Canadian policy on the protection of refugees has evolved through three distinct traditions. During the first era, refugee protection was constructed as a matter of immigration control. Indeed, until the middle of the twentieth century, Canada had no law or policy specifically oriented to the admission of refugees. Refugees simply applied for permission to enter Canada under the auspices of the general immigration scheme, the primary purpose of which was to promote domestic economic interests. The erosion of this historical view of refugees as immigrants has occurred only gradually, such that even today most refugees protected by Canada must meet immigration selection criteria, in addition to showing that they are at risk in their home country.

This article addresses the origins of the immigration restriction movement in the late 19th century United States, a movement that realized its aims in the early 20th. It critiques the dominant scholarly interpretation, which holds that the movement sprang from a racism that viewed the new immigrants of this period as biologically inferior. It argues first that activists did not have at hand a biological theory sufficient to this characterization and did not employ one. It argues second that the movement arose as an adroit political response to labor market competition. The Republican Party recognized the discontent of resident workers (including those of older immigrant origin) with competition from new immigrants. The Party discerned ethnic differences among new and old immigrants and capitalized on these conditions in order to win elections. Ethnocentrism and middle-class anxiety over mass immigrant added to a movement that depended on bringing working class voters into the Party.

It has become commonplace to acknowledge the exceptionally adversarial nature of business-government relations in the United States. When compared to their counterparts in Germany, France, Japan, and the Nordic countries, American business executives have much more autonomy from the state; and yet, there is also greater distrust between business and government. Such adversarial relations, many students of comparative political economy argue, puts the United States in the late twentieth century at a disadvantage. Faced with competitors in the world market who cooperate with their respective governments on investment, training, and long-term sectoral development, American corporations compete in global markets under a considerable handicap.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Wisconsin, like many northern industrial states, faced a profound fiscal challenge. As one concerned citizen succinctly explained, “The two great administrative problems before our people at this time are, first, the control of corporate wealth, and, second, the establishment of a rational system of taxation.” The large-scale structural pressures created by the rise of corporate capitalism and the decline of an obsolete tax system forced all levels of government to reexamine the substance and administration of their fiscal policies. At the state and local level, many governments addressed the mismatch between the increasing demand for state services and the declining supply of revenue by turning to new levies and innovative forms of administration.

Recently, the story of President Richard M. Nixon's “southern strategy” and its relationship to school desegregation has become a ripe topic for historical revision. Ever wary of the shifty-eyed Nixon, contemporary critics argued that the president had retreated from civil rights to win the votes of conservative white southerners. Modifying this thesis, recent scholars have concluded that the president was neither a segregationist nor a conservative on the race question. These writers have shown that Nixon desegregated more schools than previous presidents, approved a strengthened Voting Rights Act, developed policies to aid minority businesses, and supported affirmative action.

Particularly in the past decade or so, New Deal scholarship has taken a new turn, and the period after the mid-1950s has received substantial scrutiny and significant rethinking. Standard accounts of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency have long held that the New Deal was essentially a product of Roosevelt's first term, of the “First New Deal” of 1933 and the “Second New Deal” of 1935. Legislative stalemate, program consolidation and sometimes reduction, and attention to foreign and military affairs then marked the remainder of Roosevelt's presidency. A new and interdisciplinary literature, however, has demonstrated that the later New Deal of FDR's second and third terms was more distinctive and more important than the established view suggests. There has developed an understanding that from 1937 on the New Deal entered an important new phase, a third stage—that there was a “Third New Deal” crucial to understanding the New Deal and the direction of liberal policy and the American state.

In their research, policy analysts and historians have had an understandable attachment to ‘successful” state and federal environmental programs, initiatives that spawn long-term imitation or significantly advance the goals or innovative methodologies of specific policymakers. Indeed, by the very nature of their success, they command the attention of scholars and lawmakers. However, as this study will show, inefficient, costly, or controversial programs widely viewed as “failures” often generate equally long-term, historically significant policy changes.

