Policy History

The essay aims to analyze how the past is appropriated in the European Public Sphere and which institutions, media and actors are involved in Public History practices. In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon world, a variety of Public History discourses and practices emerged in continental Europe where the English term was rarely translated or deployed: only very rarely are "applied historians" or Public Historians practicing the discipline in a self-conscious manner. In Europe, Public History is often linked to collective identities at different levels: from local memories to the construction of regional, national and pan-European "Heimats" and "realms of memory". Thus, Europeans create multi-dimensional identities and traditions that are based upon Public History activities. This essay identifies the presence in the "polis", of Public History and Public Historians "without the name", using two case-studies, that of national history museums, and that of the emotional perception of the U.S. Civil War in Europe.

The rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s propelled the war on drugs. The experience of Canton, Ohio, shows how the response to crack solidified mass incarceration. A declining industrial city of 84,000 people in northeast Ohio with deep-seated racial divides, it was overwhelmed by aggressive, enterprising crack dealers from outside the city. In response, politicians and residents united behind the strategy of incessant arrests and drastic prison sentences. The law-enforcement offensive worsened conditions while pursuing African Americans at blatantly disproportionate rates, but few people engaged in reframing the drug problem. Instead, a punitive citizenry positioned punishment as the principal remedy. The emergency foreclosed on more comprehensive assessments of the city’s tribulations, while the criminal justice system emerged as the paramount institution.

Numerous scholars have surveyed the creation of a vulnerable agricultural landscape on the Great Plains during the years surrounding World War I, and especially the alterations to the landscape of crop production that precipitated the 1930s Dust Bowl.  What they have missed, however, is the impact of the first government-sponsored enterprise, the federal land banks, and the role of government-seeded credit in radically shifting the farm mortgage market and production patterns in this region after 1917. 

This article adds the critical element of economic causality to the story of the Great Plains Plow-Up, arguing that federal credit policy, in the form of the 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act, created the financial mechanism for the pattern of surplus production that has challenged farmers and agricultural policymakers since the end of World War I.  With this law the U.S. government launched into the mortgage market, and provided the essential start-up capital for farmers in historically undercapitalized regions, thus reshaping the form and scale of American agriculture. 

Using the financing provided under the Federal Farm Loan Act, Great Plains farmers were able to consolidate and mechanize their farms, and thus respond to the call to “plant more wheat” during the war years, thereby creating the unprecedented grain surpluses that paved the way for decades of overproduction.  The high yields and increased cultivation of the postwar years forced farmers to further maximize production, even as surpluses drove prices down.  The economic imbalance of production cycles during the 1920s led to repeated calls for government intervention in commodity markets, and eventually to the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, which implemented the production control policies that have dominated U.S. agricultural policy ever since.

The federal land banks contributed substantially to the mechanization and consolidation of American agriculture, and to the problem of surplus that has defined farm policy since the 1920s.  “From Breadbasket to Dust Bowl” contextualizes the agricultural reforms of the 1910s, and demonstrates the expansive impact of this new form of federal aid to agriculture on the rural economy and American public policy into the 21st century.

The paper explores the early history and significance of school milk in Britain. As a food for children, milk was not attractive at the beginning of the twentieth century. It had an image problem of being both expensive and potentially infected. In addition, successive governments were wary of creating expectations of the delivery of welfare items such as free or cheap milk. How is
it then that by 1934 milk represented nearly two-thirds of the “meals” served in schools? The answer lies partly in the efforts of the trade to extend its market beyond the home, and partly in the scientific finding that milk is a balanced and nutritious food. Both the local and the central state were eventually persuaded
of the logic of a “Milk in Schools Scheme”, which, after the end of the period covered in the paper, did become official and was extended nationwide.

This article studies and remarked about history of words: Policy and Public Policy that leads to develop the policy history argument in further. In this article provides Policy and Public Policy in Siam context following: “Public” first evidences in King Rama IV reign in his Anekachonnikorn Samosornsommut approach and significantly in his interested in Vox Populi. However, the meaning and the formation of meaning of a word “Public” was distinct. Similarly, a word “Public Policy” first evidences in King Rama V reign in a word “Ratthapipalanoby” but in the meaning of the path to rule his kingdom that distinct from a word “Public Policy” too. It can imply the words “Policy” and “Public Policy” as the institutionalized discourse is so far from conscious and understanding that probably the one of the problems about the lack of people participation, even controversy with their political awareness.

