Regulatory History by the Book

William J. Novak’s "New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State" is a bracing conspectus of the legal values that shaped the evolution of governmental institutions in the United States in the decades between the Civil War and the New Deal. Some twenty years in the making, it reveals the latent, and often overlooked, “subterranean processes” that gave form to the better-known manifest events that have been detailed in more conventional accounts. In contrast to his mentor, Morton Keller, whose "America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History" (2007) positioned the New Deal as a watershed in American public life, Novak charts continuities between the New Deal “administrative state” and the regulatory regime that emerged in the period between 1866 and 1932. Published as part of the Symposium on William Novak's "New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State.