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A Thousand Shadows: American Government and the Civic State - Elisabeth S Clemens. Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 425 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 9780226670836.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2021

R.M. Bates*
Affiliation:
Queens’ College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

Abstract

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Type
Book Reviews
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

1 Schlesinger, Arthur M., “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” The American Historical Review 50 (Oct. 1944): 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The paradigmatic articulation of this view is Novak, William J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” The American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Balogh, Brian, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

3 Gerstle, Gary, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. 118–23Google Scholar; White, Richard, The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

4 Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940” in Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin, eds., The Art of the State: Rethinking Political Institutions (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 187–215.