Brent Cebul is assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Lily Geismer is associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Don't Blame Us. Mason B. Williams is assistant professor of leadership studies and political science at Williams College and the author of City of Ambition.
"""Cebul, Geismer, and Williams call for an analysis of the American state that decenters political parties or ideologies and instead focuses on the norms, assumptions, and values that fuel American governance. . . . What they suggest is nothing short of a revolution in the history of U.S. political history, destined to encourage many among us to consider a wholesale upheaval of our 20th-century US survey courses.""-- ""Journal of Urban History"" ""Essential reading for all political historians and historians of the twentieth-century United States.""-- ""Journal of American History"" ""This is an original and unique anthology whose contributions offer theoretically sophisticated reassessments of the subfield of political history. Both capacious and generative, I know of no other work that comes close in offering so many fresh interpretations of twentieth-century US history and revisions of twentieth-century US historiography. The essays are well written and engaging, new and enlightening.""--Peter James Hudson, University of California, Los Angeles ""Shaped by the State brings together a valuable collection of reports from the borderlands where social, cultural, and political history intersect--and reinvigorate--each other.""--Daniel Rodgers, Princeton University"