Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management and the Development of the American State, 1900–1912

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce J. Schulman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Resource Management ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Forest Service ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Bureau Of Reclamation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gifford Pinchot

In the early years of the twentieth century, the United States created modern resource management—a collection of administrative bureaucracies that reversed long-standing policies of distributing lands into private hands and instead managed the public domain from Washington. The creation of these powerful, independent agencies underlay a broader effort to reorganize and enlarge the national government. The very same administrators who built the new conservation bureaucracies—Gifford Pinchot of the Forest Service, James R. Garfield of the Department of Interior, and Frederick Newell of the Bureau of Reclamation—also led President Theodore Roosevelt's drive for reorganization of the executive branch.

Botched Executions and the Struggle to End Capital Punishment: A Twentieth-Century Story

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (03) ◽  
pp. 694-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Austin Sarat ◽  
Katherine Blumstein ◽  
Aubrey Jones ◽  
Heather Richard ◽  
Madeline Sprung-Keyser ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Why have accounts of botched executions not played a larger role in the struggle to end capital punishment in the United States? In the twentieth century, when methods of execution became increasingly controlled and sterilized, botched executions would seem to have had real abolitionist potential. This article examines newspaper coverage of botched executions to determine and describe the way they were presented to the public and why they have contributed little to the abolitionist cause. Although botched executions reveal pain, violence, and inhumanity associated with state killing, newspaper coverage of these events neutralizes the impact of that revelation. Throughout the last century, newspapers presented botched executions as misfortunes rather than injustices. We identify three distinct modes by which newspaper coverage neutralized the impact of botched executions and presented them as misfortunes rather than as systemic injustices: (1) the dual narratives of sensationalism and recuperation in the early years of the twentieth century, (2) the decline of sensationalism and the rise of “professionalism” in the middle of the century, and (3) the emphasis on “balanced” reporting toward the end of the century.

What Is Africa to Me?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arna Bontemps
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
South Side ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
American Science

This chapter examines the rising tide of racial consciousness in Chicago during the early years of the twentieth century. It begins with a discussion of early efforts by Negroes to return to their ancestral homeland, some of them resorting to emigration outside the borders of the United States as a way out. In particular, it considers the influence of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which splintered into different organizations such as the Peace Movement of Ethiopia and the 49th State Movement in Chicago. The chapter also looks at Garvey's feud with Robert S. Abbott and his visit to the South Side in 1920 before concluding with an account of two organizations that strove to foster racial pride among Chicago Negroes: the Moorish American Science Temple and the Nation of Islam.

Background in the United States and Great Britain to 1950

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Public ◽  
The 1950S

Throughout the twentieth century, folk music has had many definitions and incarnations in the United States and Great Britain. The public has been most aware of its commercial substance and appeal, with the focus on recording artists and their repertoires, but there has been so much more, including a political agenda, folklore theories, grassroots styles, regional promoters, and discussions on what musical forms—blues, hillbilly, gospel, Anglo-Saxon, pop, singer-songwriters, instrumental and/or vocal, international—should be included. These contrasting and conflicting interpretations were particularly evident during the 1950s. This chapter begins by focusing on Alan Lomax (1915–2002), one of the most active folk music collectors, radio promoters, and organizers during the 1940s. Lomax had a major influence on folk music in both the United States and Great Britain, tying together what had come before and what would follow. The chapter then discusses folk festivals and performers; British folk music, musicians, and trans-Atlantic musical connections; and Carl Sandburg's publication of the The American Songbag in 1927.

Our Shadow Immigration System

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Adam B. Cox ◽  
Cristina M. Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Shadow System ◽  
Deferred Action ◽  
United States Today ◽  
System P

This chapter explains how legal and institutional developments in immigration enforcement coincided with the dramatic acceleration of illegal immigration during the final third of the twentieth century. Together, these legal and demographic phenomena gave rise to a massive shadow immigration system that today operates alongside the formal immigration regime. This shadow system has rendered Congress’s intricate, detailed code of immigration rules increasingly less central to defining the content and character of the immigrant population. Instead, the Executive’s enforcement judgments—decisions about whom to target from the pool of deportable immigrants—have taken center stage. Indeed, the rise of the shadow system has effectively delegated vast screening authority to the President and other executive branch officials—authority that has culminated in events as dramatic as President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The large number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States today amplifies the role of enforcement discretion and further entrenches the shadow immigration system.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Alasdair Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Public Management ◽  
The United States ◽  
Management Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Change Of Direction

This introductory chapter provides a background of public administration. In the United States, the field of public administration was launched almost a century ago by people with bold aspirations. They were not interested only in the efficiency of government offices; they wanted a thorough overhaul of the American state so that it could manage the pressures of modern-day life. Unfortunately, this expansive view of the field's purpose has been lost. Over the last four decades in particular, the focus within the field has been mainly on smaller problems of management within the public sector. This is sometimes called the “public management approach.” This narrowing of focus might have made sense in the United States and a few other advanced democracies in the waning decades of the twentieth century, but it does not make sense today. Many people have recently protested this shrinking of ambitions. Thus, there is a need for a change of direction and to recover an expansive view of the field. This book proposes a way to do so.

Deliberative Democracy in the Trenches

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cass R. Sunstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Information Acquisition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Comment ◽  
High Degree

In the last decades, many political theorists have explored the idea of deliberative democracy. The basic claim is that well-functioning democracies combine accountability with a commitment to reflection, information acquisition, multiple perspectives, and reason-giving. Does that claim illuminate actual practices? Much of the time, the executive branch of the United States has combined both democracy and deliberation, not least because it has placed a high premium on reason-giving and the acquisition of necessary information. It has also contained a high degree of internal diversity, encouraging debate and disagreement, not least through the public comment process. These claims are illustrated with concrete, if somewhat stylized, discussions of how the executive branch often operates.

scholarly journals The evolution of secularization theory: from monopoly to crisis

2008 ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
K.I. Shvalagina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Church

Secularization theory is one of those intellectual products that determine the understanding of religion, its status in society, and the changes that take place between faith and unbelief, between church and state, for quite some time. Constituted in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, this theory has found many followers both in America and in Europe, even in the USSR. Its validity and integrity, evidentiality and obviousness did not cause any doubt either to scholars or to religious and statesmen. It was clear that society is liberated from the influence of religion and the church, is rapidly secularized, which will inevitably lead to the transformation of religion into a marginal phenomenon, and eventually - to its extinction. But the predictions that were made with unqualified certainty did not come true, as the development of the religious environment at the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century showed. Not only has religion not lost its significance for the modern man, but he is also actively returning to the public sphere. In line with such objective changes, secularization theory undergoes significant transformations, evolving from a monopoly that it has had for almost half a century, to a crisis, and eventually to its antipode, a theory of desecularization.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document