Books in the American Institutions and Society series

The history of Rochdale Village in Queens, New York, once the world's largest housing coop, from its planning, to the civil rights demonstrations at its construction site in 1963, through the late 1970s, ending with a look at life in Rochdale today.

The idea that citizens' advancement should depend exclusively on merit, on qualities that deserve reward rather than on bloodlines or wire-pulling, was among the Founding ideals of the American republic, Joseph F. Kett argues in this book.

During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched a controversial counterinsurgency program called the Human Terrain System. The program embedded social scientists within military units to provide commanders with information about the cultures and grievances of local populations. Yet the controversy it inspired was...

"Published in association with the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs."

In The Fight for Local Control, Campbell F. Scribner demonstrates how, in the decades after World War II, suburban communities appropriated legacies of rural education to assert their political autonomy and in the process radically changed educational law.

In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture.

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries...

Two Weeks Every Summer, which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States.

In the critically acclaimed La Fin de la Pauverte?, Romain D. Huret identifies a network of experts who were dedicated to the post-World War II battle against poverty in the United States. John Angell's translation of Huret's work brings to light for an English-speaking audience this critical set of intellectuals working in federal government...

In Heading Out, Young takes the reader out into nature and explores with them the history of camping in the United States.