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How does the American public formulate its opinions about U.S. foreign policy and military engagement abroad?War Storiesargues that the media systematically distort the information the public vitally needs to determine whether to support such initiatives, for reasons having more to do with journalists' professional interests than the merits of the policies, and that this has significant consequences for national security. Matthew Baum and Tim Groeling develop a \"strategic bias\" theory that explains the foreign-policy communication process as a three-way interaction among the press, political elites, and the public, each of which has distinct interests, biases, and incentives. Do media representations affect public support for the president and faithfully reflect events in times of diplomatic crisis and war? How do new media--especially Internet news and more partisan outlets--shape public opinion, and how will they alter future conflicts? In answering such questions, Baum and Groeling take an in-depth look at media coverage, elite rhetoric, and public opinion during the Iraq war and other U.S. conflicts abroad. They trace how traditional and new media select stories, how elites frame and sometimes even distort events, and how these dynamics shape public opinion over the course of a conflict. Most of us learn virtually everything we know about foreign policy from media reporting of elite opinions. InWar Stories, Baum and Groeling reveal precisely what this means for the future of American foreign policy.

In the decade before the Civil War, Northern Democrats, although they ostensibly represented antislavery and free-state constituencies, made possible the passage of such proslavery legislation as the Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Law of the same year, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Lecompton Constitution of 1858. InNorthern Men with Southern Loyalties, Michael Todd Landis forcefully contends that a full understanding of the Civil War and its causes is impossible without a careful examination of Northern Democrats and their proslavery sentiments and activities. He focuses on a variety of key Democratic politicians, such as Stephen Douglas, William Marcy, and Jesse Bright, to unravel the puzzle of Northern Democratic political allegiance to the South. As congressmen, state party bosses, convention wire-pullers, cabinet officials, and presidents, these men produced the legislation and policies that led to the fragmentation of the party and catastrophic disunion. Through a careful examination of correspondence, speeches, public and private utterances, memoirs, and personal anecdotes, Landis lays bare the desires and designs of Northern Democrats. He ventures into the complex realm of state politics and party mechanics, drawing connections between national events and district and state activity as well as between partisan dynamics and national policy. Northern Democrats had to walk a perilously thin line between loyalty to the Southern party leaders and answering to their free-state constituents. If Northern Democrats sought high office, they would have to cater to the \"Slave Power.\" Yet, if they hoped for election at home, they had to convince voters that they were not mere lackeys of the Southern grandees.

Generations of Americans have debated the meaning of Abraham Lincoln's views on race and slavery. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and supported a constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery, yet he also harbored grave doubts about the intellectual capacity of African Americans, publicly used the n-word until at least 1862, and favored permanent racial segregation. In this book--the first complete collection of Lincoln's important writings on both race and slavery--readers can explore these contradictions through Lincoln's own words. Acclaimed Harvard scholar and documentary filmmaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents the full range of Lincoln's views, gathered from his private letters, speeches, official documents, and even race jokes, arranged chronologically from the late 1830s to the 1860s. Complete with definitive texts, rich historical notes, and an original introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this book charts the progress of a war within Lincoln himself. We witness his struggles with conflicting aims and ideas--a hatred of slavery and a belief in the political equality of all men, but also anti-black prejudices and a determination to preserve the Union even at the cost of preserving slavery. We also watch the evolution of his racial views, especially in reaction to the heroic fighting of black Union troops. At turns inspiring and disturbing,Lincoln on Race and Slaveryis indispensable for understanding what Lincoln's views meant for his generation--and what they mean for our own.

It is known that the US economy has grown faster during Democrat presidencies, but the Democrat-Republican presidential GDP growth gap cannot be attributed fully to policy differences, nor did Democrat presidents happen to benefit systematically from more favorable external shocks. The question why thus remains open. We postulate that, if the effect is real, a Democratic Party performance advantage should be present with respect to measures of political control other than just the presidency. We investigate partisan control of US state governments and show that national GDP grew faster when more states had Democrat governors and Democrat-majority state legislatures: a one-standard-deviation increase in the share of governorships controlled by the Democratic Party (unified Democrat state governments) is associated with a 0.57-percentage-point (0.77-percentage-point) increase in the real US national GDP growth rate. The effect appears to occur on top of the presidential D-R growth gap, suggesting that the Democrat growth advantage may be a more generalized phenomenon. To investigate whether the effects are explained by state-level policy differences, we adopt an encompassing measure of a state’s policy priorities—state policy liberalism (in the modern, popular sense rather than the classical sense). Nevertheless, our findings are not explained by state policy liberalism. That result echoes the puzzle at the national level that key national policy differences cannot account for the presidential growth gap.

American democracy is at an inflection point.With voting rights challenged, election results undermined, and even the US Capitol violently attacked, many Americans feel powerless to save their nation's democratic institutions from the forces dismantling them.

