Although state constitutional conventions in the United States were once called frequently and brought about significant changes in governance, recent decades have seen little convention activity. I examine the contrast between the earlier regularity of conventions and their recent absence, but from a different perspective than is usually taken—not by explaining the recent absence but rather explaining the regularity from the 1770s through 1970s. I investigate why legislatures in prior eras agreed to call conventions and how legislators’ traditional opposition to conventions was overcome on a regular basis. After identifying the state constitutional conventions held in the US and setting aside conventions that were called to join, leave, or rejoin the Union or were instigated by institutions other than legislatures, I focus on 82 conventions called at the discretion of legislators and for reasons unrelated to joining, leaving, or rejoining the Union. I identify the issues and circumstances that were responsible for legislators’ willingness to overcome their traditional opposition to holding conventions, thereby contributing to a better understanding of both the challenges in calling conventions and the occasions when these challenges can be overcome.

This article examines Rockefeller Republicanism and its status within the Republican Party by looking at the evolution of Nelson Rockefeller’s support for social welfare policy between 1958 and 1975. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller regularly appears in histories of modern conservatism as the embodiment of the liberalism that conservatives rejected, but these works rarely account for the entirety of Rockefeller’s career. Rather than focus on Rockefeller’s challenges to the national Republican Party in 1960 and 1964, which results in an incomplete representation of Rockefeller Republicanism, this article reassesses moderate Republicanism’s perceived dominance and Rockefeller’s advocacy for liberal domestic policies and commitment to racial liberalism in New York. A full account of Rockefeller’s struggles to find common ground with conservative New York Republicans and adoption of conservative positions related to law enforcement and welfare reform thwarted one of the GOP’s best opportunities to assemble a multiracial and cross-class constituency.

The analysis examines the effort to incorporate labor rights into the American conception of civil liberties and the opposition to that endeavor. It focuses on three Senators—Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, Jr., and Elbert Thomas—and New Deal officials who conceived of the National Labor Relations Act as a cornerstone of the effort to achieve “economic justice” and defended the law against its critics. It examines the opponents, including the National Association of Manufacturers and an anticommunist alliance between southern Democrats and Republicans. An ideological counteroffensive recast the supporters of social rights as un-American opponents of free enterprise and defined civil liberties as protecting the individual from an expansionist state and labor bosses. The analysis demonstrates the multiple causes for the disappearance of ideological space for conceiving that protection from oppressive employers constituted a civil liberty and the displacement of labor rights by the “right to work.”

The American aircraft industry’s important role in the economic, military, and cultural expansion of the United States over the past one hundred years has been well documented by historians. But America’s twentieth century aerial dominance was not preordained. After World War I, the nascent American aircraft industry faced a concerted British effort to dump thousands of war surplus machines on the U.S. market. With aircraft outside of the nation’s tariff regime, members of the Manufacturers Aircraft Association turned to Congress for emergency protections in the face of what they considered an existential threat. Despite efforts to equate a strong industrial base for aviation with the national defense, aircraft antidumping legislation became mired in partisan debates over tariff policy and accusations of wartime corruption. In the absence of relief from Congress, the Wright patent served as a barrier against the importation of foreign surplus machines.

This paper traces the political development of Congressional gun control issue framing (with a specific focus from the early 1990s to the present), demonstrating that there have been two primary contexts in which gun control policy has been debated over this time frame: as a component of general crime control and as a specific response to mass shooting events. It identifies the primary historical, political, and electoral forces shaping the gun control debate in a given period while distinguishing the critical changes that drove the evolution from a crime control to a mass shooting focus. It assesses the degree of policy coherence and electoral salience specific to each context, illuminating why “gun control as crime control” had bipartisan Congressional support in the early 1990s and identifying what comparative disadvantages hinder the mass shooting focus of the present while also recognizing that the latter unfolded against a backdrop of heighted partisan polarization. The paper concludes that although one cannot compare the crime control and mass shooting framing contexts in a political vacuum, the electoral implications particular to each are relevant for understanding legislative action or inaction in Congress over the past thirty years, if more so in some periods than others.