Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-16T05:57:29.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The State of the State among Historians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Brian Balogh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

During my first year of graduate school (1982–83), Louis Galambos congratulated me for having the courage to go into a dying field. Naïveté, not courage, had propelled me to leave my position as deputy director of income maintenance programs for the New York City Department of Social Services and study political history at The Johns Hopkins University. Although contact with the job market four years later would confirm my adviser’s warnings, at the time he issued this “heads up” I did wonder what Dr. Galambos had been smoking. After all, it seemed to me that politics, and particularly its bureaucratic incarnation, touched the lives of Americans more of ten and more forcefully than ever before. How could interest in this topic be declining? What’s more, by my third year in graduate school, I had mastered a rich body of literature that confirmed the centrality of politics.The Progressive synthesis, dating back to James Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington, was under fire but still compelled elegant work that had begun to focus less on Progressive presidents and more on the fate of liberalism as it engaged racism, sought to reconcile local preferences with national agendas, and grappled with Americans’ increasing distrust of the centrally directed programs that the New Deal and the Great Society spawned (Brinkley 1982, 1995; Chafe 1980; Gerstle 1989, 2001; McGirr 2001; Sugrue 1996).

Type
Roundtable: Twenty Years after Building a New American State
Information
Social Science History , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , Fall 2003 , pp. 455 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2003 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Balogh, Brian (1991) Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bensel, Richard (1990) Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bensel, Richard (2000) The Political Economy of American Industrialization. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Berkowitz, Edward D. (1991) America’s Welfare State from Roosevelt to Reagan. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Berkowitz, Edward D. (1995) Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Bogue, Allan (1983) “Historians and Radical Republicans: A meaning for today.” Journal of American History 70: 7–34.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen (1994) Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brinkley, Alan (1982) Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Brinkley, Alan (1995) The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and Reform. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Chafe, William (1980) Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gerstle, Gary (1989) Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gerstle, Gary (2001) American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Linda (1994) Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Graham, Hugh Davis (1990) The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of a National Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hays, Samuel P. (1987) Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Meg (1997) “‘How about some meat?’: The Office of Price Administration, consumption politics, and state building from the bottom up, 1941–1946.” Journal of American History 84: 910–41.Google Scholar
John, Richard R. (1995) Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kerber, Linda (1998) No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Koven, Seth, and Michel, Sonya (1993) Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ladd-Taylor, Molly (1994) Mother-work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Larson, John Lauritz (2001) Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Lerner, Gerda (1982) “The necessity of history and the professional historian.” Journal of American History 69: 7–20.Google Scholar
Leuchtenburg, William (1986) “The pertinence of political history: Reflections on the significance of the state in America.” Journal of American History 73: 585–600.Google Scholar
McCraw, Thomas K. (1984) Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McDougall, Walter A. (1985) The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
McGirr, Lisa (2001) Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Meier, August (1983) “Whither the black perspective in Afro-American history?” Journal of American History 70: 101–5.Google Scholar
Merrill, Karen R. (1999) “In search of the ‘federal presence’ in the American West.” Western Historical Quarterly 30: 449–73.Google Scholar
Milazzo, Paul (n.d.) “Legislating the solution to pollution: Congressional policy initiative after World War II.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Muncy, Robyn (1991) Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Onuf, Peter S. (2000) Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Onuf, Peter S., and Matson, Kathy D. (1990) A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Roth, Darlene (1983) “Growing like Topsy: Research guides to women’s history.” Journal of American History 70: 95–100.Google Scholar
Russell, Edmund (2001) War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda (1985) “Bringing the state back in: Strategies of analysis in current research,” in Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (eds.) Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 3–43.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda (1992) Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen (1982) Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers (1997) Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sugrue, Thomas (1996) The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. (1985) The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
White, Richard (1991) “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Julian E. (1998) Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar