This article examines how Black communities in New York City and Atlanta responded to the crack epidemic of the 1980s and how their grassroots activism shaped the rise of order-maintenance policing. Although much scholarship attributes the development of order-maintenance policing to top-down neoliberal and conservative forces, we demonstrate that residents—facing daily violence, open-air drug markets, and social collapse—demanded more aggressive enforcement. Drawing on extensive archival research, including municipal records, police files, oral histories, and congressional testimony, this study analyzes the formation of Tactical Narcotics Teams in New York and Operation Red Dog in Atlanta. We find that community activism was both a catalyst for and a constraint on policing strategy. Ultimately, this article complicates dominant accounts of contemporary policing by showing how demands for authority and public order, forged from the ground up, helped pave the way for order-maintenance policing.

Six weeks after the United States entered World War II, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking if he thought Organized Baseball should continue during the war. FDR responded the next day with his famous Green Light Letter, basically saying yes. Although this simple decision has been amply covered by scholars, its complex consequences have not. During the course of the war, more than a dozen executive agencies were called on to deal with practical aspects of the Green Light letter decision including the Selective Service; the Office of Defense Transportation; the War Mobilization Commission; the Office of War Mobilization; and the departments of war, treasury, and agriculture.

Most studies of American women’s voting rights are centered around the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet many women had—and used—the right to vote in school elections prior to 1920. Previous analyses have devoted little attention to studying these elections as exercises in civic education and political participation. Using systematic data from school elections in Massachusetts and Minnesota that have not been studied together previously, we seek to establish a baseline for understanding the extent of women voters’ involvement in school elections. We find that a substantial number of women took advantage of their right to vote, especially given their limited franchise. The timing of elections, type of school office, and political culture of each state also appear to have affected women’s participation. Given these findings, we urge scholars to continue to explore the role school suffrage played in women’s political socialization.

Our thesis is that the degree of permissible interaction between government and religion and its policy implications is most strikingly documented in the educational arena. To support our claim, we make three arguments: (1) by the early 1970s, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and other states were experimenting with accommodationist policies in education that neither increased religious divisiveness nor denied religious freedom. These policy experiments contributed to the Supreme Court’s new understanding of religious accommodation under the First Amendment; (2) beginning in the late 1970s, a scholarly reappraisal of the establishment clause—based on a close reading of the debates over the First Amendment in Congress and the states—was demonstrating that reasonable governmental accommodations, particularly in education, would not violate the establishment clause; and (3) that periodizing the establishment clause’s history, by focusing on state-level innovations and scholarly reinterpretations, enhances the understanding of the policy developments of the First Amendment, particularly in the educational field.

This essay examines the Army’s efforts to cultivate and gain congressional support for the GI Bill in the 1980s. Focusing on the relationship between Representative Sonny Montgomery, senior Army leaders like Maxwell R. Thurman and Robert Elton, and the staffers who worked for each of them, it illustrates the intentionality with which Army leaders worked to cultivate congressional support for and to head off congressional and presidential opposition to a bill that they saw as essential. Analyzing their public and private efforts at critical moments when the legislation was imperiled reveals that relations between the Army and Congress are more intricate than testimony at hearings and budget requests might reveal, that throughout the 1980s, Army leaders remained deeply concerned about sustaining the All-Volunteer Force, and that the ultimate success of that force and the legislation that helped ensure it rested with individuals who built and then leveraged personal relationships.

Between 2021 and 2025, national media gave attention to federal court cases and legislation that established new policies for increasing the compensation of college athletes. Foremost was “NIL,” acronym for the “Name-Image-Likeness” payment guidelines. Although NIL was hailed as a “whole new ball game” for students as paid athletes, our research tempers news coverage by drawing from historical findings about trends and traditions in college sports practices and policies. Compensation and commercialization in American intercollegiate athletics—and issues of the rights of college students and the governance of college sports—have been central to intercollegiate athletics from their founding to the present. An enduring legacy is an “American Dilemma” in the balancing of academic and business principles in the education of collegiate student athletes and conduct of varsity sports programs.

This article offers a case study of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW)’s early childhood programs and job training programs, highlighting the vulnerabilities of the War on Poverty–era “public-private partnerships” that were rooted in ideological commitments to racial liberalism and “middle-class values.” The article critically examines the challenges and criticisms faced by NCJW including issues of program participation, operation, and oversight as well as the broader political context that shaped their work. It argues that NCJW’s shift from targeted compensatory interventions to advocacy for universal family policies was a strategic response to balancing government directives, activist demands, and conservative criticism. The article concludes that NCJW’s strategies ultimately contributed to the endurance of a bifurcated system of care—a private (but subsidized) market for most and limited piecemeal interventions rooted in a regressive payment system for poor families of color.

Central banking and monetary policy face particular challenges in heterogenous and multilevel currency areas. And yet, most literature on central banking, like most modern central banks themselves, assumes the validity of a unitary monetary authority implementing uniform monetary policy, even in compound polities. Here, I explore the dilemmas of central banking and monetary policy in politically decentralized currency areas by analyzing the origins of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and its provisions for a multilevel governance structure and decentralized monetary policy. The origins of the Federal Reserve remain puzzling because its decentralized structure is often dismissed as a failed experiment or a political compromise that nobody truly wanted. However, I find that its design was the product of a deliberate political effort to reimagine central banking in a federal society, and I trace the idea of a decentralized “central” bank to a distinct interpretation of the American political-constitutional tradition.

