We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Louis Hartz’s triumphalist manifesto for an enduring American liberal tradition, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), certainly did not underestimate the role of ideology in American history, but it misinterpreted the origins of the nation’s prevailing ideologies. Hartz’s underlying argument that all American ideologies emerged from a liberal core contained a kernel of truth. But the terrain of American politics reveals that its political ideologies have been more complex than Hartz comprehended. Hartz’s fundamental misunderstanding of the ideology of the founders led him into problems in defining the liberalism that flourished in American life. Hartz’s insistence on explicating American liberalism ironically produced an original understanding of American conservatism, whether of southern slaveholders trying to fashion Tory conservatism or twentieth-century businessmen trying to insist that conservativism was consistent with the creative destruction that defines capitalism.
This chapter addresses the contributions of the Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. His influence on historical scholarship through The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935) created a field in Black history. Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of the “two-ness” of the Black experience in the United States, and lent the DuBois prestige he used as a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Black Reconstruction challenged the existing literature emphasizing the democratic achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. DuBois’ work inspired impressive later work on slave resistance, slave communities, slave religion, the slave family, and slave political awareness, as well as a reinterpretation of the Reconstruction era as one of expanding democracy. DuBois’ work stood as the basis for an anti-triumphalist interpretive thrust to American history, a thrust which persists down to the present day.
Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.
Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.
The Pacific not only inspired early investments in the New Navy but the region also offered a series of crises in which the United States could deploy naval assets. As of 1890, the New Navy could muster only five modern warships into its model “Squadron of Evolution.” As a collective, it was a force that mattered little to the North Atlantic balance of power. In the Pacific, by contrast, New Navy ships were sufficient to force Chile – a longtime antagonist – into diplomatic settlements during the Chase of the Itata (1891) and the Baltimore Incident (1891–1892). These successful acts of “cruiser diplomacy” delivered political results. Naval proponents cited operations in the Pacific as evidence of the New Navy’s efficacy and necessity. By 1893, as its sailors and marines intervened in the Hawaiian Coup, the New Navy already had a record of coercion in the Pacific. Such results undergirded celebrations and naval reviews from Astoria, Oregon to New York City, as officials displayed the New Navy and its achievements to the public and the world.
This chapter returns to the question: What can we learn from history? Drawing not only on C. Vann Woodward but also on insights of Reinhold Niebuhr, Garry Wills, and Abraham Lincoln, among others, suggests that the irony of history alerts us to the folly of ignoring inconvenient history. History, at its best, should give us a keen awareness of the irony embedded in the human experience, and, as it does, it should temper our pride even when showing mercy and our zeal even when seeking justice.
The themes of technical parity and cultural insecurity endured into the 1890s as Japan replaced Chile in the role of Pacific threat to the US New Navy. As the relative power of the Chilean Navy faded after 1892, Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) created a new challenge to US narratives about its civilizational superiority and technological prowess. Much as California’s security was a source of anxiety during the US–Chilean naval race in the 1880s, Hawaii now served as a new site of conflict between US and Japanese imperialisms – acutely in the crises of 1893 and 1897. US policymakers and naval officers used recent experiences with Chile (and China) as a lens through which to understand Japan. The upshot: the origins of the US–Japanese competition – culminating eventually in World War II – were intimately tied to navalist politics and US–Chilean tensions in the 1880s.
This chapter examines Daniel Boorstin’s contention that historically Americans’ special genius grew from taking a practical, nonideological approach to politics and government. For Boorstin, this approach allowed Americans, unfettered by ideology, to react to changing circumstances with deliberation and confidence. Boorstin argued that even the American Civil War was a nonideological conflict, emerging from a practical sectional disagreement over the need to manage the slavery question. Since Boorstin, scholarship has revealed that he failed to grasp the ideological nature of American politics in the Age of Civil War and the conflicting ideologies that drove North and South to war. Given the horrific conflict, the sweeping nature of emancipation, and the promise, later abandoned, of full citizenship to African Americans, how can the nation now have confidence that the political “genius” of American politics can survive the current era of polarization and disillusionment?
