New Books in Public Policy

What new can there be to say about the New Deal? Perhaps more than you think. Join us as Karen Tani talks about her new book, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which examines the ways in which the rights talk we typically associate with the 1960s might be traced back to New Deal Administrators who, through programs like the ADC, simultaneously reshaped federal state relations and created new incentives for the professionalization of state bureaucracies. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It’s been said that for poor and low-income Americans, the law is all over. Join us for a conversation with Vicki Lens, who, in Poor Justice: How the Poor Fare in Court (Oxford University Press, 2015), shows us how vulnerable populations interact with the legal system. Prof. Lens will talk about fair hearings for welfare applicants, cases of child maltreatment and neglect, the ways in which the law protects and coerces people with mental illness, and the implications for homelessness on New York’s right to shelter. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

American social welfare programs are rife with fraud — but its not the kind of fraud most people think of. Daniel Hatcher, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, in The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens (NYU Press, 2016), shows us the ways in which for-profit corporations and state governments alike have generated revenues through the (sometimes legal, sometimes illegal) exploitation of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family was a seminal document in Great Society-era racial politics and public policy. Join us as we talk with Susan Greenbaum about her new book, Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which chronicles the lasting legacy of The Moynihan Report and the ways in which housing, criminal justice, education, and poverty policy all still bear its marks. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 1971, prisoners took over Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The uprising followed a wave of protests in prisons and jails across the state and nation. Prisoners sought to draw public attention to years of mistreatment and abuse as they held prison employees hostage and invited the media into the facility. Four days after the takeover, state officials ended talks abruptly and retook the prison using massive force. Both prisoners and guards were killed and injured in the ensuing gunfire. In Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon, 2016), University of Michigan professor, Heather Ann Thompson, tells an untold story of this uprising and its legacy. After the retaking of the prison, state troopers and corrections officers violently retaliated against the prisoners, committing human rights violations for which the state of New York failed to prosecute any officials. Thompson’s book thoroughly documents the state’s decades-long cover-up of officials’ criminal violence during and after the uprising. Instead of substantially reforming prison conditions or thoroughly investigating crimes on all sides, they focused on prosecuting prisoners and publicly blaming all violence on them. Blood in the Water is extremely relevant today. Criminal justice reform has become an urgent political issue in the 21st century. Prisons are overcrowded and as numerous scholars and politicians have noted, the current system of mass incarceration overwhelmingly targets black and brown men, ruining lives and causing upheaval in communities of color. Historians have recently been examining the roots of this modern system in an effort to understand both its origins and its present character. Thompson’s work provides key insights into the ways this system developed and how it protects and perpetuates state violence. In this episode of New Books in History, Thompson discusses her new book. She tells listeners about the uprising and its aftermath. She also discusses the difficulty of completing this research, which speaks to the continued efforts of the state to keep the full narrative of events during the uprising from public view. Finally, she briefly speaks to the importance of the Attica uprising for understanding mass incarceration and the broader criminal justice system today. This acclaimed new book reveals important new information about the uprising and its aftermath that has previously been concealed from the public. It is a National Book Award finalist and has received significant praise. It has been written about or reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Book Review, among other publications. Thompson has given Congressional staff briefings on the subject of mass incarceration in the United States and written about the topic in numerous popular and academic venues. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of roughly 1933-1937, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) argues that the Communists were neither the first nor the only group of urban intellectuals to look to the villages as the foundation of a new nation. The book demonstrates that rural reconstruction was not a failure: the efforts that Merkel-Hess describes to generate a rural version of Chinese modernity established an important precedent that has reverberated through modern Chinese history. Along the way, it introduces some fascinating documents in the course of its analysis, including primers and pamphlets aimed at popular readers that promoted the vision that literacy was a basis for self-transformation, self-discipline, and modern citizenship. The conclusion of the book considers how the approaches and values of a late turn to developmentalism were picked up in the postwar period. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

James D. Boys is the author of Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty (Biteback Publishing, 2016). Boys is an associate professor of international political studies at Richmond University. Just in time for the election, Hillary Rising explores the full biography of Hillary Clinton. Boys draws on original interviews with close associates of Hillary Clinton, in addition to much recently declassified materials from the Clinton archive. For those who havent made up their mind, Hillary Rising provides one more piece of information. For those who know the biography, there is considerable to be learned about the political education and career path Clinton travelled to the 2016 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Suja A. Thomas, a professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, has written The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries (Cambridge University Press, 2016)–a book comprising history, political science, and constitutional jurisprudence. Her topic is the history of the jury in American law and its decline over the last century and a half. Thomas argues that the jury should be considered a branch of the government, its own powers and authority under the Constitution. Her argument is premised upon the original understanding of the constitutional provisions regarding the jury’s role in not only the judiciary, but the governance of the United States. She traces the gradual decline of the jury’s power over the course of the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. Today, judges perform many of the tasks that were originally in the province of the jury, often reducing the jury to an advisory body. Thomas contends that this state of affairs harms all actors in the American system: the traditional three branches of government, judges, juries, citizens, and parties to civil and criminal lawsuits. She urges reforms that will enhance juries power to not only decide cases, but to check the power of prosecutors and legislatures. