This article reconsiders the history of the Community Action Program (CAP). I argue that the CAP is best understood as a bold attempt at administrative experimentation and reform. Using original archival materials, I show that policymakers involved the CAP’s design outlined three models of community action: coordination, collaboration, and mobilization, which communities drew upon when implementing the program. Drawing upon an original dataset of ninety-eight community action agencies (CAAs), this article provides a synthetic assessment of the CAP’s implementation. I show that while the 1967 Green Amendment curtailed the CAP’s experimental and participatory ethos, most CAAs operated relatively harmoniously with local governments and social welfare groups to fight poverty. By looking beyond the dramatic clashes between CAAs and local governments and focusing on the multiple ways in which CAAs seized upon the CAP’s experimental nature, this article provides a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the CAP’s historical legacy.

Between 1876 and 1917, government philosophy toward telephone regulation began moving away from laissez-faire and toward some kind of involvement in economic affairs. However, while some early studies of regulation suggest business hostility to that policy, AT&T actively sought regulation, jogging government and the public in that direction. But this study is not just a restatement of the interest-group-capture theory, as offered by such economists as Stigler or historians as Kolko. Regulation resulted from the convergence of interests of many affected players, including residential and business telephone subscribers, the independent telephone companies that competed with AT&T, and the state and federal governments, as well as AT&T. I employ a multiple interest theory to account for telephone regulation, but unlike other studies using such a framework, I suggest that government is an independent actor with impact on the final policy outcome, and not merely an arena where private interests battle for control over policy outcomes, as is so common among other multiple interest studies of regulation.

World War II was a time of unprecedented industrial growth and urban and suburban expansion in California. War mobilization ushered in new types of postindustrial and technology-based industries. Military bases were established up and down the Pacific Coast. Factories suddenly materialized, supplying military hardware, jobs, and, in turn, attracting a new wave of migrants.

Since its first widespread use during World War I, the public corporation has figured prominently as an instrument of government on the federal and state level. Its policy domain has progressively expanded from wartime financing and procurement to broadly defined developmental, lending, and investment activities. Functioning outside the regular structure of the executive branch, the public corporation operates as a separate legal entity invested with independent borrowing authority and the power to retain earnings derived from its activities. The institution's proliferating presence on the political landscape reflects the continuing appeal of its hybrid form, designed to wed market efficiency to the pursuit of public purposes.

In the best-selling book Civil Action, Jonathan Harr depicts an environmental pollution tale of frightening contamination and endless litigation in a small Massachusetts town during the 1970s and 1980s. A quixotic and some-what foolish lawyer pursues two giant and evil corporations through the legal system, seeking justice for his hapless working-class clients. In the end, the solitary lawyer falters when faced with the overwhelming economic and (seemingly underhanded) legal power of the corporations. Justice is not served, if it truly ever is, until the might of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intervenes to force the business interests to admit some wrong and shell out some money.

In 1997 the French Socialist party, in alliance with the small parties of the Communists, Verts (left-wing ecologists), Citizens' Movement, and Radical Socialists (the so-called plural left), won a narrow victory defeating the President's party, the failing government and its beleaguered prime minister. In June, the left formed a government under its leader, Lionel Jospin, and included ministers from all of the formations. Its victory was unexpected as in 1993 the Socialist party had suffered a near obliteration and the conservative right had won a landslide, but it had revived at the 1995 presidential elections, when it ran Lionel Jospin, and steadily—though not spectacularly—revived after that. However, the victory in 1997 was more the result of the conservative right's divisions, an unpopular government, the hostility of the Front National, and the spectacular miscalculations of the neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac than to the prowess of the renewed Socialist party.

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

Historians of the United States have learned much in the past twenty years about the history of what is now called its political culture, and about its environmental history.1 These two dimensions of national life, however, are rarely, if ever, looked at together. The result is that we little understand how powerfully environmental policy is influenced not simply by everyday politics—of that we know abundantly—but by the long-term political mentalities of the Democrats and the Republicans, mentalities which originate not in abstract theorizing, but which grow up naturally within the cultural worlds to be found among the distinctive groups of peoples who line up within one party or the other and remain there, generation after generation. What I propose here is to put political culture and natural resource management history together and see what happens.

Using federalism as a guide, this research explores the conflicted, complementary and unique natural gas policy paths of the U.S. federal government, Wyoming and Colorado and analyzes how policies facilitate and respond to booms. Federal policymaking has consistently focused on gas ownership, leasing, interstate dispute resolution and fiscal mechanisms to stimulate and manage development. At the state level, policies are designed to enable exploration and production while protecting fuel mineral rights, minimizing waste and generating revenue. During the most recent gas boom, driven in part by technological advances like fracking, policies are being tested from local to national levels. Colorado demonstrates that states can balance economic benefits with environmental and social costs of gas booms, thus providing an example for other gas producing states. Whether states serve as stewards or laggards is a function of federalism and choice, but the direction of federal and state natural gas policy remains a long-term play.