As the United States industrialized, its state constitutions began to include protections for laborers. In this article, I describe the origins of these constitutional provisions and ask why labor organizations and other reformers pursued their inclusion in state constitutions. I argue that they saw state constitutions as a vehicle to prompt reluctant legislatures to pass protective statutes, to entrench existing protections against future legislatures, to safeguard labor legislation from constitutional challenges in state courts, and to facilitate further union organizing. Labor activism in this arena is particularly interesting in light of the literature on constitutional change, which contends that constitutional development is a tool through which actors attempt to usher courts into political conflicts; in contrast, I will argue that unions turned to constitutional change in large part to exclude courts from policymaking. Further, the union activism on behalf of constitutional change serves as a challenge to the prominent view among many scholars of American political development and law that judicial hostility to worker rights and union organizing discouraged unions from demanding state protection or institutionalizing their demands through law.

Through a comparative historical analysis of the American states, I show how public education was the original policy field through which white American women became empowered as voters and political officials. Women's changing status within the education profession and “school suffrage” rights are an important and overlooked aspect of women's political history, and the rural orientation of state governments and women's increasing administrative authority as county superintendents and rural supervisors of education was pivotal to women's political empowerment. Women's authority, however, varied across regions and across states, with women's authority especially strong in Western states. I find that women in the field of public education were most empowered where there was a history of school suffrage rights, where administrative offices were elective rather than appointed, and where the power of the state superintendent of public instruction was weak. These findings suggest that democratic institutions, more than economic development or state capacity, were fundamental to women's increasing authority in the policy domain that commanded the largest share of state and local resources at the time.

Prior analyses of congressional action on the issue of black civil rights have typically examined either of the two major Reconstructions. Our paper attempts to fill the large five-decade black box between the end of the First Reconstruction and the beginning of the Second, routinely skipped over in scholarship on Congress, parties, and racial politics. Using a variety of sources—bill-introduction data, statements by members in the Congressional Record, roll-call votes, and newspaper reports, among others—we challenge the common assumption that civil rights largely disappeared from the congressional agenda between 1891 and 1940, documenting instead the continued contestation over racial issues in Congress. By examining several failed anti-lynching initiatives, this article uncovers a largely untold story about how and when the Republican and Democratic Parties reorganized around race, finding that the realignment began earlier than is commonly understood.

In this article, I trace the historical lineage and dynamic processes leading to the creation of the Southern slaveholding Supreme Court of antebellum America. Supported by case studies of several Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era legislative battles over judicial reform, I argue that the complex, multistage creation of the Southern slaveholding Court—the Court that decided cases such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and Ableman v. Booth—was the inadvertent result of certain institutional strictures concerning the size of the Court and the geographic organization of the federal circuit system. In so doing, I illustrate how the creation of a fundamentally Jacksonian but also disproportionately Southern and undeniably slaveholding Court was not simply about who was appointed but about the structures that determined who might be appointed, who could be appointed, and who should be appointed. It was these considerations, in turn, that shaped not only the makeup and composition of the Court during this tumultuous period of American political development but also the very character of the momentous decisions it was likely to make.

Social scientists of democratic change have emphasized the role of class action in that process, neglecting the discursive shift that was necessary to legitimate mass party competition in the early American case. Although historians of U.S. party formation have emphasized the discursive dimension of this transition, they have focused on more formal theories of party and neglected the importance of martial discourse, which was perhaps more pedestrian, but had a distinctive mass appeal. Drawing on the papers of prominent politicians and the editorials of local party newspapers in Alabama and Illinois, I argue that incipient party elites used the language of wartime discipline to recruit national-level leaders, local operatives, and voters to the new form of elective politics. Martial discourse was therefore integral to the larger discourse of party, which ultimately helped to overcome the inherited antipartyism of the early Republic.