This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did it mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Some of the essays disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation.

This volume of essays explores how the American Revolution has been constructed, defined and understood by Europeans from the 1770s up until the present day. From Scotland to Spain, and from Hungary to France, the American Revolution has meant different things and been used, or at time ignored, for different reasons. The actions and the achievements of the American Patriots continue to resonate in early-twenty-first-century Europe, but this is the first in-depth comparative study of this process.

Gold Winner of the 2008 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, Biography Category Brings to life the inspiring story of one of America's Black Founding Fathers, featured in the forthcoming documentary The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song Freedom's Prophet is a long-overdue biography of Richard Allen, founder of the first major African American church and the leading black activist of the early American republic. A tireless minister, abolitionist, and reformer, Allen inaugurated some of the most important institutions in African American history and influenced nearly every black leader of the nineteenth century, from Douglass to Du Bois. Born a slave in colonial Philadelphia, Allen secured his freedom during the American Revolution, and became one of the nation's leading black activists before the Civil War. Among his many achievements, Allen helped form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, co-authored the first copyrighted pamphlet by an African American writer, published the first African American eulogy of George Washington, and convened the first national convention of Black reformers. In a time when most Black men and women were categorized as slave property, Allen was championed as a Black hero. In this thoroughly engaging and beautifully written book, Newman describes Allen's continually evolving life and thought, setting both in the context of his times. From Allen's early antislavery struggles and belief in interracial harmony to his later reflections on Black democracy and Black emigration, Newman traces Allen's impact on American reform and reformers, on racial attitudes during the years of the early republic, and on the Black struggle for justice in the age of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. Whether serving as Americas first Black bishop, challenging slave-holding statesmen in a nation devoted to liberty, or visiting the President's House (the first Black activist to do so), this important book makes it clear that Allen belongs in the pantheon of Americas great founding figures. Freedom's Prophet reintroduces Allen to today's readers and restores him to his rightful place in our nation's history.

Building Competence in School Consultation, Second Edition, directly addresses the need for practical, comprehensive consultation training, including support materials, for school psychologists, counselors, and other professionals working in schools. School psychologists consistently indicate that consultation is a crucial component of their duties but that they lack sufficient opportunities to develop their corresponding knowledge, skills, and confidence during graduate training. Drawing from evidence-based approaches as well as experienced instructors’ real-world toolkits, these essential perspectives and activities approach the standard and less common challenges of the school consultant role. Written by two leading experts in consultation, this book brings school psychology research directly to graduate students and both novice and experienced practitioners, providing invaluable context, reflection activities, videos from fellow consultation experts, and resources that translate academic findings into skills ready for immediate use. This revised and expanded second edition includes two new chapters�—one on collaboration and consultation on teams and another on teleconsultation—along with thoroughly updated content related to socially just and culturally responsive consultation practices; refreshed practice materials including rubrics and videos; references to newly published research and the latest professional standards; and updated activities for readers, all of which are freely downloadable.

Building Competence in School Consultation, Second Edition, directly addresses the need for practical, comprehensive consultation training, including support materials, for school psychologists, counselors, and other professionals working in schools. School psychologists consistently indicate that consultation is a crucial component of their duties but that they lack sufficient opportunities to develop their corresponding knowledge, skills, and confidence during graduate training. Drawing from evidence-based approaches as well as experienced instructors’ real-world toolkits, these essential perspectives and activities approach the standard and less common challenges of the school consultant role. Written by two leading experts in consultation, this book brings school psychology research directly to graduate students and both novice and experienced practitioners, providing invaluable context, reflection activities, videos from fellow consultation experts, and resources that translate academic findings into skills ready for immediate use. This revised and expanded second edition includes two new chapters�—one on collaboration and consultation on teams and another on teleconsultation—along with thoroughly updated content related to socially just and culturally responsive consultation practices; refreshed practice materials including rubrics and videos; references to newly published research and the latest professional standards; and updated activities for readers, all of which are freely downloadable.

