In 1977, the United States Congress forbade the Food and Drug Administration to outlaw use of the food additive saccharin as an artificial sweetener for a period of three years. Subsequent legislation extended the congressional ban. It remains in effect today. Congress's saccharin action neatly represented late twentieth-century federal regulatory policy. The process had become decidedly antibureaucratic and ultimately democratic. Forces both for saccharin's prohibition and for its continued use outlined and debated their positions in public, letting their arguments contend in the marketplace of ideas. Following the conduct of this de facto national plebiscite, duly elected representatives weighed the respective cases and selected the course that their constituents seemed to favor.

The Great Depression of the 1930s transformed municipal political life in Montreal, as it did that in other major cities in North America. For one thing, the debate between populists and reformers was revived as the electoral scene underwent fundamental changes. In many cities, political machines running on patronage became more influential as the middle class began to desert the city for the suburbs. At the same time, the margin of budgetary maneuvering available to cities was shrinking, and local public finances were reduced. Municipalities that had been obliged to borrow to meet social needs resulting from the depression were faced with a prolonged fiscal crisis, which for many of them resulted in bankruptcy and trusteeship. This was Montreal's fate in 1940.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when the judicial rights revolution was in full swing in the United States, poverty lawyers and allied legal scholars urged the courts to add to the expanding catalog of constitutional rights certain social and economic rights—to housing, education, and a minimum decent subsistence. The advocates of welfare rights were not deterred by the absence of pertinent constitutional language. After all, if the Court could find a right to privacy in the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights, who knew what else might be discovered there? Those efforts to constitutionalize what were historically matters of legislative discretion had only partial success. The Supreme Court did hold that, once government grants certain statutory entitlements such as welfare and disability benefits, the recipients have a constitutional right not to be deprived of those benefits without procedural due process. The Court declined, however, to find that the entitlements themselves were constitutionally required.

The dark side of European history, the waves of persecution, the pogroms, and the explosions of political and ethnic violence have produced movements of refugees throughout the period of recorded history. There is nothing new in the phenomenon of forced displacement, of individuals and groups being suddenly uprooted and tragically torn from ties of nationality, of home, of family. One of the marks of social progress in Europe has been precisely the range of responses that have been developed to handle such movements of people, responses that have resulted in a codification of laws and the evolution of international institutions which, particularly in the twentieth century, constitute a remarkable example of internationalism and human solidarity. Such social progress has never been smooth; indeed it is disfigured by historical moments of great cruelty and shame where states have denied asylum to persons in acute distress. Worse, as the experience of Nazi Germany demonstrates, European states of immense sophistication and cultural richness have been capable of unspeakable savagery, which has led to the creation of enormous human displacements within Europe and beyond. Nevertheless, the right of asylum itself has become established as a norm of civilized international behavior in Europe and many millions of persecuted and marginalized people have benefited from it. Many millions more have within their family history an experience of someone who was forced to move, victimized by repression of their race, religion, their nationality, their opinions; and elsewhere, those who perished in ghettos, concentration camps, and unmarked killing fields.

Courts, both state and federal, often play a substantial role in the adoption and implementation of changes in public policy. Properly understood, the impact of court decisions must be examined in the context of actions and reactions by other branches of government, political parties, and interest groups. Among the most transformative court decisions over the last half century are those involving legislative reapportionment and minority voting rights. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal courts restructured the nation's political institutions through decisions striking down malapportioned legislatures and local governing bodies through what used to be termed the “reapportionment revolution,” perhaps the only revolution ignored altogether by historians. Shortly thereafter the courts extended their attack on quantitative vote dilution (which the “one-person, one-vote” standard is designed to address) to include protection against electoral rules that dilute the voting strength of racial minorities.

