Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Pg. 99: Stephen Rockwell's "Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century by Stephen J. Rockwell.

About the book, from the publisher:
The framers of the Constitution and the generations that followed built a powerful and intrusive national administrative state in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The romantic myth of an individualized, pioneering expansion across an open West obscures nationally coordinated administrative and regulatory activity in Indian affairs, land policy, trade policy, infrastructure development, and a host of other issue areas related to expansion. Stephen J. Rockwell offers a careful look at the administration of Indian affairs and its relation to other national policies managing and shaping national expansion westward. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian affairs were at the center of concerns about national politics, the national economy, and national social issues. Rockwell describes how a vibrant and complicated national administrative state operated from the earliest days of the republic, long before the Progressive era and the New Deal.
Read an excerpt from Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Stephen J. Rockwell is an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at St. Joseph's College, where he is also the coordinator of the American studies program.

The Page 99 Test: Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century.

--Marshal Zeringue