In August 1927, the Virgin Mary made a surprise appearance in Providence, Rhode Island. Her image mysteriously hovered on the wall of a building on Federal Hill, the city’s central Italian American neighborhood. Streets were filled and businesses disrupted as crowds assembled to regard the phenomenon. When the Narragansett Electric Company removed the bulb from a nearby street lamp, the image disappeared, but thousands of believers continued to assemble nonetheless.The Providence Journal finally sent a reporter to Federal Hill to get to the bottom of the mystery. Several onlookers told the reporter that Mary had appeared in Providence because God was unhappy about the impending execution of Italian radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Providence Journal [PJ] 10 August 1927).

The world-systems perspective was invented for modeling and interpreting the expansion and deepening of the capitalist regional system as it emerged in Europe and incorporated the whole globe over the past 500 years (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994). The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of “advanced” economically developed and powerful states dominating and exploiting “less developed” peripheral regions has been a central concept in the world-systems perspective. In the last decade the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and smaller intersocietal systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1994) have argued that the contemporary global political economy is simply a continuation of a 5,000-year-old world system that emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) have modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup networks composed of sedentary foragers, as well as larger systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian empires, and the contemporary global system in their scope of comparison.

Congressional scholars have a unique opportunity to reconnect the histories of American state and society, a task central to the new generation of political historians. As MarkLeff (1995:852) recently argued, social and political historians have come to realize that they “ignored the other at their peril” and that “interaction was the only way to interrogate power—how it was structured and changed, where it was contested, how it was exerted, what its impact was, and what assumptions shaped the discourse that framed it” (see also Gillon 1997).To accomplish the challenge of integrating social and political history, congressional historians will have to examine how the institution’s development related to external forces. Much of what has been written about Congress thus far remains insular.

A handful of books published in the past two decades suggest how integration can be accomplished. In Sectionalism and American Political Development 1880–1980, Richard Bensel (1984) situates the internal development of Congress within the larger context of sectional tensions between the “industrial northern core” and the “underdeveloped southern and western periphery.” He pays close attention to key policy decisions and the ongoing struggle between decentralized committee and centralized partisan power to show the influence of sectionalism.

Key features of reproductive behavior in China vary systematically through space and time. In this article we present an analysis of fertility change in regional space, using a 1% household sample from China’s 1990 population census. Elsewhere,we use the same data to analyze reproductive strategizing, but here we pursue the big picture with a straightforward analysis that takes reported births as an uncomplicated indicator of fertility.The article has three objectives: first, to introduce a novel, multilevel spatial model of regional structure constructed using a geographic information system (GIS); second, to demonstrate the potential for longitudinal data derived from onetime censuses to contribute to historical demography in conjunction with regional analysis; and third, to document the manner in which China’s fertility transition has unfolded in regional space.

Social theory provides two opposing views about the role played by mass communications in modernizing America. Mass society theorists, including José Ortega y Gasset (1932), George Seldes (1938), and Joseph Bensman and Bernard Rosenberg (1963), and also critical theorists, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1991 [1944]) and Jürgen Habermas (1989), maintained that the mass press weakens authentic forms of community, whereas, in contrast, Chicago School sociologists, especially Robert Park(1971 [1922]), contended that the newspaper, notably the ethnic press, buffers the individual against the brutalizing effects of the city’s impersonality and disorganization.

Instead of encouraging reflective and rational thought, the commercial press, according to Habermas (1989: 195), is both emblem and harbinger of the decay of civil society as it reinforces the totalizing processes of modernity and offers the public crass and stultifying banalities.

Two political cartoons from the 1905 Chicago Tribune portrayed how some elements in society viewed the rise of a powerful Teamsters Union.On 29 April 1905, the front page cartoon depicted a husky teamster engaged in a sympathetic strike while the caption read, “The Dictator in His Old Act of Blocking Commerce” (Figure 1). A month later, on 3 June 1905, a cartoon played on the coincidence of the June 1905 uprising in Russia and a grand jury investigation of Teamster strike leaders in Chicago. The title caption read, “The Grand Dukes of Russia and the Grand Dukes of Chicago” (Figure 2). Both cartoons emphasized the theme of irresponsible power—either that of a dictatorship or of an unprincipled grand duke. Teamster leaders were tyrants, these images said.The sphere in which this irresponsible power was wielded extended beyond the realm of union affairs, and the relay the true menace conveyed by these images.They asserted that Teamster leaders held it in their power to stop the flow of business activity in Chicago.

In the early evening of 3 June 1943, just as the sun set over a city darkened by a blackout, about 50 sailors stationed at the Naval Reserve Training School in Los Angeles stormed through the mostly Mexican American neighborhoods that lay between the school andd owntown L.A. Their actions that night, which consistedm ostly of stripping zoot suits off young civilian men, set off more than a week of rioting as thousands of military personnel poured into Los Angeles from the surrounding bases and attacked anyone wearing zoot suits. The Los Angeles Police Department did nothing to stop the rioting servicemen, claiming that they lacked jurisdictional authority, and instead jailed hundreds of young men (mostly Mexican American but also black and white) “for their own protection.” It was not until the Army and Navy commanders in southern California took seriously the difference between “revelry” and riot and canceled military leave that the rioting stopped.

Colorblind Injustice largely derives from my workas an expert witness in federal voting rights cases. A vignette from one particularly important case, Garza v.Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors(1990), and a relatively brief summary may give those who have not yet read the book both a feel for its scope and a sense of how the issues it deals with impact real people.

At an international historical conference in the mid-1980s, I met a young Russian historian, Sergei Stankevich, who specialized in America and who had read and liked some of my work. In the last few years of the Soviet Union, Sergei’s political career took off, and his fluent English and keen insights into both countries won him the attention of U.S. and Soviet media. In late 1989, when Sergei was brought to Los Angeles for the first showing of an American television documentary that prominently featured him, he called me from a Beverly Hills hotel and invited me for a drinkth e next day. But because I was working on the Garza case and had scheduled an all-day appointment to give a deposition before a lawyer in Century City (which is where people work who can afford to live in Beverly Hills), I regretfully declined, saying, ‘‘I’m sorry, Sergei, but I’m being deposed tomorrow.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

Colorblind Injustice is an angry, ambitious, and very valuable book. In it,Kousser argues that the Second Reconstruction—that is, the post-1965 edifice of law and institutions securing essential African American and Latino civil rights and effective political voice—has been disastrously undermined, possibly mortally so, by the distorted, ignorant, or malicious (and, ultimately, to Kousser, dangerous) misinterpretations of the history of American race relations and of the meaning of the nation’s voting rights laws and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments.The culprits in this tale include, among other members of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and ClarenceThomas; political scientist AbigailThernstrom,who believes that past discrimination against racial minorities never justifies raceconscious remedies; overzealous Republican (and Democratic, though more of the former than the latter) party partisans; and a lot of additional white politicians, officials, and judges ranging in localities from Los Angeles to North Carolina.

Nicknaming his city “Dear Old Lady Thrift,” Milwaukee Journal writer Richard Davis chastised city leaders for failing to build a “great city.” His unflattering portrait pictured post–World War II Milwaukee as a “plump and smiling city . … [sitting] in complacent shabbiness on the west shore of Lake Michigan like a wealthy old lady in black alpaca taking her ease on the beach.” He continued, “All her slips are showing, but she doesn’t mind a bit” (Davis 1947: 189, 191). Reprinted in the Milwaukee Journal two weeks before voters went to the polls to decide if the city would reverse its debt-free policy to finance postwar development, Davis’s depiction warned that Milwaukee was a chaotic andin efficient metropolis in danger of falling behind(“Not So Fair Is America’s Fair City” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 16 March 1947). Her thriftiness bordered on stinginess, her complacency slipped into indolence, and her neglected femininity bespoke disorder. City leaders’ frugality, rooted in a tradition of cautious municipal fiscal policies, big city problems mismatched with small town attitudes, and public “indifference,” Davis contended, threatened the postwar city.

Critical reviews of social science research such as that presented in Colorblind Injustice typically take one of two approaches. The most popular approach evaluates the merits of the research and includes an appraisal of the logical coherence of the guiding theory or questions, the validity of the inferences made from the empirical observations, and the like.The second approach evaluates the policy implications of the research conclusions. Here I take the second rather than the first approach because I find Kousser’s research to be a masterful demonstration that racial motivations produced the electoral laws and redistricting efforts in Los Angeles,Memphis, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas between the 1950s and 1990. Furthermore, Kousser shows how the development of Supreme Court doctrine concerning the use of racial criteria in redrawing electoral districts is logically flawed and a departure from legal precedents set in the 1950s and 1960s.The current trend toward a standard of colorblindness ignores the history of discrimination against blacks and Latinos and perpetuates racial injustice. Hence, the title of the book.

It is no small task to provide an account of voting rights in both the First and Second Reconstructions. It is hard to think of many with the combined expertise in both fields who could have pulled it off as well as J. Morgan Kousser has in Colorblind Injustice (1999).

Kousser has long been a historian and a social scientist. In his earlier work , such as The Shaping of Southern Politics (1974), Kousser was clearly one of the leading proponents and artful innovators in the use of quantitative methods in historical analysis: he did not merely import old ideas from quantitative social scientists. Now, in Colorblind Injustice, we see Kousser again combining his thorough and deft historian’s touch with insights from social scientific approaches.

The key explanatory theme in Colorblind Injustice, I believe, is captured in two terse sentences: “Culture is fragile. Institutions are tough” (366). From these premises come Kousser’s central ideas about how to explain the progress and retrogression of minority voting rights and why we should care so much about the set of Supreme Court rulings beginning with Shaw v.Reno in 1993.

The often kind and always interesting comments of Larry Griffin, David James, and Bradley Palmquist touch different aspects of Colorblind Injustice. Let me respond to them, in effect, in chronological order, according to which periods of history illuminate the comments the most. Palmquist points out that institutions like the Supreme Court may suddenly reverse their decisions, as the Court did in the !“switch in time that saved nine” after FDR had proposed to pack the body in 1937, or as it over-turned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But as the Brown example suggests, it often takes a long time to overturn precedents, and that is the case with minority voting rights, as well. It was 25 years after Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” 24 years after Earl Warren ceased to be Chief Justice, and 23 years after Nixon proposed to water down the Voting Rights Act before the overwhelmingly Republican Supreme Court dared to seriously undermine African American and Latino political rights. Even then, they hesitated to attack the Voting Rights Act itself directly. Major institutions are tough in two senses: their policies often have large impacts, and the institutions, including those as tiny as the nine-member Supreme Court, are difficult to change.