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Over the last two decades, the political narrative of the "liberal coasts" and the "conservative heartland" has become something of a truism, leading many Democrats to write off much of the Midwest as a Republican stronghold. Today's polarized divide between rural and urban voters makes it easy to forget that things have not always been this way. The Liberal Heartland is a powerful reminder that the American Midwest has a progressive legacy that rivals the coasts.Across twenty chapters, The Liberal Heartland traces the political history of this region from the post-New Deal period to the rise of the New Right and Donald Trump's right-wing populism. The contributors explore the way liberals and progressives across the Midwest fought for expanding environmental protection, engaged in community activism, developed a queer-labor coalition before Stonewall, struggled for women's rights and representation in the Plains states, opposed the death penalty, and mobilized for Indigenous self-determination, among other topics. In addition to well-known leaders like Harry Truman and George McGovern, the book highlights lesser-known figures, such as Lydia Cady Langer, Mary Jean Collins, Richard Hatcher, Jim Jontz, and Paul Wellstone.A companion to the 2020 volume, The Conservative Heartland, The Liberal Heartland explores the history of the Midwest from a less-acknowledged perspective, recounting often forgotten stories that demonstrate the importance of the Midwest for New Deal liberalism and various forms of left-wing politics. This is a long-overdue book that represents a fresh look at the American heartland.

The congregants thanked God that they werent like all those hopeless people outside the church, bound for hell. So the Westboro Baptist Churchs Sunday service began, and Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a curious observer, wondered why anyone would seek spiritual sustenance through other peoples damnation. It is a question that piques many a witness to Westboros more visible activitythe GOD HATES FAGS picketing of funerals. In God Hates, sociologist Barrett-Fox takes us behind the scenes of Topekas Westboro Baptist Church. The first full ethnography of this infamous presence on Americas Religious Right, her book situates the churchs story in the context of American religious historyand reveals as much about the uneasy state of Christian practice in our day as it does about the workings of the Westboro Church and Fred Phelps, its founder.God Hates traces WBCs theological beliefs to a brand of hyper-Calvinist thought reaching back to the Puritansan extreme Calvinism, emphasizing predestination, that has proven as off-putting as Westboros actions, even for other Baptists. And yet, in examining Westboros role in conservative politics and its contentious relationship with other fundamentalist activist groups, Barrett-Fox reveals how the churchs message of national doom in fact reflects beliefs at the core of much of the Religious Rights rhetoric. Westboros aggressively offensive public activities actually serve to soften the anti-gay theology of more mainstream conservative religious activism. With an eye to the churchs protest at military funerals, she also considers why the public has responded so differently to these than to Westboro's anti-LGBT picketing.With its history of Westboro Baptist Church and its founder, and its profiles of defectors, this book offers a complex, close-up view of a phenomenon on the fringes of American Christianityand a broader, disturbing view of the mainstream theology it at once masks and reflects.

In Policing Show Business, Francis MacDonnell explores the starring role played by J. Edgar Hoover in the development of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s. As director of the FBI, Hoover poured resources into scrutinizing show business, a policy choice unjustified by any corresponding threat to public security. He detailed agents to write regular reports on actors, screenwriters, lyricists, singers, and studio executives. His frequent handwritten comments on papers inside the files of film industry personalities demonstrate a level of interest bordering on obsession.Policing Show Business is not just another book about the Hollywood blacklist. MacDonnell approaches the Red Scare through biography using FBI records on such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Hedda Hopper, Adolphe Menjou, Lena Horne, Fredric March, Cecil B. DeMille, and Burl Ives to present in unexpected, surprising, and sometimes poignant ways the rich human dramas experienced by both targets of the bureau and its collaborators.MacDonnell's meticulously researched account, drawing on many newly available FBI files, evokes the passions and resentments; the courageous acts and calculated evasions; and the petty tyrannies and self-interested campaigns of an ignominious episode in the annals of American freedom.