In both the United States and Britain, the Great Depression generated widespread interest in the possibility of utilizing state power to foster the development of corporatist institutions to restore order and stability to economic life. However, whereas Britian made only piecemeal efforts to implement corporatist mechanisms in a few selected industries, the United States proved willing, at least temporarily, to implement a far more thoroughgoing experiment in corporatism—he National Recovery Administration (NRA). This article seeks to explain this divergence in American and British policy responses to the depression. While considering the extent to which differences in state capacities, ideology, political contingencies, and the structure of economic organization may have contributed to America's greater willingness to attempt a comprehensive experiment with corporatism in the early 1930s, this article focuses on the importance of the weakness of organized labor in the American—as opposed to the British—political economy as an explanatory factor in the divergent experiences of the two nations.

This article assesses recent studies of the history of welfare states and proposes an alternative interpretation of the history of policy for health services. Health policy, like policy for retirement income, job security and unemployment, social services and housing, has been profoundly influenced by the politics of economic productivity, social justice, and demographic change in each country. However, health policy has also been guided by perceptions of the nature and course of disease and opinions about the probability that particular medical interventions, organized and distributed in particular ways, would ameliorate its effects.

The idea of policy history arises from an awareness of“something missing.” In the view of some social scientists, politics and public policy too often have been treated ahistorically by their disciplines, with evidence subordinated to theory. For some historians, the apparent waning of disciplinary interest in political history has been similarly distorting. Because of these things, social scientists, political historians, and more than a few social historians increasingly function as “policy historians,”as scholars especially alive to the vagaries and contingency of public policy and its history.

In 1962 Sam Bass Warner, Jr., published an important book about suburbanization in late nineteenth-century Boston. Like most influential books, it was timely in its subject, and Warner's scholarly study might be supposed to have built upon the interest that was being generated by numerous popular analyses of contemporary suburbanization and suburban life in post—World War II America. One can indeed find in Streetcar Suburbs the same fundamental preoccupation with the shallowness of communal life and similar diagnoses of the sprawl of single-family homes in homogeneous and militantly residential areas on the periphery of the city, as one finds in say, William H. Whyte's 1956 critique, The Organization Man.' Yet Warner's book was not part of, and did not initiate, a new genre of historical suburban studies. Instead, it served as one of the essential founding texts of what came to be known as the “new urban history”—a large number of scholarly attempts to examine the character and structure of life at the center of the developing big cities of industrializing America. Not the “crabgrass frontier” but the “urban frontier” defined the territory of historical adventure during the 1960s. The metaphor is not, and was not then, entirely an academic one. In 1961 the new President of the United States had called for a “new frontier” of public initiative, and planner Charles Abrams helped his immediate successor expand and locate that initiative with his book, The City Is the Frontier. Without entirely losing interest in the suburbs, scholars, policymakers, and citizens of various kinds suddenly realized the importance of understanding the city and its history.

In the summer of 1918, the white chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Major Joel E. Spingarn, called for urgent congressional action on mob violence. He seized the opportunity of a post in the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) of the War Department General Staff in Washington, D.C., to put forward a “constructive programme,” the central idea of which was the passage of a bill to make lynching in wartime a federal offense. Attempting to exploit the peculiar circumstances of the national emergency and the expansion of federal powers during World War I, Spingarn also proposed a series of more modest initiatives designed to lessen discrimination and raise black morale. The official reaction to the arguments he advanced in support of his program sheds light on the reluctance of the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson to develop a policy on race relations. It also suggests some of the problems and hazards facing a would-be reformer working from within.

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

As many commentators note, American political discourse is not generally characterized by a receptivity to “big” theories; nor, in particular, is policy analysis. But two writers, one at the beginning of the Cold War and one at the end, offered theories that are notable exceptions to this generalization. James Burnham and Francis Fukuyama, anchoring their theories on their observations of the Cold War, construct dramaturgical philosophies of history, synthesize and append European architectonic writers to their accounts, and offer comprehensive critiques of American liberal democracy. Moreover, both “big” theories, despite their apparent incongruence with American political discourse and conventional policy counsel, attract wide attention and are well received by economic and political elites.