The Supreme Court changed abortion laws across the United States on 22 January 1973. Abortion had been illegal in many states, and in others a closely regulated medical procedure. In only four states did the law provide a broad right to terminate a pregnancy in the early months. Roe v. Wade declared that this right in the context of the doctor-patient relationship was protected by the Constitution's “right to privacy.” In practice, abortion became a matter of personal choice.

Thinking big about the development of social policies in the United States has become fashionable. Until recently, occasional comprehensive histories of social provision in America focused on single periods of reform ferment, such as the Progressive Era, or the New Deal, or the Great Society. Then, James T. Patterson's 1981 book America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980, and Michael B. Katz's 1986 book In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, provided overviews of American attitudes toward poverty and attempts to do something about it from the nineteenth century to the present. These authors were clearly perplexed by the devolution of the antipoverty efforts of the War on Poverty and the Great Society into the political stalemates of the late 1970s and the conservative backlashes of the 1980s. Their books seem to be trying to use rich descriptive overviews of the past to gain some perspective on where American “welfare reforms” might go in the future.

State criminal disenfranchisement provisions have recently attracted much scholarly attention. Some scholars have examined the consequences of these policies, such as the number of individuals they have disenfranchised (particularly the high percentage of African Americans), the way in which they have altered election outcomes, and their effect on voter turnout. Other scholars have assessed the persuasiveness of various justifications for these policies. Still other scholars have analyzed legal strategies that might be used to repeal these policies.

Do party ideologies matter in the making of public policy in the United States? The conventional answer to this question is equivocal. The American parties are generally considered to be less ideological than their Anglo European brethren. More important perhaps, these parties seem to lack the organizational characteristics necessary to implement such ideologies (were they present to begin with). With fragmented leadership in the legislature, a decentralized system of candidate selection and a federalist, divided-powers constitutional regime, the American political system seems inhospitable—if not downright inimical—to party ideology. The American parties, writes Theodore Lowi, are “constituent parties and have almost never been ‘responsible,’policy-making parties.”

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (adhd) holds the distinction of being both the most extensively studied pediatric mental disorder and one of the most controversial. This is partly due to the fact that it is also the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder among minors. Currently, almost 8 percent of youth from the ages of four to seventen have a diagnosis of ADHD, and slightly more than 4 percent both have the diagnosis and are taking medication for the disorder. In other words, on average one in every ten to fifteen children in the United States has been diagnosed with the disorder and one in every twenty to twenty-five uses a stimulant medication—often Ritalin, Adderall, or Concertaas treatment. The biggest increase in youth diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a stimulant drug occurred during the early 1990s, when the prevalence of physician visits for stimulant pharmacotherapy increased fivefold. This unprecedented increase in U.S. children using psychotropic medication triggered an intense public debate.

While the American teachers’ unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school teachers’ job security through their backing of teacher tenure laws, the relationship between tenure and teachers’ organizations is historically contingent. This article shows how in 1937 Pennsylvania teachers pushed their state legislature to pass what was at the time the most empowering teacher tenure law in existence. Using primary documents, the article examines how nonunionized teachers politicized tenure in the early 1930s, before the New Deal reshaped the political environment. Women activists from Philadelphia’s AFT Local 192 successfully lobbied the legislature in Harrisburg in 1937 to pass a far-reaching tenure law that not only guaranteed due-process rights for teachers, but did so without allowing for a probationary period and without exception for married women teachers. Pennsylvania’s teacher unionists fought against efforts to reform the law in the years that followed.

This article examines the financial industry’s critical role in retargeting U.S. health policy goals of improving peoples’ health in the 1960s to those of expanding institutional wealth in the 1970s. Government collaborated with finance to support not-for-profit hospitals’ use of debt to build services that augmented capital and operated like for-profit businesses. Certificate of Need, hospital rate review, and national health planning programs came to assess hospital performance in terms of capital formation, returns on investment, and bond ratings. The regulatory programs helped gentrify medicine by reinforcing selective investment in lucrative, high-tech services that market specialty procedures to affluent populations in place of disease control, primary care, and general acute care for all. Their actions laid the groundwork for the 1980s finance industry coup, which employed market ideology to dominate health policy at the expense of equality, effectiveness, and public health governance.