In this study of antebellum African American print culture in transnational perspective, Erica L. Ball explores the relationship between antislavery discourse and the emergence of the northern black middle class.
Through innovative readings of slave narratives, sermons, fiction, convention proceedings, and the advice literature printed in forums like "Freedom's Journal," the "North Star," and the "Anglo-African Magazine," Ball demonstrates that black figures such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany consistently urged readers to internalize their political principles and to interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle. Ultimately, they were admonished to embody the abolitionist agenda by living what the fugitive Samuel Ringgold Ward called an "antislavery life."
Far more than calls for northern free blacks to engage in what scholars call "the politics of respectability," African American writers characterized true antislavery living as an oppositional stance rife with radical possibilities, a deeply personal politics that required free blacks to transform themselves into model husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men, and transnational freedom fighters in the mold of revolutionary figures from Haiti to Hungary. In the process, Ball argues, antebellum black writers crafted a set of ideals--simultaneously respectable and subversive--for their elite and aspiring African American readers to embrace in the decades before the Civil War.
Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Building on Karabenick's earlier volume on this topic and maintaining its high standards of scholarship and intellectual rigor, "Help Seeking in Academic Settings: Goals, Groups, and Contexts" brings together contemporary work that is theoretically as well as practically important. It highlights current trends in the area and gives expanded attention to applications to teaching and learning. The contributors represent an internationally recognized group of scholars and researchers who provide depth of analysis and breadth of coverage.
Help seeking is currently considered an important learning strategy that is linked to students' achievement goals and academic performance. This volume not only provides answers to who, why, and when learners seek help, but raises questions for readers to consider for future research. Chapters examine:
*help seeking as a self-regulated learning strategy and its relationship to achievement goal theory;
*help seeking in collaborative groups;
*culture and help seeking in K-12 and college contexts;
*help seeking and academic support services (such as academic advising centers);
*help seeking in computer-based interactive learning environments;
*help seeking in response to peer harassment at school; and
*help seeking in non-academic settings such as the workplace.
This book is intended for researchers, academic support personnel, and graduate students across the field of educational psychology, particularly those interested in student motivation and self-regulation.

This title discusses about religion and race in the British Atlantic. This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain's Caribbean and southern American colonies. Focusing on the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than previously thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists' attachment to religious continuity was thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness. Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and, colonists' attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves. This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.

What shape can radical politics take today in a time abandoned by the great revolutionary projects of the past? In light of recent uprisings around the world against the neoliberal capitalist order, Saul Newman argues that anarchism - or as he calls it postanarchism - forms our contemporary political horizon. In this book, Newman develops an original political theory of postanarchism; a form of anti-authoritarian politics which starts, rather than finishes, with anarchy. He does this by asking four central questions: who are we as subjects; how do we resist; what is our relationship to violence; and, why do we obey? By drawing on a range of heterodox thinkers including La Boetie, Sorel, Benjamin, Stirner and Foucault, the author not only investigates the current conditions for radical political thought and action, but proposes a new form of politics based on what he calls ontological anarchy and the desire for autonomous life. Rather than seeking revolutionary emancipation or political hegemony, we should affirm instead the non-existence of power and the ever-present possibilities of freedom. As the tectonic plates of our time are shifting, revealing the nihilism and emptiness of our political and economic order, postanarchism's disdain for power in all its forms offers us genuine emancipatory potential.

Dr. Newman has used his many years of experience working with interns and field supervisors to create this comprehensive guide to the school psychology internship. The second edition of this text includes updated research and tools, including a new job interview video, and new templates for developing a cover letter, CV, and remediation plan. Expanded content includes brand new chapters focused on applying for doctoral internships through the APPIC Match process, and successfully transitioning from the internship into the early career. Students and internship supervisors alike will find this easy-to-use guide helpful in alleviating anxiety around common internship concerns. Emphasis is placed on the idea that the internship year is a dynamic and formative experience, not a static event, and that interns and supervisors both must be proactive planners, coordinators, and shapers of the experience. Interns and supervisors will find this guide to be a critical support for planning and enacting a high-quality school psychology internship.

