The Path to Paralysis
How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic
October 15, 2024
How did the world’s oldest democracy lose its mojo? How did we get to a point where we face existential crises like climate change yet leaders can’t agree that there’s a problem let alone develop solutions? The Path to Paralysis examines changes during the past 60 years – conflict over race, religion and gender; wrenching economic changes and growing concentration of wealth; the end of the Cold War hardening regional divisions; and dramatic changes in communications – that produced the politics most Americans claim to hate. Long in the making, these cross-currents came together in the early 21st century – as the United States experienced the deepest recession since the 1930s and elected its first Black president – to create the perfect storm. The result is a toxic and deeply polarized politics that threatens the existence of constitutional government.
“If you want to experience how a first-rate historical analysis can give meaning to the near collapse of democratic politics in 2024, this book is a must-read for you.”
—Stanley N. Katz, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
Promises to Keep
African Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights)
2020 (2nd Edition)
Widely considered the first history of US Constitutionalism that places African Americans at the center, Promises to Keep is a compelling overview of how conflict over African Americans’ place in American society has shaped the Constitution, law, and our understanding of citizenship and rights. Both authoritative and accessible, the revised and expanded second edition incorporates key insights from the last three decades of scholarship and makes sense of recent developments in civil rights, from the War on Drugs to the rise of Black Lives Matter. Promises to Keep shows how African Americans have played a critical role in transforming the Constitution from a bulwark of slavery to a document that is truer to the nation’s promise of equality.
“This is a remarkable and valuable book. Donald Nieman has maintained the high quality of the original volume, while bringing his account into the Age of Trump. The original edition was published after a period of civil rights retrenchment. This volume follows the elections of our first African-American president, and our first modern racist president. Nieman sets this double-whammy into a clear historical context, and helps us to understand why getting race right is essential to constitutional order in the United States.”
—Stanley N. Katz, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
To Set the Law in Motion
The Freedmen’s Bureauand the Legal Rights of Blacks, 1865-1868
1979
When Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, the Civil War was coming to an end and the place of the freedpeople in the “more perfect Union” envisioned by Lincoln was uppermost in the minds of federal policy makers. An unprecedented intervention by the federal government to ensure the well-being of its citizens, the Bureau had broad authority to assist Blacks in making the transition from slavery to freedom. To Set the Law in Motion is the first full length study of the Bureau’s efforts to guarantee the civil rights of the formerly enslaved. The Bureau enjoyed only limited success, as Nieman shows. While most Bureau officials acted aggressively and creatively to protect African Americans’ rights, racism, paternalism, and free labor ideology limited their ability to imagine policies that maximized Blacks’ independence of White landowners. However, racial attitudes weren’t the principal reason the agency enjoyed limited success. Challenging historians who argue that White racism explains the Bureau’s failure, Nieman argues that other factors were more critical: President Andrew Johnson’s skillful and unremitting efforts to curb the agency’s authority; Congress’s unwillingness to make more fundamental changes in American law and legal institutions; the Bureau’s extremely limited resources; and White southerners’ willingness to use violence to maintain control of Black labor.
“To be enlightened on the Freedmen’s Bureau . . . is to be enlightened on the essence of Reconstruction itself. . . . In a tightly and lucidly written book . . . Donald G. Nieman is indeed enlightening. His book is an important contribution to the history of the Bureau and in turn of Reconstruction. . . . Quietly and without polemics, Nieman’s book suggests that the “retreat from Reconstruction” was not merely a phenomenon of the 1870s but that it began very early and at the grassroots of southern society.”
—American Historical Review
The Constitution, Law, and American Life
Critical Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Experience
1992
Eight essays by prominent U.S. legal historians imaginatively explore the interrelationship between law and society in the 19th century. Written as a tribute to Professor Harold M. Hyman, whose scholarship reimagined constitutional and legal history, the essays range widely, exploring enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, Lincoln’s constitutional vision, African Americans’ understanding of law as a tool for liberation, Victorian moralism and civil liberties, women’s citizenship, drugs and the law, law and municipal reform, and changing legal standards for commitment of the insane.
“This collection contains a series of unusually good essays on U.S. constitutional and legal history in the nineteenth century. . . . There is much to savor in these essays, which offer depth of analysis, good legal and constitutional history, and superb writing.”
—Choice
Local Matters
Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South
2001
Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place.
Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume—such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of “plantation justice” to the (theoretically) more evenhanded processes of the courts, and the increased presence of government in daily aspects of American life.
Local Matters cites a wide range of examples to support these themes. One essay considers the case of a quasi-free slave in Natchez, Mississippi—himself a slaveowner—who was “reined in” by his master through the courts, while another shows how federal aims were subverted during trials held in the aftermath of the 1876 race riots in Ellenton, South Carolina. Other topics covered include the fear of black criminality as a motivation of Klan activity; the career of Thomas Ruffin, slaveowner and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice; blacks and the ballot in Washington County, Texas; the overturned murder conviction of a North Carolina slave who had killed a white man; the formation of a powerful white bloc in Vicksburg, Mississippi; agitation by black and white North Carolina women for greater protections from abusive white male elites; and slaves, crime, and the common law in New Orleans.
Together, these studies offer new insights into the nature of law and the fate of due process at different stages of a highly racialized society.
“Examining how institutions operated on the ground, these essays emphasize that Americans’ apparent dedication to legalism was a highly complex matter. With their focus on the nineteenth-century South, moreover, they do much to reveal the interactions of race, class, and gender in a society where ideals of democracy and hierarchy created a tension that could never be easily resolved. . . . A valuable contribution to the study of the nineteenth-century South. Its essays tell us much about southern legal history. They also do much to demonstrate the relevance of that history to our understanding of the larger complexities of the region and of the nation as a whole.”
—Journal of American History
Freedom, Racism, and Reconstruction
Collected Writings of LaWanda Cox
1993
LaWanda Cox is widely regarded as one of the most influential historians of Reconstruction and nineteenth-century race relations. Imaginative in conception, forcefully argued, and elegantly written, her work helped reshape historians’ understanding of the age of emancipation. Freedom, Racism, and Reconstruction brings together Cox’s most important writings spanning more than forty years, including previously published essays, excerpts from her books, and an unpublished essay.
Now retired from Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Cox gave Donald G. Nieman her full cooperation on this project. The result is a cohesive book of refreshing and sophisticated analysis that illuminates a pivotal era in American history. It not only serves as a lasting testament to a highly original scholar but also makes available to readers a remarkable body of scholarship that remains required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the age of emancipation and the historian’s craft.
“This volume more than justifies itself as both a fitting tribute to a fine historian and a handy assemblage of seven journal articles, two excerpts from Cox’s books, two essays from edited collections, and a previously unpublished piece. Yet it has greater value still, for it should prompt fresh thinking on the part of all those who had thought they had their minds made up about emancipation, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln. The writings offered here span nearly half a century, but almost all were posed as challenges to what, at the time, had become comfortable ways of thinking. Some might yet trouble the complacent.”
—H-Civil War