Between the 1930s and early 1960s, U.S. economic policy underwent an important transformation, described by economist Herbert Stein as “The Fiscal Revolution in America.” During those years, policymakers utilized Keynesian ideas to promote prosperity, and the fiscal revolution reached its peak after John F. Kennedy proposed a growth-boosting tax cut despite the unprecedented peacetime consequence of running a deficit in nonrecession conditions. This article explores how that revolution developed during the postwar period. It challenges the argument that the business community shaped and consolidated the fiscal revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Instead, this article shows that liberal economists played a crucial role in fashioning Keynesianism’s postwar consolidation, so much so that the brand of that doctrine implemented in the early 1960s owed much to their efforts and was significantly different to the one championed by the business community.

There has always been something problematic, if not anomalous, about the political status of the District of Columbia. In theory, the federal government reigns supreme. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” in the territory that houses the seat of government, but it is not clear whether that rules out some measure of popular representation in local government. For Congress to exercise exclusive authority over the capital of the Republic, in denial of the inhabitants' right to govern their own affairs, might seem a stark contradiction of the founding principles of American government. “This, happening at the seat of a nation which boasts of its democratic government,” observed a writer in the Atlantic Monthly in 1909, during a period when the District was subject to direct federal control, “constitutes a solecism of the first magnitude.” Over the 204 years of its residence there, Congress has both allowed and disallowed local representation. For most of its first seventy years, Washington was governed by an elected mayor and councils. (The city of Georgetown and the rural sections of the District, known as Washington County, had their own separate governing arrangements.) The conduct of municipal government in the antebellum period was not dissimilar to that in other cities of comparable size, with the important distinction that Washington, like the rest of the District, was subject to the supreme authority of Congress. That authority, however, was exercised fitfully by a national legislature whose preferred stance toward the District was one of benign neglect. Whatever practical inconvenience might result from this arrangement was not judged sufficient to warrant a serious reconsideration, that is, until the Civil War and its aftermath drastically raised the stakes and altered the significance of governing the District.

Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

In the years since the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973), the abortion controversy has raged across America with increasing vigor. Since Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appointment solidified the Rehnquist Court's moderate bloc, holding the line on Roe's basic principle but inviting more state regulation, the conflict over abortion is likely to expand and intensify in most of the fifty states. The increased and bitter activity since the Supreme Court decided Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), which gave state legislatures more latitude to respond to pro-life pressures, provides only a small indication of what the future may hold. Almost twenty years after Roe legalized abortion in the United States, an end to the “clash of absolutes,” as Laurence Tribe has recently called the American abortion conflict, seems nowhere in sight.

The Reagan agenda embodied a single broad goal for domestic policy: to redefine the scope of public authority to limit the extent of state intervention in the market. This goal found a concrete expression in attempts to reverse welfare-state policies, restructure the tax system, and lighten the “regulatory burden.” The Reagan revolution was extended to antitrust. A number of top appointees were representatives of the Chicago school, a conservative group of economists and attorneys characterized by a faith in the efficiency-promoting nature of markets and a grave pessimism regarding government intervention in the economy. They rejected the political and social goals of antitrust and argued that the market rather than the state was best suited to determine the most efficient forms of economic organization.

The subject of American counterintelligence has generated a considerable amount of scholarship in recent years, the bulk of that research focusing on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Those agencies were and continue to be commonly recognized as having fulfilled the primary role as the nation's intelligence-gatherers. Within this vast intelligence community exists a microcosm in the form of counterespionage, or more euphemistically, counterintelligence.

In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House determined to reverse twenty years of federal policy toward electric utilities. His predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, had aggressively expanded public power, but Eisenhower considered this “creeping socialism,” and he intended to restrict it.