The years surrounding 1970 marked the coming of age of the modern environmental movement. As that movement enters its fourth decade, perhaps the most striking change is the virtual abandonment by national environ-mental groups of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal.

Twenty years ago, just as the study of policy was emerging out of the morass of political history, historians of women rediscovered the state. What I will name the policy turn challenged a kind of intellectual separate sphere in which women's history addressed home, family, and intimate life and left to other historians everything else. The policy turn shifted attention from Carroll Smith Rosenberg's “Female World of Love and Ritual” without losing the self-activity and focus on female difference that investigations of women on their own terms had supplied. It answered the “Politics and Culture” debate of 1980, which revolved around the efficacy of domesticity as an arena for power with a resounding move toward the public, political realm—namely, to social politics. The Reaganite assault on the New Deal order and accompanying New Right attack on women's rights intensified investigation into the origins and growth of a welfare state whose strength seemed precarious and whose history was up for grabs—a welfare state that blurred the separation of private and public and constructed, even as it reinforced, unequal social locations.

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizen's wage—has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on women's bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizen's wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their children is analytically strategic for assessing the relationship between policy and gender inequality. The situation of mother-only families reveals the inherent social and economic vulnerability of all women that exists due to their childrearing and domestic responsibilities and their low earnings, which is usually masked when women are in households with wage-earning men.

In 1971, a coalition of legislators and advocates put together a bill to establish the foundations of a public, universally available day-care system in the United States. Backed by Democrats, Republicans, and a highly mobilized set of interest organizations, the bill's middle-class appeal made it seem like a political sure bet in the months preceding the 1972 election season. Over the course of 1971, however, support for the bill eroded, and by December most House Republicans had jumped ship. On December 9, President Nixon vetoed the legislation, criticizing its “fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkability [sic], and family-weakening implications.” Such direct federal provision of day-care services, he claimed, “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing over the family-centered approach.” The day after the veto, however, Nixon signed the 1971 Revenue Act, which included tax breaks for families who use private day-care services. In late 1972, Congress passed legislation to reauthorize Head Start, a program providing early childhood education and health services for disadvantaged, preschool-aged children. Nixon's own welfare-reform proposal included day care for poor women. Clearly, only the middle class was at risk from “communal approaches” in federally supported child care; poor families, and particularly women on welfare, could use public day care while the middle class would be subsidized to solve their child-care problems through the private sector.

Writing in 1978 about the 1960s, William McLoughlin saw America in the midst of the fourth Great Awakening in our history. Awakenings are “periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture.” To put it another way, awakenings are revelatory times when large numbers of people anguish over and eventually search out new self-understandings as individuals and as a society. They are like a convulsive quickening in the cultural womb.

It is now more than forty years since Ronald Coase's seminal article on the Federal Communications Commission first appeared in the pages of the Journal of Law and Economics. The article remains important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it offered his first articulation of the Coase Theorem. Of even greater importance for our purposes, the article literally redefined the terms of debate over American broadcast regulation, in both historical and contemporary treatments of the subject.

Since its inaugural use in Oregon in 1904, direct democracy—as practiced in twenty-seven American states—has garnered its share of defenders and critics. While the debate over the merits and drawbacks of citizen lawmaking remains as contentious as ever, critics and proponents alike usually concur that two extra-legislative tools—the “citizen” initiative and the “popular” referendum—were most effectively used to counteract the legislative might of special interests during the Progressive Era. Citing the clout of corporate monopolies that dominated numerous state legislatures at the turn of the century, contemporary observers of direct democracy approvingly note how citizen groups during the Progressive Era used the mechanisms to take on an array of vested interests. As evidence, they submit the popular adoption of numerous progressive reforms during the 1910s, such as the direct primary, women's suffrage, prohibition, the abolition of the poll tax, home rule for cities and towns, eighthour workdays for women and miners, and the regulation of public utility and railroad monopolies. Circumventing their partisan state legislatures, defenders of the plebiscitary mechanisms evoke how citizens successfully employed the initiative and popular referendum, as one Progressive Era supporter of the “pure” democratic process championed, to rouse “a great forward movement toward stability, justice, and public spirit in American political institutions.”

The most controversial component of the War on Poverty in the 1960s was its Community Action Program (CAP). Controversy resulted largely from the CAP because it employed activist professionals, mandated massscale resident participation, and encouraged federal-agency-sponsored institutional conflict as a mechanism for social reform. These strategies were tested earlier in the Mobilization for Youth program founded in the late 1950s, and in the early 1960s in the Ford Foundation Gray Areas programs and the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency projects. Indeed, the basic models of social expertise and community action employed in those programs were used in Chicago two decades before.

Sheldon Reed coined the expression “genetic counseling” in 1947, the same year he succeeded Clarence P. Oliver as Director of the University of Minnesota's Dight Institute for Human Genetics. In reflections written more than a quarter-century later, Reed noted that the term had occurred to him “as a kind of genetic social work without eugenic connotations.” Sharply distinguishing the aims of eugenics and counseling, he explained that whereas the former promotes the interests of the larger society, the latter serves the interests of individual families—as families perceive them. Reed never denied that he or other postwar medical geneticists were concerned with population improvement. But he maintained that counseling served a different purpose. Commenting on the history of the Dight Institute, Reed asserted: “There were certainly no attempts to benefit society as a whole in dealing with these families. This was not thought of as a program of eugenics.”

Political scientists have long debated the nature of the American political system, particularly the degree to which the federal government is amenable to major policy initiation and reform. There are two basic schools of thought on this question. One school—which I will call the stasis school—argues that the system is highly resistant to major change. The other school of policymaking—which I will call the dynamic school—emphasizes the openness and responsiveness of America's political system and the relative ease of generating reform at the national level. While the stasis and dynamic schools are helpful in explaining systemic tendencies and the influence of particular forces on the policy process, they are less useful in illuminating the evolution of governmental policymaking in a single issue area over time.

This article examines how Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s Armed Career Criminal Act attempted to respond to the 1980s crisis of state prison overcrowding while also maintaining a political commitment to get tough on crime. Although commonly thought of as a straightforward punitive sentencing bill, this article shows that the Armed Career Criminal Act was also a desperate attempt to navigate a national crisis of state prison overcrowding in the 1980s that threatened to undercut racialized “get tough” politics and the burgeoning carceral state. In doing so, this article reshapes scholarship on the history of the United States carceral state by demonstrating that the United States’ decentralized political structure and federal government hostility toward funding state correctional expansion created significant gaps between a national discourse of law and order and actual anticrime policy making in the Reagan era, suggesting a far more contested development of the United States prison nation.

After more than two decades of “bringing the state back in,” law persists as a neglected stepchild in the history of American state-building. Legal historians have identified a profound transformation in jurisprudence that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they have said relatively little about how radically new conceptions of law influenced public policy during the 1930s.1 Conversely, historians of public policy have written extensively about American political development, the nature of bureaucratic autonomy, and the uses of economic knowledge in upholding the administrative state, but the role of law and jurisprudence in recasting state power has remained elusive.2 Moreover, as William J. Novak has observed, both groups of scholars remain hamstrung by the inherited wisdom of Progressive historiography, and they continue to subscribe to a familiar litany of cases from Lochner to Schechter that undergirds a grand narrative about law's sole function as an impediment to state-building. As a corrective, Novak has urged historians to consider more carefully the “massive amount of everyday lawmaking” and “structural sociolegal changes” rendered invisible by the court battles of the first third of the twentieth century. Although largely unacknowledged in public discussion and debate, such developments ultimately provided critical support for the consolidation and legitimation of the modern American state.3

The welfare state—the complex of policies that, in one form or another, all rich democracies have adopted to ameliorate destitution and provide valued social goods and services—is an increasingly central subject in the study of American history and politics. The past decade has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of books on the topic, including, from historians, Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity and Michael Katz's The Price of Citizenship, and, from political scientists, Robert Lieberman's Shifting the Color Line and Peter Swenson's Capitalists Against Markets. Journals ranging from the American Historical Review to Political Science Quarterly (and, with less regularity, even the American Political Science Review) now routinely feature analyses of U.S. social policy. And going back just a few years more, the early 1990s saw the publication of several influential works on the subject, notably Paul Pierson's Dismantling the Welfare State? and Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, each of which won major book prizes in political science. If any moment deserves to be seen as a heady time for writing on the American welfare state, this is it.

If we have found we cannot be the world's policeman, can we hope to become the world's narc?

In the January 1968 issue of the Washingtonian magazine, the son of the great American novelist John Steinbeck made his professional journalistic debut with the publication of a controversial article, “The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam.” John Steinbeck IV, who served as a roving correspondent for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, wrote that marijuana of a potent quality was grown naturally in Vietnam, sold by farmers at a fraction of the cost than in the United States, and could be obtained “more easily than a package of Lucky Strikes cigarettes.” He estimated that up to 75 percent of soldiers in Vietnam got high regularly. “The average soldier sees that for all intents and purposes, the entire country is stoned,” Steinbeck observed. “To enforce a prohibition against smoking the plant [in Vietnam] would be like trying to prohibit the inhalation of smog in Los Angeles.”2