Led by Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party made the 1912 campaign a passionate contest for the soul of the American people. Promoting an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reform-"New Nationalism"-that posed profound challenges to constitutional government, TR and his Progressive supporters provoked an extraordinary debate about the future of the country. Sidney Milkis revisits this emotionally charged contest to show how a party seemingly consumed by its leader's ambition dominated the election and left an enduring legacy that set in motion the rise of mass democracy and the expansion of national administrative power. Milkis depicts the Progressive Party as a collective enterprise of activists, spearheaded by TR, who pursued a program of reform dedicated to direct democracy and social justice and a balance between rights and civic duty. These reformers hoped to create a new concept of citizenship that would fulfill the lofty aspirations of "we the people" in a quest for a "more perfect union"-a quest hampered by fierce infighting over civil rights and antitrust policy. Milkis shows that the Progressive campaign aroused not just an important debate over reforms but also a battle for the very meaning of Progressivism. He describes how Roosevelt gave focus to the party with his dedication to "pure democracy"-even shoehorning judicial recall into his professed "true conservative" stance. Although this pledge to make the American people "masters of their Constitution" provoked considerable controversy, Milkis contends that the Progressives were not all that far removed from the more nationally minded of the Founders. As Milkis reveals, the party's faith in a more plebiscitary form of democracy would ultimately rob it of the very organization it needed in order to survive after Roosevelt. Yet the Progressive Party's program of social reform and "direct democracy" has reverberated through American politics-especially in 2008, with Barack Obama appealing to similar instincts. By probing the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in American politics, his book shows that Progressivism continues to shape American politics a century later.

Product Description: The long era of liberal reform that began with the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century and continued with the New Deal, culminated in the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Inspired by the example of his mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson sought to extend the agenda of the New Deal beyond the realm of economic security to civil rights, housing, education, and health care...read more

Product Description: This exciting, concise new text takes a unique political development approach to American government courses. Written by two pre-eminent scholars of American political development, Marc Landy and Sid Milkis, the text explores American government as an entity that evolves through the debates that have occurred in American politics and political culture over time...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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A look at the presidents of the United States describes the truly great presidents that have served: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR, as well as discussing what makes a truly great president.

Product Description: The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of political parties, yet parties began to form shortly after its ratification. Today, American democracy would not work without them. In Political Parties and Constitutional Government, Sidney Milkis explores the uneasy relationship between the Constitution and the party system to advance a novel argument: political parties arose as part of a deliberate program of constitutional reform...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Progressive era has long been viewed as the seedbed of the modern American state, a time when a powerful reformist impulse reshaped the nation's political life in what some have called a "second founding." Driven by a belief in executive-centered government yet devoted to the ideal of participatory democracy, Progressives sought to create self-rule on a grand scale and break the hold of localist parties and courts that had dominated American politics for decades...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Now in a new edition, The American Presidency -- winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for History, Politics and Philosophy -- examines both the constitutional precepts that underlie the presidency and the social, economic, political, and international conditions that continue to shape it...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The past three decades have brought remarkable change in American regulatory politics. The re-emergence of public interest movements in the sixties and seventies raised fundamental questions about our market economy and dramatically expanded the government's regulatory role in the protection of public health, the consumer, and the environment. The far-reaching effects of this new regulatory regime in turn precipitated a counter-movement to restrict social and economic regulation spearheaded by the Reagan administration. In their first edition of The Politics of Regulatory Change, Richard Harris and Sidney Milkis assessed the long-term consequences of the Reagan administration's attempt to drastically curtail social regulation through an in-depth study of how two of the most influential regulatory agencies, the Federal Trade Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, were affected by administration reforms. Now with their second edition, Harris and Milkis continue their assessment, creating a completely revised edition that includes coverage of the changes in regulatory politics during the Bush and Clinton administrations. They conclude that the essential elements of the 'public lobby regime' remain intact, even as the successive deregulatory assaults on that regime in the 1980's and 1990's have polarized Washington not simply over public policy but more fundamentally over the just ends of the American political system.

Product Description: Book by Milkis, Sidney M., Nelson, Michael