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This book tells the story of an academic department that underwent rapid, wrenching changes at a time and in a place that one would not have expected them to have occurred. The time was the late 1960s through the 1970s and the place was a US public university heavily dependent on state funding. The Cold War was raging, the US public was fearful of communism and the Soviet Union, and politicians were speaking to these fears for political ends. And the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was in turmoil. In this environment a significant proportion of that department's visible faculty of traditional economists was rapidly created and, in spite of the anti-Marxist political climate and the dependence of the University on state politicians for funding, quickly replaced by a significant visible group of Marxian economists. The story told covers the particulars of the background for these events relating to the University of Massachusetts, the political activism of the period, and the state of the economics profession. It describes the events themselves in considerable detail, the multi-year turmoil within the Economics Department associated with them, the eventual resolution of that turmoil into an intellectually exciting and friendly atmosphere, the significance of the events in terms of academic endeavor, and their legacy for the economics profession.

The period 1678–1730 was a decisive one in Western political history and in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled unprecedented opportunities for political activity. This book argues that women already at work in the London book trade were among the first to seize those new opportunities for public political expression. Synthesizing areas of scholarly inquiry previously regarded as separate, and offering a new model for the study of the literary marketplace, it examines not only women writers, but also women printers, booksellers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and other producers and distributors of printed texts. Part I examines the political activity of women workers in the London book trdes, Part II focuses on the largest category of women's writing in this period (religious and religio-political works), and Part III examines in depth one woman's strategies as a political writer (Delarivier Manley). Original in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, this book provides new information about middling and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. The book's central argument is that women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religiopolitical allegiances played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie claims that women had no place in public life.

This book is an ethnographic study of devolution and politics in Scotland, as well as of party-political activism more generally. It explores how Conservative Party activists who had opposed devolution and the movement for a Scottish Parliament during the 1990s attempted to mobilise politically following their annihilation at the 1997 General Election. The book draws on fieldwork conducted in Dumfries and Galloway – a former stronghold for the Scottish Tories – to describe how senior Conservatives worked from the assumption that they had endured their own ‘crisis’ in representation. The material consequences of this crisis included losses of financial and other resources, legitimacy and local knowledge for the Scottish Conservatives. The book ethnographically describes the processes, practices and relationships that Tory Party activists sought to enact during the 2003 Scottish and local government elections. Its central argument is that, having asserted that the difficulties they faced constituted problems of knowledge, Conservative activists cast to the geographical and institutional margins of Scotland became ‘banal’ activists. Believing themselves to be lacking in the data and information necessary for successful mobilisation during Parliamentary elections, local Tory Party strategists attempted to address their knowledge ‘crisis’ by burying themselves in paperwork and petty bureaucracy. Such practices have often escaped scholarly attention because they appear everyday and mundane, and are therefore less noticeable. Bringing them into view analytically has important implications for socio-cultural anthropologists, sociologists and other scholars interested in ‘new’ ethnographic objects, including activism, bureaucracy, democracy, elections and modern knowledge practices.

No state has voted Republican more consistently or widely or for longer than Kansas. To understand red state politics, Kansas is the place. It is also the place to understand red state religion. The Kansas Board of Education has repeatedly challenged the teaching of evolution, Kansas voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the state is a hotbed of antiabortion protest—and churches have been involved in all of these efforts. Yet in 1867 suffragist Lucy Stone could plausibly proclaim that, in the cause of universal suffrage, “Kansas leads the world!” This book tells the story of religiously motivated political activism in Kansas from territorial days to the present. It examines how faith mixed with politics as both ordinary Kansans and leaders such as John Brown, Carrie Nation, William Allen White, and Dwight Eisenhower struggled over the pivotal issues of their times, from slavery and Prohibition to Populism and anti-communism. Beyond providing surprising new explanations of why Kansas became a conservative stronghold, the book sheds new light on the role of religion in red states across the Midwest and the United States. Contrary to recent influential accounts, the book argues that Kansas conservatism is largely pragmatic, not ideological, and that religion in the state has less to do with politics and contentious moral activism than with relationships between neighbors, friends, and fellow churchgoers. This is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the role of religion in American political conservatism.

When we think of women's activism in America, figures such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan invariably come to mind—those liberal doyennes who have fought for years to chip away at patriarchy and achieve gender equality. But women's interests are not synonymous with organizations like NOW anymore. As this book shows, the conservative ascendancy that began in the Reagan era has been accompanied by the emergence of a broad-based conservative women's movement. And while firebrands like Ann Coulter and Phyllis Schlafly may be the public face of right-wing women's activism, a handful of large and established women's organizations have proven to be the most effective promoters of the conservative agenda. This book shows that one of the key—albeit overlooked—developments in political activism since the 1980s has been the emergence of conservative women's organizations. It focuses on the most prominent of these groups, Concerned Women for America (CWA) and the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), to reveal how they are using feminist rhetoric for conservative ends: outlawing abortion, restricting pornography, and bolstering the traditional family. But ironically, these organizations face a paradox: to combat the legacy of feminism—particularly its appeal to the majority of American women—they must use the rhetoric of women's empowerment. Indeed, the book illustrates how conservative activists are often the beneficiaries of the very feminist politics they oppose. Yet just as importantly, it demolishes two widely believed truisms: that conservatism holds no appeal to women and that modern conservatism is hostile to the very notion of women's activism.

Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer new insights into the political thinking of the public, the causes of party polarization, the motivations for political participation, and the paradoxical relationship between turnout and democratic representation. These studies propel a foundational argument about democracy. Voters can only do as well as the alternatives on offer. These alternatives are constrained by third players, in particular activists, interest groups, and financial contributors. The result: voters often appear to be shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent because the alternatives they must choose between are shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent.

Minnie Fisher Cunningham was Texas's most important 20th-century political activist. Best known for directing Texas's successful woman suffrage campaign, she played an important role in the national suffrage movement, helped to establish the League of Women Voters, and served as its first executive secretary. One of the first American women to pursue a career in party politics, she was a founder and resident director of the Woman's National Democratic Club, and in 1927 became acting head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. Cunningham ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate from Texas in 1928, and in the late 1930s returned to Washington, D.C. to work for the New Deal. She was so successful in presenting its policies to women's groups that the Democratic National Committee considered her the South's best political organizer. From 1944, when she ran for governor as a pro-New Deal candidate, until the end of her life, she was a leader of the Texas liberal movement and helped build an electoral coalition of women, minorities and male reformers within the Texas Democratic Party. An advocate for farmers and labor unions, and an opponent of gender, class, and racial discrimination in a conservative state, she helped to develop a Left Feminism allied with left-liberal organizations to press for expanded democracy and fundamental social change. Her forty years of activism helps fill in the still-emerging narrative of female political activism between the demise of the first women's movement after 1920 and the rebirth of feminism in the 1960s.

The last two decades have seen historians and political scientists extensively study the rise of conservatism. An addition to that literature, this book offers an analysis of the state of college conservatism and explains the factors that shape the student and the citizen. Conservative pundits allege that the pervasive liberalism of America's colleges and universities has detrimental effects on undergraduates, most particularly right-leaning ones. Yet not enough attention has actually been paid to young conservatives to test these claims—until now. This book explores who conservative students are, and how their beliefs and political activism relate to their university experiences. It shows that the diverse conservative movement evolving among today's college students holds important implications for the direction of American politics.