Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> American Government - State

During the early 1990s the Department of Justice used its Voting Rights Act power to object to racially unfair redistricting laws to force states to maximize minority congressional districts. The results were dramatic: Congressional Black Caucus membership swelled from 25 to 38 and nine new Hispanic congresspersons were sworn in. Only three years later, the maximization strategy lay in ruins. The courts forced many of the new minority districts to be redrawn and the judiciary reserved especially harsh criticism for the Department.

Cunningham examines and analyzes how the Department came...

This biography, the first of Richard Spencer Childs, begins in the Progressive Era when Childs initiated and pursued two fertile ideas: the short ballot doctrine and the council-manager plan. Childs understood that the simplification of the task of the voter was a question pressing for solution and that the council-manager plan would transform municipal government. This comprehensive work discusses other aspects of Childs' broad reform agenda. His proposals included: county government reform; reform in state government administration; unicameral state legislatures; reapportionment of state...

The third of four volumes comprising a biographical dictionary of state house speakers from 1911 to 1994, this book covers speakers from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Following an insightful analytical introduction, the entries provide biographical and career information on all of the Southern speakers. The volume concludes with valuable statistical appendixes based on an exhaustive database.

This book complements volumes on the West and Midwest. A...

The remarkable changes in China over the past three decades are mostly considered at the national level, whereas local government - which has played and continues to play a key role in these developments - is often overlooked. The themes of China's local administrative hierarchy, and its historical evolution, have until now received scant attention; this book fills that gap, and presents a comprehensive survey of China's local administration, from the province down to the township. It examines the political and functional definitions and historical origins of the nine local administrative...

Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows in Made with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy.

Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It...

In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, -Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else - With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation's coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia's leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal,...

What?

In our cynical age, such a claim seems either remarkably naIve or hopelessly outdated. Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured, as in the classic film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, " as a drunken exercise in bombast and rascality.

Now Jon K. Lauck examines anew the values we like to think were at work during the...

Television host, razor sharp political pundit, and #1 bestselling author Bill O'Reilly focuses in on where we all stand in the Age of Obama in Pinheads and Patriots. In this brave, hard-hitting, provocative volume, the author of Culture Warrior and A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity guides Americans through the extensive transformations sweeping their country and explains exactly what these profound changes mean for every one of us.