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This book asserts that the Civil War marks the end of one era of American legal history, and the beginning of another. Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysberg Address is viewed as the beginning of a new kind of “covert” constitutional law – one with a stronger emphasis on equality in the wake of the abolition of slavery – which was legally established in the Amendments made to the U.S. Constitution between 1865 and 1870. The author asserts that the influence of this “secret constitution”, which has varied in degree from Reconstruction to the present day, is visible in the rulings of the Supreme Court on issues hinging on personal freedom, equality, and discrimination.

The book analyses the changes that have occurred in developing countries since the end of the Cold War. The first section highlights major areas of change in economics, politics, and security and institutions, while the second section develops these themes and reveals the diversity of experience through regional case studies (Latin America, Asia Pacific, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East).

Many have long suspected that when America takes up arms it is a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight. Despite these concerns about social inequality in military sacrifice, the hard data to validate such claims has been kept out of public view. The Casualty Gap renews the debate over unequal sacrifice by bringing to light new evidence on the inequality dimensions of American wartime casualties. It demonstrates unequivocally that since the conclusion of World War II, communities at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder have borne a disproportionate share of the human costs of war. Moreover, they show for the first time that when Americans are explicitly confronted with evidence of this inequality, they become markedly less supportive of the nation's war efforts. The Casualty Gap also uncovers how wartime deaths affect entire communities. Citizens who see the high price war exacts on friends and neighbors become more likely to oppose war and to vote against the political leaders waging it than residents of low-casualty communities. Moreover, extensive empirical evidence connects higher community casualty rates in Korea and Vietnam to lower levels of trust in government, interest in politics, and electoral and non-electoral participation. In this way, the casualty gap threatens the very vibrancy of American democracy by depressing civic engagement in high-casualty communities for years after the last gun falls silent.

The book is the first in-depth ethnographic study of churched religion in the Pacific Northwest. It describes and explains how Protestant churches survive and thrive in the most unchurched region of the country. The study is based on nearly 450 interviews from thirty-four vital liberal and evangelical Protestant churches in the Pacific Northwest. These two sets of congregations embody separate moral worldviews and the study shows how these moral worldviews conflict, compete, and, on rare occasions, find common ground in five areas: ideology; religious beliefs; organizational and ritual life; mission (both local and international), and finally, how each relates to the politics of the region and nation. Evangelicals have dominated the public discourse on American religious life and politics over the last decade; it has become popular to accuse them of advocating an American theocracy. There was no evidence for this claim in the data from this study. Evangelicals do want influence — focusing intense energy on a political culture to nurture families — but they express the same intense distrust of the government that was found among liberals. Moreover, the study found relative disinterest on the part of liberals in influencing the public square. There was little consensus among liberals in protesting the Iraq War. Nonetheless, liberals were committed to a “moral culture” like evangelicals, though with distinctively different values — embracing a culture of inclusiveness and hospitality for homosexuals, the homeless, and the hungry.

Why did the British government declare war on Germany in August 1914? Was it because Germany posed a threat to British national security? Today many prominent historians would argue that this was not the case and that a million British citizens died needlessly in the trenches for a misguided cause. However, this book counters such revisionist arguments. It disputes the suggestion that the British government either got its facts wrong about the German threat or even, as some have claimed, deliberately ‘invented’ it in order to justify an otherwise unnecessary alignment with France and Russia. By examining the military and naval intelligence assessments forwarded from Germany to London by Britain's service attachés in Berlin, its ‘men on the spot’, this book clearly demonstrates that the British authorities had every reason to be alarmed. From these crucial intelligence documents, previously thought to have been lost, this book proves that in the decade before the First World War, the British government was kept well-informed about military and naval developments in the Reich. In particular, the attachés consistently warned that German ambitions to challenge Britain posed a real and imminent danger to national security. As a result, the book concludes that far from being mistaken or invented, the British government's perception of a German threat before 1914 was rooted in hard and credible intelligence.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizing the slave trade and slavery as violations of the principles of Christianity, natural rights, and political security. A black spokesman for abolitionism was Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), one of the first African Americans to publish. Haynes served as a minuteman in the American War of Independence and began writing against the slave trade and slavery in the 1770s. After ordination in a Congregational church, he assumed a pulpit in Rutland, Vermont, where he became a leading controversialist, defender of the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and interpreter of republican ideology. He was dismissed from his pulpit in 1818, because his affiliation to the Federalist Party and his opposition to the War of 1812 offended his congregation. The last 15 years of his life were characterized by pessimism about the ability of Americans of the early republic to defeat racism as well as by a defense of Puritanism, which he believed could guide the creation of a free, harmonious, and integrated society.

