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America’s political history is a fascinating paradox. The United States was born with the admonition that government posed a threat to liberty. This apprehension became the foundation of the nation’s civic ideology and was embedded in its constitutional structure. Yet the history of public life in the United States records the emergence of an enormously powerful national state during the nineteenth century. By 1920, the United States was arguably the most powerful country in the world. In The Paradox of Power Ballard C. Campbell traces this evolution and offers an explanation for how it occurred. Campbell argues that the state in America is rooted in the country’s colonial experience and analyzes the evidence for this by reviewing governance at all levels of the American polity—local, state, and national—between 1754 and 1920. Campbell poses five critical causal references: war, geography, economic development, culture and identity (including citizenship and nationalism), and political capacity. This last factor embraces law and constitutionalism, administration, and political parties. The Paradox of Power makes a major contribution to our understanding of American statebuilding by emphasizing the fundamental role of local and state governance to successfully integrate urban, state, and national governments to create a composite and comprehensive portrait of how governance evolved in America.

How and why has government gotten bigger? “Should be a compulsory assignment for any seminar on modern political culture.” —The Journal of American History American government has evolved over the generations since the mid-nineteenth century. The changing character of these institutions is a critical part of the history of the United States. This engaging survey focuses on the evolution of public policy and its relationship to the constitutional and political structure of government at the federal, state, and local levels. A new chapter in this revised and updated edition also examines the debate about “big government” in recent decades. “A marvelous multidisciplinary synthesis that builds on the findings of historians of national, state, and local government, along with those of economists and political scientists, to provide a coherent account of the rise of modern American governing structures.” —Journal of Interdisciplinary History