Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
The increase in writing by political historians and political scientists about the United States in the 1940s registers concerns about origins – after some major endings, notably of Democratic political predominance and the Cold War. That decade also saw the beginning of serious national efforts at reform in racial politics.
1. Similar concerns animate Katznelson's studies of the 1940s. See Katznelson, Ira and Pietrkowski, Bruce, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Fall 1991): 301–39Google Scholar ; Katznelson, Ira, Geiger, Kim, and Kryder, Daniel, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950, ”Political Science Quarterly Summer (1993): 283–306Google Scholar.
2. I make this argument in Plotke, David, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Brinkley, End of Reform, 113.