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Anyone who has spent time in a school as an adult probably knows how hard it is for teachers to leave their work when they come home every night. There always seems to be more work for them to do, along with inordinate responsibility and a sense that every extra minute spent on tomorrow’s lesson plan will generate better outcomes for students. But teachers also bring their non-school lives along with them when they return each day. We have young teachers and old teachers; single teachers and those who are married with children; teachers who have lived their entire lives in their communities and those who have traveled the world before settling down. Each of them already brings at least one thing that is unique and worthwhile. Maybe it is their energy, optimism, or sense of purpose. Maybe it is their wealth of firsthand experience or their understanding of the community and its history. Is there something we should look for in our teachers? How can we prepare them to share the best of what they have to offer as we encourage them to grow in new ways? What can teachers learn from reflecting on how their biographies and life circumstances intersect with their work? In Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), Michael Copperman recounts his experiences as a recent college graduate recruited by Teach for America to serve in a community far from his home that was burdened both by poverty and racial segregation. Copperman joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @MikeCopperman. During our conversation, he also recommended the following books: What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher by Lee Gutkind Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century by Jason Ward Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How can children grow to realize their inherent rights and respect the rights of others? In Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), authors Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham explore this question through both human rights law and children’s literature. Both international and domestic law affirm that children have rights, but how are these norms disseminated so that they make a difference in children’s lives? Human rights education research demonstrates that when children learn about human rights, they exhibit greater self-esteem and respect the rights of others. The Convention on the Rights of the Child — the most widely-ratified human rights treaty — not only ensures that children have rights, it also requires that states make those rights “widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike.” This first-of-its-kind requirement for a human rights treaty indicates that if rights are to be meaningful to the lives of children, then government and civil society must engage with those rights in ways that are relevant to children. Human Rights in Children’s Literature investigates children’s rights under international law — identity and family rights, the right to be heard, the right to be free from discrimination, and other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights — and considers the way in which those rights are embedded in children’s literature from Peter Rabbit to Horton Hears a Who! to Harry Potter. This book traverses children’s rights law, literary theory, and human rights education to argue that in order for children to fully realize their human rights, they first have to imagine and understand them. Learn more at: www.jonathantodres.com Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Parents often wonder what their children do at school all day. How different is it from what they remember years ago? Teachers often hear similar questions from their friends. Is it like what they imagine? If these adults could really understand, what might they say about school? Does it matter? It would seem that the most effective critiques are those offered by the individuals with the most firsthand knowledge. But the analysis of outsiders is also powerful. These people can draw on their varied backgrounds to bring new perspectives to familiar challenges. They may see things that those with more experience can more easily miss, perhaps even the lived experience of students. What can we learn from those stories? In Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids (Blue Rider Press, 2016), Nicholson Baker describes his month spent working as a substitute teacher with students of all ages or anyone looking to deepen their understanding of those experiences before offering their own policy proposals. Baker joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @nicolsonbaker8. During our conversation, he also recommended the following books: Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman Philosophy of Education by Nel Noddings The Way It Spozed to Be: A Report on the Classroom War Behind the Crisis in Our Schools by James Herndon Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2016). Strach holds a dual appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Hiding Politics in Plain Sight examines the politics of market mechanisms–especially cause marketing–as a strategy for public policy change. Strach shows that market mechanisms, like corporate-sponsored walks or cause-marketing, shift issue definition away from the contentious processes in the political sphere to the market, where advertising campaigns portray complex issues along a single dimension with a straightforward solution: breast cancer research will discover a cure and Americans can support this by purchasing specially-marked products. This market competition privileges even more specialized actors with business connections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, talks about his and Nik Theodore’s new book, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

