Winner of the 2005 J. David Greenstone Book Award from the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association.Winner of the 2005 Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association
Winner of the 2005 V.O. Key, Jr. Award of the Southern Political Science Association
The Reconstruction era marked a huge political leap for African Americans, who rapidly went from the status of slaves to voters and officeholders. Yet this hard-won progress lasted only a few decades. Ultimately a "second reconstruction" associated with the civil rights movement and the...

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965, he explained that "[t]his act flows from a clear and simple wrong...Millions of Americans are denied the vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong is one which no American, in his heart, can justify." Now, in the fortieth anniversary year of its passage, readers can learn about the history, impact, and significance of this landmark event through the dynamic pairing of essays and primary source documents that define CQ Press's Landmark Events in U.S. History Series. The...

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics,...