Books published by publisher Univ Pr of Kansas

The Supreme Court's controversial decision in Oregon v. Smith sharply departed from previous expansive readings of the First Amendment's religious freedom clause and ignited a firestorm of protest from legal scholars, religious groups, legislators, and Native Americans. Carolyn Long provides the first book-length analysis of Smith and shows why it continues to resonate so deeply in the American psyche.In 1983, Klamath Indian Alfred Smith and his co-worker Galen Black were fired as counselors from a drug rehabilitation agency for using peyote, a controlled substance under Oregon law, in a religious ceremony of the Native American Church. Both were subsequently denied unemployment benefits, which the State of Oregon claimed was permissible under its police powers and necessary in its effort to eradicate drug abuse. But Smith and Black argued that the denial of unemployment benefits constituted an infringement of their religious freedom and took their cases to court. Long traces the tortuous path that Smith followed as it went from state courts to the Supreme Court and then back again for a second round of hearings. A major event in Native American history, the case attracted widespread support for the Indian cause from a diverse array of religious groups eager to protect their own religious freedom. It also led to an intense tug-of-war between the Court and Congress, which fought back with amendments to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (to protect the religious use of peyote) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which protected religious freedom for all Americans. The Court subsequently ruled the latter act unconstitutional in Boerne v. Flores (1997).Long provides a lucid and balanced view of the competing sides in Smith. Drawing on interviews with Smith and his family, as well as with lawyers, judges, and congressional and interest group representatives involved in this struggle between Congress and Court, she takes the reader from the rituals of a peyote religious ceremony to the halls of government to reveal the conflicting interests that emerged in this key First Amendment case. She also clarifies how the Court reversed longstanding precedent by replacing the balancing test of "compelling state interest" and "least restrictive means" with a new "reasonable basis" argument that theoretically could be used to curtail religious practices well beyond those of the Native American church.Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protection of religious freedom applies only to laws that specifically target religious behavior and that an individual's religious beliefs do not excuse one from complying with statutes that indirectly infringe on their religious rights. Engagingly written, Long's study highlights the resultant struggles, but without ever losing sight of the rich human dimensions of the story.

“Presto! No More Pests!” proclaimed a 1955 article introducing two new pesticides, "miracle-workers for the housewife and back-yard farmer." Easy to use, effective, and safe: who wouldn’t love synthetic pesticides? Apparently most Americans did—and apparently still do. Why—in the face of dire warnings, rising expense, and declining effectiveness—do we cling to our chemicals? Michelle Mart wondered. Her book, a cultural history of pesticide use in postwar America, offers an answer.America's embrace of synthetic pesticides began when they burst on the scene during World War II and has held steady into the 21st century—for example, more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US in 2008 are Roundup Ready GMOs, dependent upon generous use of the herbicide glyphosate to control weeds. Mart investigates the attraction of pesticides, with their up-to-the-minute promise of modernity, sophisticated technology, and increased productivity—in short, their appeal to human dreams of controlling nature. She also considers how they reinforced Cold War assumptions of Western economic and material superiority.Though the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the rise of environmentalism might have marked a turning point in Americans’ faith in pesticides, statistics tell a different story. Pesticides, a Love Story recounts the campaign against DDT that famously ensued; but the book also shows where our notions of Silent Spring’s revolutionary impact falter—where, in spite of a ban on DDT, farm use of pesticides in the United States more than doubled in the thirty years after the book was published. As a cultural survey of popular and political attitudes toward pesticides, Pesticides, a Love Story tries to make sense of this seeming paradox. At heart, it is an exploration of the story we tell ourselves about the costs and benefits of pesticides—and how corporations, government officials, ordinary citizens, and the press shape that story to reflect our ideals, interests, and emotions.

Few first ladies have enjoyed a better reputation among historians than Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Aristocratic and sophisticated, tasteful and discreet, she managed the White House with a sure hand. Her admirers say that she never slipped in carrying out her duties as hostess, mother, and adviser to her husband. Lewis Gould's path-breaking study, however, presents a more complex and interesting figure than the somewhat secularized saint Edith Roosevelt has become in the literature on first ladies. While many who knew her found her inspiring and gracious, family members also recalled a more astringent and sometimes nasty personality. Gould looks beneath the surface of her life to examine the intricate legacy of her tenure from 1901 to 1909.The narrative in this book thus uncovers much new about Edith Roosevelt. Far from being averse to activism, Edith Roosevelt served as a celebrity sponsor at a New York musical benefit and also intervened in a high-profile custody dispute. Gould traces her role in the failed marriage of a United States senator, her efforts to secure the ambassador from Great Britain that she wanted, and the growing tension between her and Helen Taft in 1908-1909. Her commitment to bringing classical music artists to the White House, along with other popular performers, receives the fullest attention to date.Gould also casts a skeptical eye over the area where Edith Roosevelt's standing has been strongest, her role as a mother. He looks at how she and her husband performed as parents and dissents from the accustomed judgment that all was well with the way the Roosevelt offspring developed. Most important of all, Gould reveals the first lady's deep animus toward African Americans and their place in American society. She believed "that any mixture of races is an unmitigated evil." The impact of her bigotry on Theodore Roosevelt's racial policies must now be an element in any future discussion of that sensitive subject.On balance, Gould finds that Edith Roosevelt played an important and creative part in how the institution of the first lady developed during the twentieth century. His sprightly retelling of her White House years will likely provoke controversy and debate. All those interested in how the role of the presidential wife has evolved will find in this stimulating book a major contribution to the literature on a fascinating president. It also brings to life a first lady whose legacy must now be seen in a more nuanced and challenging light.

From the ancient Appalachians to the high Sierra, mountains have always symbolized wilderness for Americans. Susan Schrepfer unfolds the history of our fascination with high peaks and rugged terrain to tell how mountains have played a dramatic role in shaping American ideas about wilderness and its regulation.Delving into memoirs and histories, letters and diaries, early photos and old maps, Schrepfer especially compares male and female mountaineering narratives to show the ways in which gender affected what men and women found to value in rocky heights, and how their different perceptions together defined the wilderness preservation movement for the nation. The Sierra Club in particular popularized the mystique of America's mountains, and Schrepfer uses its history to develop a sweeping interpretation of twentieth-century wilderness perceptions and national conservation politics.Schrepfer follows men like John Muir, Wilderness Society cofounder Robert Marshall, and the Sierra Club's own David Brower into the mountains—and finds them frequently in the company of women. She tells how mountaineering women shaped their lives through high adventure well before the twentieth century, participating in Appalachian mountain clubs and joining men as "Mazamas"—mountain goats—scaling Oregon's Mount Hood.From these expeditions, Schrepfer examines how women's ideas, language, and activism helped shape American environmentalism just as much as men's, parsing the "Romantic sublime" into its respective masculine and feminine components. Tracing this history to the 1964 Wilderness Act, she also shows how the feminine sublimes continue to flourish in the form of ecofeminism and in exploits like the all-woman climb of Annapurna in 1978.By explaining why both women and men risked their lives in these landscapes, how they perceived them, and why they wanted to save them, Schrepfer also reveals the ways in which religion, social class, ethnicity, and nationality shaped the experience of the natural world. Full of engaging stories that shed new light on a history many believe they already know, her book adds subtlety and nuance to the oft-told annals of the wild and gives readers a new perspective on the wilderness movement and mountaineering.

Once the dust of the Revolution settled, the problem of reconciling the erstwhile warring factions arose, and as is often the case in the aftermath of violent revolutions, the matter made its way into the legal arena. Rutgers v. Waddington was such a case. Through this little-known but remarkable dispute over back rent for a burned-down brewery, Peter Charles Hoffer recounts a tale of political and constitutional intrigue involving some of the most important actors in America’s transition from a confederation of states under the Articles of Confederation to a national republic under the U.S. Constitution.At the end of the Revolution, the widow Rutgers and her sons returned to the brewery they’d abandoned when the British had occupied New York. They demanded rent from Waddington, the loyalist who had rented the facility under the British occupation. Under a punitive New York state law, the loyalist Waddington was liable. But the peace treaty’s provisions protecting loyalists’ property rights said otherwise. Appearing for the defendants was war veteran, future Federalist, and first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. And, as always, lurking in the background was the estimable Aaron Burr. As Hoffer details Hamilton's arguments for the supremacy of treaty law over state law, the significance of Rutgers v. Waddington in the development of a strong central government emerges clearly—as does the role of the courts in bridging the young nation’s divisions in the Revolution’s wake.Rutgers v. Waddington illustrates a foundational moment in American history. As such, it is an encapsulation of a society riven by war, buffeted by revolutionary change attempting to piece together the true meaning of, in John Adams’ formulation, “rule by law, and not by men.”

