New Books in American Politics

A persuasive account of the philosophy and power of nonviolence organizing, and a resource for building and sustaining effective social movements.Despite the rich history of nonviolent philosophy, many people today are unfamiliar with the basic principles and practices of nonviolence––even as these concepts have guided so many direct-action movements to overturn forms of racial apartheid, military and police violence, and dictatorships around the world. Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom (U California Press, 2022) is a crucial resource on the long history of nonviolent philosophy through the teachings of Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., one of the great practitioners of revolution through deliberate and sustained nonviolence. His ongoing work demonstrates how we can overcome violence and oppression through organized direct action, presenting a powerful roadmap for a new generation of activists.Rev. Lawson’s work as a theologian, pastor, and social-change activist has inspired hope and liberation for more than sixty years. To hear and see him speak is to experience the power of the prophetic tradition in the African American and social gospel. In Revolutionary Nonviolence, Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong reflect on Rev. Lawson's talks and dialogues, from his speeches at the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960 to his lectures in the current UCLA curriculum. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to Rev. Lawson's teachings on how to center nonviolence in successfully organizing for change.James M. Lawson Jr. is a Methodist minister who taught nonviolent theory and practice to help launch the 1960s Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Memphis sanitation strike, and worker and immigrant rights movements in Los Angeles. He continues to energize leaders and activists and inspire social change movements in the United States today.Michael K. Honey is Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is the author of five award-winning books on labor, the freedom movement, and Martin Luther King; the editor of King’s labor speeches; the past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association; and a former civil liberties and community organizer in the South.Kent Wong is director of the UCLA Labor Center, a union attorney, and a labor activist. He has taught a course on nonviolence with Rev. James Lawson Jr. for the past twenty years and has published books on the labor movement, immigrant rights, and the Asian American community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack with vivid scenes of the post-apocalyptic hellscape that would follow. The film was viewed by over 100 million Americans and remains the highest rated TV movie in history. After the premiere, ABC News aired an episode of Viewpoint, a live special featuring some of the most prominent public intellectuals of the debating the virtues of the Arms Race and the prospect of a winnable nuclear war. The response to the film proved more powerful than perhaps any film or television program in the history of media. Aside from its record-shattering Nielsen ratings, it enjoyed critical acclaim as well as international box office success in theatrical screenings.The path to primetime for The Day After proved nearly as treacherous as the film's narrative. Battles ensued behind the scenes at the network, between the network and the filmmakers, with Broadcast Standards and Ad Sales, in the edit room and on the set, including the "nuke-mares" experienced by the cast. After the director was pushed aside, he contemplated suicide while also engineering a comeback through the press. But these skirmishes pale in comparison to the culture wars triggered by the film in the press, alongside a growing Nuclear Freeze movement, and from a united, pro-nuclear Right. Once efforts to alter the script failed, the White House conducted a full-throttled propaganda campaign to hijack the film's message.Apocalypse Television: How the Day After Helped End the Cold War (Applause Books, 2023) features a dramatic insider's account of the making of and backlash against The Day After. No other book has told this story in similar fashion, venturing behind-the-scenes of the programming and news divisions at ABC, Reagan officials in the White House who mounted the propaganda campaign, rogue publicists who hijacked the film to promote a Nuclear Freeze, the backlash from the conservative movement and Religious Right, the challenges encountered by film's production team from conception to reception, and the experiences of the citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, where the film was set and shot, if also, ground zero in America's nuclear heartland.David Craig is a Clinical Professor in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California. Before his academic career, he was a multiple Emmy-nominated Hollywood producer and cable television executive involved in over thirty projects.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katlyn Marie Carter, Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions (Yale UP, 2023) examines how debates over secrecy and transparency in politics during the eighteenth century shaped modern democracy.Does democracy die in darkness, as the saying suggests? This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence.In the years preceding the American and French revolutions, state secrecy came to be seen as despotic—an instrument of monarchy. But as revolutionaries sought to fashion representative government, they faced a dilemma. In a context where gaining public trust seemed to demand transparency, was secrecy ever legitimate? Whether in Philadelphia or Paris, establishing popular sovereignty required navigating between an ideological imperative to eradicate secrets from the state and a practical need to limit transparency in government. The fight over this—dividing revolutionaries and vexing founders—would determine the nature of the world’s first representative democracies.Unveiling modern democracy’s surprisingly shadowy origins, Carter reshapes our understanding of how government by and for the people emerged during the Age of Revolutions.Katlyn Marie Carter is assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in South Bend, IN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What (and why) can and can't we say? What do empirical examples both at home and abroad tell us about how we should protect freedom of speech? How do we create an environment where speech is not only permitted but encouraged? Does freedom of speech bring people together or sow discord? Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and Professor Emerita at New York Law School, brings her decades of expertise to bear explaining why freedom of speech is foundational to so many other fundamental rights.Nadine Strossen is Professor Emerita at New York Law School, and was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991-2008. She is a Senior Fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford UP, 2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2023). She is the Host and Project Consultant for Free To Speak, a 3-hour documentary film series released in October. You can also find her remarks "Current Free Speech Controversies" with the Madison Program here.Here are some examples of studies, referenced at the end of the episode, demonstrating links between words a language has for colors and how those colors are perceived by speakers, for Russian and for Chinese and Mongolian.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Examining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) investigates debates concerning the One Hundredth Anniversary of American Independence. This commemoration, which came only seven years after the conclusion of the Civil War, provided a crucible for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans and their memories of the recent conflict.Using a rich archive, including a variety of newspapers, Contesting Commemoration illustrates how the Centennial became embroiled in the fierce political and racial debates of Reconstruction. African Americans celebrated this opportunity to assert their Americanness, while White Southerners approached the celebration with a profound pragmatism and flexibility, only partially re-embracing American nationalism as they attempted to maintain Southern distinctiveness.Contesting Commemoration follows events in Philadelphia, where ten million visitors came to celebrate the Centennial, and in communities across the South. It is a searching interrogation of the powers of American memory, the bitter debates of Reconstruction, and continued contestations over Southern distinctiveness.Jack Noe is a Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and also lectures at Durham University. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, but a long-time resident of the United Kingdom, he earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2018.Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We often narrate the history of women’s rights in the United States by focusing on the fight for suffrage. Yet starting as early as 1835, states expanded married women’s economic rights. How were these statutes passed at a time when women’s political power was severely constrained, including no right to vote in most states? With limited national coordination? In In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage (Columbia UP, 2023), Dr. Sara Chatfield argues that married women’s property rights reform occurred through a two-level process. Within each state, policy developed and cycled through different state-level institutions. Without explicit coordination, these policies spread throughout the states with institutional actors borrowing, copying, and learning from the successes and failures of other states – such that ALL states passed some reform by 1920. Dr. Chatfield’s important contribution to the American political development literature shows how male legislators pursued legislation that served their own interests and how state legislatures and courts interacted to create property reforms essential to changing economics, the project of permanently seizing land from Native people, and protecting slaveholding women and families from economic instability. The reform of property rights included both property as a commodity and also a means of social control and order. Dr. Chatfield’s book furthers our understanding of how gender, federalism, and liberalism interacted in the development of state power.In the podcast, Dr. Chatfield generously cites the works of others including Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (my NBN interview with Dr. Bateman here), Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston’s The Political Development of American Debt Relief (Chicago), and Alena Wolflink’s Claiming Value:The Politics of Priority from Aristotle to Black Lives Matter (Routledge).Dr. Sara Chatfield is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Denver, where she teaches classes on American politics and law. Her research interests focus on American politics, especially American political development, gender and politics, and methods.Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Katherine Turk tells us about Sisterhood, a familial metaphor used to evoke gendered solidarity in women’s movement of the mid-sixties and seventies, and a utopian ideal of equality within the human family. It’s a universalizing but aspirational concept that helped feminists build a political coalition.Our conversation is based upon Katherine’s new book about the National Organization of Women: The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America (FSG, 2023). This mainstream feminist organization is often neglected in histories of the period, dismissed as a liberal organization dedicated to incremental change. But NOW was an expansive organization that changed over time, shifted the conversation and legal structures in the US, and left an important historical record that we can learn from in social justice work today.Katherine Turk is an associate professor of History and an adjunct associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching focus on women, sex, gender, law, labor, and modern social movements. Her first book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) studies the history of Title VII of the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, which outlawed workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as sex, race, and religion.The image for this week was made by Saronik Bosu. It shows Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins, and Patricia Hill Burnett, leaders of NOW who are the primary subjects of Katherine’s book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf, 2023), a book ten years in the making, is the definitive account of the postwar trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and the impact it had on the modern history of Asia.Written by Gary Bass, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, the book shines a much-needed spotlight on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the criminal process historically overshadowed by its namesake in Nuremberg for the senior leaders of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich. In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the victorious powers turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. To them, it was clear that Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for their crimes. For the Allied powers, the trials were an opportunity both to render judgment on their vanquished foes and to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was no more than victors’ justice. Professor Bass tells a meticulously-researched compelling story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the postwar era in the Asia–Pacific. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the meaning and morality of international justice, in all its messy complexity and contradiction.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. LInkedIn. Twitter: @batesmithHis recent publications include: “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, forthcoming 2023, ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) “International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms (Routledge, 2021) by Dr. Troels Burchall Henningsen examines the political and military dynamic between threatened local regimes and Western powers, and argues that the power of informal politics forces local regimes to simulate statebuilding.Reforms enabling local states to take care of their own terrorist and insurgency threats are a blueprint for most Western interventions to provide a way out of protracted internal conflicts. Yet, local regimes most often fail to implement reforms that would have strengthened their hand. This book examines why local regimes derail the reforms demanded by Western powers when they rely on their support to stay in power during existentially threatening violent crises.Based on the political settlement framework, the author analyses how web-like networks of militarised elites require local regimes to use informal politics to stay in power. Four case studies of Western intervention are presented: Iraq (2011-2018), Mali (2011-2020), Chad (2005-2010), and Algeria (1991-2000). These studies demonstrate that informal politics narrows strategic possibilities and forces regimes to rely on coup-proofing military strategies, to continue their alliances with militias and former insurgents, and to simulate statebuilding reforms to solve the dilemma of satisfying militarised elites and Western powers at the same time.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Civics textbooks focus on how Congress makes policy through the legislative process, but the reality is that members of Congress have limited opportunities to advance their policy priorities. In fact, less than five percent of the bills that are introduced in Congress become law. Even the most tenacious legislators are confronted by bicameralism, partisan gridlock, chamber procedures, leadership's control of the agenda, and the diverse interests of 534 other members of Congress. What strategies do lawmakers have for navigating these challenges?In Backdoor Lawmaking: Evading Obstacles in the US Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Melinda N. Ritchie reveals how members of Congress use the federal bureaucracy as a backdoor for policymaking. Today, more law in the United States is made by unelected bureaucrats through federal agency regulations than with congressional statute. Ritchie argues that the bureaucracy's growing role in policymaking offers lawmakers a discreet way to represent controversial interests outside of the formal constraints of Congress. Lawmakers overcome obstacles in the legislative process by substituting agency regulations for legislation and pressuring agencies to make policy changes that would not pass Congress.Drawing on an original dataset constructed from records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. Ritchie traces the interactions between members of Congress and federal agencies to illustrate how these communications function as part of a lawmaker's overarching strategy for policymaking. Original and timely, Backdoor Lawmaking explains how members of Congress exploit the separation of powers and evade the lawmaking process established in the US Constitution.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices