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In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched,Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

The principles of trade unionism are based on working people acting together in solidarity with each other, to improve wages, working conditions, and life for themselves and all others. In its most developed forms, this extends not only to the worker next to you, but to working people all around the world, wherever they might be. Some of the foremost proponents of these principles in the United States since the 1880s has been the American Federation of Labor (AFL), then later the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and since their merger in 1955, the AFL-CIO. However, unknown to many labor leaders and most union members in the U.S., the foreign policy leaders of the AFL and then the AFL-CIO, have been carrying out an international foreign policy that has worked against workers in a number of \"developing countries.\" This has been done on their own, and in collaboration with the U.S. Government and its agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee for Labor and Diplomacy. In the post-World War II period, this foreign policy program has led to the AFL-CIO's foreign policy leadership helping to overthrow democratically elected governments—Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973); to support dictatorships in countries such as Guatemala, Brazil and Chile (after their respective military coups), as well as in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea; and to support efforts by reactionary labor leaders to help overthrow their democratically-elected leaders as in Venezuela in 2002. It has also included providing AFL-CIO support for U.S. Government policies around the world, including support for apartheid in South Africa. This book argues that these activities—done behind the backs and without the informed knowledge of American trade unionists—acts to sabotage the very principles of trade unionism that these leaders proclaim to

One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20, 000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL's experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor's Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.

01 02 The significance of international organisations as historical actors is one of the least researched aspects 20th century history. Daniel Maul's study of the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) during the core phase of decolonization (1940 to 1970) opens up new perspectives on the topic. Clearly presented, methodologically innovative and based on a wide range of sources, Maul explores makes clear the multifarious ways in which the ILO contributed to the debates which accompanied the dissolution of the European colonial empires and the processes of post-colonial nation-building that followed, both as a political hub and a forum for debate and as an independent actor. Maul takes an innovative look at the history of decolonization, post-colonial nation-building and the enduringly relevant international human rights and development discourses that these processes spawned. 02 02 An innovative diplomatic and intellectual history of decolonization, post-colonial nation building and international human rights and development discourses, this study of the role of the ILO during 1940–70 opens up new perspectives on the significance of international organisations as actors in the history of the 20th century. 19 02 One of the first books to explore the role of an international organization's secretariats in world politics on an empirical basis Contextualizes the history of the ILO within global debates Opens up new perspectives on the history of decolonization, Important new insights into the development of human rights discourses 13 02 DANIEL ROGER MAUL Lecturer in the Department of History, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, and has published widely on the history of globalization and international organizations. He is currently working on a history of international relief in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 08 02 'Abreak-through in historical scholarship on international politics in the twentieth century in general and on the role of international organizations, human rights and development in particular. It is immensely gratifying to see this excellent book appear in English translation, which makes it available to the large international audience it deserves. A carefully crafted, well-written study, the book will become a standard work for scholars and students in history, political science, human rights and development studies.' - Corinna R. Unger, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany 'This excellent book offers fresh insights into the complex field of international social policy. After difficult beginnings the International Labour Organization became 'a world en miniature', within which a new state order with new nations and new ideas, hopes, and claims for freedom and human rights emerged in the decades after World War II. The ILO shaped the process of decolonization in manifold ways and, as Daniel Maul shows on the basis of much new evidence, helped to establish a discourse of global responsibility.' -Andreas Eckert, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Germany 'This is a rich history for scholars of human rights, international organizations, and development, tightly focused on the ILO but not trapped in the halls of its secretariat.' - Roland Burke, La Trobe University, American Historical Review 04 02 List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Timeline Introduction PART I: 'A PEOPLE'S PEACE IN THE COLONIES', 1940–47 'The promise of a new earth to till': The ILO's Colonial Work in Exile, 1940–43 A Charter for the Colonies: The Colonies at the Philadelphia Conference, 1944 A New World With New Ideas: The ILO and the Quest for a Colonial Post-war Order, 1945–48 PART II: THE TOOLS OF PROGRESS: THE ILO, 1948–60 Principled Development: The Beginnings of the Technical Assistance Programme (TAP) At Arm's Length: The ILO and Late Colonial Social Policy Universal Rights? Standard-setting Against the Backdrop of Late Colonialism, Decolonization and the Cold War PART III: A GROWING CONFLICT: DEVELOPMENT, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DECOLONIZATION, 1960–70 A New Power: The ILO and the Growing Importance of the Developing World in the 1960s An Intellectual Fashion: Human Rights Standards as a Barrier to Development? Conclusion Appendix I: Selection of Important Conventions and Recommendations, 1930–70 Appendix II: Ratification of Core Human Rights Standards by Country and Date of Ratification (Selection) Sources and Bibliography Index 31 02 A history of the role of the ILO in the period of decolonization and post-colonial nation building and its contribution to international human rights and development discourses

Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.