This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.
Political psychologists have long theorized that authoritarianism structures the positions people take on cultural issues and their party ties. Authoritarianism is durable; it resists the influence of other political judgments; and it is very impactful-in a word, it is strong. By contrast, researchers characterize the attitudes most people hold on most issues as unstable and ineffectual-in a word, weak. But what is true of most issues is not true of the issues that have driven America's long running culture war-abortion and gay rights. This Element demonstrates that moral issue attitudes are stronger than authoritarianism. With data from multiple sources over the period 1992-2020, it shows that (1) moral issue attitudes endure longer than authoritarianism; (2) moral issues predict change in authoritarianism; (3) authoritarianism does not systematically predict change in moral issues; and (4) moral issues have always played a much greater role structuring party ties than authoritarianism.
Americans in the twenty-first century find themselves searching for new understandings of their history. They seek explanations for chronic political polarization, acute pandemic polarization, social media addiction, heightened concern over global warming and armed global conflict, widening cultural and economic gaps between city and countryside, persistent racial tensions, gender divides, tensions over abortion rights and the public school curriculum, and a forty-year pattern of increasing economic inequality in the United States. Americans are looking for a past that can help them understand the divided and fractious present, a past that enlightens and inspires. In this collection of original essays, Lacy K. Ford uses the past to inform the present, as he provides a deeper, more nuanced understanding of American history and the American South's complicated relationship with it.
The initial creation of the United States' ocean-going battlefleet – otherwise known as the 'New Navy' – was a result of the naval wars and arms races around the Pacific during the late-nineteenth century. Using a transnational methodology, Thomas Jamison spotlights how US Civil War-era innovations catalyzed naval development in the Pacific World, creating a sense that the US Navy was falling behind regional competitors. As the industrializing 'newly-made navies' of Chile, Peru, Japan, and China raced against each other, Pacific dynamism motivated investments in the US 'New Navy as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. In this provocative exploration into the making of modern US navalism, Jamison provides an analysis of competitive naval build-ups in the Pacific, of the interactions between peoples, ideas, and practices within it, and ultimately the emergence of the US as a major power.
Courts are often thought of as protectors of minority rights. What happens when the composition of courts changes such that politically disadvantaged groups expect a less favorable reception? This Element examines whether the increasing conservatism of the US Supreme Court during Donald Trump's presidency changed the behavior of litigants and amicus curiae. The authors test whether membership changes led to reduced filings by individuals and organizations representing marginalized groups and increased filings by businesses and conservative states and interest groups. The authors find substantial reductions in participation by the most politically disadvantaged and substantial increases in participation by the most conservative groups.
The cost of administering elections is an importantly understudied area in election science. This book reports election costs in 48 out of 50 states. It discusses the challenges and opportunities of collecting local election costs. The book then presents the wide variation in cost across the country with the lowest spending states spending a little over $2 per voter and the highest spending almost $20 per voter. The amounts being spent in the state are also examined over the election time period of 2008 – 2016. Economic events like the Great Recession had predictable effects on lowering spending on elections but the patterns are not the same across the different regions of the country. The relationship between spending and election administration outcomes is also explored and finds that the voters' confidence and perceptions of fraud in elections is associated with the amount spent on election administration.
The Conclusion emphasizes the book’s primary argument, that its proposed system of means-based adjustments to the tax compliance rules would more effectively deter tax avoidance and evasion by the rich than would reforms focused solely on increasing the IRS’s funding or on rules targeting specific potentially abusive activities. It notes that the book has provided four practical applications of this approach – as adjustments to tax penalties, penalty defenses, the statute of limitations, and information reporting – but that these examples are just the beginning. The book concludes that its analysis and new approach to tax administration should be relevant to legislators and other tax policymakers, scholars of both tax law and progressivity, and federal and state tax administrators.