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This article pushes towards the integration of the history of Black Adult Education (AE) into the broader history of AE literature and it contributes a critique of the field's general omissions and misrepresentations of Black history. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to critique the white-dominated history of AE texts and (2) to provide a historiographical essay that highlights works focused on the Black history of AE. In doing so, we offer a historical counternarrative rooted in the secondary historical literature that addresses the history of Black education. Ultimately, this paper critiques historiographical essays focused on AE, situates our discussion within debates on approaches to race in AE, and revisits works of Black AE from within the field as well as key works by educational historians that address issues related to Black AE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year, approximately 1,500 youth migrate alone and clandestinely from China to the United States. If apprehended and placed in removal proceedings, these individuals and their legal advocates often prioritize specific narratives of family and age to qualify for legal relief. Such narratives are not new, of course. Shaped and arguably demanded by the law and broader ideologies of race, childhood, and citizenship, in many ways these accounts reflect both the intent and the constraints of an earlier subset of migrants, the Chinese “paper sons” who purchased family stories and identity papers to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, a meaningful divergence exists—one chiefly dependent on contemporary migrants’ status as “children.” For Chinese youth designated Unaccompanied Alien Children, establishing the vulnerability worthy of protection largely relies on a complex tale of cultural obligation and coercive, exploitative parents. As a result, instead of selecting one family over another as a century ago, today a specific and considerably more damaging image of the migrant’s family is put forth. Moving between the “paper sons” at the start of the 20th century and those daughters and sons at the end, this article critically explores the role that relatedness, either fictitious or filtered, plays in establishing legal relief in the United States. It likewise examines the unsettling of valued ties that occurs when actual, intimate relationships are silenced or diminished in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the “state” and the “people” are antonyms of American political thought is a widely held assumption. This essay argues that it is a mistake—Americans early in their thinking about politics distinguished the state from government and defined the state as the people themselves. Building on a deep reservoir of political thought pioneered by seventeenth-century theorists, Americans believed that to raise questions about the state was to inquire about the legitimacy of governmental action. The essay has three parts. It begins by explicating Quentin Skinner’s recent research on the concept of the state, supplemented by the work of other scholars, to apply that research to the American context. The essay then turns to a discussion of the concept of “the people” in the American context to orient the final section of the paper. Finally, the paper explicates James Wilson and St. George Tucker’s influential and rival populist theories of the American state. The overall aim of the essay is to stretch our political imagination and thus help us begin to reimagine the concept of the democratic state in more fruitful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr Dean Warren was born in 1924 and died prematurely from cancer in 1989. He was a man of uncommon intelligence, wit, collegiality, integrity, honesty, and a true leader in American surgery. In 1966, he and his colleagues (Drs Zeppa and Fomon) presented a new concept for surgical shunts to control variceal hemorrhage while maintaining portal perfusion or hepatopetal blood flow. He termed this new shunt the distal splenorenal shunt (DSRS), which was the first selective shunt invented. The DSRS selective shunt was a brilliant improvement over the total shunt concept proposed by Nicolai Eck and was practiced worldwide during the 1980s. In a space of 2 decades, Dr Warren's pioneering work would show that the selective DSRS was superior to total shunts for treatment of portal hypertension, but that endoscopic sclerotherapy was a better first-line treatment for variceal hemorrhage than his own creation. His absolute adherence to the principles he espoused in his presidential address to the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract in 1973 were employed in his research and treatment of patients. This paper details Dr Warren's extraordinary research accomplishments and sets a lesson for us that well-designed clinical trials including randomization are essential in the advancement of the care of surgical patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“This is a Black Paper,” declared BUILD’s statement criticizing the Buffalo Public School system for providing inferior education to black children in Buffalo, New York. Written in 1967 by the community organization, BUILD (which stood for Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was a call for change. Like other black communities in late 1960s America, black Buffalo was caught up in the fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. A “Rust Belt” city, Buffalo was hit hard by deindustrialization, which, coupled with unemployment, segregated housing and unequal education, adversely affected its black community. In 1967, a riot exploded in Buffalo’s predominantly black East Side. This article analyzes statements made by black Buffalonians and argues that Black Power thrived in Buffalo in the late 1960s, through community organizations which attempted to address urban issues that negatively affected African Americans in a postindustrial city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This