University Press of Kansas

In contrast to recent efforts to restrict students by putting more power in the hands of parents and school officials, Ronald C. Den Otter makes a bold and rigorously argued case for respecting the autonomy of students and expanding their free-speech rights. In recent years, the debate over student speech has roiled college campuses and elicited a wave of books and articles, from both the Right and the Left, over what speech is permissible and who should receive a platform to speak. What has largely been overlooked in this debate is the freedom of speech—or lack thereof—enjoyed by junior high and high school students in American public schools. Education in Democracy makes a powerful case for why free speech is just as important, if not even more so, for secondary education students as it is for those in higher education. As Ronald C. Den Otter shows, US Supreme Court jurisprudence on this topic lacks consistency and clarity, tending to restrict freedom for these students while giving school officials almost complete control, as in Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in Morse v. Frederick. Den Otter argues instead for a stricter version of the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District substantial disruption test, proposing that public junior high and high school students should be treated the same as students at public universities. Without ignoring the challenges of hate speech, Den Otter makes a bold and impassioned argument for respecting the autonomy of all students and developing their autonomous capacities. Paternalistic treatment of students in the form of censorship by school authorities is morally and constitutionally unacceptable, according to Den Otter. Instead, American society should see public schools as laboratories in pluralism and democracy, places where students cultivate the civic virtue of tolerance and learn how to disagree in a responsible way. Doing so requires the bedrock foundation of free speech.

For more than half a century, James Hamilton has been an active participant and an inside observer of some of the most consequential moments in modern US history. He has been involved in investigations concerning Watergate, the Kennedy assassination, “Debategate,” the Keating Five, the Clinton impeachment, Vince Foster’s suicide, the Valerie Plame affair, Benghazi, and the Major League Baseball steroids scandal. He argued against Brett Kavanaugh in front of the Supreme Court and won. He has tales to tell of power brokers, players, and politicians who helped steer the course of the country. Written in clear, incisive prose with self-deprecating humor, Advocate discusses the travails of prominent politicians and other well-known individuals, focusing particularly on high-profile congressional and other investigations. Credited with developing the modern system for vetting Democratic vice-presidential candidates, Hamilton recounts his extensive vetting of vice-presidential, cabinet, and Supreme Court candidates—including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This book concludes with practical, sage advice for young lawyers entering the profession. Much more than a memoir from a seasoned lawyer, Advocate is a richly detailed history of some of the most sensational and controversial events in Washington politics over the past fifty years. By sharing information and insights known only to him, Hamilton fills in the gaps of historical events while advising the public on lessons that can be learned from the past. Anyone interested in the uniquely American intermingling of law and politics will find this an engaging read.

Honorable Mention: Best First book in the History of Religions Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s call for all people to “become involved” in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom and another party’s property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win. Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country—an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations—to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership. Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions—between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations—towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

The definitive resource on the topic of executive privilege, now in a revised and updated fifth edition that includes the Biden presidency. Executive Privilege--called "the definitive contemporary work on the subject" by the Journal of Politics--is widely considered the best in-depth history and analysis of executive privilege and its relation to the proper scope and limits of presidential power.The expanded fifth edition picks up where the fourth edition left off in 2019, with President Donald Trump''s bold assertion of a "protective executive privilege" that recognizes no balancing powers against the executive branch. In addition to an expanded analysis of the battle over the Mueller Report, the controversy surrounding the citizenship question on the 2020 census, and the White House security clearances dispute, new sections examine the conflict over the report on steel and aluminum tariffs and the investigation into missing presidential records stored at Trump''s Mar-a-Lago residence, some of which were marked as classified.Mark J. Rozell and Mitchel A. Sollenberger have also added a new chapter on President Joe Biden, whom the authors regard as taking a measured approach to questions of secrecy and privilege. This chapter recounts how Biden handled former President Trump''s executive privilege claims during the January 6th investigation, while also managing the controversy surrounding his own classified documents dispute and the investigations into his son, Hunter Biden.With its thorough and authoritative analysis of the many controversies regarding presidential privilege and accountability from the founding of the nation to Trump and beyond, Executive Privilege remains an essential resource.

