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Just after 8:00 in the morning on Tuesday, September 21, 1943, the singer and radio star Kate Smith addressed her national audience with a personal story that set the tone for the marathon bond drive she would conduct over the next eighteen hours. In her usual self-effacing manner, she began by recounting the words of a man whose speech at a recent bond rally in Utica, New York, held special meaning for her audience:You know, friends, when we buy War Bonds, we're not buying tanks and guns and shells and planes. What we're really doing is buying our boys back … bringing them home to us, safe and sound once again. Now I know there isn't a person listening to me who wouldn't give everything he has to buy his boy back. … I'd give anything … all my money, or my health, or my own life … to buy my boy back from the War. But I'm afraid I can't do that now. You see, I got a telegram from Washington this morning. My boy isn't coming back.

The early American state "in action" : the federal Marine hospitals, 1789-1860 / Gautham Rao -- