"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1995" Vivien Hart is Reader in American Studies at the University of Sussex. What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage...

Erwin C. Hargrove is Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Prisoners of Myth is the first comprehensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority from its creation to the present day. It is also a telling case study of organizational evolution and decline. Building on Philip Selznick's classic work TVA and the Grass Roots (1949), a seminal text in the theoretical study of bureaucracy, Erwin Hargrove analyzes the organizational...

Lee Ann Banaszak is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Wyoming became the first American state to adopt female suffrage in 1869--a time when no country permitted women to vote. When the last Swiss canton enfranchised women in 1990, few countries barred women from the polls. Why did pro-suffrage activists in the United States and Switzerland have such varying success? Comparing suffrage campaigns in forty-eight...

"Winner of the 1998 Distinguished Scholarship Award, Collective Behavior and Social Movement Section of the American Sociological Association" Nicola Beisel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Moral reform movements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the United States over a century ago, most notably when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information...

"Winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award" Daniel J. Tichenor is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He has published extensively in leading journals on immigration policy. Immigration is perhaps the most enduring and elemental leitmotif of America. This book is the most powerful study to date of the politics and policies it has inspired, from the founders' earliest efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing...

"Winner of the 2008 J. David Greenstone Award, Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2008 C. Herman Pritchett Award, Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association" Keith E. Whittington is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of Constitutional Interpretation and Constitutional Construction. Should the Supreme Court have the...

Kristin A. Goss is Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies and Political Science at Duke University. More than any other advanced industrial democracy, the United States is besieged by firearms violence. Each year, some 30,000 people die by gunfire. Over the course of its history, the nation has witnessed the murders of beloved public figures; massacres in workplaces and schools; and epidemics of gun violence that terrorize neighborhoods and...

"Winner of the 2011 C. Herman Pritchett Award, Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2011 Gladys M. Kammerer Award, American Political Science Association" Sean Farhang is assistant professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Of the 1.65 million lawsuits enforcing federal laws over the past decade, 3 percent were prosecuted by the federal government, while...

"Winner of the Fenno Prize" Eric Schickler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From the 1910 overthrow of "Czar" Joseph Cannon to the reforms enacted when Republicans took over the House in 1995, institutional change within the U.S. Congress has been both a product and a shaper of congressional politics. For several decades, scholars have explained this process in terms of a particular collective...