Product Description: A full understanding of the institution of the American presidency requires us to examine how it developed from the founding to the present. This developmental lens, analyzing how historical turns have shaped the modern institution, allows for a richer, more nuanced understanding beyond the current newspaper headlines...read more

Product Description: As Americans, we cherish the freedom to associate. However, with the freedom to associate comes the right to exclude those who do not share our values and goals. What happens when the freedom of association collides with the equally cherished principle that every individual should be free from invidious discrimination? This is precisely the question posed in Boy Scouts of America v...read more

Product Description: The study of the presidencythe power of the office, the evolution of the executive as an institution, the men who have servedhas generated a great body of research and scholarship.What better way to get students to grapple with the ideas of the literature than through conflicting perspectives on some of the most pivotal issues facing the modern presidency? Richard Ellis and Michael Nelson have once again assembled a cadre of top scholars to offer a series of pro/con essays that will inspire spirited debate beyond the pages of the book...read more

George W. Bush's presidency has helped accelerate a renewed interest in the legal or formal bases of presidential power. It is now abundantly clear that presidential power is more than the sum of bargaining, character, and rhetoric. Presidential power also inheres in the Constitution or at least assertions of constitutional powers. Judging Executive Power helps to bring the Constitution and the courts back into the study of the American presidency by introducing students to sixteen important Supreme Court cases that have shaped the power of the American presidency. The cases selected include the removal power, executive privilege, executive immunity, and the line-item veto, with particularly emphasis on a president's wartime powers from the Civil War to the War on Terror. Through introductions and postscripts that accompany each case, landmark judicial opinions are placed in their political and historical contexts, enabling students to understand the political forces that frame and the political consequences that follow from legal arguments and judgments.

Product Description: In office less than half a year, President George Washington undertook an arduous month-long tour of New England to promote his new government and to dispel fears of monarchy. More than two hundred years later, American presidents still regularly traverse the country to advance their political goals and demonstrate their connection to the people...read more

Product Description: For over one hundred years, it has been deeply ingrained in American culture. Saluting the flag in public schools began as part of a national effort to Americanize immigrants, its final six words imbuing it with universal hope and breathtaking power...read more

Why do people who identify themselves as liberal or egalitarian sometimes embrace intolerance or even preach violence? Illiberalism has come to be expected of the right in this country; its occurrence on the left is more paradoxical but no less real. In this book, Richard J. Ellis examines the illiberal tendencies that have characterized egalitarian movements throughout American history, from the radical abolitionists of the 1850s to the New Left activists of the 1960s. He also takes on contemporary radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and radical environmental groups like Earth First to show that, even today, many of the American Left's sacred cows have cloven hooves. He explains how orthodoxy arises within a group from the need to maintain distance from a society it views as hopelessly corrupt, and how individuals committed to egalitarian causes are particularly susceptible to illiberalism -- even poets like Walt Whitman, who celebrated the common people but often expressed contempt for their mundane lives. Political correctness, idealizing the oppressed, and an affinity for authoritarian and charismatic leaders are all parts of what Ellis calls 'the dark side of the left.' (view table of contents)

Product Description: Americans today expect their president to speak directly to them on the issues of the day -- to address their concerns, to ask for their support, even to feel their pain. Yet, as the essays in this volume make clear, this was not always the case...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Designed to offer an empirical counterpart to "Cultural Theory", by Michael Thompson, Richard J. Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky, this work applies the theoretical concepts of that 1990 publication to key areas in methodology, public policy and history...read more