monograph explores how corporate, political, and public health concerns shaped the Nixon administration’s public service advertising campaign against drug abuse. Between 1970 and 1973, the Nixon administration worked with the nonprofit Advertising Council to orchestrate a national, “one-voice” mass media campaign to change Americans’ attitudes toward the use of drugs. Papers preserved in the archives of the Advertising Council and by Nixon administration officials expose behind-the-scenes conflicts over the government’s drug-abuse message among the White House, federal agency staff, and private partners in the campaign, including drug companies and the advertising and broadcasting industries. Controversies included whether to include alcohol, marijuana, legally marketed prescription drugs such as amphetamines, and dangerous retail drugs such as headache medicines and caffeine, and whether the campaign should promote safe drug use or only discourage “abuse.” Archival records reveal the president’s power to set the government’s message, despite bureaucratic and expert resistance. However, government control over the propaganda campaign was limited by reliance on the Ad Council and the voluntary participation of networks and broadcasters to distribute public service announcements (PSAs). Through the Ad Council’s process of reviewing and obtaining broadcast network clearances for individual PSAs, advertisements that disparaged alcohol and other legally advertised products were weeded from the national campaign. Ultimately, the White House’s vision of a mass media offensive against drug abuse in all its forms was implemented primarily as a campaign against the use of illegal drugs, particularly by youth. Although successful with broadcasters, the campaign was terminated in 1973 amid concerns it was actually stimulating illegal drug use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the issue of political deception by exploring the role of self-deception in democratic politics. Within politics, deception of the people is actually very often produced by the self-deception of political leaders and officials, which is then supplemented by mechanisms of self-deception of the public itself. That self-deception, rather than simply straightforward deception, is a significant obstacle to truth and transparency in democratic politics is often hinted at by political scientists and historians but never properly pursued. And yet it should be, for which one of them is the case has important normative implications. This paper briefly presents the notion of self-deception and offers some reasons to take its presence in politics seriously. It also counters possible objections to doing so. Different kinds of political self-deception are presented and illustrated through historical examples so as to provide a clear typology and make the case for self-deception in politics stronger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a case study of Transition House in Cambridge, MA, a pioneering feminist agency founded in 1976. Transition House has survived and is, today, a thriving agency. Based on interviews with and papers collected from those involved in founding and running it, as well as a few guests/clients, I argue that Transition House's evolution was impelled by three major forces shared with other early domestic violence agencies: changes in the culture due in part to successes of the battered women's movement in the early years, changes in the larger political-economic context due to national policies and economic trends, which make getting out of poverty in 2017 more difficult than it was in the 1970s, and learning from survivors and from evolving research on domestic violence. In 1976, the immediate focus was on women "battered" by their partners, and the agency was strongly identified with the women's movement. In 2017, the focus is on women who are battered by economic and social conditions as much as by their partners, and the agency is seen as a partner with the city and with other nonprofit agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding public preferences for governing processes is an understudied area of research. In this paper, I evaluate a set of critical assumptions relating to process preferences that the literature has thus far not addressed. I specifically address the claims made by John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse in their seminal book, Stealth Democracy, which suggests that people prefer political decisions to be made via expert-based governing arrangements to promote a level of efficiency and effectiveness within the government that elected officials cannot provide. Using original questions from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I find concurring evidence that citizens are not strongly attached to standard participatory processes found in democracy. However, upon using more precise measurements and placing expert processes into contemporary context, preferences weaken and appear to be shallow in nature. In an era where process preferences are receiving more attention as trust in government wanes, it is important to understand the depth of these preferences and their potential to change politics. These results suggest it is imperative for future scholars to approach the study of process preferences with care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of economic downturns for states’ redistributive politics. We track state policies from 1980 through 2010 and illustrate how economic downturns led states to adopt budget-balancing policies by suppressing both the increased spending on programs benefiting the poor otherwise expected under Democratic Party control and the tax cuts for the wealthy otherwise expected under Republican Party control. We also undertake a natural experiment case study—comparing the forty Democratic and Republican governors in office right before (2007–2008) and after (2009–2010) the onset of the Great Recession. We find that Republican governors were less likely to propose spending