Of all the Allied strategic defensive campaigns in the first half of World War II, the fight to defend Malaya and Singapore provided perhaps the best chance to use special forces to wider effect. In December 1941 the issue in the East during World War II was whether or not the Japanese could drive the Western Allies out of Southeast Asia before the Allies could reinforce strongly enough to prevent it. Consequently, the British Army organized, trained, and specifically equipped special-forces combat units to operate independently, for long periods of time if necessary, physically separated from the main forces in the field. British Army special-forces units were usually directed to carry out two broad but often closely related missions: provide direct assistance to main force operations; and harass enemy movements, lines of supply, and communications. Special forces were also frequently used to destroy specific targets, sometimes in completely independent operations with no main force in the field, and especially to act as the eyes and ears of the main force, gathering intelligence on enemy movements and or screening those of friendly forces. In Misfire, Brian Farrell analyzes how and why the British Army developed special forces in the early years of World War II; what uses it made of them; and the role that special and irregular forces played in defending Malaya and Singapore against Japanese invasion, from prewar preparations to capitulation in February 1942. Farrell’s examination of the use of special and irregular forces helps us understand both the Malayan campaign and wider efforts to defend Southeast Asia as well as what that campaign tells us about the evolution of such forces in the British and Empire armies.

The final work by late historian Thomas N. Ingersoll on the political crisis posed by the presidential election of 1800—the reverberations of which are still felt today. Written by the late Thomas Ingersoll before his death in December 2021, this book examines the fourteen-month struggle to control the identity and future of the United States following George Washington’s death in December 1799. In this period, Americans engaged in a fierce debate over every aspect of political life, but especially over the meaning of egalitarianism and equality in the nascent nation. Ingersoll’s work focuses in particular on the divisions between two emergent national political parties: the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. Both were “democratic,” strictly speaking, but they were still nervous about what “democracy” actually meant. Each party was also deeply divided along a spectrum from most moderate to most extreme. After a fraught election campaign shaped by disagreements over fundamental issues of class, gender, race, and religion, the populist Democratic-Republicans sent the moderately progressive Thomas Jefferson to the White House and won control of the House of Representatives. This victory ended twelve long years of Federalist domination and began one of the greatest political dramas in American history. Rather than accepting their electoral defeat, the Federalists sought to subvert the will of the people and sow chaos and anarchy in the courts and in Congress, nearly tearing the country apart in the process. The Revolution of 1800 did nothing to stem the tide of a growing sectionalism that threatened to unmoor the nation but rather moved the country one step closer to all-out civil war. A Tempestuous Sea of Liberty is a magisterial history of this pivotal period in American history, written by a senior historian in full command of the material.

An expert on presidential history and national identity explores the complicated and conflicted ways Americans remember Thomas Jefferson and what these impressions reveal about the nation he helped to found. Thomas Jefferson is everywhere. In Washington, DC, and on Mount Rushmore. In history textbooks and children’s picture books. On Broadway and HBO. Jefferson is even on our money—both the ubiquitous nickel and the rare $2 bill. The many different ways that Americans remember the third president of the United States tell us very little about Jefferson himself, but they tell us a lot about the American people. In Remembering Jefferson, presidential scholar Mary E. Stuckey examines various sites where Jefferson appears—his home at Monticello, references by other presidents, monuments and memorials, popular culture, and children’s literature—as a way of interrogating national identity. She is less interested in the actual Jefferson than in how he is used across a variety of contexts to make claims about what it means to be American in the contemporary moment. Stuckey finds that Jefferson is a remarkably useful and multipurpose symbol. He reminds people of the importance of the nation’s founding. He provides an opportunity to reflect on inclusion and exclusion, on race and racism. He gives people a way to ground national identity in the past, while keeping it open to change. Jefferson was so complicated and multilayered that he has been purposed to suit a variety of agendas throughout history and across the entire political spectrum. In our fraught political moment, where debates over America’s founding have become cultural battlegrounds, Remembering Jefferson is a timely reminder that how we think about the past reflects who we are in the present.