A Systematic Approach to Learning Robot Programming with ROS provides a comprehensive, introduction to the essential components of ROS through detailed explanations of simple code examples along with the corresponding theory of operation. The book explores the organization of ROS, how to understand ROS packages, how to use ROS tools, how to incorporate existing ROS packages into new applications, and how to develop new packages for robotics and automation. It also facilitates continuing education by preparing the reader to better understand the existing on-line documentation. The book is organized into six parts. It begins with an introduction to ROS foundations, including writing ROS nodes and ROS tools. Messages, Classes, and Servers are also covered. The second part of the book features simulation and visualization with ROS, including coordinate transforms. The next part of the book discusses perceptual processing in ROS. It includes coverage of using cameras in ROS, depth imaging and point clouds, and point cloud processing. Mobile robot control and navigation in ROS is featured in the fourth part of the book The fifth section of the book contains coverage of robot arms in ROS. This section explores robot arm kinematics, arm motion planning, arm control with the Baxter Simulator, and an object-grabber package. The last part of the book focuses on system integration and higher-level control, including perception-based and mobile manipulation. This accessible text includes examples throughout and C++ code examples are also provided at https://github.com/wsnewman/learning_ros

Dr. Newman has used his many years of experience working with interns and field supervisors to create this comprehensive guide to the school psychology internship. The second edition of this text includes updated research and tools, including a new job interview video, and new templates for developing a cover letter, CV, and remediation plan. Expanded content includes brand new chapters focused on applying for doctoral internships through the APPIC Match process, and successfully transitioning from the internship into the early career. Students and internship supervisors alike will find this easy-to-use guide helpful in alleviating anxiety around common internship concerns. Emphasis is placed on the idea that the internship year is a dynamic and formative experience, not a static event, and that interns and supervisors both must be proactive planners, coordinators, and shapers of the experience. Interns and supervisors will find this guide to be a critical support for planning and enacting a high-quality school psychology internship.

When and why do groups target each other for extermination? How do seemingly normal people become participants in genocide? Why do some individuals come to the rescue of members of targeted groups, while others just passively observe their victimization? And how do perpetrators and bystanders later come to terms with the choices that they made? These questions have long vexed scholars and laypeople alike, and they have not decreased in urgency as we enter the twenty-first century. In this book--the first collection of essays representing social psychological perspectives on genocide and the Holocaust-- prominent social psychologists use the principles derived from contemporary research in their field to try to shed light on the behavior of the perpetrators of genocide. The primary focus of this volume is on the Holocaust, but the conclusions reached have relevance for attempts to understand any episode of mass killing. Among the topics covered are how crises and dificult life conditions might set the stage for violent intergroup conflict; why some groups are more likely than others to be selected as scapegoats; how certain cultural values and beliefs could facilitate the initiation of genocide; the roles of conformity and obedience to authority in shaping behavior; how engaging in violent behavior makes it easier to for one to aggress again; the evidence for a "genocide-prone" personality; and how perpetrators deceive themselves about what they have done. The book does not culminate in a grand theory of intergroup violence; instead, it seeks to provide the reader with new ways of making sense of the horrors of genocide. In other words, the goal of all of the contributors is to provide us with at least some of the knowledge that we will need to anticipate and prevent future such tragic episodes.

An Interview with the Author on the History News Network

A Founding Father with a Vision of Equality Richard Newman's op-ed in "The Philadelphia Inquirer"

Author Spotlight in "The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle"

"Gold" Winner of the 2008 "Foreword Magazine" Book of the Year Award, Biography Category

Freedom's Prophet is a long-overdue biography of Richard Allen, founder of the first major African-American church and the leading black activist of the early American republic. A tireless minister, abolitionist, and reformer, Allen inaugurated some of the most important institutions in African-American history and influenced nearly every black leader of the nineteenth century, from Douglass to Du Bois.