The associational life of middle-class women in 20th-century England has been largely ignored by historians. During the Second World War women's clubs, guilds, and institutes provided a basis for the mobilization of up to a million women, mainly housewives, into unpaid part-time work. Women's Voluntary Services (WVS) — which was set up by the government in 1938 to organize this work — generated a rich archive of reports and correspondence which provide the social historian with a unique window into the female public sphere. Questioning the view that world war two served to democratize English society, the book shows how the mobilization enabled middle-class social leaders to reinforce their claims to authority. Displaying ‘character’ through their voluntary work, the leisured women at the centre of this study made themselves indispensable to the war effort. The book delineates these ‘continuities of class’, reconstructing intimate portraits of local female social leadership in contrasting settings across provincial England, tracing complex and often acerbic rivalries within the voluntary sector, and uncovering gulfs of mutual distrust and incomprehension dividing publicly active women along gendered frontiers of class and party. Britain's wartime mobilization relied on an uneasy balance between voluntarism and the expanding power of the state, calling on a Victorian ethos of public service to cope with the profoundly un-Victorian problems of total war. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that these female social leaders finally found themselves marginalized by bureaucracy and professionalization.

During the Civil War, Northerners fought each other in elections with almost as much zeal as they fought Southern rebels on the battlefield. Yet politicians and voters alike claimed that partisanship was dangerous in a time of national crisis. This book challenges the prevailing view that political processes in the North somehow helped the Union be more stable and effective in the war. Instead, it argues, early efforts to suspend party politics collapsed in the face of divisions over slavery and the purpose of the war. At the same time, new contexts for political mobilization, such as the army and the avowedly nonpartisan Union Leagues, undermined conventional partisan practices. The administration's supporters soon used the power of antiparty discourse to their advantage by connecting their own antislavery arguments to a powerful nationalist ideology. This book offers a reinterpretation of Northern wartime politics that challenges the “party period paradigm” in American political history and reveals the many ways in which the unique circumstances of war altered the political calculations and behavior of politicians and voters alike. As this book shows, beneath the superficial unity lay profound differences about the implications of the war for the kind of nation that the United States was to become.

This book connects two central problems encountered by the Federal Republic of Germany prior to reunification in 1990, both of them rooted in the Second World War. Domestically, the country had to integrate eight million expellees forced out of their homes in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the lost war. Externally, it had to reestablish relations with Eastern Europe, despite the burdens of the Nazi past, the expulsions, and the ongoing East–West struggle during the Cold War. This book shows how the long-term consequences of the expellee problem significantly hindered West German efforts to develop normal ties with the East European states. In particular, it emphasizes a point largely overlooked in the existing literature: the way in which the political integration of the expellees into the Federal Republic had unanticipated negative consequences for the country's Ostpolitik.

After 1949, the British Empire in Hong Kong was more vulnerable than the lack of Chinese demand for return and the success of Hong Kong's economic transformations might have suggested. Its vulnerability stemmed as much from Britain's imperial decline and America's Cold War requirements as from a Chinese threat. It culminated in the little known ‘1957 Question’, a year when the British position in Hong Kong appeared more uncertain than any time since 1949. This is the first scholarly study that places Hong Kong at the heart of the Anglo–American relationship in the wider context of the Cold War in Asia. Unlike existing works, which tend to treat British and US policies in isolation, this book explores their dynamic interactions — how the two allies perceived, responded to, and attempted to influence each other's policies and actions. It also provides a major reinterpretation of Hong Kong's involvement in the containment of China. The author argues that, concerned about possible Chinese retaliation, the British insisted and the Americans accepted that Hong Kong's role should be as discreet and non-confrontational in nature as possible. Above all, top decision-makers in Washington evaluated Hong Kong's significance not in its own right, but in the context of the Anglo–American relationship: Hong Kong was seen primarily as a bargaining chip to obtain British support for US policy elsewhere in Asia. Using a variety of British and US archival material as well as Chinese sources, the author examines how the British and US government discussed, debated, and disagreed over Hong Kong's role in the Cold War, and reveals the dynamics of the Anglo–American alliance and the dilemmas of small allies in a global conflict.

This book examines both the social and the political history of slavery. James Polk — President of the United States from 1845 to 1849 — owned a Mississippi cotton plantation with about fifty slaves. Drawing upon previously unexplored records, this book recreates the world of Polk's Mississippi plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But this book suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery — influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system — may actually have helped to precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.

This is a fascinating study of how the climate of fear in Nazi Germany affected Hitler's advisers, and shaped the decision-making process. It explores the key foreign policy decisions from the Nazi seizure of power up to the hours before the outbreak of World War II. The author argues persuasively that the tense environment led the diplomats to a nearly obsessive control over the “information arsenal” in a desperate battle to defend their positions and to safeguard their lives. Unlike previous studies, this book draws the reader into the diplomats' darker world, and illustrates how Hitler's power to make informed decisions was limited by the very system he created. The result, the author concludes, was a chaotic flow of information between Hitler and his advisers that may have accelerated the march toward war.