and increased calls for spending cuts; yet, no similar shift in tax proposals was evident with continued calls for tax cuts to the wealthy. Democratic governors exhibited a similar pattern, but were less responsive and more likely to maintain their earlier policy proposals even after a significant downturn in the national economy. Together, these findings highlight how economic and political conditions interact with one another to shape “who gets what, when, and how from government,” as well as clarify that we must ask and answer these questions separately for taxing and spending to capture the complex politics of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Super-majorities have occurred frequently in Congress but have escaped scholarly attention. This paper employs new measures of positive agenda control and a unique data set of 3,407 nontrivial bills from 1981 to 2008 to answer two questions: how did legislative leaders construct veto-proof coalitions, and what did presidents do with them? Legislative leaders, we argue, deployed procedures to expand and sustain veto-proof coalitions, despite increasing polarization. The resulting history, which signaled members' commitment to a bill, provided information to the president that reduced uncertainty about possibilities for interbranch bargaining and the likely success of a veto. We find that positive agenda control increased the probability of vote tallies of two-thirds or more, especially after the 1994 election. In addition, we demonstrate that presidents concentrated veto activity on bills with outcomes of less than two-thirds, rejected some veto-proof bills for reputational gains, and deployed signing statements strategically. The analysis suggests that congressional leaders paradoxically gained capacity for nurturing large, bipartisan alliances as the institution became more polarized. Moreover, it demonstrates that strategic activity by legislative leaders is critical to explaining variation in presidential options for veto bargaining and signing statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her various roles as First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has long maintained that the subjugation of women poses a national security threat to the United States. Clinton's proposition has come to be termed the "Hillary Doctrine." Yet does this principle receive support from the empirical record? In this paper, we offer a test of the Hillary Doctrine by analyzing if more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that restrict women's rights than from countries that are not gender restrictive. Using a time series, cross-national analysis of 156 countries from the period 1981 to 2005, our negative binomial models offer strong support for the Hillary Doctrine and suggest that the promotion of women's rights may well enhance the national security of the United States with respect to terrorism. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last three election cycles suggest that we may be experiencing a surge in black political ambition. Barack Obama's historic election is sandwiched between the failed efforts of people such as Denise Majette, Harold Ford Jr., Artur Davis, and Kendrick Meek. Combined with Cory Booker's senatorial run, scholars have argued that there is a need for a reevaluation of black political ambition and a new classification for black politics itself. If we are experiencing a genuine emergence of a new ambitious breed of black politicians, then the paradox of ambition--that black electoral success is detrimental to black agenda setting--would suggest that we may also be experiencing a major abandonment of black politics. This paper begins to investigate this possibility in terms of individual bill sponsorship for black members of Congress from 1947 to 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether there has been a recent decline in helping behavior in the United States. In a lost letter experiment, 7,466 letters were 'lost' in 63 urban areas in the United States and Canada in 2001 and 2011. There has been a 10 percent decline in helping behavior in the United States, but not in Canada. Two arguments anticipate change in the level of help provided to strangers: the rise of new technologies, and neighborhood racial and ethnic diversity. Findings exclude increased privatism as a source for the decline in helping. In 2001 there was no variation in altruistic behavior based on neighborhood diversity. However, areas of the United States where the proportion of noncitizens increased since 2001 experienced reduced helping; the opposite was found in Canada. Possible explanations include changing attitudes toward noncitizens, and differences in public policy related to economic inequality, social inclusion, and the acceptance of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 1960s Chicago, radical black police officers opposed to police brutality created the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). This paper describes the political vision of the AAPL and that of the contemporaneous, path-breaking black television series Bird of the Iron Feather, which was inspired by the AAPL and created with AAPL members’ input. Both used their positions within white-dominated institutions to present black perspectives on white power. The AAPL and Bird also analyzed gangs, both black and white, as functional parts of a larger, white-dominated, urban “machine” political structure. Their analyses of structural racism, and their understanding of the diverse responses of black Americans living within such a system, uncovered the complexities of black urban life in the mid-twentieth century. Together, they stand as sophisticated expressions of a popular black power vision that eschewed romantic images of revolutionary resistance in favor of careful analysis of and resistance to personal and structural white violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does Congress repeal laws enacted by prior generations? Although the substantial body of work on policy creation