Allen (1760-1831) was born a slave in colonial Philadelphia, secured his freedom during the American Revolution, and became one of the nations leading black activists before the Civil War. Among his many achievements, Allen helped form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, co-authored the first copyrighted pamphlet by an African American writer, published the first African American eulogy of George Washington, and convened the first national convention of black reformers. In a time when most black men and women were categorized as slave property, Allen was championed as a black hero. As Richard S. Newman writes, Allen must be considered one of America's black Founding Fathers.

In this thoroughly engaging and beautifully written book, Newman describes Allen's continually evolving life and thought, setting both in the context of his times. From Allen's early antislavery struggles and belief in interracial harmony to his later reflections on black democracy and black emigration, Newman traces Allen's impact on American reform and reformers, on racial attitudes during the years of the early republic, and on the black struggle for justice in the age of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. Whether serving as Americas first black bishop, challenging slaveholding statesmen in a nation devoted to liberty, or visiting the President's House (the first black activist to do so), this important book makes it clear that Allen belongs in the pantheon of Americas great founding figures. Freedom's Prophet reintroduces Allen to today's readers and restores him to his rightful place in our nation's history.

Prof. Newman is considered one of the great chemical engineers of his time. His reputation derives from his mastery of all phases of the subject matter, his clarity of thought, and his ability to reduce complex problems to their essential core elements. He has been teaching undergraduate and graduate core subject courses at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), USA, since joining the faculty in 1966. His method is to write out, in long form, everything he expects to convey to his class on a subject on any given day. He has maintained and updated his lecture notes from notepad to computer throughout his career. This book is an exact reproduction of those notes. The book presents concepts needed to define single- and multi-component systems, starting with the Gibbs function. It helps readers derive concepts of entropy and temperature and the development of material properties of pure substances. It acquaints them with applications of thermodynamics, such as cycles, open systems, and phase transitions, and eventually leads them to concepts of multiple-component systems, in particular, chemical and phase equilibria. It clearly presents all concepts that are necessary for engineers.

This timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America's most vulnerable households Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market. Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead

The abolitionist movement launched the global human rights struggle in the 18th and 19th centuries and redefined the meaning of equality throughout the Atlantic world. Even in the 21st century, it remains a touchstone of democratic activism-a timeless example of mobilizing against injustice. As famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass commented in the 1890s, the antislavery struggle constituted a grand army of activists whose labors would cast a long shadow over American history. This introduction to the abolitionist movement, written by African American and abolition expert Richard Newman, highlights the key people, institutions, and events that shaped the antislavery struggle between the American Revolutionary and Civil War eras as well as the major themes that guide scholarly understandings of the antislavery struggle. From early abolitionist activism in the Anglo American world and the impact of slave revolutions on antislavery reformers to the rise of black pamphleteers and the emergence of antislavery women before the Civil War, the study of the abolitionist movement has been completely reoriented during the past decade. Where before scholars focused largely on radical (white) abolitionists along the Atlantic seaboard in the years just before the Civil War, they now understand abolitionism via an ever-expanding roster of activists through both time and space. While this book will examine famous antislavery figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, it will also underscore the significance of early abolitionist lawsuits, the impact of the Haitian Revolution on both black and white abolitionists in the United States, and women's increasingly prominent role as abolitionist editors, organizers, and orators. By drawing on the exciting insights of recent work on these and other themes, a very short introduction to the abolitionist movement will provide a compelling and up-to-date narrative of the American antislavery struggle

The unique design problems which helicopters produce are many and complex. Through practical examples and illustrated case studies, supported by all the relevant theory, this primer text provides an accessible introduction which guides the reader through the theory, design, construction and operation of helicopters. Fundamental performance and control equations are developed, from which the book explores the rotor aerodynamic and dynamic characteristics of helicopters. Example calculations and performance predictions, reflecting current practice, show how to assess the feasibility of a design.

