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Start giftingNew Democracy
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThe activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America.
In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration.
William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated people's rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power.
William J. Novak is the author of the prizewinning The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America and coeditor of Corporations and American Democracy and The Democratic Experiment. He is Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.
A. W. Miller was a voice actor before he even knew what he was doing. From a young age he started performing character voices for the entertainment of his friends and family. Then he forgot he could do all that until he started working as the creative services director for several radio stations. But he wouldn't find his permanent footing in voice acting until after he was halfway through a fifteen-year teaching career and his wife said to him one day: "Hey, have you thought about being an audiobook narrator?" After picking up his dropped jaw, Miller and his wife converted a closet into a professional home studio and then he never looked back. For almost a decade he's been lending his voices to audiobooks, video games, and commercials. He is a father, husband, homesteader, and a published author. He's so passionate about audiobooks that he taught his wife to edit and now they are the dynamic VO duo! Miller lives with his wife on their five-acre homestead in middle Tennessee, where they care for their two heifers, pigs, thirty-ish chickens, and a menagerie of cats and dogs.