The story of how the advocacy of workers and labor unions and a monumental shift on the Supreme Court paved the way for fair labor standards in the United States.The eight-hour day. The five-day work week. Minimum wage. Time-and-a-half overtime pay. Prohibition of oppressive child labor.Today we take these features of employment for granted, but they are the result of a long, difficult, and often violent struggle for workplace protections that culminated in...

In the depths of the Great Depression, when foreclosure rates skyrocketed across the United States, more than two dozen states passed mortgage-extension or -adjustment laws to help farmers and homeowners keep their properties. One such statute in Minnesota led to the most important property law case of its time and still casts a long shadow upon constitutional debates and our own era's severe economic downturn.Fighting Foreclosure marks the first book-length study of the l...

Finalist: Langum Prize in American Legal HistoryChild labor law strikes most Americans as a fixture of the country’s legal landscape, involving issues settled in the distant past. But these laws, however self-evidently sensible they might seem, were the product of deeply divisive legal debates stretching over the past century—and even now are subject to constitutional challenges. Child Labor in America tells the story of that historic legal struggle. The b...

National Book Award for Nonfiction FinalistNational Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction FinalistA New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Washington Post Notable Book of the YearA PBS “Now Read This” Book Club SelectionNamed one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the Boston GlobeA landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet...

The veteran journalist presents "an illuminating history and analysis" of the American electoral system—and a bold call for change ( Kirkus).The framers of the Constitution battled over it. Lawmakers have tried to amend or abolish it more than 700 times. To this day, millions of voters, and even members of Congress, misunderstand how it works. It deepens our national divide and distorts the core democratic principles of political equality and majority rule....

Now with a new epilogue-- an unprecedented and unwavering history of the Supreme Court showing how its decisions have consistently favored the moneyed and powerful.Few American institutions have inflicted greater suffering on ordinary people than the Supreme Court of the United States. Since its inception, the justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps because of their race, and...

Praised by the late John Lewis, this is the seminal book about the long and ongoing struggle to win voting rights for all citizens by the president of The Brennan Center, the leading organization on voter rights and election security, now newly revised to describe today’s intense fights over voting.As Rep. Lewis said, and recent events in state legislatures across the country demonstrate, the struggle for the right to vote is not over. In this “important and powerf...

A redistricting crisis is upon us. This surprising, compelling book tells the history of how we got to this moment—from the Founding Fathers to today’s high-tech manipulation of election districts—and shows us how to protect our most sacred, hard-fought principle of one person, one vote. Here is THE book on gerrymandering for citizens, politicians, journalists, activists, and voters.“Seabrook’s lucid account of the origins and evolution of gerrymandering—th...

“The American taxpayer”—angered by government waste and satisfied only with spending cuts—has preoccupied elected officials and political commentators since the Reagan Revolution. But resistance to progressive taxation has older, deeper roots. American Tax Resisters presents the full history of the American anti-tax movement that has defended the pursuit of limited taxes on wealth and battled efforts to secure social justice through income redistribution for the past 150 years.

Historian David Moss adapts the case study method made famous by Harvard Business School to revitalize our conversations about governance and democracy and show how the United States has often thrived on political conflict. These 19 cases ask us to weigh choices and consequences, wrestle with momentous decisions, and come to our own conclusions.

A history of the methods used to assault voting rights in America from the 1960s to 2020.The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is considered one of the most effective pieces of legislation the United States has ever passed. It enfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, particularly in the American South, and drew attention to the problem of voter suppression. Yet in recent years there has been a continuous assault on access to the ballot box in the form of stricter vote...

A practical, accessible, engaging, and comprehensive guide to how American democracy works (and how it sometimes doesn't work).The stakes have never been higher: national security, civil liberties, the economy, the future of the republic. Yet few outside Washington actually understand how our government and political system should work, much less how it actually operates. On one level, it's a complex, interlocking world veiled in power brokering, bureaucracy, and b...