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Throughout U.S. history, presidents have participated in photography as subjects, producers, and consumers of photographs. Yet few scholars have examined the 180-year relationship between presidents and photography in any depth. Photographic Presidents studies how presidents shaped and participated in transformative moments in the history of the medium: George Washington, who more than 50 years after his death emerged as a crucial subject for early photography in a nation eager to consume portraits of elite leaders; John Quincy Adams, who in the early 1840s lamented in his diary his failure to get a good daguerreotype; William McKinley, whose 1901 assassination set off a morbid race to find and publish the dead president’s “last photographs”; Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, each vexed by encounters with “candid cameramen” with the capacity to catch their subjects unaware; and Barack Obama, whose use of social media photography embodied the tensions inherent in early twenty-first-century digital photography. From its introduction in 1839 to the present day, photography has introduced new visual values that have often clashed with existing social and cultural norms. As representations of elite leaders who symbolized the nation, presidential photographs became sites of tension in which the implications of these new visual values played out in public.

This book links the state constitutions of Illinois to Abraham Lincoln’s legacy amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Beginning with Euro-American settlement in the region that would become Illinois, the narrative details the various nations that governed the territory and the issues that concerned its population, from degrees of authoritarian rule to the status of indentured servants and black and Native slaves. As the territory came under U.S. control through the Northwest Ordinance, its sparse population held southern attitudes toward government and slavery. Through an enabling act in 1818, the northern border of Illinois Territory was set sixty miles north of the southern tip of Lake Michigan, encompassing what would eventually become the economic powerhouse of Chicago. Analysis of the four nineteenth-century state constitutional conventions (1818, 1847, 1862, 1869) summarizes essential issues for Illinois’s citizens, from the balance of governmental powers to the civil rights of African Americans, from squabbles over internal improvements like canals and railroads to geographical splits between rural and urban, Yankee and southern. This history and analysis shows that the enabling act that extended the Illinois border north also enabled the growth of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln’s election as president, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution that altered the nation’s history.

In the 1950s, Milwaukee's strong union movement and socialist mayor seemed to embody a dominant liberal consensus that sought to continue and expand the New Deal. This book explores how business interests and political conservatives arose to undo that consensus, and how the resulting clash both shaped a city and helped redefine postwar American politics. The book focuses on Frank Zeidler, the city's socialist mayor. Zeidler's broad concept of the public interest at times defied even liberal expectations. At the same time, a resurgence of conservatism with roots presaging twentieth-century politics challenged his initiatives in public housing, integration, and other areas. As the book shows, conservatives created an anti-progressive game plan that included a well-funded media and public relations push; an anti-union assault essential to the larger project of delegitimizing any government action; opposition to civil rights; and support from a suburban silent majority. In the end, the campaign undermined notions of the common good essential to the New Deal order. It also sowed the seeds for grassroots conservatism's more extreme and far-reaching future success.

Few expected politician Abraham Lincoln and Congregational minister Owen Lovejoy to be friends when they met in 1854. One was a cautious lawyer who deplored abolitionists' flouting of the law, the other an outspoken antislavery activist who captained a stop on the Underground Railroad. Yet the two built a relationship that, in Lincoln's words, “was one of increasing respect and esteem.” This book examines the thorny issue of the pragmatism typically ascribed to Lincoln versus the radicalism of Lovejoy, and the role each played in ending slavery. Exploring the men's politics, personal traits, and religious convictions, the book traces their separate paths in life as well as their frequent interactions. It shows how Lincoln and Lovejoy influenced one another and analyzes the strategies and systems of belief each brought to the epic controversies of slavery versus abolition and union versus disunion. The book moves beyond mere politics to a nuanced perspective on the fabric of religion and personal background that underlay the minister's worldview. The book reveals how Lincoln embraced the radical idea of emancipation, and how Lovejoy shaped his own radicalism to wield the pragmatic political tools needed to reach that ultimate goal.

This book locates the roots of American conservatism in a city that was a nexus of labor and industry in postwar America. Drawing on archival research focusing on Detroit, the book shows how conflict over business values and opposition to labor, anticommunism, racial animosity, and religion led to the development of a conservative ethos in the aftermath of World War II. Using Detroit—with its large population of African American and Catholic workers, strong union presence, and starkly segregated urban landscape—as a case study, the book articulates a nuanced understanding of anticommunism during the Red Scare. Looking beyond national politics, the book focuses on key debates occurring at the local level among a wide variety of common citizens. In examining this city's social and political fabric, it illustrates that domestic anticommunism was a cohesive, multifaceted ideology that arose less from Soviet ideological incursion than from tensions within the American public.