As you spend more time working in one role, organization, or field, it can become easy to lose perspective on how your work is similar or different from that being done by people in other positions, places, and industries. How are you asked to spend your time? How are you given feedback? How are you evaluated? Do your workplace norms make any sense? What would an outsider say about them? Because so many teachers enter the profession right out of college and either spend their entire careers in schools or leave within a few years, they are not often in the position to hear or offer these kinds of school critiques. In Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Frontline of American Public Education (Sourcebooks, 2013), John Owens describes his frustrations upon leaving the publishing industry after 30 years and pursuing a second career teaching high school English in a New York City public school at the height of the education reform movement. Owens joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @JOwensTeacher. During our conversation, he also recommended the following books: Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and Danger to America’s Public Schools by Diane Ravitch The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why is our criminal justice system so unfair? How do innocent men and women end up serving long sentences while the guilty roam free? According to law professor and scholar Adam Benforado, our systems problems stem from more than occasional bad apples; they start with deeply rooted biases we all hold and which influence the course of justice. Eugenio Duarte sat with him to discuss how these biases shape every step along the way, from how a crime is initially investigated, through the process of indicting and trying suspects, to ultimate determinations of punishment. His revelations, coming from empirical investigations and first-hand experience, are shocking and sobering. He documents them in his new book, Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (Penguin Random House, 2016), and also compels readers to take action to right the wrongs in how we delivery justice. Adam Benforado is Associate Professor of Law at Drexel University. He has published numerous scholarly articles, and his op-eds and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Legal Times. Follow him on Facebook. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology. Many have claimed that we are living in a second Gilded Age, marked by the same extreme wealth and high levels of inequality as the early part of the previous century. Amsterdam takes us back to this time period to investigate how the Gilded Age addressed poverty and the role of the business community. Roaring Metropolis describes the rise of urban capitalists at the turn of the last century. Far from anti-government zealots, Amsterdam shows that business leaders pushed for extensive government spending on social programs. They advocated for public schooling, public health, the construction of libraries, museums, parks, and playgrounds. As Amsterdam demonstrates, public spending soared in American cities, especially Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, during the period due in part to businessmen’s political activism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than they did a few years ago. Others still are learning and assessing in new ways, using different tools, and collaborating with different partners. But in what ways are schools changing the most? What happens when multiple changes occur simultaneously? How can people who have different relationships to schools prepare themselves and support change? In Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Milton Chen draws upon his years of experience using television and the Internet to share educational material in order to explain what schools look like when separate school innovations begin to converge. Chen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @miltonchen2. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll talk with Carrie Booth Walling. I’m teaching a class on the Historical Method this semester. As part of this we’ve talked quite a bit about the question of whether historians have ethical imperatives as part of their writing. As you might expect, the students have disagreed, sometimes emotionally, about this issue. Within the field of genocide studies, this question is considerably less contentious. No one expects to be completely neutral in the face of studying mass atrocities. Each of the books in this occasional series on our response to mass atrocities has examined the topic carefully, thoroughly and objectively. Yet, each has an ethical imperative manifested in a tangible urgency that underlays the careful scholarly analysis. James Waller’s new book Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016) shares this passion. Building on his earlier work, Waller is most interested in how we should respond to genocide and similar crimes. His answer is aimed at academics, but especially at non-specialists. The result is a superb survey of the existing literature on prevention understood broadly. Read in conjunction with Straus and Conley-Zilkic, it reminds us of the importance of acting before crises strike and of recognizing both the opportunities and the limitations of intervention. It’s a must read for anyone interested in the topic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Katherine Turk is assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) explores how women tested the boundaries of work place equality following the passing of the Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The under staffed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was given the task of interpreting the ambiguous meaning of sex equality. Thousands of letters flooded the commission appealing to broader notions of fairness and sexual equality. The ambiguity of the law allowed women to assert expansive interpretations to include safer workplaces, higher wages, flexible schedules, equal pay and comparable worth. The EEOC struggled to apply the law as it dealt with sex-specific protective state laws, industry practices and common sense notions of gender. The backlog of claims pressed the EEOC to narrow the definition of sex equality and turned to statistics in developing cases to be tested in the courts. Turk examines multiple legal cases, union and industry conflicts that shaped the limits of sex equality falling short of fundamental change for working class women. Title VII was a powerful weapon that weakened the sex division of labor but was unable to overturn the white, male, breadwinner standard. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Megan Tompkins-Stange is the author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is assistant professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Who hasn’t applied for a foundation grant? But what do they want out of the funding? In Policy Patrons, we learn quite a bit, especially as it relates to influencing the direction of public policy. Tompkins-Stange’s book explores under-studied area of philanthropic foundations. Relying on extensive original interviews, the book shows how foundations, such as the Gates Foundation and Ford Foundation, vary in style and approach to public policy, and how this relates to the on-going reform of public schools in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international system? Should it continue advancing the world-shaping grand strategy it has followed since the dawn of the Cold War? Or should it “come home” and focus on its internal problems? The recent resurgence of isolationist impulses has made the politics surrounding these questions increasingly bitter. In America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), Stephen G. Brooks (Dartmouth College) and William C. Wohlforth (Dartmouth College) take stock of these debates and provide a powerful defense of American globalism. They stress that world politics since end of World War Two has been shaped by two constants: America’s position as the most powerful state, and its strategic choice to be deeply engaged in the world. Ever since, the US has advanced its interests by pursuing three core objectives: reducing threats by managing the security environment in key regions; promoting a liberal economic order to expand global and domestic prosperity; and sustaining the network of global institutions on terms favorable to US interests. While there have been some periodic policy failures, America’s overall record is astounding. But how would America’s interests fare if the United States chose to disengage from the world and reduce its footprint overseas? Their answer is clear: retrenchment would put core US security and economic interests at risk. And because America’s sole superpower status will long endure, the US will not be forced to turn inward. While America should remain globally engaged, it also has to focus primarily on its core interests: reducing great power rivalry and security competition in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East; fostering economic globalization; and supporting a multilateral institutional system that advances US interests. Pursuing objectives beyond this core runs the risk of overextension. A bracing rejoinder to the critics of American globalism, America Abroad is a powerful reminder that a robust American presence is crucial for maintaining world order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market, corrupt bankers, and severe economic inequality. The comparisons are often too simple, however. In their new book, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015), Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker examine capitalism at the turn of the century, telling a more nuanced story about the cotton market, politics, and regulation. The Cotton Kings examines the ups and downs of the cotton futures market, explaining how cotton brokers were able to keep cotton prices low by controlling information. This enriched the brokers, but impoverished farmers. A small group of brokers in New Orleans successfully cornered the market in the early 1900s, in effect, self-regulating the cotton market and raising prices for years. The Cotton Kings traces the exciting story of this turn of events and explains why such self-regulation was not enough in the long run. Ultimately, The Cotton Kings makes a strong argument in favor of federal regulation to control corruption and help farmers and manufacturers alike. In this episode of the podcast, Hahn and Baker explain this cotton futures market and its ups and downs around the turn-of-the century. They also discuss some of the heroes and dramatic episodes of the historical moment. Finally, they discuss the lessons from that time for our present moment. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the Great Depression and into the war years. By focusing on popular and official narratives, she provides new insights into the questions of masculinity, femininity, gender outsiders, and sexual outcasts, connecting all these categories with federal policies and exploring them in the New Deal context. In this New Books in Gender Study’s podcast we focus exactly on these arguments, discussing further how these analytic categories correlated to each other during the 1930s. Allen argues that cultural representations of gender, sexuality, and race had practical consequences for federal policies, and vice versa. The book is well theoretically informed, based on the variety of sources, but still accessible to read with a lot of examples and compelling stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens, Parker provides an anthropological glimpse into a New York City public school that is considered to be failing. Despite being rooted in a strong theoretical framework, the book should be accessible to anyone interested in education or policy making because of the familiar narrative laid out in a relatable manner. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. With trust in government at all-time lows, what is there to do? Kettl’s book places our current moment into a longer history of bi-partisan commitment to effective government. In Escaping Jurassic Government, he argues that we have lost our commitment to competency, and thus have pulled from the Right and the Left for more or less government, rather than better government. Kettl suggests that there are at least four ways forward; the most optimistic direction focused on a renewed commitment to people and effective government management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was, but I was pretty sure there must be something remarkable about it if ordinary drug fiends were risking jail time and worse by robbing mom-and-pop drug stores to get it. As Sam Quinones explains in his remarkable book Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), the Oxycontin crime wave was an early moment in the emergence of a full-blown Opiate epidemic in the United States. For many young doctors working in “pain management in the 90s and naughts, Oxycontin was remarkable indeed. It gave them just what their predecessors in the eternal fight against pain lacked: a supposedly non-addictive opium-based medication that they could prescribe far and wide without fear of hooking their patients on it. And with all the best intentions, prescribe it far and wide these doctors did. But it wasn’t non-addictive at all; masses of patients become dependent. And not only them. Drug-users learned that “Oxy” afforded a wonderful high, and it became highly coveted “on the street.” The rub was that this new “wonder drug” was either hard to get–unless you had access to a “Pill Mill”–and/or very expensive. So Oxycontin addicts got desperate. Some, like the ones the press was screaming about in