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.

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.

The general public in the United States has been inundated during the 1980s and early 1990s with information about narcotics abuse, trafficking, and control. From journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials, and the medical community, the American populace ascertained that illicit drug use and trading have recently become among the nation's most intractable problems. Repeatedly, those sources reported that the consumption of cocaine, especially “crack”, had reached epidemic proportions, that drug-related violence overran the country's major cities, that youths should (according to First Lady Nancy Reagan) “just say no” to the purveyors of addictive substances, and that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush had declared war on drugs. Americans learned too that only partial gains had been made against narcotics abuse and trafficking. Such a realization proved difficult for them to fathom following the 1988 presidential election campaign with its antidrug rhetoric, after the enactment by Congress of the Omnibus Drug Act of 1988 (which created a cabinet level “drug czar”—the director of the office of National Drug Control Policy in the Executive Office of the President), and given the stormy two-year tenure of William Bennett in that post. Of greater concern by 1991, evaluations of the nation's antinarcotics endeavors by the press, government authorities, and other informed observers indicated that the fundamental strategy of drug control was in dispute. Notwithstanding compelling arguments which insisted that the narcotics problem would continue until the domestic demand for drugs ended, federal government efforts have generally sought to eliminate foreign narcotics production and the smuggling of those substances into the United States.

It is a regrettable feature of the scholarly literature on Woodrow Wilson that so little of it relates to, or attempts to integrate, all the different phases or various aspects of his career—as an academic political scientist, as a figure in American domestic politics, and as a shaper of American foreign policy (and begetter of what has become known as “Wilsonianism”). Of course, there have been many biographies, including some fine ones, but they have generally paid more attention to Wilson's personal life and characteristics than to his thinking. There have also been some books on his work as an academic political scientist, but these have not explored in any depth its relation to his later political career. The disjunction has some justification in that Wilson's actions and utterances as a politician certainly reflected both immediate pressures and a variety of considerations apart from his own personal beliefs and ideals. Nevertheless, he remained the same man, and an appreciation of the long-established and deeply rooted views Wilson held about the nature of politics and of historical development can enhance our understanding of his approach to the problems he faced—not least with respect to foreign policy. In this essay I will attempt to make such a connection by focusing on Wilson's thought about law and constitutions—subjects central to his thinking about politics throughout his life.

In 1961 I was introduced to the invidious distinctions of race in America at the Sears and Roebuck store in Miami, Florida. I was seven years old when the babysitter took me shopping, spicing up the offer by promising some of those hot cashews whose aroma wafted through the deliciously cool air at Sears. While Myrtle browsed, I spotted a diversion that promised even more variety than the retail behemoth's tentative steps into fashion wear: it was a water fountain. There were two, actually, but the one I set my sights on was labeled “colored.” With thoughts of rainbows and Maypoles whirling through my mind, I headed straight for this ingenious invention that would soon quench all the shades of my thirst. Why hadn't I ever seen multicolored water before? Myrtle's guttural report aborted any further speculation. “Stop,” she boomed from oversized lingerie. Then something very strange happened. Myrtle ran. I had never seen Myrtle move quickly, let alone run. I froze. She grabbed my hand, suspended just inches from the cool silver handle and white porcelain basin. “That's dirty,” she grimaced. “It's for colored people.”

In August 1945 the Truman administration faced a host of dilemmas when it moved to demobilize the American economy and dismantle the system of wartime economic regulations. The new President and many of his top officials lacked executive experience, having assumed their positions less than six months earlier. Given Japan's sudden and surprising surrender, they also had not yet prepared detailed reconversion plans, since most had expected the Pacific War to continue for at least six months to a year longer. And within the administration there was no consensus on two key issues—whether price controls would help or hinder the transition to peacetime, and whether inflation or unemployment was the main threat to postwar prosperity.

Soon after American entry into World War I, Colonel Charles Keller of the Army Corps of Engineers confronted an emergency on the home front that threatened to stymie victory abroad. For several years, the West Point career officer had been in charge of overseeing the development of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls, New York. Now Keller began receiving urgent messages from manufacturers in nearby Buffalo complaining that shortages of electricity were preventing them from producing vital materials such as high-grade steel for shell casings, aluminum for airplanes, chlorine for poison gas, and other electrochemicals.

In a way, there is an unspoken subtext to this “state-of-the-field” panel on political history. For at least some of us, there is a whisper of uneasiness associated with this topic, a small internal voice concerned about the health and survival of political history. In the relatively recent past, the flowering of social history challenged and eventually toppled the dominance of political history—a fine development, given that in the long reach of history politics is only part of the story. Unfortunately, this shift of balance left some scholars with a bad taste in their mouths. Some social historians have retained a lingering antipathy toward political history as a looming presence—an elite-driven, chronologically organized, “imperalist” narrative that threatens to subsume scholarship once again. Some political historians, in turn, feel besieged by social history and its seeming focus on minority and underprivileged populations to the exclusion of much else. Both of these emotionalized outlooks rest on distorted and exaggerated assumptions. But for many political historians, the end result is a current of nervous tension about the place of their field in the larger scheme of historical scholarship.

By the 1950s, two contrasting strategies of white leadership were emerging in the South: “massive resistance” and “moderation.” Both were equally committed in principle to a defense of segregation, but they employed different tactics: The former trumpeted “defiance,” the later counseled “delay.” The strategists of-“massive resistance,” who for a decade largely dominated politics in Alabama and Mississippi, were convinced that any concession, even a tactical one, would be a dangerous break in the dike of segregation. They believed that defiance could deter the federal government from enforcing the university desegregation decisions and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954; 1955). On the other hand, the strategists of “moderation,” who gained political ascendancy in South Carolina, maneuvered within the law, first to postpone implementation of Brown, and then to determine the minimum amount of desegregation that blacks would accept, which would not at the same time inflame white racists. In effect, they used skillful tactics of delay to “moderate” both white racism and black aspirations. Ultimately, they were more successful in achieving their objectives than the resisters, because they avoided sweeping federal interventions.

Significant differences in the availability of new medicines in the United States and the United Kingdom became apparent in the 1970s. This article examines the history of drug regulation in the two countries and argues that the divergence was the result of distinctive regulatory approaches that emerged simultaneously throughout the twentieth century. The British approach was based largely on informal, nonstatutory controls, while the American approach relied heavily on centralized regulatory controls. The article argues that the nature of business-government relations has played a significant role in the divergence. The impact of these divergent approaches is apparent in the contemporary regulatory framework, especially with respect to determining the effectiveness of new drugs.

Rogers Smith's American Political Science Review article, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions of America,” poses challenging substantive and methodological questions for the study of American political development. Whether or not it intended to do so, the article has struck a chord in several programs of research. The following colloquy between Smith and me centers on Smith's reading of political culture in terms of “traditions.” In a spirit of advancing our common enterprise, I have sharpened rather than muted the differences between Smith's views and my own in order to bring them into relief in a short space.