Forthcoming in the Journal of American History (September 2016)

A vast agricultural reform movement emerged in the northeastern countryside during the antebellum era. The massive popularity of state and county agricultural fairs, starting in the late 1840s, formed the most visible manifestation of this phenomenon, while the earlier rise of an independent agricultural press formed its essential precondition. Surprisingly, historians have paid relatively little attention either to the social determinants or to the political consequences of the agricultural reform movement. Socially, the movement was rooted in a set of economic conditions and the thick print and associational networks characteristic of what I call the “Greater Northeast.” This article thus offers a friendly corrective to the recent historiography’s overemphasis on the connections between agricultural reform and modernizing southern slaveholders. Politically, the movement had complicated effects. On the one hand, agricultural reformers pioneered a mode of nonpartisan lobbying that led directly to the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and to passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act, two landmarks in nineteenth-century American state formation. The story thus runs counter to the long-standing “party period” framework, which cannot account for these important policy innovations. On the other hand, and despite nonpartisanship, the movement’s dissemination of the discourse of “scientific agriculture” and natural-science education tilted the political playing field in favor of the Republican Party, thus contributing to the sectional crisis of the 1850s on the basis of rural development policy, not just free labor. This article therefore argues (1) that agricultural reform was a major social movement in mid-century America which deserves scholarly attention; (2) that it pioneered an incipient restructuring of the American state and political structure along the lines of administrative bureaucracy and interest-group politics; (3) that it nevertheless interacted in decisive ways with the party system; (4) and, finally, that it points the way toward broadening our category of social movements to include not only oppositional and moral reform movements, but what might be called state-allied or state-constructive movements.

Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign will likely preoccupy future historians for years to come. While a number of factors contributed to his rise—including the growing power of social media, a latent racism and nativism within sections of the American public, and economic malaise resulting from Republican and Democratic administrations’ trade policies—the media deserve special scrutiny for their role in accelerating Trump’s candidacy, most obviously because they set agendas and frame political debates each election cycle.

This thesis examines the way proponents, opponents, and park studies understood and discussed the history and cultural resources of the Congaree Swamp. During the early advocacy of the 1960s and through the planning for the 1988 boundary expansion, proponents of creating a preserve characterized history as distant and having little physical impact on their natural wilderness landscape. Opponents alternatively focused on land uses of hunting, fishing, and logging that, while historic, had also continued through that point in time. For them, creating a preserve landscape would change the landscape they knew through those activities. Studies undertaken by the National Park Service combined the requirements of cultural resource management legislation with the knowledge of park advocates. As time passed, Congaree Swamp National Monument (later Congaree National Park) increasingly has devoted more time and resources to the historical subjects brought up by those who had opposed the park. At present, and into the future, the park has the opportunity to look at the Swamp’s past in an interdisciplinary way, as an environmental history of both cultural and natural resources.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, old problems afflict new media.  Once again, America anguishes over the diminished democratic promise of a new medium. Like broadcasting in the 1940s, digital communications have become dominated by oligopolies driven by a corporate libertarian logic that is antagonistic toward public-interest principles. These ownership structures contribute to various shortcomings with American broadband, including disparities among communities and socioeconomic groups in terms of speeds and access, higher costs for service, and impediments to free-flowing information and content. Just as radio’s full democratic potential was thwarted by commercial capture in the 1930s and ’40s, a similar fate faces the Internet today. This crisis in digital media coincides with a structural crisis in journalism as the newspaper industry continues its irreparable decline.

In October 1934 the National Government took over what had previously been a commercial initiative to encourage milk-drinking in schools. By the outbreak of war the Milk in Schools Scheme had reached 87 per cent of elementary schools in England and Wales and 56 per cent of pupils were drinking one-third of a pint daily. This paper investigates the motivations behind this scheme and the problems associated with its implementation. There was resistance from within government and a number of objections were raised around the country, particularly to the strategy of the Board of Education. The conclusions are, first, that the
economic necessity of providing a market for liquid milk was more important in the mind of policy-makers than nutritional supplements for undernourished children and, second, that the
evolution of the policy itself was highly contingent upon the network of power and influence within which it operated. In 1933 it would have been difficult to predict with any degree of
certainty how a Milk in Schools Scheme would have operated, but in time it was to become one of the government’s most robust and universally supported food policies.

Historians claiming that federal government institutions and policy were of little moment in the early United States need to re-consider the U.S. government's all-too systematic and effective efforts to subjugate and expropriate the American Indians.

