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Confronted by a number of home-grown Islamic terrorist attacks, many Americans incorrectly assume that Muslim religiosity correlates with anti-American values and that the American mosque is the center of radical socialization efforts. This paper examines the nature of the relationship between mosque involvement and political engagement. It finds that mosque attendance is positively associated with political engagement only when the attendance engages congregants in ways beyond religious ritual. Attending mosque to pray does not significantly impact political identities or engagement like following politics, registering to vote, voting, or party membership, while participation in other social or religious activities at a mosque is associated with an increased probability of engagement. These results suggest that not all mosque involvement is equally beneficial for promoting political engagement and that religious participation must proactively engage with the social lives of the congregants to have a substantive political effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For generations, Mexican and American Indian populations reciprocally and ritualistically took captives from one another’s societies in what are today the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These captive-taking wars breached the expansion of the American state into the west (1850s) and tested the ability of the American state to enforce law and policy in a frontier environment. This intriguing history, however, has yet to be addressed in legal and social science research on race. Our goal in this article is two-fold: (1) to determine whether the captive status of individuals taken in these endemic borderland wars is visible within surviving U.S. administrative materials (e.g., census); and (2) to determine whether close analysis of census materials can be used to ascertain whether federal liberators were able to abolish the captive-taking trade relative to their official mandate. The authors analyze a core sample of 1860s-era census materials from the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico—which has a documented history of Indian captivity and enslavement—as well as church records to determine whether these materials indicate the continuance of captivity even after federal liberators had the opportunity to abolish the trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics appeared in 1946, one year after he received tenure at the University of Chicago. Thus, the monograph demarcates the beginning of Morgenthau's career in the United States, to which he had emigrated nine years earlier. Three main aspects seem important for understanding this work. The first is Morgenthau's bewilderment about American political culture and, as he perceived it, its cheerful optimism about the betterment of politics, society, and humanity in general. The second aspect is the nature of the argument: Scientific Man is a dogmatic tract, an attempt to hammer home certain philosophical positions—positions that were largely unpopular in the U.S. social sciences in the 1940s (and later)—rather than a reflective scholarly elaboration of certain philosophical commitments. The third is Morgenthau's place between two academic cultures: Morgenthau's language in his American writings partly stems from, but also tries to leave behind, his European academic socialization. The monograph thus reflects the author's peculiar situation, as he inhabits two sometimes crucially different semantic and cultural contexts, but fails to bridge or broker them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although a great deal has been written about the perestroika movement in turn-of-the century political science its actual place in the history of the discipline has been poorly understood by its founders, defenders, and critics. Perestroika can be best understood as a manifestation of the persistent crises of identity that have characterized the discipline of political science, and it cannot be explained apart from the manner in which it was reflection of issues that attended both the origins of the field and periods such as the 1920s and aftermath of the behavioral era. What has been particularly important in each case has been the impact on both American politics and political science of the ethic of pluralism, which has created significant difficulties for both the practical and epistemic relationship between the discipline and its subject matter. — John Gunnell.This essay is followed by responses from James Farr, Robert O. Keohane, David D. Laitin, Kristen Renwick Monroe, Anne Norton, and Sanford F. Schram. John Gunnell then offers a response to commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author comments on the views of Michael Desch, professor of political science at University of Notre Dame, on researching in political science for academic reasons. Topics discussed include engagement of academics for solving problems related to political; science, collaboration between security policymakers of the U.S. and academics and relevance of social science for the U.S. national security policy.