Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. The geography of federalism matters a lot for Medica...

In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms of modernity. How did this happen?

When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progressive agenda to limit political corruption and democratiz...

The study of Palestine and Israel has been largely shaped by the politics of the conflict and thus, many scholars start with political history, often using Israeli state sources. Maha Nassar, in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Ar...

In the last few weeks, minimum wage workers in 18 states saw their wages go up; in Maine a full dollar increase. Why states have taken the lead on raising the minimum wage is the topic of the new book from Christopher Witko and William Franko,

How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich relied on terror to survive in his new book Hitler’s C...

Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact,

At the start of Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), five different, and competing, approaches to populism. It has been used to describe those on the left and the right, those in power and those seeking out power.

Do we live in a country of red and blue states or something more purple-ish? The red state/blue state meme of 2000 has really never gone away, and scholarly debate, as well as frequent media attention, has argued for its merits and demerits.

In our hyper polarized world, it is easy to assume that this is a natural state of being, the result of natural shifts in politics. In Sam Rosenfeld‘s new book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (University of Chicago Press,

It was a year that at times left Lyndon Johnson feeling as though he was living in a continuous nightmare. Yet as Kyle Longley describes in his book LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval (Cambridge University Pre...

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016,

Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic...

Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressional action hostile to immigrants.

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the ...

Studies of Arab nationalism populate the field of Middle Eastern studies, perhaps even overpopulate it. However, what Adam Mestyan does in Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton University Press,

In the wake of the Alabama Senate election in December, 2017, attention has been drawn to the intersection of religion and politics. This is the subject of God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield,

In a perceptive challenge to longstanding assumptions about Dominican anti-Haitianism, April J. Mayes finds fresh ways to think about the production of race in late 19th and 20th century Dominican Republic.

In their new book Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement is Good For Synagogues, Jews and America (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017), Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen argue that social action and Jewish action go hand-in-hand.

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017).

We end the year by remembering our favorite authors, books, and some of the titles. There were so many great books written this year that we had the fun of reading and talking to a few of the authors. Weve both been doing a lot of grading, so left out...

What is it about Black Republicans that makes them fodder for comedy? How do Black Republicans view their participation in their political group? Corey D. Fields answers these questions and more in his new book,

Catapulted into the Oval Office by an unusual set of circumstances, Gerald Ford remains a unique figure in American presidential history. In Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford (University Press of Kansas, 2017),

In his new book, Disposable Leaders: Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney,

If any place (outside contemporary North Korea) can be called “Totalitarian,” it would be Stalinist Russia. Under the “Greatest Genius of All Time,” Soviet “citizens” enjoyed no free speech, no free press, and no free assembly.