In The Rise of the States, noted urban historian Jon C. Teaford explores the development of state government in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the so-called renaissance of states at the end of the twentieth. Arguing that state governments were not lethargic backwaters that suddenly stirred to life in the 1980s, Teaford shows instead how state governments were continually adapting and expanding throughout the past century. While previous historical scholarship focused on the states, if at all, as retrograde relics of simpler times, Teaford describes how states actively assumed new responsibilities, developed new sources of revenue, and created new institutions. Teaford examines the evolution of the structure, function, and finances of state government during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the post–World War II years, and the post–reapportionment era beginning in the late 1960s. State governments, he explains, played an active role not only in the creation, governance, and management of the political units that made up the state but also in dealing with the growth of business, industries, and education. Not all states chose the same solutions to common problems. For Teaford, the diversity of responses points to the growing vitality and maturity of state governments as the twentieth century unfolded.

The question of how the American state defines its powernot what it is but what it "does"has become central to a range of historical discourses, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system, to the functions of agencies and America s place in the world. Here, James Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen Sawyer assemble some definitional work in this area, showing that the state is an integral actor in physical, spatial, and economic exercises of power. They further imply that traditional conceptions of the state cannot grasp the subtleties of power and its articulation. Contributors include C.J. Alvarez, Elisabeth Clemens, Richard John, Robert Lieberman, Omar McRoberts, Gautham Rao, Gabriel Rosenberg, Jason Scott Smith, Tracy Steffes, and the editors."

A noted historian explores the development of U.S. State governments from the end of the 19th century to the so-called renaissance of States in the 20th. It is a common misperception that America’s state governments were lethargic backwaters before suddenly stirring to life in the 1980s. In The Rise of the States, Jon C. Teaford presents a very different picture. Teaford shows how state governments were continually adapting and expanding throughout the past century, assuming new responsibilities, developing new sources of revenue, and creating new institutions. The Rise of the States examines the evolution of the structure, function, and finances of state government during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the post-World War II years, and into the 1960s. State governments not only played an active role in the creation, governance, and management of the political units that made up the state, but also in dealing with the growth of business, industries, and education. Different states chose different solutions to common problems, and this diversity of responses points to the growing vitality and maturity of state governments as the twentieth century unfolded.

"Democrats enacted the major changes, but only with enormous reluctance and only under enormous pressure. And Republicans, with one exception, were not eager to repeal the actions of Democrats when Republicans regained power. Democrats did not play the simple role of being liberal, and Republicans did not play the simple role of being conservative. The behavior and motives of parties present an important puzzle, which this book also seeks to address.".

American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political history is today.

The history of public policy in postwar America tends to fixate on developments at the national level, overlooking the crucial work done by individual states in the 1960s and ’70s. In this book, Nicholas Dagen Bloom demonstrates the significant and enduring impact of activist states in five areas: urban planning and redevelopment, mass transit and highways, higher education, subsidized housing, and the environment. Bloom centers his story on the example set by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose aggressive initiatives on the pressing issues in that period inspired others and led to the establishment of long-lived state polices in an age of decreasing federal power. Metropolitan areas, for both better and worse, changed and operated differently because of sustained state action—How States Shaped Postwar America uncovers the scope of this largely untold story.

"Prof. Ford's book is a suggestive attempt to construct, from a study of such facts or reasonable implications of biology, anthropology, and philology as relate to the origin of man, a scientific theory of the origin and nature of the state. Briefly stated, the theory affirms that the state is as properly to be regarded an organism as is any form of animal life; that it has its origin in the formation of communities among animals earlier than man. . . . The Individual, accordingly, is a derivative rather than an original; the state Is absolute in its relation to the individual units; and different types of government develop according to the conditions and needs of different environments. . . . 'The test of value in any Institution to primarily not the advantage of the Individual but the advantage of society' (p. 177)." —The Nation "A scholarly contribution, of interest to advanced students in political science and students of government and law generally. List of authorities (4p.)." —The New Republic "As a whole, the book may be said to be an excellent summary of the argument for a social origin of society, as against the obsolete Individualism of the social contract theory, but it fails to prove that the state had a pre-human origin or to give a satisfactory notion of what the author means by state, government, and sovereignty." —Boston Transcript