Boston, stole the drug from the local CVS and the like. Most, however, turned to an old drug that was easier to get and cheaper: Black Tar Heroin from Mexico. In the wake of Oxycontin, Black Tar spread from the Southwest across much of the U.S., even to places like Western Massachusetts, where I live now and the heroin epidemic is in full, tragic swing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University and faculty fellow at the Watson Institute. How do sub-units of government meet the everyday needs of their residents? Do they vary in how well they provide basic health and education services? Singhs book makes a novel argument about these questions with extensive original data collection. How Solidarity Works suggests that sub-national units, states and provinces, can develop solidarity between residents. When this solidarity is high it is associated with developing strong regimes of social welfare programs. Conversely, when sub-national solidarity is low, there is little basis around which to provide for those in greatest need. This intricately argued book marshals an enormous amount of original information about several states in India. The empirical findings and larger theoretical argument are remarkable and worthy of replication outside of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It can be tempting to generalize certain attributes of schools as either being good or bad. Magnet and charter schools are often characterized as being inherently good. They usually offer special programs that ground all of their instruction. Having that choice is appealing to many families, and why not? Someone must have put a lot of thought into creating that special program, convincing stakeholders to open a school, and persuading teachers to build their curriculum around the program often times forgoing a higher salary at another school. With the neighborhood school, it seems like had to be there, and there is not anything special” about it that ties it together, except maybe geography. How is it supposed to compete with International Baccalaureate or STEM or performing arts? These things seem to give school a purpose. But what if the special program is something unexpected, perhaps something with a bit more baggage? How do geography, industry, and what our society expects from students influence the special programs made available to them? Are there any school lotteries you would think twice about before entering your child? In A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Nicole Nguyen, provides an ethnography of a public high school that responded to calls for reform by adopting homeland security as its primary focus and lens for all other classes. She explores the history of militarization in schools, its impact on students, and the intersection of ethics and personal politics. Nguyen joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with her via email at [email protected]. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Whatever your role — teacher, principal, or superintendent — when you work in a school system, you experience tensions between your reasons for going into education and how you actually spend your time in schools. You might be driven to support student-directed learning, coach new teachers, or initiate portfolio assessment, but you continually find yourself called away from those drivers. Instead, you have to assume some other responsibility that you may not see as essential but has gradually taken up more your time sometimes without explanation. How do we change institutions, like schools, to ensure that we are focused on our actual priorities? How do we jumpstart uncomfortable conversations? What can we learn from schools that were willing to totally rethink how they do things? In #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education (Jossey-Bass, 2014), Grant Lichtman shares reflections following his three-month road trip across the country to visit schools and discuss innovation with stakeholders inside and outside the classroom. Lichtman joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @GrantLichtman. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades. When we ask students how they are doing in reading, we do not expect them to actually read to us or share their thoughts on a recent books they have finished. We expect to learn them to tell us a reading level or point to wherever they are on a rubric. But what does that mean? Have we lost sight of the actual value of the things we are attempting to measure and quantify? What if we looked at school work the way we attend practices, games, and recitals? In Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment (Theory and Practice, 2014), Matt Renwick, outlines the rationale for portfolio work in the twenty first century, including how portfolios can motivate and empower students, provide evidence for report cards and school conferences, guide the instruction of teachers, and share school language with families. Renwick joins New Books in Education for the Interview. You can find more information about his work on his blog. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @ReadByExample. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twentieth century school reform debates according to Campbell F. Scribner of the University of Maryland-College Park, who has a new book on the topic, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2016). The Fight for Local Control discusses rural struggles for local control of school districts in this earlier period, mostly in the North, and their connection to the later suburban/urban battles. Rural resistance to the closing of one-room schools and the consolidation of small school districts provided a language and model that was then used by suburban communities to fight urban, state, and federal regulation of their schools, including the famously contentious fights over integration in the form of busing. The book also examines how conservatives later abandoned local control arguments in favor of individual choice policies. In this episode of the podcast, Scribner discusses how he got into the topic and the main insights of the book. He tells us about the regional differences in school systems and education politics. He explains some of the virtues and pitfalls of local control arguments and how his book might inform our thinking about current education politics. Finally, he also talks about doing research on rural schools with sparse, decentralized records. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultural historian, tracking the correlation between a growing American image consciousness and the rise of laws, such as the tort of invasion of privacy and damages for emotional distress, which enabled individuals to control and defend their public persona. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The school structures we present to teachers can sometimes resemble two extremes. In the first set of circumstances, teachers have enormous autonomy over what they teach, when they teach it, and how they teach it. In the second, they have almost no choices whatsoever. The texts are all provided, along with the objectives, the script, and the pacing guide. I am not sure that either of these working conditions are sustainable longterm. Obviously, no one enjoys being told exactly what to do. It conveys a lack of trust and respect. But it is an awesome responsibility to be told that everything is up to you. When we live in a culture that continually reinforces the idea that the longterm success of every student is tied to a single teacher’s priorities, words, and actions, this is a recipe for burnout. Are there practices that provide room for creativity without placing an unreasonable burden on individual teachers? How might teachers’ aims inform their choices? How can all teachers facilitate deeper learning in a sustainable way? In Learning That Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction (Jossey-Bass, 2016) Ron Berger and co-authors, Libby Woodfin and Anne Vilen, outline instructional moves, lesson structures, and discussion protocols that ask more from students and work in a variety of teaching contexts. Woodfin joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about her work with Expeditionary Learning on its website. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

As evidenced by many of the conversations featured on this podcast, scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands composes a significant and influential genre within the field of U.S. Western History and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies. Geographically rooted in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, or Greater Mexico, publications in this subfield explore a broad range of themes including: migration and labor, citizenship and race, culture and identity formation, gender and sexuality, politics and social justice, just to name a few. This episode features a conversation with two historians of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Kelly Lytle Hernandez, author of Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (UC Press, 2010), and John Mckiernan Gonzalez, author of Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942 (Duke University Press, 2012). My discussion with Kelly and John focuses on their exemplary scholarship to explore how historians conceptualize, investigate, and explain the history of the U.S.-Mexico Border region. In particular, we discuss how the U.S.-Mexico border exists in the minds of policy makers, bureaucrats, low level officials, businessmen and the public at large, as more than a fixed political boundary. Indeed, competing notions of who and what the border is supposed to control has historically shaped ideas about race, public policy, and law enforcement practices throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region. In addition to their existing work, we discuss their forthcoming publications which signal exciting new directions in the field of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies and U.S. History in general. This conversation was recorded during a session of the 109th annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association held earlier this month in Kona, Hawaii. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. What is missing from the explanation of Donald Trump’s rise and the politics of this year’s presidential campaign? Jason Stahl suggests that part of what is missing is a better appreciation of the politics of conservative of ideas over the last seventy years. In his book, he traces the evolution of conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, from small upstarts with little power to major players in national policy making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016). Roth is a national reporter for MSNBC. Next, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is the author of Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State (Carolina Academic Press, 2016). She is an associate professor of law at Stetson University College of Law and a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The two books look at the state of the democracy, Roth from the perspective of a reporter covering voting rights issues in state and local government, and Torres-Spelliscy from the perspective of the constitution. Together, these two books address whether corporate power has grown too strong and whether reforms can shift the balance of power in U.S. politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies.” This is true, but tends to understate the force of the arguments being put forward here. Ingrid Piller presents a powerful case for how language is variously overlooked or misunderstood as a factor that entrenches disadvantage and inequality in a globalized society. She argues that discrimination based on language persists, often justified by appeal to the false premise that individuals exercise complete control over their own linguistic repertoires, and reinforced by tacit assumptions embedded in our cultural practices. In this interview, we talk about some of the relevant domains, and ask how a better-informed approach to linguistic diversity can potentially help in addressing persistent forms of social injustice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Eric Schickler is the author of Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 (Princeton University Press, 2016). Schickler is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Much scholarship on the racial realignment of U.S. political parties argues for an elite based explanation focused on Washington and national figures. Schickler’s new book challenges this notion with a deep-dive into the archives. He argues that rather than a top-down explanation, party realignment happened from the bottom-up. He credits the long history of the Civil Rights movement, emergence of new players in organized labor, and state and local forces. Realignment, then, is a gradual process that occurred over decades, rather than primarily in the 1960s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor are the editors of Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016). Mollenkopf is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity, Director, USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, and Director, USC Center for the Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California. Much research on immigrant integration has focused on urban settings. In Unsettled Americans, Mollenkopf and Pastor offer a novel collection of comparative studies of immigrant incorporation at the metropolitan level. The book focuses on the reception of immigrants in seven different metro areas, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as