Most people could probably tell you that Lizzie Borden "took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks," but few could say that, when tried, Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and fewer still, why. In Joseph A. Conforti's engrossing retelling, the case of Lizzie Borden, sensational in itself, also opens a window on a time and place in American history and culture. Surprising for how much it reveals about a legend so ostensibly familiar, Conforti's account is also fascinating for what it tells us about the world that Lizzie Borden inhabited. As Conforti—himself a native of Fall River, the site of the infamous murders—introduces us to Lizzie and her father and step-mother, he shows us why who they were matters almost as much to the trial's outcome as the actual events of August 4, 1892. Lizzie, for instance, was an unmarried woman of some privilege, a prominent religious woman who fit the profile of what some characterized as a "Protestant nun." She was also part of a class of moneyed women emerging in the late 19th century who had the means but did not marry, choosing instead to pursue good works and at times careers in the helping professions. Many of her contemporaries, we learn, particularly those of her class, found it impossible to believe that a woman of her background could commit such a gruesome murder. As he relates the details, known and presumed, of the murder and the subsequent trial, Conforti also fills in that background. His vividly written account creates a complete picture of the Fall River of the time, as Yankee families like the Bordens, made wealthy by textile factories, began to feel the economic and cultural pressures of the teeming population of native and foreign-born who worked at the spindles and bobbins. Conforti situates Lizzie's austere household, uneasily balanced between the well-to-do and the poor, within this social and cultural milieu—laying the groundwork for the murder and the trial, as well as the outsize reaction that reverberates to our day. As Peter C. Hoffer remarks in his preface, there are many popular and fictional accounts of this still-controversial case, "but none so readable or so well-balanced as this."

In his farewell address, President Washington reminded his audience that the Constitution, "till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all." He regarded the Constitution as a binding document worthy of devout allegiance, but also believed that it contains a clear and appropriate procedure for its own reform. David Kyvig's illuminating study provides the most complete and insightful history of that amendment process and its fundamental importance for American political life. Over the course of the past two centuries, more than 10,000 amendments have been proposed by the method stipulated in Article V of the Constitution. Amazingly, only 33 have garnered the required two-thirds approval from both houses of Congress, and only 27 were ultimately ratified into law by the states. Despite their small number, those amendments have revolutionized American government while simultaneously legitimizing and preserving its continued existence. Indeed, they have dramatically altered the relationship between state and federal authority, as well as between government and private citizens. Kyvig reexamines the creation and operation of Article V, illuminating the process and substance of each major successful and failed effort to change the formal structure, duties, and limits of the federal government. He analyzes in detail the Founders' intentions; the periods of great amendment activity during the 1790s, 1860s, 1910s, and 1960s; and the considerable consequences of amendment failure involving slavery, alcohol prohibition, child labor, New Deal programs, school prayer, equal rights for women, abortion, balanced budgets, term limits, and flag desecration. Ultimately, Kyvig demonstrates that so-called "constitutional revolutions" can only endure through formal amendment; without it such sea changes as the New Deal are likely to be temporary amidst the shifting winds of political fortune. That truth underscores the centrality of the amendment process to American constitutionalism, sheds light on the "amendment fever" that swept through the 104th Congress, and better prepares us to deal with such initiatives in the future.

Grover Cleveland, who served as both the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth president of the United States, dominated the American political scene from 1884 to 1896. Viewed at one time as a monument of presidential courage, Cleveland has over the past generation been dismissed by historians as a "Bourbon Democrat," the symbol of that wing of the Democratic party devoted to preserving the status quo and protecting the interests of the propertied. In this revisionist study, Richard Welch takes a fresh look at the Cleveland administrations and discovers a man whose assertive temperament was frequently at odds with his inherited political faith.Although pledging public allegiance to a Whiggish version of the presidency, Cleveland's aggressive insistence on presidential independence led him to exercise increasing control of the executive branch and then to seek influence over Congress and national legislation. Quick to denounce governmental paternalism and the centralization of political power, Cleveland nevertheless expanded the authority of the national government as he revised federal land and Indian policies in the West and ordered the army to Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike. For all his fears of constitutional innovation, he was neither a champion of big business nor unaware of the problems posed by the post-Civil War economic revolution. He signed the Interstate commerce Act, warned against the growing power of industrial combination, advocated voluntary federal arbitration of labor-management disputes, and fought the monopolization of western lands by railroad an timber corporations.Welch places Cleveland's battles on behalf of tariff revision, civil service reform, and the gold standard within the context of the conundrum of a strong president who usually failed to gain the cooperation of Congress or the Democratic party. Cleveland reinvigorated the American presidency and reestablished an equilibrium between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, but by his obdurate enmity to the silverites and the "agrarian radicals," he helped assure the division and defeat of his party in the election of 1896. Welch demonstrates that Cleveland's achievements and failures as a political leader were attributable to an authoritarian temperament that saw compromise as surrender.Two chapters of the book are devoted to Cleveland's diplomacy, focusing especially on his response to Hawaiian and Cuban revolutions and the boundary dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain. Welch takes issue with the currently popular thesis that U.S. diplomacy in the last decade of the nineteenth century displayed a concerted governmental effort to solve domestic economic problems by expanding foreign markets in East Asia and Latin America.In addition to providing insights into the character of one of our more interesting presidents, this reassessment of Grover Cleveland's historical legacy shows clearly that the Cleveland years served as the essential preface to the development of a modern presidency and to the identification for executive power.

