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When newly liberated African American slaves attempted to enter the marketplace and exercise their rights as citizens of the United States in 1865, few, if any, Americans expected that, a century and a half later, the class divide between black and white Americans would be as wide as it is today. The United States has faced several potential key turning points in the status of African Americans over the course of its history, yet at each of these points the prevailing understanding of African Americans and their place in the economic and political fabric of the country was at best contested and resolved on the side of second-class citizenship. This text seeks to answer the question of what the United States would look like today if, at the end of the Civil War, freed slaves had been granted full political, social, and economic rights. It does so by tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education, and psychology. As a whole, the book is a systematic study of the gap between the promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four articles, written by scholars of African American studies and across every major social discipline, the book presents a portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy affords readers an uncommon overview and integration of the eclectic body of knowledge of American bureaucracy. One of the major dilemmas facing the administrative state in the United States today is discerning how best to harness for public purposes the dynamism of markets, the passion and commitment of non-profit and volunteer organizations, and the public-interest-oriented expertise of the career civil service. Researchers across a variety of disciplines, fields, and subfields have independently investigated aspects of the formidable challenges, choices, and opportunities this dilemma poses for governance, democratic constitutionalism, and theory building. This literature is vast, affords multiple and conflicting perspectives, is methodologically diverse, and is fragmented. Each of the articles in this text identifies major issues and trends, critically takes stock of the state of knowledge, and ponders where future research is most promising. The book is one of Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior offers comprehensive coverage of the various theoretical approaches to the study of American elections and political behavior. The articles provide broad overviews of intellectual developments and challenges, as well as incisive commentary on the accomplishments of, and challenges facing, scholars of American politics. Substantively, the Handbook includes articles focusing on various approaches and issues in research design, political participation, vote choice, presidential and non-presidential elections, and issues, interests and elites as influences on individuals' political behavior. Each of the articles offers a working research bibliography, as well as retrospective evaluations of research and discussions of fruitful paths for future research. This book is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics – and thus they question stylized facts about America’s political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time – and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance?

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups is a major new volume that aims to help with the assessment of the current state of scholarship on parties and interest groups and the directions in which it needs to move. Never before has the academic literature on political parties received such an extended treatment. Thirty articles critically assess both the major contributions to the literature and the ways in which it has developed. With contributions from most of the leading scholars in the field, the Handbook provides a definitive point of reference for all those working in and around the area. Equally important, the articles also identify areas of new and interesting research. The articles offer a distinctive point of view, an argument about the successes and failures of past scholarship, and a set of recommendations about how future work ought to develop. This Handbook is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.

Public opinion and the media form the foundation of the United States' representative democracy, and are the subject of enormous scrutiny by scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens. This handbook takes on the big questions about public opinion and the media both empirical and normative focusing on current debates and social scientific research. Bringing together the thinking of a team of academic experts, its chapters provide an assessment of contemporary research on public opinion, the media, and their interconnections. Emphasizing changes in the mass media and communications technology the vast number of cable channels, websites and blogs, and the new social media, which are changing how news about political life is collected and conveyed they describe the evolving information interdependence of the media and public opinion. In addition, the handbook reviews the wide range of influences on public opinion, including the processes by which information communicated through the media can affect the public. It describes what has been learnt from the latest research in psychology and genetics, and studies of the impact of gender, race and ethnicity, economic status, education and sophistication, religion, and generational change, on a wide range of political attitudes and perceptions. The handbook includes extensive discussion of how public opinion and mass media coverage are studied through survey research and increasingly through experiments using the latest technological advances.

Animal studies is an interdisciplinary field that captures one of the most important topics in contemporary society: how can humans rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals? This “animal question” is the focus of The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. In the last few decades, animal studies has flourished, with the widespread recognition of (1) the commodification of animals in a wide variety of human contexts, such as the use of animals as food, labor, and objects of spectacle and science; (2) the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction; and (3) the increasing need to coexist with other animals in urban, rural, and natural contexts. These themes are mapped into five major categories, reflected in the titles of the five parts that structure this volume: “Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics, and Public Policy”; “Animal Intentionality, Agency, and Reflexive Thinking”; “Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle, and Sport”; “Animals in Cultural Representations”; and “Animals in Ecosystems.” Each category is explicated with specially commissioned chapters written by international scholars from diverse backgrounds, including philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy. The thirty chapters of the handbook investigate issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia’s distinctive politics—both ancient and modern—at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation’s Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia’s unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia’s political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centre on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration cover how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. This Handbook is an opportunity for others to consider the nation’s unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.