Charlotte, Phoenix, San Jose, and California’s “Inland Empire.” The chapter authors also link their findings to new research on regional governance and on spatial variations within metropolitan areas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Robert Boatright, associate professor of political science at Clark University, is the editor of The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Campaign finance reform has been a salient topic during this year’s presidential campaign. Everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton has offered opinions on how the money in political campaigns might be better regulated. This attention can be tracked to the most recent unraveling of existing federal regulations by the Supreme Court in a series of decisions, most famously Citizens United. But how does this U.S. story fit into a larger comparative policy environment? Boatright has edited a collection of perspectives drawn from a variety of national contexts, including Canada, Germany, and Australia. The volume shows the extent to which outside of the U.S., we are living through a deregulatory moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

William Resh is the author of Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Resh is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. With a presidential transition looming, attention will soon be drawn to the enormous task of appointing officials to hundreds of federal positions. How those newcomers will interact with long-standing careerists in government is the subject of Resh’s book. Using innovative data collection, he answers a variety of questions that public administration scholars have long pondered. Does trust matter in government? How do appointees and careerists interact? Does this matter for agency performance? Resh offers empirical answers to these seminal questions in the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Lance deHaven-Smith‘s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2014) investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct articulated in the Declaration of Independence has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition. Lance deHaven-Smith reveals that the term “conspiracy theory” entered the American lexicon of political speech to deflect criticism of the Warren Commission and traces it back to a CIA propaganda campaign to discredit doubters of the commissions report. For this NBN interview, Lance and Jasun discuss the book and the wider implications of what Lance calls State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD), cultural engineering, and how, when the ruling elite move, they create their own reality. Lance deHaven-Smith is Professor in the Reubin O’D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. A former President of the Florida Political Science Association, deHaven-Smith is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Battle for Florida, which analyzes the disputed 2000 presidential election. Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on “extra-consensual perceptions.” He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But additionally there are epistemological questions about these communities. Though frequently dismissed as simply ignorant, misinformed, or superstitious, it turns out that vaccine suspicion, denial, and refusal are positively correlated with higher levels of education, and greater depth of knowledge about vaccine science. Accordingly, the common view that vaccine refusal is the product of ignorance seems simplistic. Yet the more strident forms of vaccine refusal are based in demonstrably false beliefs. How is this best explained? In Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care (Routledge 2016) Mark Navin offers a balanced examination of the epistemology and value commitments of various stripes of vaccine refusal. After arguing that vaccine refusers may be reasonable, he defends a novel version of the view that there is a moral requirement to vaccinate one’s children. He then defends the claim that the State may use coercive means to enhance vaccination, but Navin makes room for exemptions for non-medical reasons. Navin’s book is a fascinating philosophical exploration of some very deep questions at the intersection of social epistemology and social ethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The application of behavioral science inside government has gained steam over the past few years with the creation of so-called “Nudge units” popping up in countries around the world. Their goals are simple: Use the lessons of behavioral science to make government work better. The Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom and the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences team in the U.S. Canada has a team now. Australia. Singapore. All the Scandinavian countries. Behavioral science teams now have a bit of buzz. Before this buzz, there was BIAS – the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, the first major opportunity to apply a behavioral science lens to programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States. The project, which began in 2010 funded through the Administration of Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, sought to apply behavioral insights to issues related to the design and implementation of social service programs and policies with a goal of learn how such tools could be used to improve the well-being of low-income children, adults, and families. The non-profit education and social policy organization MDRC led the project. (Disclosure: I worked on BIAS in 2010-2011 at one of the partner organizations, ideas42, also participating.) Traditionally, many social programs were designed in ways that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them. They must decide which programs to apply to or participate in, complete forms, attend meetings, show proof of eligibility, and arrange travel and child care. Program designers have often assumed that individuals will carefully consider options, analyze details, and make decisions that maximize their well-being. BIAS drew heavily from that past three decades of research in the behavioral sciences showing that human decision making is often imperfect and imprecise. People clients and program administrators alike procrastinate, get overwhelmed by choices, miss details, lose their self-control, rely on mental shortcuts, and permit small changes in the environment to influence their decisions. As a result, programs and participants may not always achieve the goals they set for themselves. Working through ACF programs, the BIAS team designed and tested 15 behaviorally-informed interventions in seven states involving nearly 100,000 people. Many of the interventions involved a redesign of communications materials. Projects ranged from increasing child support collections, to improving child care recertification processes, to changing messaging around TANF participation. Along the way, BIAS researchers published a series of reports laying out not just which designs worked and didn’t, but how they went about implementing the designs in difficult bureaucratic and technological environments and when they faced challenges that altered their work. A final report is due out later this year. Of the 15 interventions, 11 showed positive signs of impact, making the overall project today one proof point among a growing number about the promise of applying insights from behavioral science to make government work better. John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

