Undergraduate | Yale MacMillan Center - Center for the Study of Representative Institutions

Bootlegged Aliens: Immigration Politics on America's Northern Border

In contemporary discourse, much of the discussion of U.S. border politics focuses on the Southwest. In Bootlegged Aliens, however, Ashley Johnson Bavery considers the North as a borderlands region, demonstrating how this often-overlooked border influenced government policies toward illegal immigration, business and labor union practices around migrant labor, and the experience of being an illegal immigrant in early twentieth-century industrial America. Bavery examines how immigrants, politicians, and employers helped shape national policies toward noncitizen laborers.

Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic

Looking at farmers as serious independent agents in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the American republic, Grassroots Leviathan offers an original take on the causes of the Civil War, the rise of federal power, and American economic ascent during the nineteenth century.
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society, Winner of the Wiley-Silver Book Prize by the Center for Civil War Research.
Ariel Ron is Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era at Southern Methodist University.
HYBRID EVENT

A Right to Have Rights? Citizenship and Denaturalization in the Americas, Past and Present

Political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described the possession of nationality as a baseline for “the right to have rights.” But as she also emphasized (and experienced in her own right) one’s citizenship can sometimes be abruptly taken away. Nation-states in the twentieth century and our own time have stripped countless individuals of their native-born and/or acquired citizenship through laws of denaturalization and expatriation.

Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke's Political Economy

Although many of Edmund Burke’s speeches and writings contain prominent economic dimensions, his economic thought seldom receives the attention it warrants. Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy stands as the most comprehensive study to date of this fascinating subject. In addition to providing rigorous textual analysis, Collins unearths previously unpublished manuscripts and employs empirical data to paint a rich historical and theoretical context for Burke’s economic beliefs.

Is There a Social Awakening?

John B. Judis is Editor-At-Large at Talking Points Memo and author of many books, including The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and The Emerging Democratic Majority, co-written with Ruy Teixeira. He has written for numerous publications, including The New Republic, The National Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and The Washington Post.

The President and Economic Leadership: What Can the Gilded Age Tell Us?

Do presidents matter for America’s economic performance? This talk looks for answers in a set of least-likely cases: the Gilded Age presidents (1869-1901). The conventional wisdom is that prior to Theodore Roosevelt, presidents mattered little during peacetime. One reason is that the 19th century public expected little of its executives. And even if a president had wanted to affect policy, most observers argue that the Gilded Age presidency was too institutionally weak to do much. We also tend to stereotype Gilded Age presidents as ineffective, irrelevant, and forgettable.

The President and Immigration Law

In their powerful new book, leading immigration law scholars Professors Cristina Rodríguez (Yale) and Adam Cox (NYU) interrogate the long history of presidential power in the realm of immigration policy to demonstrate how and why the executive branch assumed increasingly expansive discretionary powers and implemented them in the domain of immigration law. Their in-depth study dives into a range of diplomatic controversies over, institutional histories of, and case law about immigration policy and presidential power in immigration law from the revolutionary era to the present.

Ideas of Power: The Politics of American Party Ideology Development

This groundbreaking book challenges the dominant view of ideology held by both political scientists and political commentators. Rather than viewing ideological constructs like liberalism and conservatism as static concepts with fixed and enduring content, Professor Verlan Lewis explains how the very meanings of liberalism and conservatism frequently change along with the ideologies of the two major parties in American politics.