Shaped by the State

Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4774483
AutoresTracy L Steffes (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen107
Número1
Páginas225-226
Fecha de publicación2020-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaaa105
OpenAlexW3037797428
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15

In the introduction to their edited volume, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams challenge scholars of modern American political history to revisit an overarching framework: the rise of the New Deal political order and its displacement by a conservative and/or neoliberal one. This framework of the rise and fall of the New Deal order, they contend, obscures continuities and persistent features of American politics that cut across chronological periods and partisan divides, including deeply rooted norms, values, and consensuses. The framework's periodization and its analytical focus on partisan conflict risk missing deeper forms of consensus and important developments that do not fit into that mold, including white supremacy, patriarchy, values of global capitalism, and notions of American exceptionalism. Furthermore, political historians should think carefully about the concept of political order itself and question what is missed by ordering political time around crisis. The excellent essays in this volume function on two levels. First, most represent a recent or in-progress book that promises substantive contributions to twentieth-century American history. The diverse, wide-ranging essays examine questions that span across subfields, and different readers will undoubtedly be drawn to different essays: New Deal state building through localism and public-private partnerships; citizens’ shifting perceptions of Social Security numbers and privacy; the hidden state role in reconstituting monetary policy; how urban property assessment policies exploited African Americans; workplace enactment of antismoking regulations; the role of religious organizations in refugee care; the influence of foreign policy in the building of the American carceral state; the gendering of regulation and antistatism through “nanny state” critiques; and how bracero workers turned to the Mexican government for protection from American labor exploitation (p. 335

American exceptionalism · Capitalism · Democracy · Localism · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Law · Race, History, and American Society