increases (and real decreases) in old age security benefit levels, employees looked elsewhere for financial and medical security. As a consequence, the number of subscriptions to private pension plans increased by 239 percent between 1940 and 1950 (from 4.1 to 9.8 million subscribers). Nonetheless, employer and employee contributions soared, increasing the pension...

September/October 2004 Historically Speaking 19 An Interview with John Ferling JOHN FERLING, professor emeritus ofhistory at the State University ofWest Georgia (he retired in May 2004), has written extensively on the political and military history ofearly America. Among his works are A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2003); A Wilderness ofMiseries: War and Warriors in Early America (GreenwoodPress, 1980); andStruggle for a Continent: The Wars ofEarly America (Harlan Davidson, 1993). An accomplished biographer, Ferling has written lives ofGeorge Washington, John Adams, and the Pennsylvania LoyalistJoseph Galloway, as well as Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2000). His most recent work is thejustpublishedAdams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, part of Oxford University Press's Pivotal Moments in American History series. Joseph Lucas hadtheprivilege ofinterviewing this prolificstudent ofearly American history in April of2004. Ferling reveals that hispredilectionfor writing about war, politics, and great leaders stemmedpartlyfrom expediency. Yet Ferling also passionately believes that these classicsubjects continue to matter, and their histories have much to teach us today. Joseph Lucas: During your long and productive career you have bucked several ofthe trends that have defined your generation of historians. You have focused on elite leaders rather than marginalized masses. Your primary concerns are political and military history rather than social and cultural history. And you see the past not as a foreign country but as intimately connected to the present. Indeed, you argue that the past, particularly with regard to political and military leadership, holds important lessons for us today. How do you account for your iconoclastic views? And how do you see your work in relation to that ofyour peers and colleagues? John Ferling: Well, for many years I had a poster over my desk, and it contained a quote from Thoreau about marching to a different John Ferling drummer. So maybe I am iconoclastic. But I don't think so. I think I've wound up doing what I've done out of necessity because of where I teach. It just seems the pragmatic thing to do. I don't teach at a major research university, and I don't have a research library at my disposal. So I've chosen to work with the resources available to me on a daily basis. We have things like the modern editions of the Washington papers, Franklin papers, Hamilton papers, Adams papers, and so forth. That was the direction that I went simply because the material was there and available to me. As a result, I think, most of my work has been on political and military history. When I was finishing graduate school, I had a one-year appointment at a school just outside ofPhiladelphia in Chester County. I was very much interested in abolitionism, and there was a wonderful library ofabolitionist materials in Chester County, maybe five minutes from where I was living. Ifthat had materialized into permanent, tenuretrack employment, I would have probably worked on the history ofantislavery. I do think there are lessons from the past: political lessons and military lessons as well. I'm struck by the fact, for example, thatJefferson wrote a letter toJohn Adams in 1813 stating that all through history, in every society at every time, one party existed that favored the many while another party existed that favored the few, and political battles tended to revolve around that struggle between the many and the few. And that's how I see American politics. I see that struggle going on in the Revolution. I see that struggle going on between the Federalists and the Democratic Republican Party in the 1790s and the early days ofthe republic. I see it through most of the 19th and 20th centuries in America's political history as well. Lucas: Are there other important lessons from the era of the American Revolution and the early republic? Ferling: I think there are. The American Revolution , for example, can tell us a great deal about the limits ofmilitary power. Look at the relative strength of Great Britain and the colonies in 1775—it seemed as if there was no way that the colonists...

This provocative three-volume encyclopedia is a valuable resource for readers seeking an understanding of how movies have both reflected and helped engender America's political, economic, and social history. Movies in American History: An Encyclopediais a reference text focused on the relationship between American society and movies and filmmaking in the United States from the late 19th century through the present. Beyond discussing many important American films ranging fromBirth of a NationtoStar Warsto theHarry Potterfilm series, the essays included in the volumes explore sensitive issues in cinema related to race, class, and gender, authored by international scholars who provide unique perspectives on American cinema and history. Written by a diverse group of distinguished scholars with backgrounds in history, film studies, culture studies, science, religion, and politics, this reference guide will appeal to readers new to cinema studies as well as film experts. Each encyclopedic entry provides data about the film, an explanation of the film's cultural significance and influence, information about significant individuals involved with that work, and resources for further study.