This work was produced in furtherance of the Center's statutory mandate to conduct, coordinate, and encourage programs relating to the history of the judicial branch ...

Ronald Reagan's first great victory in the 1966 California governor's race is one of the pivotal stories of American political history, a victory that seemed to come from nowhere and has long since confounded his critics. Just four years earlier Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown was celebrated as the "Giant Killer" for his 1962 victory over Richard Nixon, and his liberal agenda reigned supreme. Yet in 1966 political neophyte Reagan trounced Brown by almost one million votes, marking not only the coming-of-age of Reagan's new conservatism but also the first serious blow to modern liberalism. Drawing on scores of oral histories, thousands of archival documents, and personal interviews with participants, Dallek offers a gripping new portrait of the 1960s that is far more complicated than our collective memory of that decade.

In chronicling the life and career of Albert Gore, Sr., historian Anthony J. Badger seeks not just to explore the successes and failures of an important political figure who spent more than three decades in the national eye—and whose son would become Vice President of the United States—but also to explain the dramatic changes in the South that led to national political realignment. Born on a small farm in the hills of Tennessee, Gore served in Congress from 1938 to 1970, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate. During that time, the United States became a global superpower and the South a two party desegregated region. Gore, whom Badger describes as a policy-oriented liberal, saw the federal government as the answer to the South's problems. He held a resilient faith, according to Badger, in the federal government to regulate wages and prices in World War II, to further social welfare through the New Deal and the Great Society, and to promote economic growth and transform the infrastructure of the South. Gore worked to make Tennessee the "atomic capital" of the nation and to protect the Tennessee Valley Authority, while at the same time cosponsoring legislation to create the national highway system. He was more cautious in his approach to civil rights; though bolder than his moderate Southern peers, he struggled to adjust to the shifting political ground of the 1960s. His career was defined by his relationship with Lyndon Johnson, whose Vietnam policies Gore bitterly opposed. The injection of Christian perspectives into the state's politics ultimately distanced Gore's worldview from that of his constituents. Altogether, Gore's political rise and fall, Badger argues, illuminates the significance of race, religion, and class in the creation of the modern South.