"On December 15, 1972, as rumors swirled of a pending peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam, Governor Jimmy Carter issued an executive order creating the Georgia Advisory Committee on Vietnam Veterans (GACVV). His reasoning was simple: "the citizens of the State of Georgia and of the United States of America owe a debt of gratitude to these veterans who have served the Nation in an unpopular war." Carter's efforts followed trends occurring across the country as a host of states contemplated their responsibilities to Vietnam veterans by considering such benefits as cash bonuses, educational stipends, and free hunting licenses. Through his words and actions, Carter joined this broader debate regarding society's obligation to Vietnam veterans. In A Debt of Gratitude, Glenn Robins examines Carter's role in the creation of Vietnam veterans' issues as a national agenda item. Covering virtually the entire decade of the 1970s, from Carter's single terms as governor and president of the United States, Robins demonstrates that, throughout this period, Carter distinguished himself as one of the country's most important decision-makers concerning Vietnam veterans' policy. By addressing Vietnam veterans' issues and by communicating his positions and views, Carter made a substantial political investment in moving these items from the level of public debate to the level of policy prescriptions, thereby raising awareness, generating concern, and promising government attention to honor and thank Vietnam veterans"--

The Santa Fe Trail has a special allure in southwestern history-it was a road of lucrative commerce, military expansion, and great adventure. Because these themes are connected with the Santa Fe Trail in the American imagination, however, the trail is not often associated with stories of women. Crossings tells the personal stories of several women who made the journey, showing how they were involved with and affected by Santa Fe Trail trade. The Santa Fe Trail was a nexus of nations and cultures, connecting the northern frontier of newly formed Mexico with the quickly expanding western United States, as well as with the many Indigenous nations whose traditional lands it crossed. With her attention on women, Frances Levine enriches our understanding of the Santa Fe Trail and shows how interregional trade affected society, politics, and culture.Through diaries, letters, and firsthand accounts, Levine seeks to understand the experiences of women who journeyed from St. Louis to Santa Fe, as well as some who made an eastward crossing. Crossings focuses on women who traveled during the most crucial period of Santa Fe Trail trade from the early 1820s to the later 1870s, ending as railroads made cross-continental movement a safer and more leisurely experience for travelers. Several of the women made multiple crossings, adding to the depth of their observations of the changing country and dispelling the myth of women in this period as averse to the risks of trail life.Crossings introduces readers to the stories of women such as the Comanche captive María Rosa Villalpando; Carmel Benavides Robidoux and Kit Carson's half-Arapaho daughter Adaline, both of whose lives were dramatically impacted by American expansion; suffragist Julia Anna Archibald Holmes; Kate Messervy Kingsbury, who sought health on the trail west; diarist Susan Shelby Magoffin and her enslaved servant Jane; army wife Anna Maria De Camp Morris; Jewish pioneers Betty and Flora Spiegelberg; and many others. As an expert guide to the people of the Santa Fe Trail, Frances Levine has curated a view of the American West that gives voice to many of the women who made this journey.

"The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an agency of the US government whose funding is kept secret. How is it possible for a government agency to be exempt from providing "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures"? In Hidden Cost of Freedom, Brad Fisher chronicles the origins and administrative inner workings of the CIA's clandestine financial system"--

What happened to the Democratic Party after the 1960s? In many political histories, the McGovern defeat of 1972 announced the partys declineand the conservative movements ascent. What the conventional narrative neglects, Patrick Andelic submits, is the role of Congress in the partys, and the nations, political fortunes. In Donkey Work, Andelic looks at Congress from 1974 to 1994 as the Democratic Partys stronghold and explores how this twenty-year tenure boosted and undermined the partys response to the conservative challenge.If post-1960s America belongs to the conservative movement, Andelic asks, how do we account for the failure of so much of the conservative agendaespecially the shrinking of the federal government? Examining the Democratic Partys unusual durability in Congress after 1974, Donkey Work disrupts the narrative of inexorable liberal decline since the 1970s and reveals the ways in which liberalism and conservatism actually developed in tandem. The book traces the evolution of ideologies within the Democratic Party, particularly the emergence of neoliberalism, suggesting that this political philosophy was as much an anticipation of Americas right turn as a reaction to it; as factions vied for control of the party, Congress itself both strengthened and weakened liberal resistance to the conservative movement.By putting the focus on Congress and legislative politics, in contrast to the presidential synthesis that dominates US political history, Andelics book offers a new, deeply informed perspective on two turbulent decades of American politicsa perspective that alters and expands our understanding of how we arrived at our present political moment.