* Tackles the theory, design, construction and operation of helicopters
* Illustrated with many practical examples and case studies
* Provides the fundamental equations describing performance and dynamic behaviour

God is dead, but his presence lives on in politics. This is the problem of political theology: the way that theological ideas find their way into secular political institutions, particularly the sovereign state. In this intellectual tour-de-force, leading political theorist Saul Newman shows how political theology arose alongside secularism, and relates to the problem of legitimising power and authority in modernity. It is not about the power of religion so much as about the religion of power. Examining the current crisis of the liberal order, he argues that recent phenomena such as the rise of populism, the renewed demand for strong national sovereignty and the return of religious fundamentalism may be understood through this paradigm. He illustrates his argument through an exploration of themes such as sovereignty, democracy, economics, technology, ecological catastrophe, messianism and the future of radical politics, engaging with thinkers ranging from Schmitt and Hobbes to Stirner, Foucault, and Agamben. This book will be a crucial text for all students, scholars and general readers interested in the meaning and significance of political theology for political theory.

In the spring of 1978, citizens of Love Canal, a suburban development in Niagara Falls, NY, began protesting against the leaking toxic waste dump - a sixteen acre site containing 100,000 barrels of chemical waste - upon which their homes, elementary school, and backyards stood. The Love Canal citizens' movement represented a different brand of environmental reform. Rather than focusing on resource conservation and preservation of natural spaces, Love Canal reformers advocated environmental justice. By the early 1980s, hundreds of local activists (many of them self-described "housewives-turned-activists") had forced two important initiatives from politicians and business leaders: government relocation of Love Canal families and government/industry remediation of the dump itself. Love Canal activists also spurred passage of the Superfund law at the federal level, "Right to Know" statutes at the state level, and a wave of copycat citizen-environmentalist groups in communities across the country (so-called NIMBYs: "Not In My Backyard" environmentalists). Nearly thirty years after making international headlines, Love Canal remains a watchword of hazardous waste reform and one of the most significant environmental disasters in American history. In this book, Richard S. Newman examines this oft-told event within the wider context of the landscape through five centuries. He begins with the conflicts that erupted between the resident Iroquois and French explorer Rene Lasalles' commercial development schemes in the Niagara Falls region. During the 18th and 19th century, the Love Canal landscape was transformed by successive generations of European and American entrepreneurs and industrialists. Love's Canal was the dream of William Love, a developer who in 1893 planned a massive industrial metropolis to be carved out of the Niagara region's lush farmland, capped by an artificial river with a waterfall higher than Niagara Falls. His scheme failed but not before digging of the canal had begun. The scheme attracted the interest of famous conservationists like John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Burroughs, who argued for preserving the falls from commercial and industrial overuse. Yet throughout the twentieth century the area supported massive industrial growth, including that of the Hooker Electrochemical Corporation, the company that dumped industrial chemicals into the abandoned Love Canal site. As the company grew, its efforts to handle disposal of its hazardous waste led to development of a new process of "in-ground disposal." Only by considering Love Canal land-use and alteration through successive stages of commercialization, industrialization, deindustrialization, and technological innovation can we understand the road to a hazardous waste nightmare in the 1970s-and the global environmental justice movement it sparked. A portrait of a charged landscape and the people who have continually redefined its meaning, this book will look at local land-use from long-term perspective.

