This essay examines the development of Andrew Jackson's ideas about nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty within the southern borderlands of the post-Revolutionary United States. It argues that he was in many respects a conventional borderlands leader—that is, someone with little sense of attachment to any particular polity, who speculated in Indian lands while pursuing commercial ventures through American, Spanish, and Native jurisdictions. But an especially devastating war between the settlers of Middle Tennessee and some Cherokee warriors during the 1790s forced Jackson and others to articulate their attachment to the United States in new ways. Bitterly rejecting a Federalist model of citizenship that assumed clear territorial limits, they invented a new “protection covenant,” whereby the people themselves, imagined within a brutal state of nature, retained full sovereignty to deploy violence. In addition to a fresh look at Jackson, the article demonstrates the importance of international as well as Constitutional law in the formation of early American nationalism.

Nearly unique amongst the world's monetary bodies, the Federal Reserve defies description as a central bank. A century after its creation, the Fed retains a hybrid structure of a president-appointed, Senate-confirmed Washington board and twelve largely privately directed regional reserve banks—each of which remains moored in the cities originally selected in 1914. In this article we investigate the origins of the Federal Reserve System, focusing on the selection of the twelve reserve bank cities. In contrast to accounts that suggest politics played no role in the selection of the cities, we suggest that a range of political interests shaped Democrats' choices in designing the reserve system. The result was a decentralized institution that initially proved unable to coordinate monetary policy—a key contributor to the onset of the Great Depression less than two decades later.

A legislative “breakpoint,” the Cannon Revolt profoundly transformed congressional operation, spurring a series of reforms that ultimately led to the disintegration of traditional modes of partisan authority and the creation of new patterns of governance. In this article, I argue that the Cannon Revolt affords an opportunity to examine a crucial, but poorly understood, dynamic in congressional politics. Whereas spatial theories of Congress typically hold that legislators located at the floor median are decisive actors in chamber politics, the archival account presented here suggests that these legislators require the scaffolding of an intraparty organization to secure pivotal status. As I demonstrate, intraparty organization enabled a ragtag group of Republican reformers opposed to Cannon's “czar rule” to draft and unite behind a common proposal for parliamentary reform, and to build the cross-party coalition that scholars agree was critical to its passage. In this account, the influence of the so-called “Insurgent” Republicans hinged on their collective capacity to hang together in sufficient numbers to hold the balance of power in the chamber—in effect, organizing all potentially pivotal votes into one bloc essential to sustaining the majority party coalition.

While scholars have illuminated the effects of mass incarceration, the origins of the criminal justice policies that produced these outcomes remain unclear. Many explanations obscure as much as they reveal—in great measure because they either ignore or minimize the consequences of crime. Emphasizing the exploitation of white fears, the construction of black criminality, or the political strategies of Republican political elites, prevailing theories ignore black crime victims. In order to excavate the historical roots of the modern carceral state, this study traces the development of New York State's Rockefeller drug laws. Rather than beginning in Albany, this history focuses on Harlem, a community hit hardest by rising crime rates and drug addiction. Drawing upon a variety of primary sources, this study traces how African American activists framed and negotiated the incipient drug problem in their neighborhoods and interrogates the policy prescriptions they attached to indigenously constructed frames. It describes how middle-class African Americans facing the material threats of crime and crime-related problems drew upon the moral content of indigenous class categories to understand these threats and develop policy prescriptions. It reveals how the black middle class shaped the development of this punitive policy and played a crucial role in the development of mass incarceration.

Thomas Jefferson is often invoked as an advocate of limited government and a defender of individual rights. This article argues that rights were Jefferson's starting place. Jefferson also believed that American citizens should have opportunities to develop the capabilities necessary to enjoy the full use of their rights. Rather than thinking about Jefferson as progovernment or antigovernment, this article concludes that we must understand the particular kind of government Jefferson desired, the ends he had in mind, and why and how those ends differed from his Federalist predecessors. A better understanding of Jefferson's statecraft not only offers a new perspective on the relationship between government and rights in Jefferson's thought but also how and why Jeffersonians in power used the state to promote individual freedom.

One of the most momentous shifts in twentieth-century party politics was the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights. Recent scholarship finds that this realignment began as early as the 1940s and traces it to pressure groups, especially organized labor. But such scholarship does not explain why labor, which was traditionally hostile to African Americans, began to work with them. Nor does it ascribe agency to the efforts of African American pressure groups. Focusing on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), this article attempts to fill these gaps in the literature. It explains why civil rights and labor leaders reassessed their traditional animosities and began to work as allies in the Democratic Party. It further shows how pressure from the new black-blue alliance forced the national Democratic Party to stop straddling civil rights issues and to become instead the vehicle for promoting civil rights. NAACP and CIO leaders consciously sought to remake the Democratic Party by marginalizing conservative Southerners, and eventually succeeded.

I examine the exploitation of quorum rules in American legislatures from the colonial era to the present. After documenting changing quorum standards, I examine instances where minorities (and occasionally majorities) have exploited them through disappearing quorums and bolting quorums. This analysis allows me to identify the conditions under which quorum rules have been more easily abused for partisan purposes.

The rise of the Republican Right in the 1960s reshaped not only the politics of the Republican Party, but ultimately that of the country as well. What had started as an improbable movement to draft Goldwater for president in 1964 emerged, amid the political and social turmoil of the decade, as the dominant force within the Republican Party. But what has not received as much attention is the significant role that the national Republican Party leadership and the emphasis it placed on party renewal, rather than reform, played in the Right's rapid post-Goldwater ascent. This article examines how the process of party renewal, specifically the emergence of a national “service party” structure, helped not only to unify the GOP after the 1964 Goldwater loss, but also led to the development of a more conservative Republican Party during the second half of the 1960s.

President Lyndon Johnson declared the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 to be “the most farsighted, the most comprehensive, the most massive housing program in all American history.” To replace every slum dwelling in the country within ten years, the act turned from public housing, the government-run program started in the 1930s, toward private-sector programs using both nonprofit and for-profit companies. As a result, since its passage, for-profit businesses have developed the great majority of low-income residences in the United States. The law also helped popularize the idea of “public-private partnerships,” collaborations of government agencies and non-government entities—including for-profit companies—for social and urban improvements. Remarkably, political liberals supported the idea that private enterprise carry out social-welfare programs. This article examines the reasons that Democratic officials, liberals, and housing industry leaders united to create a decentralized, ideologically pluralistic, and redundant system for low-income housing. It shows that frustrations with the public housing program, the response to widespread violence in the nation's cities, and the popularity of corporate America pushed the turn toward the private sector. The changes in housing and urban policy made in the late 1960s, the article concludes, helped further distinguish the American welfare state and encourage the rise of neoliberalism in the United States.