Civil Rights and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Democratic Party, 1945-1976 is about ideology and politics. It focuses on the civil rights issue in Democratic party politics from 1945 to 1976 but glances at a longer history to describe American liberalism.

This book is an interpretation of our recent political past. It offers an explanation of the rise and decline of postwar liberalism, a creed that was vitally concerned with civil rights. Partly because of such special concern, liberalism inspired in many a daring vision of social justice and, by the end of the 1960s, inspired in many more a reaction of loathing and contempt. To explain the rise of this ideology, John Frederick Martin has drawn from numerous archives and interviews and assessed the contributions of Truman, Stevenson, Kefauver, Harriman, Kennedy, and Johnson. To explain its decline, he has analyzed the reaction to the liberals' government-the sentiments aroused by busing, affirmative action, Model Cities, and the militance of blacks, Democrats, and white ethnics. Though varying in their intent, these responses shared a dislike of the liberals' treatment of minorities and a dread of government power-a dread made stronger by the antiwar movement and the Watergate scandal-and thereby discredited the very ends and means of the liberal program. By the early 1970s, Martin argues, it was no surprise that a politics of consumerism-pivoting on the rights of the average citizen, not of the deprived citizen, and eschewing government power-had replaced the liberal ideology. Placing this narrative in a larger context, Martin explains the importance of the race issue in previous liberal movements and composes an interpretation of the whole of American liberalism as well as of its latest stage and the Democrats' recent ordeal.

In examining the founding of New England towns during the seventeenth century, John Frederick Martin investigates an old subject with fresh insight. Whereas most historians emphasize communalism and absence of commerce in the seventeenth century, Martin demonstrates that colonists sought profits in town-founding, that town founders used business corporations to organize themselves into landholding bodies, and that multiple and absentee landholding was common.
In reviewing some sixty towns and the activities of one hundred town founders, Martin finds that many town residents were excluded from owning common lands and from voting. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, when proprietors separated from towns, that town institutions emerged as fully public entities for the first time.
Martin's study will challenge historians to rethink not only social history but also the cultural history of early New England. Instead of taking sides in the long-standing debate between Puritan scholars and business historians, Martin identifies strains within Puritanism and the rest of the colonists' culture that both discouraged and encouraged land commerce, both supported and undermined communalism, both hindered and hastened development of the wilderness. Rather than portray colonists one-dimensionally, Martin analyzes how several different and competing ethics coexisted within a single, complex, and vibrant New England culture.