The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America - Softcover

Radford, Gail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022603772X ISBN 13: 9780226037721

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

In the late nineteenth century, public officials throughout the United States began to experiment with new methods of managing their local economies and meeting the infrastructure needs of a newly urban, industrial nation. Stymied by legal barriers, they created a new class of quasipublic agencies called public authorities. Today these entities operate at all levels of government, and range from tiny operations like the Springfield Parking Authority in Massachusetts, which runs thirteen parking lots and garages, to mammoth enterprises like the Tennessee Valley Authority, with nearly twelve billion dollars in revenue each year. In "The Rise of the Public Authority", Gail Radford recounts the history of these inscrutable government corporations, examining the ways they were established and the unprecedented powers that they have exercised over the last hundred years. Radford has mapped this institutional terra incognita, giving readers a grand tour of these institutions and the way that they operate, making a substantial contribution to our understanding of these pervasive but elusive mechanisms - and their implications for American political development.

About this title

Review:

"Gail Radford is an imaginative student of American statecraft whose probing narrtaive has put an otherwise prosaic set of agencies and institutions close to the center of our understanding of statebuilding. By explaining how quasi-governmental state authorities became such a pervasive part of the way virtually every level of government finances its activities, Radford unlocks a puzzle: how so many Americans can both distrust their state and also insist upon an ever-expanding set of governmental services. This is an important and provocative book."
--Nelson Lichtenstein "author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor "

"Gail Radford has performed a real service here, deftly situating the first comprehensive history of this sprawling but underappreciated aspect of American governance within broader narratives of modern US history. As she explores the histories of agencies like the Federal Farm Land Bank and the Buffalo Sewer Authority, Radford's prose absolutely crackles--this is a real page-turner!"--Derek Hoff "coauthor of Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, The Contract Clause, and the Great Depression "

Gail Radford has performed a real service here, deftly situating the first comprehensive history of this sprawling but underappreciated aspect of American governance within broader narratives of modern US history. As she explores the histories of agencies like the Federal Farm Land Bank and the Buffalo Sewer Authority, Radford s prose absolutely crackles this is a real page-turner! --Derek Hoff "coauthor of Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, The Contract Clause, and the Great Depression ""

"At a time when many Americans express a deep frustration with government in the United States, Gail Radford provides a crucial new perspective on how the American state actually works and into how that state was built."Rise of the Public Authority" breaks down conventional categories of American political development by tracing a critical form of state capacity that operates across federal and subfederal levels of government and, more often than not, out of the public eye. Gail Radford makes this rarely recognized and even less understood capacity vitally clear."--Guian A. McKee "author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia ""

About the Author:

Gail Radford is associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo and the author of Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 022603772X
• ISBN 13: 9780226037721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228