"Through a close analysis of New Right architect Paul Weyrich, who is often seen as secular but was a committed Catholic who worked closely with evangelical Protestants, this book explores the way this Catholic-Protestant political alliance was forged by using a shared identity of victimhood to stitch together disparate religious groups, and then how this new political coalition constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as the ideal goal. Chelsea Ebin calls this "prefigurative traditionalism" -- a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this strategy, the new Religious Right obscures the radicality of its politics by framing the movement's aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive. An interdisciplinary work informed by the fields of history, religious studies, public law, and American politics, Prefiguring the Past is an insightful exploration of the origins of the New Christian Right, whose political victories are now radically reshaping the landscape of American society"--

"On February 27, 1973, a group of roughly 300 armed Indigenous men, women, and children seized the tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, at gunpoint, took hostages, barricaded themselves in the hilltop church, and visibly displayed an upside-down American flag. Taking place at the site of the infamous massacre in 1890, the highly symbolic confrontation spearheaded by the American Indian Movement (AIM) ultimately evolved into a prolonged, 71-day armed standoff between law enforcement officers and modern-day Indigenous warriors-some of whom were Vietnam War veterans who were using Vietnam-era equipment and weaponry. By organizing in defense of the newly proclaimed Independent Oglala Nation, the AIM activists at Wounded Knee linked the nationalist quest for sovereignty and self-determination with a warrior masculinity that was constructed from a mix of Indigenous cultures and contemporary cultural elements, including the Black civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the antiwar movement. In Reinventing the Warrior, Matthias Andrâe Voigt examines the way gender construction was integral to the Red Power movement. Indigenous activists sought to become "more manly" in order to challenge hegemonic masculinities-and, by implication, colonialism. Indigenous remasculinization challenged the emasculating nature of white supremacy. Voigt traces the story of the reinvention of Indigenous warriorhood from 1968 to the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973 and beyond"--

The Vietnam War ended nearly fifty years ago but the central paradox of the struggle endures: how did the world's strongest nation fail to secure freedom for the Republic of Vietnam? Michael F. Morris addresses this vexing question by focusing on the senior Marine headquarters in the conflict's most dangerous region. Known as I Corps, the northern five provinces of South Vietnam witnessed the bloodiest fighting of the entire war. I Corps also contained the Viet Cong's strongest infrastructure, key portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the important political and economic prizes of Hue and Da Nang. For Americans, it was the site of the first major military operation (Operation STARLITE); the Battles of Hue City and Khe Sanh during the 1968 Tet Offensive; and a military innovation known as the Combined Action Platoon (CAP), a counterinsurgency technique designed to secure the region's villages. The Marine zone served as Saigon's "canary in the coal mine"--if the war was to be won, allied action must succeed in its most contested region. With such deep significance, I Corps holds many answers to the lasting questions of the Vietnam War.Following the Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF)--the primary US tactical command in I Corps from 1965 to 1970--Corps Competency? provides the first composite analysis of the critical role of the senior Marine headquarters and offers a coherence missing in piecemeal accounts. Despite the critical importance of I Corps, relatively little is known about its overall impact on the war due to disconnected and patchy historical study of the region.In this comprehensive and newly insightful study of the Vietnam War, Michael Morris tells a story that illustrates what can happen when a corps headquarters is not ready for the conflict it encounters and then fights the war it wants to rather than the one it must.

