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? How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel traces answers to these...

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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 democratize party politics. One hundred years later, party organizations...

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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 Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), looks specifically at the...

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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, The New Economic Populism:...

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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 Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (Yale University...

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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, especially within polarized political periods. Reflecting the way this book examines both of these branches of government and the exercise of their...

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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. Into this confusion, Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser...

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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. Are we a sharply divided and polarized...

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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, 2018), he argues otherwise. Rosenfeld takes us back...

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