As the nation witnesses a distinct decline in civic engagement among young adults, political science instructors across the nation face the formidable task of engaging students in lower-level, general education courses outside students' primary domain of interest. The research presented here seeks to understand if visually enhanced lecture material can effectively engage such students better than more traditional methods of classroom delivery. The project utilizes an experimental design involving two different sections of the same introductory American government course. By exposing the sections to different visual presentations, and controlling for a variety of potentially confounding factors, the impact that simple visual images have on student engagement both inside and outside the classroom are isolated. Findings suggest that the use of simple visual images can enhance students' impressions of the discipline of political science and boost their interest in and knowledge of politics and public affairs more generally.

Experiments designed as an election simulation involve participants in an investigation of strategic voting. Participants assigned political preferences and informed of candidate/party positions on an ideological dimension respond to and learn the results of two public opinion polls before voting. When given two alternatives, the participants vote sincerely. Confronted with three or more alternatives, participants make tactical decisions to narrow the field. Strategic behavior quickly reduces the number of alternatives to two. Consistent with Duverger's law, candidate/party viability encourages strategic voting and the development of a two-party system. The election simulation serves as a useful tool to teach about electoral behavior and to explore topics such as strategic voting.

A simulation of the foreign policy decision-making process, as described in this article, can assist an instructor in linking students' abstract understanding of complex political events, circumstances, and decision making to the real-world interplay of the multiple factors involved in decision making. It is this type of active learning that helps bring a student's abstract understanding into the concrete world. Instead of being passive learners relying on an instructor's knowledge, students are active participants in the learning process.

This section lists upcoming book publications across the broad field of political science. This list is fully reader generated. If your first-edition book is scheduled for publication in the three months before publication of the next issue of PS, enter the details of publication in the box found at the PS Web site: http://www.apsanet.org/section_223.cfm. We hope that spreading word of upcoming work will help keep our members even more attune to new scholarship within the discipline.

Robert E. Agger died at age 80 in September 2007.

Dr. Harold Guetzkow, professor emeritus of political science, psychology, and sociology at Northwestern University, passed away on Novermber 11, 2008, in San Jose, California, at age 93. His wife, Lauris, whom he had married in 1944, preceded him in death. He is survived by sons James (Charolette) and Daniel (Diana) Guetzkow, and his daughter Gay (Howard) Ben Tré. In his seven decades of active scholarship, he distinguished himself as a vibrant and path-breaking scholar as well as an incredibly talented mentor.

Harry S. Hall, emeritus professor of political science, died at the age of 86 from natural causes on October 4, 2008.

Vivien Hart, professor of American studies, died on February 2, 2009, aged 70.

Sam Huntington's works were taken seriously by political leaders and informed publics around the world. He served in government and advised administrations, both Republican and Democratic. But if you asked Sam who he was, professionally, he would have said, I am sure, “I am a social scientist.”

William W. Kaufmann died on December 14, 2008, in his sleep, at the age of 90. During the cold war, he was a key figure among the “defense intellectuals”—less famous but more influential than most—who moved freely from think tanks to the Pentagon to academia and back again, crafting the theories of nuclear deterrence and translating them to policy. Yet by the '80s, in the final, rococo phase of the standoff, he'd come to reject much of his old thinking and emerged, quite publicly, as one of the defense establishment's most accredited critics.

Duncan MacRae, Jr., was appointed Kenan Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of North Carolina in 1972 and served in that capacity until his death as emeritus professor in July 2008.

Clara Penniman, emeritus professor of political science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, died on January 30, 2009. Penniman was born on April 5, 1914, in Steger, Illinois, to Alethea B. and Rae E. Penniman.

John Stanga, our highly esteemed Wichita State University colleague, died on December 30, 2008, at the age of 69. He is survived by his three sons—Tomas, Joseph, and John Peter. As colleagues, we respected him as a unique scholar, teacher, and friend. In an era often characterized by narrow specialization, he was a true Renaissance man—not only publishing and teaching in several fields of our discipline, but also demonstrating a deep mastery of literature and music, particularly jazz.

Dr. Bruce M. Unger, professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College, died of cancer at his home January 31, 2008. A native of Brooklyn, and life-long Brooklyn Dodgers fan, Bruce received his BA at Queens College in 1964, MA at Tulane University in 1967, and Ph.D. at Tulane in 1973. He joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon in 1968, and served 39 years on the faculty. He was Charles J. Potts Professor of Social Sciences when he retired in 2007.

C. Sylvester Whitaker, Jr., passed away on November 29, 2008, in Waterville, Maine, after a long battle with cancer. He was 73 years old.

For the first time in its history, the APSA Annual Meeting and Exhibition will be held outside of the continental United States. Held September 3–6, 2009, in Toronto, this marks the 105th assembly of the world's largest annual gathering of political scientists. The meeting will feature over 800 panels organized by 49 thematic divisions, 66 related groups, APSA committees, and presidential task forces, as well as more than 200 meetings and receptions. In addition to division and related group panels, program chairs Simone Chambers of the University of Toronto and Bruce Jentleson of Duke University will present a series of theme panels and plenary sessions that will focus on the meeting's theme, “Politics in Motion: Change and Complexity in the Contemporary Era.”

This report was the first to be prepared by the UCLA-based team of co-editors that took over leadership of the Review in July 2007 from Lee Sigelman, who had edited it for the previous six years. Here we report on the journal's operations during the year from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2008, including both decisions made during the early months by Lee, as he closed up shop, and those made by the new team. Because revisions often take authors many months to complete, the time span between original submission and final acceptance of an article can be long. As a result, the issues of the journal published between mid-2007 and mid-2008 owe at least as much to Lee as they do to us—indeed, of the articles accepted during those 12 months, 83% either had been accepted by Lee or came to us as revised versions of papers he had initially handled, almost all of which we accepted. So our first task is to acknowledge the extremely important contribution Lee made to the publication in this transitional year, even as he was beginning a well-deserved rest. We are grateful to Lee for all his help, and our respect for his management skills only increases with time.

Unlike most APSA CFP participants, I am not a mid-career academic, journalist, federal employee, or health care professional. I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science, smack in the midst of my dissertation research, which generated job-search needs that are quite a bit different than my colleagues. Most are here on a sort of sabbatical from their current career or even seeking to explore a possible career change. They are looking for positions that will immerse them in the life of a congressional staffer, some even desiring the 70-hour-a-week “Hill lifestyle.”