In this book, Bruce I. Oppenheimer and the late Robert L. Peabody analyze the 1976 House majority leader race and present the result of their unrivaled insider access to this turning point in congressional history. This fierce contest among the Democratic leadership marked the transition of the House of Representatives into the party-dominated institution that is so familiar today. The 1976 election, in which the Democrats consolidated the gains made in 1974, led to two important changes in House Democratic leadership. After Carl Albert's retirement, Majority Leader Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., of Massachusetts advanced unopposed to the Speakership. This led to a contest between four formidable candidates for the position of majority leader: Rules Committee Spokesman Richard Bolling of Missouri, Caucus Chairman Phillip Burton of California, Majority Whip John McFall of California, and Representative James C. Wright, Jr., of Texas. It was arguably the most competitive contest for a major leadership position in congressional history. Ultimately, it took extensive campaigning and three ballots before Wright emerged victorious. During the race, Oppenheimer and Peabody conducted lengthy interviews with the candidates and their principal supporters, resulting in their eye-opening analysis of this contest as a key stepping stone between committee government and conditional party government in the House of Representatives that continues to the present day. The authors first presented their original research on the 1976 House majority leader contest at the 1977 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. With that original groundbreaking paper at its core, this book adds new chapters by Oppenheimer that evaluate the accuracy of the study and provide richer historical context, showing how congressional politics changed in the years after the 1976 contest. Their original study was the result of the greatest access that political scientists have ever had to a congressional leadership race, and it has enduring value for understanding our current political crisis.

The beautiful picture of brothers in arms vanquishing a tyrant. The power of a well-orchestrated army and navy winning historic battles. Overwhelming military might and ability through teamwork. This is how the US military services portray themselves to the public and to their own service members through official doctrine. However, under the veneer of jointness, deeply fraught processes are at play. Frequently, the services think more about protecting organizational turf than about national security and maintaining an advantage against the United States' external adversaries. Uniting US military services is a difficult endeavor that becomes even more so the farther from a battlefield and the higher up the command structure the unifying needs to happen.In The Collaborative Fight, Paul R. Birch and Lina M. Svedin examine cases of institutional jointness among US military services from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. They draw actionable conclusions for practitioners in the defense establishment while giving examples of successful joint cooperation that overcame the difficulties inherent in pursuing it. Even the successful cases that Birch and Svedin discuss show that the US military services face bureaucratic incentives and organizational leadership issues that make battlefield cooperation less than ideal.Birch and Svedin adeptly translate theory and history into approaches useful to practitioners in the field while examining the theoretical framework outlining the drivers in joint military cooperation.

Today, when politicians, pundits, and scholars speak of states' rights, they are usually referring to Southern efforts to curtail the advance of civil rights policies or to conservative opposition to the federal government under the New Deal, Great Society, and Warren Court. Sean Beienburg shows that this was not always the case, and that there was once a time when federalism--the form of government that divides powers between the state and federal governments--was associated with progressive, rather than conservative, politics.In Progressive States' Rights, Sean Beienburg tells an alternative story of federalism by exploring states' efforts in the years before the New Deal of shaping constitutional discourse to ensure that a protective welfare and regulatory governmental regime would be built in the states rather than the national government. These state-level actors not only aggressively participated in constitutional politics and interpretation but also specifically sought to create an alternative model of state-building that would pair a robust state power on behalf of the public good with a traditionally limited national government.Current politics generally collapse policy and constitutional views (where a progressive view on one policy also assumes a progressive view on the other), but Beienburg shows that this was not always true, and indeed many of those most devoted to progressive policy views were deeply committed to a conservative constitutionalism.