Compounded as it is of contrasting forms, the purely national and the purely federal, federalism in the United States is inherently unstable. The division of power and prerogative between nation and states constantly changes, tending normally to become more national. Sometimes change occurs more swiftly and penetrates more deeply than others, and the 1960s were one of those times. One after another, constitutional thresholds were crossed. By the mid-1970s, American federalism had become something very different from what it had been fifteen years before. The place of place in the American polity had been sharply devalued. Autonomous individuals as political actors had gained at the expense of place-based communities. So had groups identified by such rival attributes as race or gender.

My initial decision to explicate how I read formal planning texts was provoked by the 1988 publication of a scheme for the CBD of Philadelphia and the adjacent residential neighborhoods. I thought initially that I might be able to help people directly read The Plan for Center City. Ultimately, however, I settled on a more modest goal: encouraging a conversation among planners about both reading and writing plans. My contribution to that conversation, an essay entitled “Reading Plans,” started with the notion that a plan, like any other text, creates images of an “ideal” and a “real” author and reader. I went on to explore the ways in which I located myself within and against those images. Once I'd fixed my location, I suggested, I read the core of a plan—whether it was a budget, a simple plat of streets and lots, a formal set of legal rules controlling land use, or an elaborately argued hybrid like The Plan for Center City—in three complementary ways: as a complex set of policy arguments, as an elaboration of a decision opportunity, and as a story.

During the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission took on the powerful American Medical Association, hastening the end of the medical profession's domination of the health-care industry. The pivotal confrontation was the FTC's administrative action (the “FTC proceeding”), commenced in 1975, against the AMA. According to the FTC, ethical restrictions on physician advertising, solicitation, and contract practice bore no reasonable relationship to procompetitive concerns, the touchstone of the FTC's public-interest calculus. By eliminating these restraints, FTC commissioners and attorneys cut the ties that bound rank-and-file physicians to their national, state, and local medical societies, thereby undermining the structure of organized medicine. Stripped of its organizing principles and enforcement mechanisms, the medical establishment weakly resisted the formation of large-scale provider networks and the integration of insurance products and delivery systems, known as health maintenance organizations or HMOs.

The decline of traditional industries, or “deindustrialization,” has been a topic of growing interest among American historians. Most of the existing literature illuminates the experiences of individuals, communities, and companies directly affected by plant closures. Historians have recently begun to explore public policy responses to industrial decline, although policymaking on this issue at the state level has received almost no attention. State government has nevertheless been an important locus of activity for dealing with deindustrialization. This is not surprising, considering the importance of the states in the American federal system and the fact that industrial decline often concentrates in particular areas of the country at a given time.

This article examines the views of Britain's organized railway, mining, and engineering workers (machinists) and their union leaders about state involvement in workplace accident prevention (1876–97), accident compensation (1876–1911), and the 1911 National Insurance Act. The miners and the railwaymen left numerous comments on these topics because they labored in unusually hazardous trades. (Their unions were large and were relatively democratic.) After 1880, leaders of the miners and railwaymen concluded that it was problematic to rely solely on trade union workplace bargaining power to protect worker life and limb and to compensate injured workers for their economic losses. Faced with what was initially seen as a Hobson's choice between employer compulsion and state compulsion, after the mid-1880s these trade unionists began to lean toward the latter. Historical experience led the trade union leaders whose views are discussed in this article to trust increasingly the Labor Department of the Board of Trade and to endorse Liberal welfare-state programs proposed in 1908 and thereafter. In 1911 the rank-and-file machinists who expressed their views about National Insurance in letters to the labor press were suspicious of augmenting the power of the state, but they were unwilling to scuttle National Insurance, preferring to agitate to expand union rights of participation. Worker opposition to some features of state-mandated income maintenance programs, especially those with compulsory payroll deductions, should not be interpreted as rejection of the welfare state in principle.

On 26 July 1990, President George Bush signed an ambitious new civil rights law at an emotional ceremony held on the South Lawn of the White House. Passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, PL 101–336) brought civil rights protections for people with disabilities to a level of parity with civil rights protections already enjoyed by racial minorities and by women. What accounted for a Republican administration enthusiastically endorsing a sweeping civil rights law that might benefit as many as 43 million people? Briefly put, historical traditions within disability policy that in turn reflected broader trends within social welfare policy between 1950 and 1990 allowed the ADA to be portrayed in conservative terms that were congenial to a Republican administration.