Jonathan Obert
Biographic Data
| ID | 3469823 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Obert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Obert |
| SIGNATURE | OBERT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Amherst College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0847-3083 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Armed Federalism, Gun Markets, and the Right to Bear Arms in the United States
This article argues that fragmented and varied regulatory, cultural, and electoral responses to guns and gun rights in the contemporary United States are a result of two long-standing features of American political life––its tradition of armed federalism and its unique, domestically oriented market for small firearms. As a result of the intersection of these two phenomena, the past 150 years have seen the growth of a fragmentary regulatory respon…
Authors’ Response
It is a special honor to publish our work alongside rigorous critiques from Dorothy Sue Cobble, Kristoffer Smemo, Eric Schickler, and Devin Caughey. We are grateful for the opportunity to debate our research in the pages of Labor with such an esteemed and interdisciplinary group of labor historians and political scientists. In this memo we will restate our argument, address three common concerns raised by the commentators, respond to specific que…
Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies: The CIO and the Taft-Hartley Act
The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that fo…
Inlaws, Outlaws, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Oklahoma
While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in…
Policing the Boundary and Bounding the Police: Fictitious Borders and the Making of Gendarmeries in North America
This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the states of late nineteenth century North America and the reality of local trans-border life helped drive the militarization of borderlands policing. The form this militarization took, in turn, reflected administrative state development; that is, whether they were relatively unitary and centralized, like Canada, or whether they were marked by fragmenta…
Shocked into Service: Free Trade and the American South’s Military Burden
Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While trade shocks generally lead to local increases in US Army enlistment, there are two different regional dynamics that concentrate this effect in the South. First, trade-related job losses are disproportionately concentrated in this region, where manufacturing jobs gradually migrated during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, the South’s “mi…
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
Long ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrated that the production of historical narrative always involved the consolidation of power, noting in Silencing the Past, that historical "facts are not cr
The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics
American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence…
Keeping Vigil: The Emergence of Vigilance Committees in Pre-Civil War America
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call …
Right Wing Militias, Guns, and the Technics of State Power
Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serv…
A Fragmented Force: The Evolution of Federal Law Enforcement in the United States, 1870–1900
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Coevolution of Public and Private Security in Nineteenth-Century Chicago
The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago arose from the breakdown of an older system in which the provision of law enforcement was delegated to local communities. The growth of anonymity and the presence of strangers in a city undergoing massive changes in transportation undermined this delegative system and created the perception of new public security threats. These threa…
The Six-Shooter Marketplace: 19Th-Century Gunfighting as Violence Expertise
How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-cen…
Keeping Vigil: The Emergence of Vigilance Committees in Pre-Civil War America
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call …
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
Long ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrated that the production of historical narrative always involved the consolidation of power, noting in Silencing the Past, that historical "facts are not cr
The Coevolution of Public and Private Security in Nineteenth-Century Chicago
The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago arose from the breakdown of an older system in which the provision of law enforcement was delegated to local communities. The growth of anonymity and the presence of strangers in a city undergoing massive changes in transportation undermined this delegative system and created the perception of new public security threats. These threa…
Right Wing Militias, Guns, and the Technics of State Power
Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serv…
The Six-Shooter Marketplace: 19Th-Century Gunfighting as Violence Expertise
How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-cen…
Armed Federalism, Gun Markets, and the Right to Bear Arms in the United States
This article argues that fragmented and varied regulatory, cultural, and electoral responses to guns and gun rights in the contemporary United States are a result of two long-standing features of American political life––its tradition of armed federalism and its unique, domestically oriented market for small firearms. As a result of the intersection of these two phenomena, the past 150 years have seen the growth of a fragmentary regulatory respon…
Inlaws, Outlaws, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Oklahoma
While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in…
A Fragmented Force: The Evolution of Federal Law Enforcement in the United States, 1870–1900
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Six-Shooter Marketplace: 19Th-Century Gunfighting as Violence Expertise
How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-cen…
Right Wing Militias, Guns, and the Technics of State Power
Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serv…
A Fragmented Force: The Evolution of Federal Law Enforcement in the United States, 1870–1900
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Coevolution of Public and Private Security in Nineteenth-Century Chicago
The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago arose from the breakdown of an older system in which the provision of law enforcement was delegated to local communities. The growth of anonymity and the presence of strangers in a city undergoing massive changes in transportation undermined this delegative system and created the perception of new public security threats. These threa…
The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics
American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence…
Keeping Vigil: The Emergence of Vigilance Committees in Pre-Civil War America
What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call …
Policing the Boundary and Bounding the Police: Fictitious Borders and the Making of Gendarmeries in North America
This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the states of late nineteenth century North America and the reality of local trans-border life helped drive the militarization of borderlands policing. The form this militarization took, in turn, reflected administrative state development; that is, whether they were relatively unitary and centralized, like Canada, or whether they were marked by fragmenta…
Shocked into Service: Free Trade and the American South’s Military Burden
Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While trade shocks generally lead to local increases in US Army enlistment, there are two different regional dynamics that concentrate this effect in the South. First, trade-related job losses are disproportionately concentrated in this region, where manufacturing jobs gradually migrated during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, the South’s “mi…
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
Long ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrated that the production of historical narrative always involved the consolidation of power, noting in Silencing the Past, that historical "facts are not cr
Authors’ Response
It is a special honor to publish our work alongside rigorous critiques from Dorothy Sue Cobble, Kristoffer Smemo, Eric Schickler, and Devin Caughey. We are grateful for the opportunity to debate our research in the pages of Labor with such an esteemed and interdisciplinary group of labor historians and political scientists. In this memo we will restate our argument, address three common concerns raised by the commentators, respond to specific que…
Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies: The CIO and the Taft-Hartley Act
The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that fo…
Inlaws, Outlaws, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Oklahoma
While much of the federal Department of Justice’s policing bureaucracy was in retrenchment from the 1880s and 1890s, the Indian Territories was the site of some of the most aggressive policing in the nation’s history. Specifically, a series of reforms in US-Indian relations permitted a high level of federal involvement in policing and the management of local order. Using original demographic data on US deputy marshals and criminal gangs active in…
Armed Federalism, Gun Markets, and the Right to Bear Arms in the United States
This article argues that fragmented and varied regulatory, cultural, and electoral responses to guns and gun rights in the contemporary United States are a result of two long-standing features of American political life––its tradition of armed federalism and its unique, domestically oriented market for small firearms. As a result of the intersection of these two phenomena, the past 150 years have seen the growth of a fragmentary regulatory respon…
Political science (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Public Administration (6 works) · Race, History, and American Society (6 works) · American History and Culture (5 works) · Economics (5 works)