In war powers analysis, reliance on the interpretive method of historical practice, also called the \"gloss of history,\" has made history a technology of the forever war. This approach draws upon the history of U.S. military conflict to interpret the scope of presidential war power and embeds past actions into the separation of powers. There is a crucial flaw in this methodology, however. The understanding of history in historical gloss is not informed by the changing historiography of war. This has led to a divergence between the \"history\" in legal authority and the revised historical understanding in scholarly works of history. Whereas lessons of history in other contexts often serve as levers for reexamination of government action, in gloss-of-history analysis the past instead serves to legitimate settled practices. The consequence is that presidential overreach is not recognized and corrected, but instead built into the doctrine of expanding unilateral power. This Article is the first to examine how static ideas about history in legal analysis have aggrandized presidential war power. It analyzes the most important example of this: President Harry S. Truman's unilateral actions in the Korean War and subsequent reliance on his example in executive branch legal opinions. The war is a principal precedent supporting the idea that presidents may use substantial military force without congressional authorization. This has legitimated unilateralism in less massive wars, and since that time all U.S. uses of military force have been in conflicts smaller than Korea, with the exception of the war in Vietnam. Decades of historical scholarship, however, have shown that Truman misunderstood the nature of the conflict and disregarded Congress's role, and that his advisors failed to seriously consider Congress's war authorization power until after force was deployed. Historians have also shown the devastating costs of war for Koreans, whose experience is not centered in the U.S. war powers literature. Historical revision did not prompt legal reconsideration, however. Instead, the Korean War is calcified as a significant precedent supporting executive unilateralism, undermining democratic limits, and enabling ongoing war. The Article argues that gloss of history analysis must be dynamic, attentive to the way understandings of the past change over time. An approach to gloss informed by historical revision could reassert history's role as a critical perspective on law.

Since the mid-twentieth century, elite political behavior in the United States has become much more nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become more one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing literature finds that citizens have only weakly and belatedly mimicked elite trends. We show, however, that a different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens, but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using biennial estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat and Republican in each state over the past six decades, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (3) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress. Overall, our findings contradict the reigning consensus that polarization in Congress has proceeded much more rapidly and extensively than polarization in the mass public.

It has been claimed and disputed that World War II has been followed by a ‘long peace’: an unprecedented decline of war. We conduct a full change point analysis of welldocumented, publicly available battle deaths data sets, using new techniques that enable the robust detection of changes in the statistical properties of such heavy-tailed data. We first test and calibrate these techniques. We then demonstrate the existence of changes, independent of data presentation, in the early to mid-19th century, as the Congress of Vienna system moved towards its collapse, in the early to mid-20th century, bracketing the World Wars, and in the late 20th century, as the world reconfigured around the end of the Cold War. Our analysis provides a methodology for future investigations and an empirical basis for political and historical discussions.

The dynamics of international relations in Asia are undergoing broad and fundamental changes that are reverberating around the world. Primary among the catalysts of change in the region is the rise of China as the engine of regional economic growth, as a major military power, as a significant voice in regional diplomacy, and as a proactive power in multilateral institutions. With in-depth assessments by seventeen of the world’s leading experts on China’s foreign relations, this groundbreaking volume offers the most timely, up-to-date, and comprehensive analysis of China’s emerging influence on international relations in Asia. The contributors explore the various dimensions of China’s rise, its influence on the region, the consequences for the United States, and alternative models of the evolving Asian order. What emerges is a clear picture of China increasingly at the center of the regional web; while North Korean and Taiwan could erupt in conflict, the predominant trend in Asia is the creation of an extensive web of mutual interdependence among states and non-state actors. Providing the best overview we currently have of the changing political balance on the Asian continent, this accessible volume will be essential reading for anyone concerned with contemporary Asian affairs.