In the face of technology failures in preventing oil from reaching beaches and coasts after catastrophic oil spills in the 1960s and early 1970s, the oil industry and governmental officials needed to quickly reconsider their idea of prevention. Initially, prevention meant stopping spilled oil from coating beaches and coasts. Exploring the presentations at three oil-spill conferences in 1969, 1971 and 1973, this idea of prevention changed as the technological optimism of finding effective methods met the realities of oil-spill cleanup. By 1973, prevention meant stopping oil spills before they happened. This rapid policy transformation came about because the oil industry could not hide the visual evidence of the source of their technology failures. In this century, as policymakers confront invisible pollutants such as pesticides and greenhouse gases, considering ways to visually show the source of the pollution along with the effects could quicken policy decisions.

The 1940s was a contentious decade for U.S. media policy. Activists, policymakers, and media industries grappled over defining the normative foundations that governed major communication and regulatory institutions. At this time, a reform agenda took shape at both the grassroots social movement level and within elite policy circles. An analysis of the rise and fall of this postwar media reform movement holds at least three key lessons for contemporary media activists. First, it reminds us of the imperative to maintain a strong inside/outside strategy that keeps regulators connected to the grassroots. Second, we learn that media activists retreat on structural reform objectives at their own peril. Finally, we must remember that media reform rises and falls with other political struggles and radical social movements. With these lessons in mind, media reformers should seek to build liberal-left coalitions and, perhaps, a new popular front.

The previously neglected case of the early bird protection in Belgium between 1845 and 1914 is the focal point of this paper. The paper’s objective is to uncover the nature of early bird protection. It does this by scrutinising the arguments used by both advocates and critics of bird protection laws, as well as those used by the public opinion and specific lobby groups. The Belgian bird protection laws turned out to be about much more than birds, they were tools used by the urban bourgeoisie to discipline the working classes and the rural poor and including them in the bourgeois society. The elites also used them to exclude the masses from hunting by prohibiting all  forms of hunting except firearms. Opponents of these laws claimed that hunting had little effect on bird populations. They blamed agricultural modernisation and habitat loss for the fall in bird numbers. The Belgian bird protection laws were no pioneers within Europe, but the were no latecomers either.
De focus van deze paper is de tot hiertoe onderbelichte casus van de Belgische vogelbescherming tussen 1845 en 1914. Het doel van de paper is de aard van de vroege vogelbescherming bloot te leggen. Dit gebeurt door de argumenten van zowel voor- als tegenstanders van vogelbeschermingswetten, evenals die van de publieke opinie en specifieke belangengroepen te bestuderen. De Belgische vogelbeschermingswetten bleken over veel meer te gaan dan alleen vogels, ze waren een middel van de stedelijke burgerij om arbeiders en plattelandsbewoners te disciplineren en hen in te lijven in de burgerlijke samenleving. Elites gebruiken hen eveneens om het gewone volk uit te sluiten van de jacht door alle jachtmethoden te verbieden buiten vuurwapens. Tegenstanders van de vogelbeschermingswetten meenden dat jacht weinig effect had op vogelpopulaties en legden de schuld voor de achteruitgang van vogels bij moderniseringen in de landbouw en habitatverlies. De Belgische vogelbeschermingswetgeving was geen pionier in Europa, maar kon ook niet onder de laatkomers gerekend worden.

Continued patterns of urbanization are leading to ever larger and more complex urban regions. Regional institutions have arisen as a governance solution to address the problems of coordination across large, jurisdictionally fragmented urban regions. Regional special purpose bodies (RSPBs) are one such regional institutional arrangement. This paper examines this institutional phenomenon with a particular focus on transportation and transit bodies. It describes the extent of their adoption across Western Europe and North America and contrasts their development in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

How do media systems come to be structured in different ways? Through a comparative historical institutional analysis of the origins of broadcasting policy in the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, this study examines reasons private, commercial interests dominated the U.S. system while Britain granted a monopoly to the publicly funded, noncommercial BBC. Policy outcomes at this critical juncture were contingent on different path-dependent notions of the public interest as well as temporal sequencing. Through an analysis of primary documents and secondary literature, this study considers the implications of these different approaches for modern communication policy and democratic society.