This article analyzes Southern cotton interests and the agricultural politics within the Roosevelt Administration, offering insights into how market conditions can shape reform agendas and the considerable opportunities for capture that accompany ambitious reform agendas that rely on interested experts. It shows that Southern cotton interests within the Administration were divided into interest groups, depending on their market position, that mapped onto a broader national constellation of agricultural interest groups. These groups competed among themselves for capture of a reform agenda that was adjudicated by the responses of the cotton market to different interventions.

This article examines the institutionalization of emergency preparedness in the United States, situating the Californian experience, particularly in Los Angeles, within this broader transformation from a fragmented federal concern into a decentralized form of governance. Although scholarship has addressed specific risk domains and institutional mechanisms, few studies have explored how civilian roles in preparedness were historically constructed. This research addresses that gap by analyzing how Cold War civil defense mandates were reinterpreted through civic, professional, and institutional networks in California. Adopting a sociohistorical approach, it draws on archival records, media discourse, institutional documents, and US legal sources. Findings reveal that the figure of the “prepared civilian” emerged through contingent adaptations rather than top-down design and that preparedness circulated unevenly across governance levels. The study contributes to public policy history by reframing emergency preparedness as a historically contingent mechanism of power, shaping institutional knowledge and practice within evolving emergency management systems.

The Supreme Court is less constrained than political science has recognized. Motivated justices can dramatically alter politics without deferring to actors in the other branches. Subverting constraints, justices can aggrandize power and impose their irreducible preferences. Using Reconstruction as an example, this article brings new evidence to support the claim that an autonomous Court precipitated the end of Reconstruction. I make three essential arguments: First, the Republican commitment to federal civil rights protection extended longer than is traditionally supposed. Second, the architect of postbellum constitutionalism, Justice Bradley, harbored long-standing fear of Black equality and enfeebled the Reconstruction amendments when neither legal nor political imperatives compelled him to do so. Last, Bradley’s interventions substantially hindered Reconstruction by facilitating the “redemption” of southern state governments. This article employs mixed-methodology, using a difference-in-differences analysis and novel archival data. Contrary to scholarship arguing that the Court simply followed a Republican retreat, the Court dramatically reshaped the political-social development of Reconstruction.

Jack Kemp’s ascent from cast-off professional football player to conservative national figure requires understanding how the phases of his athletic career, which he filtered through his on-field experiences, shaped his unorthodox hybridity. He was in many ways a standard small-government conservative advocating the tenets of the technocratic Sunbelt New Right, but one who took surprisingly progressive stands on issues of labor and race very much at odds with developing Republican orthodoxy.

Given that there is a diverse universe of policy ideas, this article investigates the patterned way in which legislators incorporate policy ideas into proposals. Focusing on federal gendered pay inequity policy proposals in the United States beginning in 1945, I find that gendered pay inequity policy content is characterized by relatively long periods of ideational stability punctuated by moments of sudden change in policy ideas. These moments of sudden change I refer to as policy innovation junctures. Since 1945, there have been four policy innovation junctures: Equal Pay Inception, the 79th Congress (1945–1946); Married Mothers’ Benefits, the 90th Congress (1967–1968); Professional Women and Training Programs, the 101st Congress (1989–1990); and Policy Synthesis, the 105th Congress (1997–1998). The policy ideas generated during these junctures come to dominate policy efforts pursued during the long periods of stability, very often comprising any legislation that is ultimately passed years, if not decades, down the road.

This essay memorializes William E. Leuchtenburg (1922–2025), who over the course of his long, distinguished career made numerous significant contributions to policy history, presidential history, and the history profession in general.

This article uses youth soccer in Georgia, a state traditionally dominated by American football, as a case study of the challenges of the American youth sports system as a mechanism for talent development. We trace the historical divergence of US youth sports from global models, emphasizing the inefficiencies of school-based athletics and the rise of privatized club systems. Through historical analysis and interviews, the study reveals how socioeconomic barriers, geographic disparities, and competing league structures hinder equitable access and talent development. The pay-to-play model exacerbates exclusion, particularly for minority and low-income families. Georgia’s case reflects broader national trends, where market-driven youth sports systems prioritize elite experiences over inclusive development.

During the Nine Years’ War, limitations of state capacity required that English imperial policy makers delegate substantial authority to provincial governors and assemblies in North American colonies. Proximity to sites of conflict, along with access to developed regional financial networks, gave provincial leaders relative efficiency when planning and executing military campaigns. Although useful in the short term, imperial policy makers considered the influence of provincial leaders like William Phips in Massachusetts to be a threat to their centralized authority in metropolitan London. Consequently, North American colonial wars revealed a tension in the transatlantic imperial relationship between the metropolitan English state and English colonies—namely, that peripheral expansion required delegation but that same delegation threatened central authority that English authorities considered necessary for sovereignty. This tension reached a breaking point on the issue of monetary policy. Phips’s advocacy for colonial monetary autonomy would ultimately provoke his removal as governor and imprisonment.

In 1977, British Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan joined Commonwealth leaders by committing to the Gleneagles Agreement and thereby pledged to “combat the evil of apartheid” by “taking every practical step” to prevent sporting contacts between Britain and South Africa. Within two years of the agreement being struck, the Tories came to power under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Until the end of Thatcher’s time in office (1990), Britain’s application of the agreement became more controversial and divisive than it ever had during Callaghan’s administration, as critics zeroed in on the new Prime Minister’s interpretation of what “every practical step” represented or required. Although there are several studies that explore how and why Thatcher’s government chose to apply Gleneagles, none consider how the agreement was interpreted, debated, and contested from multiple perspectives. In this article, we examine what motivated such different reactions to Gleneagles in Britain and the Commonwealth and why ultimately Thatcher could not seem to please anyone.