A bold explanation of how reactionary political movements appeal to racism to reconcile American democracy with antidemocratic practices.“All power to the people!” So goes the familiar slogan of 1960s racial justice politics. The message is clear: the fight against racism is a fight for greater democracy—for the rule of “the people.” And yet, across American history, movements of racial backlash have also framed themselves as aiming to deliver greater democracy and redeem the rule of “the people.” Examples abound, ranging from the Southern Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction, to the “populist” backlash to the civil rights movement, and the white revanchism of our own time. How is it that we find claims to greater democracy on both sides of these struggles? What does this reveal about modern democracy, popular sovereignty, and the peculiar politics of race in America?The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People provides a novel account of the relationship between race and democratic politics in the United States. Across five chapters, Michael Gorup turns to the life and work of key figures in the history of American political thought—including Thomas Jefferson, Hosea Easton, David Walker, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Huey P. Newton—to argue that racial politics in the United States has always been a politics of peoplehood. Racism is what Gorup calls a politics of “popular enclosure”: it limits the scope of democratic power by circumscribing who is said to belong to "the people.” In so doing, it contains democratization from within. Neither strictly antidemocratic, nor a necessary entailment of modern democracy as such, Gorup argues that racism is best understood as a political construct developed to manage, if never fully reconcile, the contradictions that beset settler democracy.Racism is, in short, American democracy’s “counterrevolutionary shadow”—a technology for rendering despotic practices like enslavement, exploitation, and dispossession tolerable within a society where the people are said to rule.

A groundbreaking new examination of federal Indian boarding schools in the New Deal era and the threats it posed to Indigenous sovereignty, from the old danger of assimilation to the new challenges of biculturalism and pluralism.The destructive legacy of federal Indian boarding schools is undisputed. The education programs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged in a policy of cultural genocide designed to erase Indigenous cultures and identities, disrupt community and familial systems of cultural transmission, and impose a monocultural education throughout settler society. In the early 1930s, the Lakota author and educator Luther Standing Bear, himself a survivor of Carlisle Indian Boarding School, challenged the government to adopt a bicultural model of education. His call for reform coincided with a short-lived change in federal policy toward Native Americans that appeared to embrace this vision of this “double education,” a policy known as the “Indian New Deal” (1933–1945).The Indian New Deal was a controversial series of reforms implemented by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) under the commissionership of John Collier. A reaction against the previous policy of coercive assimilation to US social, cultural, and economic norms, the Indian New Deal marked a shift to a pro-reservation, ostensibly pro-communitarian approach to “Indian Affairs.” Collier was idealistic but also highly paternalistic, and has been criticized both for holding romanticized, inaccurate views of Indigenous cultures and for continuing assimilation efforts with some policies.Education for Preservation? examines the extent to which the New Deal reflected Standing Bear’s call for a bicultural approach to teaching, focusing on what was taught at the government day and boarding schools, and on the staff, pupil, and community experiences of the schools. Gabriella A. Treglia argues that the New Deal version of pluralism, rather than constituting a veiled extension of earlier assimilationist control—as some have argued—posed a new threat to Indigenous cultural sovereignty. Assimilationist in some areas and pluralist in others, and reflecting the underlying Eurocentric outlook of its creators, the “Indian New Deal” was fatally flawed.Treglia’s groundbreaking work demonstrates the dangers of top-down education approaches that can, whether intentionally or inadvertently, perpetuate colonial education paradigms and settler colonialist narratives as well as generate cultural conflict.

