Policymakers transfer knowledge about policies, ideas, and institutions between political systems, learning from one another in a process of policy learning; lesson drawing; diffusion; or policy transfer. As Dolowitz and Marsh observe: “While terminology and focus often vary … studies are concerned with the process by which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions, and ideas in one political system (past or present) are used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system.” The literature on policy transfer has mainly addressed how policymakers glean potential lessons and use those experiences to devise reforms. It asks questions about why policy transfer occurs; who was involved; what was transferred; from where; the extent of the transfer; and how the process of transfer is “related to policy ‘success’ or ‘failure.’” Greener distinguishes this from policy learning, where policymakers make deliberate adjustments in response to experience or new information, and learning is evident when policy changes as a result of this process. Some scholars see policy transfer as a subset of policy learning, since these are often part of the same procedure. Oliver and Pemberton advance a model, for example, of how ideas are absorbed through learning, in which bureaucratic battles ensue to institutionalize a new policy, and reformers' success in securing support can be critical in determining the extent of policy learning and transfer.

Admitting, then, that it is eminently desirable to reduce the action of the organized public force to the minimum … shall we not say that government can not relieve itself from the necessity of frequent and minute interferences with industry in any other way to so great an extent as by, 1st, insisting on the thorough primary education of the whole population; 2d, providing a strict system of sanitary administration; 3d, securing by special precautions the integrity of banks of savings for the encouragement of the instincts of frugality, sobriety, and industry? Each of these things is contrary to the doctrine of Laissez faire; yet I, for one, can not find room to doubt that, on purely economical grounds, the action of the State herein is not only justifiable but a matter of elementary duty.

As winter descended on Washington in December 1878, the Forty-fifth Congress gathered for what promised to be a hectic third and final session. Emotions ran high. In this era, Congress habitually reserved much of its business for these brief, intense “lame duck” sessions that fell between the election of legislators in November and the adjournment of Congress the following March. Compounding the usual sense of urgency was the startling result of the recent election: the Democratic party had gained control of the Senate and, when the next Congress convened, would control both the Senate and the House for the first time since before the Civil War. Senate Republicans well understood that they had but a few precious months to close ranks and enact legislation on some of the burning issues of the day: civil rights, the currency, the tariff. Yet when the session opened, none of these issues made their way to the floor. Instead, and despite howls of protest from senators eager to move on to what they plainly regarded as more urgent concerns, the Senate assembled on many afternoons for several weeks to debate a completely different matter: a proposed law concerning the rights of inventors. At this critical juncture in American politics, the Senate found itself embroiled in a long and complex discussion of the virtues and deficiencies of the patent system.

One way of approaching the following essays is to pause here at the beginning and consider the peculiarity of the conversation we will be overhearing. In this volume we will be listening to a group of scholars who are Catholic, Episcopal, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and secularist in their varied backgrounds. They are considering the place of religion in public policymaking. The peculiarity arises if we think about American public life historically. For one thing, we are listening to people who most likely would not have been inclined to interact with each other at the outset of the twentieth century. More than that, they are talking about something that hardly anyone a hundred years ago would have thought even needs discussing.

In mid-nineteenth century America the asylum became the foundation of public policy. This ubiquitous institution was regarded as a symbol of an enlightened and progressive nation that no longer ignored or mistreated its severely and chronically mentally ill citizens. The faith in an institutional policy was embodied in a vast and costly system of state mental hospitals that by 1940 had an inpatient population of about 450,000. Despite the presence of serious problems, there was little disposition to call into doubt the wisdom of institutional care and treatment. Even though mental health policy was formulated within a decentralized and divided political system, there was no doubt that a holistic and clear consensus prevailed.

Scholars assessing Richard Nixon's contribution to the desegregation of Southern schools have often been unimpressed. His biographer Stephen Ambrose concedes that there was some White House contribution, but observes that “Nixon had to be hauled kicking and screaming into desegregation on a meaningful scale, and he did what he did not because it was right but because he had no choice.” The political scientist Michael Genovese concurs, telling us that Nixon sought to “withdraw the federal government from its efforts at desegregation.” A recent civil rights dictionary concludes that this was “the first successful presidential candidate to be opposed to civil rights enforcement,” adding that “many of his tactics thwarted the furthering of school desegregation.” The noted civil rights historian, William Chafe, meanwhile, contends that “Nixon repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to the politics of polarization”; “continued to embrace” southern evasions that “had been invalidated by the Supreme Court”; and used “the power of the presidency to delay, if not halt completely, federally imposed school desegregation.” And Kevin O'Reilly, in an overview of presidential leadership on civil rights, finds the 37th president to have been essentially indistinguishable from the race-baiting George Wallace. Nixon resented the Alabamian, he reveals, because “he wanted the gutter all to himself.” Considering a number of contenders, he concludes that “school desegregation emerged as the administration's most important and enduring (anti)civil rights crusade.”

