This book analyzes the political culture of the American Sunbelt since the end of World War II. It highlights and explains the Sunbelt's emergence during the second half of the twentieth century as the undisputed geographic epicenter for conservative Republican power in the United States. However, the book also investigates the ongoing nature of political contestation within the postwar Sunbelt, often highlighting the underappreciated persistence of liberal and progressive influences across the region. Sean P. Cunningham argues that the conservative Republican ascendancy that so many have identified as almost synonymous with the rise of the postwar American Sunbelt was hardly an easy, unobstructed victory march. Rather, it was consistently challenged and never foreordained. The history of American politics in the postwar Sunbelt resembles a rollercoaster of partisan and ideological adaptation and transformation.

Coined by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to describe the new alloy of conservatism that united voters across the southern rim of the country, the term "Sunbelt" has since gained currency in the American lexicon. By the early 1970s, the region had come to embody economic growth and an ambitious political culture. With sprawling suburban landscapes, cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles seemed destined to sap influence from the Northeast. Corporate entrepreneurialism and a conservative ethos helped forge the Sunbelt's industrial-labor relations, military spending, education systems, and neighborhood development. Unprecedented migration to the region ensured that these developments worked in concert with sojourners' personal quests for work, family, community, and leisure. In the resplendent Sunbelt the nation seemed to glimpse the American Dream remade. The essays in Sunbelt Rising deploy new analytic tools to explain this region's dramatic rise. Contributors to the volume study the Sunbelt as both a physical entity and a cultural invention. They examine the raised highway, the sprawling prison complex, and the fast-food restaurant as distinctive material contours of a region. In this same vein they delineate distinctive Sunbelt models of corporate and government organization, which came to shape so many aspects of the nation's political and economic future. Contributors also examine literature, religion, and civic engagement to illustrate how a particular Sunbelt cultural sensibility arose that ordered people's lives in a period of tumultuous change. By exploring the interplay between the Sunbelt as a structurally defined space and a culturally imagined place, Sunbelt Rising addresses longstanding debates about region as a category of analysis.

Between 1940 and 1980, the Sunbelt region of the United States grew in population by 112 percent, while the older, graying Northeast and Midwest together grew by only 42 percent. Phoenix expanded by an astonishing 1,138 percent. San Diego, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Tampa, Miami, and Atlanta quadrupled in size. Even a Sunbelt laggard such as New Orleans more than doubled its population. Sunbelt Cities brings together a collection of outstanding original essays on the growth and late-twentieth-century political development of the major metropolitan areas below the thirty-seventh parallel. The cities surveyed are Albuquerque, Atlanta, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tampa. Each author examines the economic and social causes of postwar population growth in the city under consideration and the resulting changes in its political climate. Major causes of growth such as changing economic conditions, industrial recruitment, lifestyle preferences, and climate are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the role of the federal government, especially the Pentagon, in encouraging development in the Sunbelt. Describing characteristic political developments of many of these cities, the authors note shifting political alliances, the ouster of machines and business elites from political power, and the rise of minority and neighborhood groups in local politics. Sunbelt Cities is the first full-scale scholarly examination of the region popularly conceived as the Sunbelt. As one of the first works to thoroughly examine a wide range of cities within the region, it has served as a standard reference on the area for some time.

Historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer examines how Barry Goldwater and elite Phoenix businessmen used policy and federal funds to fashion a postwar "business climate," setting off an interstate competition for investment that transformed American politics.

From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt investigates the effects of federal policy on the American South from 1938 until 1980 and charts the close relationship between federal efforts to reform the South and the evolution of activist government in the modern United States. Decrying the South's economic backwardness and political conservatism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of programs to reorder the Southern economy in the 1930s. After 1950, however, the social welfare state had been replaced by the national security state as the South's principal benefactor. Bruce J. Schulman contrasts the diminished role of national welfare initiatives in the postwar South with the expansion of military and defense-related programs. He analyzes the contributions of these growth-oriented programs to the South's remarkable economic expansion, to the development of American liberalism, and to the excruciating limits of Sunbelt prosperity, ultimately relating these developments to southern politics and race relations. By linking the history of the South with the history of national public policy, Schulman unites two issues that dominate the domestic history of postwar America--the emergence of the Sunbelt and the expansion of federal power over the nation's economic and social life. A forcefully argued work, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, originally published in 1991(Oxford University Press), will be an important guide to students and scholars of federal policy and modern Southern history.

Here, leading scholars-including Hodgson himself-confront the longstanding theory that a liberal consensus shaped the United States after World War II. The essays draw on fresh research to examine how the consensus related to key policy areas, how it was viewed by different factions and groups, what its limitations were, and why it fell apart in the late 1960s.

This volume showcases the most exciting new voices in the fields of business and political history. While the media frequently warns of the newfound power of business in the world of politics, the authors in this book demonstrate that business has mobilized to shape public policy and government institutions, as well as electoral outcomes, for decades. Rather than assuming that business influence is inevitable, the chapters explore the complex evolution of this relationship in a wide range of different arenas--from attempts to create a corporate-friendly tax policy and regulations that would work in the interests of particular industries, to local boosterism as a weapon against New Deal liberalism, to the nexus between evangelical Christianity and the oil industry, to the frustrations that business people felt in struggles with public interest groups. The history that emerges show business actors organizing themselves to affect government in myriad ways, sometimes successfully but other times with outcomes far different than they hoped for. The result in an image of American politics that is more complex and contested than it is often thought to be. The essays represent a new trend in scholarship on political economy, one that seeks to break down the barriers that once separated old subfields to offer a vision of the economy as shaped by politics and political life influenced by economic relationships.