A story of pioneering students who brought together Americans of all faiths to embrace their differences, improve civil discourse, and work for the betterment of society. An inspiring model for activists, organizers, and educators seeking middle ground in a polarized world. Interfaith Inclusion tells the almost-forgotten story of the University Religious Conference (URC) and the students who sought to expand the circle of inclusion in the United States. The URC was a multifaith student organization that began in 1928, functioning primarily at UCLA. It started out by reaching across religious lines and expanded to reaching across ethnic and racial lines as well. Lois E. Nettleship begins with the origins of the group in the policies that the US War Department put in place in the First World War to build a sense of unity and inclusion among recruits of different religions. Following the war, O. D. Foster, a Congregational minister and YMCA worker in the US Army camps, applied these inclusive values to public higher education. He and others who shared his vision created the URC, which went on to create similar organizations at other universities across the nation. The URC carried out projects designed to bring students of different religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds together and to demonstrate to the public that all of them, however different they might appear, were Americans who shared many common values. In the 1950s these projects, religious and secular, became a model for other organizations. The URC pioneered student summer trips to India that exposed them to new religions and became a model for the Peace Corps. Soon thereafter the New York City Public School System used the URC model of acceptance, led by former URC participants, to train teachers, counselors, and pupils in how to demonstrate similar kinship among diverse groups in the city. Nettleship argues that building inclusion was the work not only of prominent politicians, religious leaders, and others in the spotlight, but also of students, amateurs, and volunteers with a practical bent and a sense of civic duty. Interfaith Inclusion resurrects one of the earliest efforts in the United States to develop a diverse movement for the purpose of improving civil discourse and embracing difference. Nettleship's story of how liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews sought to work together to better society is particularly relevant today in a time of religious strife, division, and political polarization. Contemporary inclusive activists and educators likely have never heard of the URC, but they are continuing its legacy.

A deeply researched political history that finds a new origin story to today’s deeply entrenched partisanship. Cash reminds us that the “forgotten war” in Korea was also the occasion for the “forgotten debate” between liberals and conservatives. When it comes to the origins of today’s sharp partisan divide, most have pointed to the usual suspects—Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in 1994, Watergate, and the Vietnam War. In The Forgotten Debate, Dane J. Cash suggests that we need to look further back in history. He argues that we can trace the roots of the current ideological divide in America to the period of the Korean War. The 1950s were hardly a time of “liberal consensus,” as Cash maintains that liberals themselves were quite divided about the proper course of action in Korea and in the Cold War more generally. Left liberals supported containment policy and its manifestation as a limited war in Korea, whereas hawkish liberals favored a much more aggressive strategy, particularly one vis-a-vis Communist China, which was largely indistinguishable from the position taken by avowed conservatives. The seeds of neoconservatism were thus sown much earlier than is typically appreciated. Furthermore, conservative voices were galvanized by what they perceived to be American timidity (and ultimately failure) in prosecuting the Korean War. Their frustrations about Korea and American weakness toward China led them to develop a unilateralist, “America First” foreign policy, which coalesced into a coherent movement several years prior to the founding of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in 1954—generally considered to be the genesis of modern conservatism. Drawing on a range of opinion journals, The Forgotten Debate shows that conflict, rather than consensus, marked elite attitudes to the Korean War. Cash thus reminds us that the divisions in society today have a much longer history than we typically realize. The Korean War is often ignored and overshadowed by later developments, like the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, but many of our current ideological positions were forged in that forgotten period.

From two expert presidential scholars comes a new answer to why the Trump presidency happened: decades of partisanship and policies have centered the president as the sole focus of American government to create a treacherous system whose danger may far outlive the politics of Donald J. Trump.The election of Donald J. Trump on November 6, 2016, changed how we understand the American presidency—but this transformation was not of his own making. His unprecedented rise to power led to an administration where Trump brazenly defied established constitutional norms and institutions. Yet, as Nicholas F. Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis reveal, Trump’s presidency was not merely a shocking departure from tradition, but a symptom of a constitutional disease that had has long afflicted the American polity. They call this condition presidentialism, a dangerous shift towards an executive-centered politics and government that places immense power in the hands of a single individual. While some scholars of American politics view the Trump presidency as a cult of personality, Jacobs and Milkis argue that his unsettling ascent to the White House was decades in the making, the result of numerous cultural, institutional, and constitutional changes. From aggressively redeploying the federal government’s administrative powers, to using the tools of the modern presidency to undertake a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, Trump’s presidency reveals the peril of a presidency-centered democracy that combines executive aggrandizement and polarizing struggles over the meaning of American identity. The disruptive features of the Trump presidency should not be viewed as an ephemeral phenomenon, nor does Donald Trump’s departure from the White House end the threat that presidentialism poses to American democracy. Subverting the Republic explains why the Trump presidency happened—and why it might happen again.