For all that has been written about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many misconceptions about the man and his achievements continue to persist. Roger Daniels seeks to correct these in a new two-volume biography of the 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945 (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Drawing upon Roosevelt’s speeches, press conferences, and other statements, Daniels argues that Roosevelt was not the second-class intellect deemed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. but a person of considerable intellectual ability who possessed a mastery of not just politics but administration as well. When it came to formulating both domestic and foreign policy Daniels credits Roosevelt as being oriented towards the future in ways unlike many of his contemporaries. This emphasis plays a role in shaping national policy not just on the prominent issues such as the role of the government in the economy but on questions of race and immigration as well, both of which undergo slow but significant shifts during his presidency. The looming threat of war in Europe widened Roosevelt’s scope, and Americas entry into the struggle in 1941 brought with it the opportunity to establish the mechanisms to avoid such global conflicts from happening again. It is thanks to Roosevelt’s focus and his determination to realize his vision, Daniels concludes, that establishes the saliency of his presidency for us today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Daniel E. Dawes has written 150 Years of ObamaCare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Dawes is the executive director of health policy and external affairs at Morehouse School of Medicine and a lecturer within Morehouse’s Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine. In 150 Years of ObamaCare, Dawes tells the long and often forgotten history of the nearly two century fight for health care equity that culminated in the passage of the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare. He draws on his role as a leader in a large coalition of organizations that helped shape ObamaCare, revealing what went on behind the scenes. He illustrates this with copies of letters and e-mails written by those who worked to craft and pass the law. Ultimately, Dawes argues that ObamaCare is much more comprehensive in the historical context of previous reform efforts that go back to the Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Many of us are familiar with the court-mandated bussing programs created in an effort to achieve school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. Far fewer of us realize there were also voluntary transfer programs that were crafted in out-of-court settlements in the decades that followed. For example, as part of the Canford Program, wealthy districts like those in Arbor Town accept between 6-60 students from nearby South Bay City, where resources are more scarce. These children who win the lottery have access to all of the same teachers, facilities, and curricular materials as the students living in the surrounding neighborhoods. Still, their experiences are far from the same. Canford students ride the bus each morning. Their trips are long and chaotic, and as a result, they often arrive late, hungry, or unsettled. These students must quickly transition into routines that fail to take this reality into account, and issues of equity quickly arise. Do the benefits of such a program exceed its costs? How might such a program be redesigned? To what extent is the bus (or recess) part of school anyway? In The Bus Kids: Children’s Experiences with Voluntary Desegregation (Yale University Press, 2009), Ira Lit, recounts the experiences of small children participating in an inter-district transfer program designed to allow students living in a low-income community to attend better-resourced schools in other nearby towns. Lit joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can find more information about his work with the Stanford Teacher Education Program on its website.To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him via email at [email protected]. You can reach the host on Twitter at @tsmattea. Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as the Trente glorieuses. Rudolph’s emphasis is on French designs and experiences of dwelling, and the interior spaces of French homes in particular. The book argues that housing was essential to the modernizing project that French society engaged in during these years, a vital site of reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War, and a key locus of nation-building and democratization. In this period, the French state actively pursued policies that sought to guarantee its citizens the right to safe, hygienic, and comfortable homes that would nurture individual happiness while helping to strengthen families as the building blocks of a thriving society. From the creation of a Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in 1945, to the housing crisis of 1953, to the yearly Salon des arts menagers promoting new household methods and technologies, to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, At Home in Postwar France examines the class, gender, and design ideals and tensions of a France in the throes of major transformations on multiple fronts. Pursuing the diffusion, mediation, and reception of the new housing forms that developed in the period, the book considers the contributions of state officials, architects and designers, and proponents of domestic economy and organization in France. It also examines the reactions of the residents and social commentators who felt and evaluated the impact of these forms. At Home in Postwar France explores a range of hopes and dreams for modern French living spaces, thinking through a variety of new approaches to housing on a mass scale. Taking on the complicated relationship between home and citizenship in postwar France, the book offers readers new perspective on how French women and men dwelt and thought about dwelling during this critical period in the nations history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy