Governors, grants, and elections

fiscal federalism in the American States

Each year, states receive hundreds of billions of dollars in grants-in-aid from the federal government. Gubernatorial success is often contingent upon the pursuit and allocation of these grants. In Governors, Grants, and Elections, Sean Nicholson-Crotty reveals the truth about how US governors strategically utilize these ...

Plutocracy in America

how increasing inequality destroys the middle class and exploits the poor

The growing gap between the most affluent Americans and the rest of society is changing the country into one defined-more than almost any other developed nation-by exceptional inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. This book reveals that an infrastructure of inequality, both open and hidden ...

Forging communities

how tecnology changes politics

Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a ...

Metaphors of mind

an Eighteenth-Century dictionary

An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire's classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek's massive online archive, this volume ...

Otherworldly Politics

The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica

A compelling look at the analogous political worlds of science fiction, fantasy, and international relations. In Otherworldly Politics, Stephen Benedict Dyson examines the fictional but deeply political realities of three television shows: Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica. Dyson explains how these shows ...

Fuels paradise

seeking energy security in Europe, Japan, and the United States

In recent years, the efforts of nations to promote energy security have been hotly debated. Fuels Paradise examines how five major developed democracies - Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States - have sought to enhance their energy security since the oil shocks of the 1970s ...

Rome's christian empress

Galla Placidia rules at the twilight of the empire

In Rome's Christian Empress, Joyce E. Salisbury brings the captivating story of Rome's Christian empress to life. The daughter of Roman emperor Theodosius I, Galla Placidia lived at the center of imperial Roman power during the first half of the fifth century. Taken ...

The transformation of governance

public administration for the twenty-first century

The traditional theory of public administration is based on entrenched notions of hierarchy and authority. However, as the structure of public work has grown less hierarchical, managers have adopted a wide variety of non-authoritarian strategies. This growing gap between theoretical ideas and actual practice poses ...

Constitutional calculus

the math of justice and the myth of common sense

How should we count the population of the United States? What would happen if we replaced the electoral college with a direct popular vote? What are the consequences of allowing unlimited partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts? Can six-person juries yield verdicts consistent with the needs ...

Ex Oriente Lex

near eastern influences on Ancient Greek and Roman Law

Throughout the twelve essays that appear in Ex Oriente Lex, Raymond Westbrook convincingly argues that the influence of Mesopotamian legal traditions and thought did not stop at the shores of the Mediterranean, but rather had a profound impact on the early laws and legal developments ...

Crisis in an Atlantic Empire

Spain and New Spain, 1808-1810

With a compelling narrative that weaves together story and thesis and brings to life immense archival research and empirical data, Crisis in an Atlantic Empire is a finely grained historical tour of the period covering 1808 to 1810, which is often called "the age of ...

Rethinking the New medievalism

In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term "new medievalism" to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was ...

Medicine and religion

a historical introduction

Medicine and Religion is the first book to comprehensively examine the relationship between medicine and religion in the Western tradition from ancient times to the modern era. Beginning with the earliest attempts to heal the body and account for the meaning of illness in the ...

Imagined civilizations

China, the West, and their first encounter

ccounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), who ...

The empire of the self

self-command and political speech in Seneca and Petronius

In "The Empire of the Self", Christopher Star studies the question of how political reality affects the concepts of body, soul, and self. Star argues that during the early Roman Empire the establishment of autocracy and the development of a universal ideal of individual autonomy ...

Problems of democratic transition and consolidation

Southern Europe, South America, and Post-communist Europe

Since their classic volume The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes was published in 1978, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan have increasingly focused on the questions of how, in the modern world, nondemocratic regimes can be eroded and democratic regimes crafted. In Problems of Democratic Transition ...

Hezbollah and Hamas

a comparative study

Hezbollah and Hamas are major players in Middle Eastern politics and have a growing involvement in global events. Despite their strikingly different beginnings, they share a common denominator - an adversary in Israel. "Hezbollah and Hamas" draws from primary interviews and documents coupled with a thorough ...

The Inquisition in New Spain. 1536-1820

a documentary history

The Inquisition! Just the word itself evokes, to the modern reader, endless images of torment, violence, corruption, and intolerance committed in the name of Catholic orthodoxy and societal conformity. But what do most people actually know about the Inquisition, its ministers, its procedures? This systematic ...

The Tea Party

a brief history

The Tea Party burst on the national political scene in 2009-2010, powered by right-wing grassroots passion and Astroturf big money. Its effect on electoral politics and the political process is undeniable, but the message, aims, and staying power of the loosely organized groups seem less ...

Leaving without losing

the war on terror after Iraq and Afghanistan

As the United States withdraws its combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians, foreign policy specialists, and the public are worrying about the consequences of leaving these two countries. Neither nation can be considered stable, and progress toward democracy in them - a principal aim of ...

The new geopolitics of transatlantic relations

coordinated responses to common dangers

The United States and Europe encounter many of the same foreign policy challenges, challenges that diversely impact the two regions and produce different-but often complementary-responses. In regard to Russia's renewed assertiveness, for example, the issue for the United States is one of global competition ...

The return of Hans Staden

a go-between in the Atlantic World

Hans Staden's sixteenth-century account of shipwreck and captivity by the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil was an early modern bestseller. This retelling of the German sailor's eyewitness account known as The True History shows both why it was so popular at the time and ...