Next Projects

Books:

FEAR AND FURY: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in America

BULLET AND BURN: The Philadelphia Move Bombing and Law and Order America

PUBLISHERS MARKETPLACE
Deal of the Day
Non-fiction: History/Politics/Current Affairs: 

Author of BLOOD IN THE WATER, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Ridenhour Prize, and National Book Award and LA Times Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson's BULLET AND BURN, a history of the dramatic confrontations between Philadelphia police and the MOVE organization during the 1970s and early 1980s that culminated in officers dropping a bomb on a residential neighborhood in 1985, killing men, women and children and leaving 61 middle class homes and an entire city block in ashes, to Edward Kastenmeier at Pantheon, in a significant deal, by Geri Thoma at Writers House. Film: Jon Cassir at Creative Artists Agency 

Articles:

Lore and Logics: The Liberal State, the Carceral State, and the Limits of Justice and Inequality in Postwar America

Thanks to a growing body of scholarship we now know quite a bit about the origins and impact of the carceral state, but two critically important gaps remain in our study of this apparatus. Firstly, we have failed to explore the ways in which carceral elements of the American state may well have been foundational to the state building project writ large in the wake of WW II. Secondly, we have not examined what expanding the American carceral state in the latter third of the 20th c. meant for the legitimacy of the American state, nor for fate of the American democracy itself, as the postwar period progressed.

This omission matters, particularly to how we understand the relationship between the punitive carceral state and the democratic American state. In short, if the building of the American carceral state was not only rooted in, but indeed foundational to, the constructing and legitimizing the American state itself after WW II–and thus the American state depends upon a robust carceral state for its legitimacy–then the nation’s carceral apparatus would necessarily expand as that state matures and, as important, the full fruits of democracy might well be foundationally and structurally impossible to realize.

This article will examine the extent to which in the wake of WW II–and in the face of Cold War pressures abroad as well as Civil Rights pressures at home–the construction of a stable American state depended upon monitoring, neutralizing, containing, and even eliminating, threats to its legitimacy. It hypothesizes that the legitimacy and stability of the American nation state was structurally dependent upon a robust carceral state. As important, it posits that the reverse was equally true—that the seemingly limitless expansion American of the carceral state after WW II depended upon the stability and foundational legitimacy of the American state writ large.

Ultimately, then, this “think piece” will call on scholars to disentangle the process of postwar state building in the U.S. from the principles of democracy that American politicians publicly espoused, and the citizenry remained inspired by, even as the nation grew less democratic and more punitive over time.