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. In his other acclaimed books about the American presidency, Fred Greenstein assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. Here, he evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. Using his trademark no-nonsense approach, Greenstein looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, he provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Greenstein sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. Presidents and the Dissolution of the Unionreveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times--and what caused others to fail.

This article examines the debate in the Italian Catholic world which erupted during the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967. At the time, Italy was governed by the Christian Democrats, a Catholic-based party in a center-left coalition and the Italian electorate leaned heavily towards Israel, as newspapers, magazines and many politicians feared a possible resurgent genocide against the Jews. Only a few important but minority public figures took radically different positions: Foreign Minister Amintore Fanfani and, more moderately, Prime Minister Aldo Moro together with their allies in the party. After the end of the war, many Italian Catholics changed their minds: Israel no longer risked \"a new holocaust,\" and the tragedy of the Palestinian people became obvious.

Bu çalışma, Meksikalı diplomat Salvador Pardo Bolland'ın 1951-1953 yılları arasında Türkiye'de görev yaptığı sırada kaleme aldığı diplomatik raporlara dayanmaktadır. Türkiye'ye Geçici Maslahatgüzar olarak atanan Bolland, Demokrat Parti'nin (DP) ilk iktidar yıllarını hem iç hem de dış politika açısından değerlendirmiştir. Bolland'ın raporları, Türkiye'de iktisadi ve siyasi alanda uygulanan politikalara yönelik çeşitli analiz ve eleştirileri içermektedir. DP'nin özellikle yabancı yatırımı teşvik eden politikalarına dair eleştiriler sunan Bolland, bu yaklaşımların uzun vadede ekonomik bağımsızlık açısından risk taşıdığına dikkat çekmiştir. Bolland, Türkiye'nin dış politikasını Batı'ya yönelmiş bir çizgide değerlendirirken, dış politika kararlarının ABD'nin etkisiyle şekillendiğini vurgulamıştır. NATO'ya katılım ve Kore Savaşı'na asker gönderme gibi adımları, Türkiye'nin Batı blokuna entegrasyon çabalarının göstergesi olarak yorumlamıştır. Bolland'ın raporları, Türkiye'nin ABD etkisindeki dış politikasını eleştirel bir perspektiften ele alırken, bu durumun Türkiye için muhtemel sonuçlarına dair çıkarımlar getirmektedir. Sonuç olarak, Meksikalı diplomat Salvador Pardo Bolland'ın raporları, 1950'lerin başlarındaki Türkiye'nin siyasal manzarasına dair, yabancı bir gözlemcinin bakış açısıyla önemli tespitler ve analizler sunmaktadır.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans and Democrats who advocated conflicting visions of American citizenship could agree on one thing: the rhetorical power of Abraham Lincoln's life. This volume examines the debates over his legacy and their impact on America's future. In the thirty-five years following Lincoln's assassination, acquaintances of Lincoln published their memories of him in newspapers, biographies, and edited collections in order to gain fame, promote partisan aims, champion his hardscrabble past and exalted rise, and define his legacy. Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer explore how style, class, and character affected these reminiscences. They also analyze the ways people used these writings to reinforce their beliefs about citizenship and presidential leadership in the United States, with specific attention to the fissure between republicanism and democracy that still exists today. Their study employs rhetorical and corpus research methods to assess more than five hundred reminiscences. A novel look at how memories of Lincoln became an important form of political rhetoric, this book sheds light on how divergent schools of U.S. political thought came to recruit Lincoln as their standard-bearer.

The political party system in the United States has periodically undergone major realignments at various critical junctures in the country's history. The Civil War boosted the Republican Party's fortunes and catapulted it into majority status at the national level, a status that was further solidified during the Populist realignment in the 1890s. Starting in the 1930s, however, Roosevelt's New Deal reversed the parties' fortunes, bringing the Democratic Party back to national power, and this realignment was further modified by the \"culture wars\" beginning in the mid-1960s. Each of these realignments occasioned shifts in the electorate's support for the major parties, and they were superimposed on each other in a way that did not negate entirely the consequences of the preceding realignments. The story of realignment is further complicated by the variations that occurred within individual states whose own particular political legacies, circumstances, and personalities resulted in modulations and modifications of the patterns playing out at the national level. In this book, Renée Lamis investigates how Pennsylvania experienced this series of realignments, with special attention to the period since 1960. She uses a wealth of data from a wide variety of sources to produce an analysis that allows her to trace the evolution of electoral behavior in the Keystone State in a narrative that is accessible to a broad range of readers. Her account helps explain why Senator Arlen Specter was reelected whereas Senator Rick Santorum was not, and why Pennsylvania Republicans have been highly successful in major statewide elections in an era when Democratic presidential standard-bearers have regularly carried the state. Overall, her book constitutes a gold mine of information and interpretation for political junkies as well as scholars who want to know more about how national-level politics plays out within individual states.