In 1915, western farmers mounted one of the most significant challenges to party politics America has seen: the Nonpartisan League, which sought to empower citizens and restrain corporate influence. Before its collapse in the 1920s, the League counted over 250,000 paying members, spread to thirteen states and two Canadian provinces, controlled North Dakota’s state government, and birthed new farmer-labor alliances. Yet today it is all but forgotten, neglected even by scholars.
Michael J. Lansing aims to change that. Insurgent Democracy offers a new look at the Nonpartisan League and a new way to understand its rise and fall in the United States and Canada. Lansing argues that, rather than a spasm of populist rage that inevitably burned itself out, the story of the League is in fact an instructive example of how popular movements can create lasting change. Depicting the League as a transnational response to economic inequity, Lansing not only resurrects its story of citizen activism, but also allows us to see its potential to inform contemporary movements.
Starting in the early 1900s, many thousands of native Filipinos were conscripted as laborers in American
West Coast agricultural fields and Alaska salmon canneries. There, they found themselves confined to exploitative low-wage jobs in racially segregated workplaces as well as subjected ...
Here, grounded firmly in American history, is a skilled folklorist's survey of the entire field
of America's folklore—from colonization to mass culture. Tracing the forms and content of American folklore, Mr. Dorson reveals the richness, pathos, and humor of genuine ...
This book based on an exhibition held at The Baltimore Museum of Art in 1974,
offers 81 color reproductions of American prints in a range of styles, from the Barbizon-derived lithographs of William Morris Hunt to the post-World War II ...
In recent decades, and particularly since the US Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision, lawmakers
and other elites have told Americans that stricter campaign finance laws are needed to improve faith in the elections process, increase trust in the government, ...
Intellectuals “have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope
and targets of scorn,” writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: Are intellectual public figures essential voices of knowledge ...
More people watched his nationally syndicated television show between 1953 and 1955 than followed I
Love Lucy. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records he set at Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Radio City Music Hall ...
Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win
on the national stage—but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist ...
The George W. Bush administration’s ambitious—even breathtaking—claims of unilateral executive authority raised deep concerns among
constitutional scholars, civil libertarians, and ordinary citizens alike. But Bush’s attempts to assert his power are only the culmination of a ...
