Books in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series

Analyzing economic policy from the New Deal through the Reagan Revolution, Tax and Spend takes a new look at the so-called tax-and-spend liberals of the past. This important study examines why many Americans have come to hate the government but continue to demand the security it provides.

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical role the famous evangelist played in creating the modern American South. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful transitional symbol-an evangelist, first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure.

Focusing on the fate of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, this comprehensive history of the thirty year war over welfare shows how stubborn allegiance to the male-headed household undermined the struggle for economic justice.

Radical Pacifism in Modern America illuminates the complex relationships between gender, race, activism, and political culture, identifying critical factors that simultaneously hindered and facilitated grassroots efforts at social and political change.

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet is the first religious biography of this leading civil rights activist and intellectual. Though Du Bois is often labeled an atheist, historian Edward J. Blum argues that his religious and spiritual insights are central to understanding his political and intellectual work.

Drawing from extensive archival research, Out of the Horrors of War demonstrates that disabled citizens in the World War II era organized a national movement for economic security and full citizenship, reshaping the U.S. welfare state and laying the foundation for the disability rights movement.

Queer Clout weaves together activism and electoral politics to trace the gay movement's path since the 1950s in Chicago. Stewart-Winter stresses gay people's and African Americans' shared focus on police harassment, highlighting how black political leaders enabled white gays and lesbians to join an emerging liberal coalition in city hall.

In Central Harlem, the symbolic and historic heart of black America, the violent unrest of July 1964 highlighted a new dynamic in the racial politics of the nation. The first "long, hot summer" of the Sixties had arrived.

Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians.

Up South documents the efforts of Philadelphia's Black Power activists to construct a vital and effective social movement combining analyses of racism with a program of grassroots community organizing in the context of the failure of civil rights liberalism to deliver on its promise of racial equality.

Rachel Rains Winslow examines how the adoption of foreign children transformed from a marginal activity in response to episodic crises in the 1940s to an enduring American institution by the 1970s. She provides the first historical examination of the people, policies, and systems that made the United States an enduring "adoption nation."