provides tentative explanations, we believe repeals represent an alternative way of examining the effects of congressional organization on legislative behavior. In this paper, we develop hypotheses based on both the conditional nature of party power and the location of pivot points, and test these hypotheses with a new data set of repeals from 1877 to 2012. We find that the largest effects on Congress’s capacity to repeal legislation are variation in the majority’s positive agenda control and shifts in the gridlock interval. We also find that when the majority claims control of both chambers after a long stretch in the minority, there is an increased likelihood of repeal beyond what is predicted by conditional party government alone. Because the partisan factors in our model have the largest substantive effects, and because repeals do not occur automatically in productive Congresses, we characterize repeals as long-term contests between two great “teams” over the location of the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how financial deregulation and the partisan underpinnings of deregulation shaped the path of income inequality in the United States. Using time-series data from 1914 to 2010, we assess the effect of partisan politics on financial deregulation and, in turn, the effect of deregulation on income inequality. We find that financial deregulation has generally declined when Democrats attain more power in Washington and that deregulation has contributed to rising inequality. We also learn that the partisan effect on deregulation has diminished since the early 1980s, suggesting that one way partisan politics has contributed to the recent rise in inequality is related to convergence on matters of financial deregulation. We explore several potential explanations for this post–1980 partisan convergence, finding evidence supporting the idea that globalization, the increasing availability of credit, and shifts in campaign finance were contributing factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In recent years, charter schools have received a great deal of media attention, appearing in documentary films, newspaper articles, magazine profiles, television news programs, and even sitcoms and feature films. The media is not alone in its interest in charter schools; researchers in the public and for-profit arenas have also focused their attention on charter schools in recent years. Questions: This paper employs qualitative content analysis to answer the following questions: What information have journalists contributed to the charter school debate in the United States? And how might this information have shaped or influenced the debate? Research Design: To answer these questions, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of print media coverage of the early years of the charter school debate. We analyzed 145 articles about public charter schools and public alternative schools that appeared in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times between 1994 and 2006. We developed two types of coding categories: descriptive and interpretive. The descriptive coding categories captured the following information about each article in our dataset: the publisher, the type of school described and the student population. The interpretive coding categories captured reporters' descriptions of the students, teachers, resources, and institutional cultures of charter and alternative schools. Findings: Our analysis uncovered several interesting themes. First, we found that print media depictions of charter and alternative school teachers tended to be more positive than media depictions of teachers in traditional public schools. This was especially true of print media coverage of charter schools that serve low-income students and/or students of color. Our analysis also cast doubt on a core assumption of the charter school debate; that charter schools' approach to educating their students differs significantly from that of traditional public schools and public alternative schools. In their articles about charter schools that serve middle-income students, reporters described institutional cultures and pedagogical strategies identical to those found in alternative schools with similar student populations. When reporting on alternative schools that serve low-income students and/or students of color, reporters described pedagogical strategies that mirrored those found in charter schools with similar student populations. Recommendations: Further research is needed to determine whether charter and alternative schools are educating their low- and middle-income students differently. If future research confirms this, we warn that charter and alternative schools could be preparing their low-income students and/or students of color inadequately for higher education and work in professional environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A main goal of John T. Scopes’ supporters during his 1925 trial for teaching evolution in Tennessee was to educate the public on evolution science through newspapers. This paper argues that, though journalists, lawyers, and scholars expected newspaper coverage to make Americans smarter about evolution, little effort was devoted to that aim. Rather, a preference for conflict and an emerging professional objectivity resulted in more confusion than clarity, just as news coverage of evolution and other controversial science issues does today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to link the history of the Multicentre Australian Study of Epidural Anaesthesia in high risk surgery, the MASTER Trial, the first National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded multicentre randomised clinical trial in Australia led by anaesthetist researchers, and the decision of The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) to establish a clinical trials network, in 2003, to the success of contemporary researchers in Australia and New Zealand in anaesthesia and perioperative medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]