The last half century has seen a dramatic expansion in access to primary, secondary, and higher education in many nations around the world. Educational expansion is desirable for a country's economy, beneficial for educated individuals themselves, and is also a strategy for greater social harmony. But has greater access to education reduced or exacerbated social inequality? Who are the winners and the losers in the scramble for educational advantage?
In Growing Gaps, Paul Attewell and Katherine S. Newman bring together an impressive group of scholars to closely examine the relationship between inequality and education. The relationship is not straightforward and sometimes paradoxical. Across both post-industrial societies and the high-growth economies of the developing world, education has become the central path for upward mobility even as it maintains and exacerbates existing inequalities. In many countries there has been a staggering growth of private education as demand for opportunity has outpaced supply, but the families who must fund this human capital accumulation are burdened with more and more debt. Privatizing education leads to intensified inequality, as students from families with resources enjoy the benefits of these new institutions while poorer students face intense competition for entry to under-resourced public universities and schools. The ever-increasing supply of qualified, young workers face class- or race-based inequalities when they attempt to translate their credentials into suitable jobs. Covering almost every continent, Growing Gaps provides an overarching and essential examination of the worldwide race for educational advantage and will serve as a lasting achievement towards understanding the root causes of inequality.

Historians in the United States have argued that the ideals of the American Revolution have had an enduring significance outside their own country. The essays in this volume explore how the American Revolution has been constructed, defined and understood by Europeans from the 1770s, illustrating what it has meant in different countries.

What shape can radical politics take today in a time abandoned by the great revolutionary projects of the past? In light of recent uprisings around the world against the neoliberal capitalist order, Saul Newman argues that anarchism - or as he calls it postanarchism - forms our contemporary political horizon. In this book, Newman develops an original political theory of postanarchism; a form of anti-authoritarian politics which starts, rather than finishes, with anarchy. He does this by asking four central questions: who are we as subjects; how do we resist; what is our relationship to violence; and, why do we obey? By drawing on a range of heterodox thinkers including La Boetie, Sorel, Benjamin, Stirner and Foucault, the author not only investigates the current conditions for radical political thought and action, but proposes a new form of politics based on what he calls ontological anarchy and the desire for autonomous life. Rather than seeking revolutionary emancipation or political hegemony, we should affirm instead the non-existence of power and the ever-present possibilities of freedom. As the tectonic plates of our time are shifting, revealing the nihilism and emptiness of our political and economic order, postanarchism's disdain for power in all its forms offers us genuine emancipatory potential.

God is dead, but his presence lives on in politics. This is the problem of political theology: the way that theological ideas find their way into secular political institutions, particularly the sovereign state. In this intellectual tour-de-force, leading political theorist Saul Newman shows how political theology arose alongside secularism, and relates to the problem of legitimising power and authority in modernity. It is not about the power of religion so much as about the religion of power. Examining the current crisis of the liberal order, he argues that recent phenomena such as the rise of populism, the renewed demand for strong national sovereignty and the return of religious fundamentalism may be understood through this paradigm. He illustrates his argument through an exploration of themes such as sovereignty, democracy, economics, technology, ecological catastrophe, messianism and the future of radical politics, engaging with thinkers ranging from Schmitt and Hobbes to Stirner, Foucault, and Agamben. This book will be a crucial text for all students, scholars and general readers interested in the meaning and significance of political theology for political theory.

Americans like to think that they look after their own, especially in times of hardship. Particularly for the Great Depression and the Great Society eras, the collective memory is one of solidarity and compassion for the less fortunate. "Who Cares?" challenges this story by examining opinion polls and letters to presidents from average citizens. This evidence, some of it little known, reveals a much darker, more impatient attitude toward the poor, the unemployed, and the dispossessed during the 1930s and 1960s. Katherine Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs show that some of the social policies that Americans take for granted today suffered from declining public support just a few years after their inception. Yet Americans have been equally unenthusiastic about efforts to dismantle social programs once they are well established. Again contrary to popular belief, conservative Republicans had little public support in the 1980s and 1990s for their efforts to unravel the progressive heritage of the New Deal and the Great Society. Whether creating or rolling back such programs, leaders like Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan often found themselves working against public opposition, and they left lasting legacies only by persevering despite it.

Timely and surprising, "Who Cares?" demonstrates not that Americans are callous but that they are frequently ambivalent about public support for the poor. It also suggests that presidential leadership requires bold action, regardless of opinion polls.