The U.S. government position on world population growth as it emerged in the early 1960s was a fundamental departure in both content and commitment. We embraced the idea that one of the goals of American foreign policy should be the simultaneous reduction of both mortality and fertility across the Third World. It was not simply rhetoric. As the years passed, we committed a growing portion of our foreign aid to that end. The decision to link U.S. foreign-policy objectives with the subsidy of family planning and population control was truly exceptional in that it explicitly aimed at altering the demographic structure of foreign countries through long-term intervention. No nation had ever set in motion a foreign-policy initiative of such magnitude. Its ultimate goal was no less than to alter the basic fertility behavior of the entire Third World! Whether one views this goal as idealistic and naive or as arrogant and self-serving, the project was truly of herculean proportions.

Arrested people by academic authorities in Coimbra (1768-1806): police, offenses and resistance of imprisoned women and men
This study intends to perceive the exercise of repression of the University, not so much against the students, but against the common people of a university city. For this, two sources were explored: the registration of the arrests in the public prison (1768-1779) and the orders and release conditions of those who were arrested by academic authorities (1797-1806). The repressive action of the University was exercised mainly on the non-university population and the preferred targets were women accused of deviant behaviour. The resistance was passive but tenacious and constant, in violation of rules and with attempts to manipulate superior decisions.
Key words: University; Police; everyday forms of resistance; prostitutes; poor people.

Pretende-se com este estudo perceber o exercício da repressão da Universidade não tanto sobre os estudantes, mas sobre a população comum de uma cidade universitária. Para tal, exploram-se duas fontes: o registo das detenções na cadeia pública (1768-1779) e as ordens e condições de solturas dos que foram presos pelas autoridades académicas (1797-1806). A ação repressiva da Universidade exercia-se sobretudo sobre os não universitários da cidade e, dentro destes, os alvos preferenciais eram mulheres acusadas de comportamentos desviantes. A resistência era passiva, mas tenaz e constante, com violação das regras e tentativas de manipular as decisões superiores.
Palavras-chave: Universidade, Polícia, resistência quotidiana, prostitutas, pobres.

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizen's wage—has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on women's bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizen's wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their chil...

As winter descended on Washington in December 1878, the Forty-fifth Congress gathered for what promised to be a hectic third and final session. Emotions ran high. In this era, Congress habitually reserved much of its business for these brief, intense “lame duck” sessions that fell between the election of legislators in November and the adjournment of Congress the following March. Compounding the usual sense of urgency was the startling result of the recent election: the Democratic party had gained control of the Senate and, when the next Congress convened, would control both the Senate and the House for the first time since before the Civil War. Senate Republicans well understood that they had but a few precious months to close ranks and enact legislation on some of the burning issues of the day: civil rights, the currency, the tariff. Yet when the session opened, none of these issues made their way to the floor. Instead, and despite howls of protest from senators eager to move on t...

What do we mean by the term “policy history”? In conventional usage, “history” refers to one of two kinds of investigation: the study of something that happened at some point in the past, or the study of how something came to be what it is. It is this second usage—the idea of policy history as an unfolding story of policy development—that I want to examine in this essay. Understanding the sources of policy often requires that we pay attention to processes that play out over considerable periods of time.

Since the end of 15th century and until the first half of 16th century, the Spanish kings requested and received several concessions for the royal patronage in the dioceses of their dominions in Europe and in the New World. The control of the clergy trough the royal elections of bishops, as is known, expanded the network of patronage and the market of titles and honors in favour of the loyalty to the Crown.
Before the Barcelona agreements of the 1529, in the instructions sent from the Spanish kings to the viceroy and to the Spanish ambassadors to the Holy See. It marked the continuous demands by the Crown to obtained the royal patronage on not specified number of dioceses. Then, in the 1529, it was reserved to Charles V a portion of 10% of the large ecclesiastical geography of the Kingdom of Naples. The overview of studies on the royal patronage from the nineties to nowadays can be defined complete for each dominion of the Spanish Crown.  This study is aimed to propose a synchronic and diachronic survey  about the feudal government on the 25 cities that were located dioceses of the royal patronage. The investigation is focused in three principal moments of the 16th century and It aims to improve the analytical framework of these same cities as part of more complex Spanish politics.
Indeed, each episcopal place of the royal patronage was located in borders of military operations, in borders of the defense of the Kingdom by the sea and the land site. They represented the strategic points for the political and economic priorities of the Spain in the 16th century.

Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other conservative southerners explain to outsiders and to themselves why they shifted from support for an interventionist state powerful enough to enforce segregation to an ideology founded on individual rights and liberty. It thus eased the South’s integration with the emerging New Right.