Study of the origins of public policy has achieved an important place among historical scholars. For instance, historians have published many valuable studies explaining the origins of regulatory agencies in industries such as natural resources, energy, and transportation, including the origins of agencies responsible for enforcing safety standards. Scholars have treated road construction, the subject of this article, in a similar fashion, seeking to comprehend the principal factors informing the origins of state and federal road building programs. Not surprisingly, then, scholarly examinations of the Interstate Highway System, which exercised such a remarkable influence on the economy, as well as on the social and physical landscapes of the nation, have remained focused on explications of the origins of policy.Perhaps this particular preoccupation has been due to what historians Peter N. Stearns and Joel A. Tarr have identified as a tendency to equate policy origins with “a policy message.” But Stearns and Tarr contend that studies of “origins do not carry such an inherent message and subsequent stages of policy development must also be explored. “

Money, wrote Pennsylvanian Francis Rawle in 1725, is “the vital spirit and blood of the body politick.” Is not money, another pamphleteer contended, “the blood of life, which circulates from member to member, throughout the whole body of all living creatures?” It followed that the tokens acting as the medium of value could be anything, “whether it be pewter, silver, spelter, brass or paper, matters not which.” Americans in fact used provincial tax credit notes for money, along with other specie substitutes: “bills of credit” were issued to public creditors and could be employed by the holder or others to pay public obligations like taxes. They were “in value equal” to coin and, like coin, could be passed from hand to hand in the meantime. It was their circulating property—”the ready currency of the thing”—that controlled.

In 1890, Congress passed the Second Morrill Land-Grant Act, which provided federal resources to support the creation of nineteen Black land-grant colleges. At a historical and political moment when Black Americans faced a violently repressive backlash against what progress they had achieved during Reconstruction, the successful passage and implementation of this legislation was unlikely. How did congressional lawmakers successfully pass the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890, and was the expansion of educational opportunity for African Americans a clearly expressed objective? Using historical analysis of primary sources, this analysis suggests that the 1890 legislation’s investment in Black colleges reflected a politically expedient compromise between northern Radical Republicans who supported greater educational access for Black citizens and Southern Democrats who wished to expand higher educational opportunity in their region while also maintaining the segregated racial order of southern educational institutions.

The British National Health Service (NHS) was created shortly after the end of World War II and formally came into being on its “Appointed Day” in July 1948. The NHS has been seen as the crowning achievement of the postwar Labour government's “welfare state” by both the general public and academic commentators. As Rodney Lowe points out, by the late 1940s opinion polls showed it to be by far the best-received part of Labour's social policies; and in popular perceptions the terms “NHS” and “welfare state” were often viewed as synonymous. Lowe himself, while carefully noting the problems that attended the birth of the health service, nonetheless sees it as an “idealistic” institution and remarks that in no other Western country, not even social democratic Sweden, “were the whole population and the full range of medical need (Beveridge's principles of universalism and comprehensiveness) so quickly realized by a free service.” Another respected commentator, Rudolf Klein, similarly highlights the exceptionally wide-ranging remit of the NHS, claiming it as a “unique experiment in social engineering.”

In 1944, Robert Kuczynski, a demographer working with the Colonial Office, wrote a memo discussing plans for a postwar census of the British Empire. He called for the creation of a Colonial Demographic Service, arguing that Colonial Office programs “offer no guarantee of a decisive improvement unless there is an expert on the spot to make an effective use of these means.” Kuczynski's firm belief in the need for expert knowledge matched the growing willingness of the Colonial Office to call upon experts in a variety of fields to assist in the reshaping of colonial government. This article examines why demography came to be seen as useful for colonial governance in the interwar years and how officials attempted to make use of demographers and demographic information in the final years of the British Empire. At present, this topic falls between several existing literatures. Works by Richard Soloway, Daniel Kelves, and others document the domestic history of demography in Great Britain, particularly its involvement in debates over hereditarian views of population. At the international level, most recent studies deal with the United States and trace the origins of American support for programs of population control after 1945. Still another body of literature chronicles the unique nature of policy formation in Britain and its relationship with social science in the twentieth century. This article seeks to connect these literatures by focusing on the colonial and international role of British demography from the end of World War I to the postcolonial era of the 1960s.

The state of policy history is good. This is a dramatic change from only four years ago, when I started an article in this very journal about the evolution of policy history by asserting: “The future of policy history remains unclear.” At the time, my statement reflected the sentiment shared by many fellow policy historians who did not feel that professional opportunities had fully caught up with the intellectual vitality of the subfield.

Dwarfing all debates over civil rights policy and race relations during the three decades since 1964 has been the storm over affirmative action. Critics have argued that affirmative action in practice has meant requiring racial quotas, and hence practicing “reverse discrimination” against innocent (usually white male) third parties. This has been done, critics contend, in the name of a law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that explicitly prohibited racial preferences. Proponents have countered that racism is so deeply rooted in American culture and institutions that mere nondiscrimination will perpetuate the injustice of the past. There is abundant evidence to support both contentions. The purpose of this essay is not to weigh the evidence and determine which side is correct. Ultimately such profound disagreements are not resolvable by logic and evidence alone, because they hinge on divergent assumptions about human nature and the purpose and limits of government. My more modest goal in this essay is to use the insights of history to understand why civil rights policy evolved in this dual fashion following the breakthrough legislation of 1964–68, and to try to assess the consequences.

Drug wars. Few topics generate more ccontroversy or provoke more debate. Few topics conjure up more futile and dismal images among the American population. Few topics are more synonymous with defeat. Never has our government been mired in a conflict so enduring or fought against an enemy so utterly impossible to conquer. For seventy-five years—nearly four times longer than both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined—the federal government has been waging an endless war against seemingly impossible odds.