Not long ago, Republicans could take pride in their party’s tradition of environmental leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a “hoax” and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened? In The Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg show that the party’s transformation began in the late 1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and anti-federalist voters. This coalition came about through a concerted effort by politicians and business leaders, abetted by intellectuals and policy experts, to link the commercial interests of big corporate donors with states’-rights activism and Main Street regulatory distrust. Fiscal conservatives embraced cost-benefit analysis to counter earlier models of environmental policy making, and business tycoons funded think tanks to denounce federal environmental regulation as economically harmful, constitutionally suspect, and unchristian, thereby appealing to evangelical views of man’s God-given dominion of the Earth. As Turner and Isenberg make clear, the conservative abdication of environmental concern stands out as one of the most profound turnabouts in modern American political history, critical to our understanding of the GOP’s modern success. The Republican reversal on the environment is emblematic of an unwavering faith in the market, skepticism of scientific and technocratic elites, and belief in American exceptionalism that have become the party’s distinguishing characteristics.

Today, the demand for transparency is omnipresent. In particular, transparency is considered a prerequisite for good governance, for political participation and democracy. On closer inspection, however, transparency proves to be ambivalent. For complete transparency has not yet been achieved anywhere. Moreover, measures to increase transparency can have the opposite effect and stir up mistrust. Historians are just beginning to discover this topic. The volume assembles contributions covering European history since the 19th century. The contributors focus on political and cultural history, but include also economic and media history as well as the history of ideas. They analyse publicly debated demands and efforts for transparency, conceived as the access to information or ist disclosure.

Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta's ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city's variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of "the environment." Arising out of Atlanta's Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism's undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South. Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national "poster child" for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region's Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.

The Root and the Branch examines the relationship between the early labor movement and the crusade to abolish slavery between the early national period and the Civil War. Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals contributed to the antislavery project, from the development of free labor ideology to the Republican Party’s adoption of working-class land reform in the Homestead Act. By pioneering an antislavery politics based on an appeal to the self-interest of ordinary voters and promoting a radical vision of “free soil” and “free labor” that challenged liberal understandings of property rights and freedom of contract, labor reformers helped to birth a mass politics of antislavery that hastened the conflict with the Slave Power, while pointing the way toward future struggles over the meaning of free labor in the post-Emancipation United States. Bridging the gap between the histories of abolitionism, capitalism and slavery, and the origins of the Civil War, The Root and the Branch recovers a long-overlooked story of cooperation and coalition-building between labor reformers and abolitionists and unearths new evidence about the contributions of artisan reformers, transatlantic radicals, free Black activists, and ordinary working men and women to the development of antislavery politics. Based on painstaking archival research, The Root and the Branch addresses timely questions surrounding the relationships between slavery, antislavery, race, labor, and capitalism in the early United States.

Most New Yorkers have very little knowledge of how influence is wielded in Albany. This acclaimed book offers a chance to look behind those closed doors. The authors - an Albany-based political scientist and a former State Assembly member, now joined by an expert on political blogging and networking - infuse their discussion of institutions and processes with the drama and significance of real power politics. Completely revised and updated with extensive new material, the book covers recent political developments and electoral contests as well as all the basics: constitutional issues; historical, economic, social, and demographic factors; the functioning of executive, legislative, and judicial institutions; urban, local, and special district governments; parties, interest groups, and bureaucracies; and, finance, budgets, health, education, and welfare programs. Throughout, the authors are attentive to the many paradoxes and dualities that distinguish political, social, and economic life in the Empire State.

"Political scientist Samuel DeCanio examines how political elites used high levels of voter ignorance to create a new type of regulatory state with lasting implications for American politics. Focusing on the expansion of bureaucratic authority in late-nineteenth-century America, DeCanio's exhaustive archival research examines electoral politics, the Treasury Department's control over monetary policy, and the Interstate Commerce Commission's regulation of railroads to examine how conservative politicians created a new type of bureaucratic state to insulate policy decisions from popular control"--Back cover.

?The best general account of politics in the North,? as David Herbert Donald calls this book, is also the first one-volume history of its subject. Abraham Lincoln?s single goal of saving the Union required not simply subduing the South but contending as well with divisiveness in the North?with refractory state officials, draft resisters, peace advocates, secret organizations, with Northern Democrats (too often seen only as Copperheads or as traitors to the Union), and with powerful Republicans who often vocally disagreed with Lincoln?s policies. In this account, Radical Republicans represent consensus with Lincoln more than conflict, sectional more than economic interests, and party over faction. Largely, dissent was heard and accommodated; and, if the federal legislation of the time did amount to a Second American Revolution, it emerged from the conflicts, within the North as well as against the South, of a nation at war. The outcome was a nation not only saved but strengthened and slavery ended.

"Predicting the Winner is a riveting narrative about election night 1952, when Dwight David Eisenhower won in a landslide and was elected president of the United States"--

After years of divided government, countless Republicans campaigned on a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Yet when they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2017—after six years that included more than fifty symbolic votes and innumerable pledges—they failed to repeal the bulk of the law. Pundits were shocked, and observers and political scientists alike were stuck looking for an explanation. What made Obamacare so hard to repeal? And in a larger sense: What explains why some laws are repealed, and yet others endure in spite of considerable efforts? Are repeals different from law-making or do they mirror one another? Why are repeals more likely at some times than others? What theories of legislative behavior and policymaking explain when repeals happen? Congress in Reverse is the first book to attempt to answer these questions. Jordan M. Ragusa and Nathaniel A. Birkhead examine when and why existing statutes are successfully “undone,” arguing that repeals are most common when the parties are united on the issue—which was not the case when it came to Obamacare for the Republican Party—and the majority party wins control of Congress after a long stint in the minority. By shifting focus from the making of laws to their un-making, Congress in Reverse opens up a new arena for studying legislative activity in Congress.