The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834 represented what many considered the ongoing benevolence of the United States toward Native Americans, establishing a congressionally designated refuge for displaced Indians to protect them from exploitation by white men. Others came to see it as a legally sanctioned way to swindle them out of their land.This first book-length study of "Indian country" focuses on Section 1 of the 1834 Act-which established its boundaries-to show that this legislation was ineffectual from the beginning. William Unrau challenges conventional views that the act was a continuation of the government's benevolence toward Indians, revealing it instead as little more than a deceptive stopgap that facilitated white settlement and development of the trans-Missouri West.Encompassing more than half of the Louisiana Purchase and stretching from the Red River to the headwaters of the Missouri, Indian country was designated as a place for Native survival and improvement. Unrau shows that, although many consider that the territory merely fell victim to Manifest Destiny, the concept of Indian country was flawed from the start by such factors as distorted perceptions of the region's economic potential, tribal land compressions, government complicity in overland travel and commerce, and blatant disregard for federal regulations. Chronicling the encroachments of land-hungry whites, which met with little resistance from negligent if not complicit lawmakers and bureaucrats, he tells how the protection of Indian country lasted only until the needs of westward expansion outweighed those associated with the presumed solution to the "Indian problem" and how subsequent legislation negated the supposed permanence of Indian lands.When thousands of settlers began entering Kansas Territory in 1854, the government appeared powerless to protect Indians--even though it had been responsible for carving Kansas out of Indian country in the first place. Unrau's work shows that there has been a general misunderstanding of Indian country both then and now--that it was never more or less than what the white man said it was, not what the Indians were told or believed--and represents a significant chapter in the shameful history of America's treatment of Indians.

Why did it take so long for American law schools to start teaching about climate change? Although most environmental law professors were aware of climate change by 1990, it took nearly fifteen years for them to incorporate the topic into their curriculum. In her innovative new work, Kimberly K. Smith explores how American environmental law professors have addressed climate change, identifying the barriers they faced, how they overcame them, and how they created "climate law" as a domain of legal specialization.Making Climate Lawyers explores the history of why American law schools were resistant to teaching about climate change and how that changed over the course of a forty-year period, resulting in law schools across the country incorporating climate change into their curricula, with many even establishing centers on the environment. Smith challenges dominant explanations of why the United States was slow to develop climate policy: it wasn't just political opposition or short-sightedness. Creating climate legal professionals required changing the fundamentals of legal education.Based on dozens of interviews with faculty and students, Making Climate Lawyers fills a gap in the literature on the intellectual history of climate change, most of which focuses on the history of climate science. Smith focuses instead on how the climate problem fits (or doesn't fit) into the structure of American law. She uses this story as a lens through which to understand both the transformation of legal education since the 1980s and the nature of climate change as a policy problem.

Choice Outstanding TitleThroughout its existence, the Red Army was viewed as a formidable threat. By the end of the Cold War, however, it had become the weakest link in the Soviet Union's power structure. Always subordinate to the Communist Party, the military in 1991 suddenly found itself answering instead to the president of a democratic state. Dale Herspring closely examines how that relationship influenced the military's viability in the new Russian Federation.Herspring's book is the first to assess the relationship between the Russian military and the political leadership under Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. He depicts an outmoded and demoralized military force still struggling to free itself from Cold War paradigms, while failing to confront not only debacles in Afghanistan and Chechnya but also a rise in crime and corruption within the ranks. He reveals how Gorbachev neglected the military to save Russia from internal collapse and Yeltsin reneged on continuing promises of support. And, while Putin claims a better understanding of the armed forces, he has severely tightened his control over the military while monitoring its struggle toward modernization.Herspring argues that presidential leadership--or a significant lack thereof--has been the key variable determining the kind of military Russia puts in the field. It has been up to the president to ensure that the high command makes a successful transition to the new polity--otherwise combat readiness will decline and generals and admirals could become politicized. By focusing on how the high command has reacted to each president's decisions and leadership style, Herspring shows that, in spite of the continued importance of the military's bureaucratic structure, personality factors have assumed a much more important role than in the past.The Kremlin and the High Command provides the most complete analysis to date of the Russian president's influence on the Russian officer corps, the soldiers they lead, and their army's combat readiness. Shedding light on the chaos that has plagued the USSR and Russia over the past 25 years, it also suggests how the often fraught relationship between the president and the high command must evolve if the Russian Federation is to evolve into a truly democratic nation.