This study uniquely and systematically makes the argument that the electoral process in America should be considered as a public good. This argument is placed in the context of an examination of campaign funding and historical attempts at reform. It furthermore is more analytic than anything in the field in tracing the connections between our system of private funding of electoral campaigns and specific difficulties that the country has encountered with regard to the environment, health care, and the financial crisis.

In THE COMMITTEE OF VIGILANCE Steven Levi discusses and analyzes the rise and fall of the last of the old western vigilance committees---and the rise of the first modern American committee devoted to ferreting out “Un- American activities”among the laboring poor,union leaders, progressive politicians and social activists. The Preparedness Day bombing of 1916 was the catalyst(along with the Los Angeles Times bombing several years earlier) for full scale civic strife and class violence in San Francisco.

Foreword by Professor Wang Gungwu,former Vice Chancellor, University of Hong Kong and currently Director of the East asian Institute, University of Singapore

Walter Dean Burnham is widely regarded as the greatest living student of American voting behavior. He pioneered the collection and publication of historical American election statistics and his many essays and books on them are read around the world. His compilation of voting statistics for the famous 1975 Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 was a landmark in the field.

Anarchism stands as one of the the most vital social movements of the twentieth century. Yet the lack, and growing, contemporary movement remain obscured. Lost in recent accounts are the creative and constructive practices undertaken daily by anarchist organizers seeking a world free from violence, oppression and exploitation.