Synopses & Reviews
While it is obvious that America 's state and local governments were consistently active during the nineteenth century, a period dominated by laissez-faire, political historians of twentieth-century America have assumed that the national government did very little during this period. A Government Out of Sight challenges this premise, chronicling the ways in which the national government intervened powerfully in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans through the law, subsidies, and the use of third parties (including state and local governments), while avoiding bureaucracy. Americans have always turned to the national government especially for economic development and expansion and in the nineteenth century even those who argued for a small, nonintrusive central government demanded that the national government expand its authority to meet the nation 's challenges. In revising our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout this period, this study fundamentally alters our perspective on American political development in the twentieth century, shedding light on contemporary debates between progressives and conservatives about the proper size of government and government programs and subsidies that even today remain out of sight.
Review
“Boundaries of the State in US History contains cutting edge work on the nature of the American state. It explains how the United States managed to accomplish complex goals, such as distributing its western lands, without an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus. The contributors to this widely ranging book force us to rethink our fundamental notions of the American state, such as its weakness in comparison with European and other states. This collection will become indispensable to political scientists and historians alike.”
Review
“This resonant collection explores the varieties and powers of the US national state by taking its boundaries and limits seriously. Generating striking insights across a range of fundamental subjects, its thoughtful overviews and absorbing essays offer readers fresh understanding of deep-seated connections between political authority and both domestic society and basic global patterns.”
Review
“This outstanding collection captures the full breadth of exciting new work on the American state. The essays challenge us to think in novel and creative ways about the binaries—state and society, republic and empire, public and private, federal and local—that have profoundly shaped historical writing on this institution. They powerfully advance our ability to comprehend the possibilities and perils of democratic statecraft across the entire span of US history. A major achievement.”
Synopsis
The question of how the American state defines its powernot what it is” but what it doeshas become central to a range of historical discourses, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system, to the functions of agencies and Americas place in the world. Here, James Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen Sawyer assemble some definitional work in this area, showing that the state is an integral actor in physical, spatial, and economic exercises of power. They further imply that traditional conceptions of the state cannot grasp the subtleties of power and its articulation. Contributors include C.J. Álvarez, Elisabeth Clemens, Richard John, Robert Lieberman, Omar McRoberts, Gautham Rao, Gabriel Rosenberg, Jason Scott Smith, Tracy Steffes, and the editors.
About the Author
James T. Sparrow is associate professor of history and master of the Collegiate Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He is the author of
Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government.
William J. Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He is the author of
The People’s Welfare Law and editor of
The Democratic Experiment.
Stephen W. Sawyer is chair of the History Department and cofounder of the History, Law, and Society Program at the American University of Paris. He is the translator of Michel Foucault’s Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer
Introduction
Part I : The State and the World
Gautham Rao
One / The Early American State “In Action”: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–1860
Stephen W. Sawyer
Two / Beyond Tocqueville’s Myth: Rethinking the Model of the American State
C. J. Alvarez
Three / Inventing the US-Mexico Border
James T. Sparrow
Four / Rumors of Empire: Tracking the Image of Britain at the Dawn of the American Century
Jason Scott Smith
Five / The Great Transformation: The State and the Market in the Postwar World
Part II : The State and Civil Society
Tracy Steffes
Six / Governing the Child: The State, the Family, and the Compulsory School in the Early Twentieth Century
Gabriel N. Rosenberg
Seven / Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America
Elisabeth Clemens
Eight / Good Citizens of a World Power: Postwar Reconfigurations of the Obligation to Give
Omar M. McRoberts
Nine / The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State: Black Religion and the Negotiation of Church/State Boundaries during the War on Poverty
Robert C. Lieberman
Ten / Private Power and American Bureaucracy: The State, the EEOC, and Civil Rights Enforcement
Richard R. John
Eleven / From Political Economy to Civil Society: Arthur W. Page, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Reframing of the Past in Post–New Deal America
William J. Novak
Conclusion: The Concept of the State in American History
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index