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The Constitution and Public Policy in U.S. History
201 pages | 6 x 9 | 2009
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-03534-5 | paper: $28.00 sh
Despite its crucial importance in United States history, the study of the constitutional system fell out of favor with many historians and history departments for several decades during the latter half of the twentieth century. The dawn of the twenty-first century, however, has borne witness to a new interdisciplinary interest among scholars in reviving this important dialogue in American history. This book represents some of the most innovative contributions to this dialogue by a new generation of historians and legal scholars. The essays presented in this volume offer new insights into constitutionalism, legal culture, and the political arena, together contributing to an “ongoing reconceptualization of the historical relationship between the Constitution and public policy.”
In this volume of Issues in Policy History, Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman bring together eleven essays from renowned scholars Mary Sarah Bilder, Donald T. Critchlow and Cynthia L. Stachecki, Christine Desan, Morton Keller, Ajay K. Mehrotra, David Quigley, John A. Thompson, Christopher Tomlins, and Michael Willrich. By applying new archival research to questions of policy history and embedding constitutional history in its political context, these scholars breathe new life into the study of public policy and reaffirm Woodrow Wilson’s conclusion that the Constitution’s “spirit is always the spirit of the age.”
Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
Bruce J. Schulman is Professor of History at Boston University.
Contents
Editor’s Preface
Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer
Introduction
Mary Sarah Bilder
Idea or Practice: A Brief Historiography of Judicial Revie
Christine Desan
From Blood to Profit: Making Money in the Practice and Imagery of Early America
Christopher Tomlins
Necessities of State: Police, Sovereignty, and the Constitutio
David Quigley
Constitutional Revision and the City: The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894
Michael Willrich
“The Least Vaccinated of Any Civilized Country”: Personal Liberty and Public Heath in the Progressive Era
Ajay K. Mehrotra
Forging Fiscal Reform: Constitutional Change, Public Policy, and the Creation of Administrative Capacity in Wisconsin, 1880–1920
John A. Thompson
Woodrow Wilson and a World Governed by Evolving Law
Anthony Badger
The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956
Alan Rogers
State Constitutionalism and the Death Penalty
Donald T. Critchlow and Cynthia L. Stachecki
The Equal Rights Amendment Reconsidered: Politics, Policy, and Social Mobilization in a Democracy
Morton Keller
Governance and Democracy: Public Policy in Modern America
Contributors