This is the first study in half a century to focus on the election of 1796. At first glance, the first presidential contest looks unfamiliar—parties were frowned upon, there was no national vote, and the candidates did not even participate (the political mores of the day forbade it). Yet for all that, Jeffrey L. Pasley contends, the election of 1796 was �absolutely seminal,� setting the stage for all of American politics to follow.Challenging much of the conventional understanding of this election, Pasley argues that Federalist and Democratic-Republican were deeply meaningful categories for politicians and citizens of the 1790s, even if the names could be inconsistent and the institutional presence lacking. He treats the 1796 election as a rough draft of the democratic presidential campaigns that came later rather than as the personal squabble depicted by other historians. It set the geographic pattern of New England competing with the South at the two extremes of American politics, and it established the basic ideological dynamic of a liberal, rights-spreading American left arrayed against a conservative, society-protecting right, each with its own competing model of leadership.Rather than the inner thoughts and personal lives of the Founders, covered in so many other volumes, Pasley focuses on images of Adams and Jefferson created by supporters-and detractors-through the press, capturing the way that ordinary citizens in 1796 would have actually experienced candidates they never heard speak. Newspaper editors, minor officials, now forgotten congressman, and individual elector candidates all take a leading role in the story to show how politics of the day actually worked.Pasley's cogent study rescues the election of 1796 from the shadow of 1800 and invites us to rethink how we view that campaign and the origins of American politics.

Choice Outstanding TitleThe presidential campaign of 1848 saw the first strong electoral challenge to the expansion of slavery in the United States; most historians consider the appearance of the Free Soil Party in that election a major turning point of the nineteenth century. The three-way race capped a decade of political turmoil that had raised the issue of slavery to unprecedented prominence on the national stage and brought about critical splits in the two major parties.In the first book in four decades devoted to the 1848 election, Joel Silbey clarifies our understanding of a pivotal moment in American history. The election of Whig Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War, over Democrat Lewis Cass and Free Soiler Martin Van Buren followed a particularly bitter contest, a fierce political storm in an already tumultuous year marked by the first significant attempt by antislavery advocates to win the presidency.Silbey describes what occurred during that election and why it turned out as it did, offering a nuanced look at the interaction of the forces shaping the direction of politics in mid-nineteenth century America. He explains how the Free Soilers went about their reform movement and why they failed as they ran up against the tenacious grip that the existing two-party structure had on the political system and the behavior of the nation's voters.For Whigs and Democrats it was politics as usual as they stressed economic, cultural, and ideological issues that had divided the country for the previous twenty years. Silbey describes the new confrontation between the force of tradition and a new and different way of thinking about the political world. He shows that ultimately, when America went to the polls, northerners and southerners alike had more on their minds than slavery. Nevertheless, while Van Buren managed to attract only 10 percent of the vote, his party's presence foreshadowed a more successful challenge in the future.Emphasizing both persistent party commitments and the reformers' lack of political muscle, Silbey expertly delineates the central issues of an election framed by intense partisanship and increasing sectional anger. If 1848 did not yet mark the death rattle of traditional politics, this insightful book shows us its importance as a harbinger of change.

In his National Book Award winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek ''an original relation to nature,'' drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Steven Woodworth's previous book, the critically acclaimed Jefferson Davis and His Generals, won the prestigious Fletcher Pratt Award and was a main selection of the History Book Club. In that book he showed how the failures of Davis and his military leaders in the west paved the way for Confederate defeat. In Davis and Lee at War, he concludes his study of Davis as rebel commander-in-chief and shows how the lack of a unified purpose and strategy in the east sealed the Confederacy's fate.Woodworth argues that Davis and Robert E. Lee, the South's greatest military leader, had sharply conflicting views over the proper conduct of the war. Davis was convinced that the South should fight a defensive war, to simply outlast the North's political and popular support for the war. By contrast, Lee and the other eastern generals-notably P.G.T. Beauregard, Gustavus Smith, and Stonewall Jackson-were eager for the offensive. They were convinced that only quick and decisive battlefield victories would prevent the North from eventually defeating them with its overwhelming advantage in men and materials.Davis and Lee, Woodworth shows, shared a mutual respect for each other for most of the war. But it was respect mixed with a stubborn resistance to the other's influence. The result of this tense tug-of-war was Davis's misguided pursuit of a middle ground that gave neither strategy its best chance for success. The war finally ground to a bloody conclusion with Davis as indecisive as ever and virtually blind to how little confidence his generals had in his leadership.Drawing extensively upon the papers of Jefferson Davis and the works of leading Civil War historians, Woodworth places the eastern military campaigns in an entirely new light and expands our understanding of Davis as leader of the Confederacy.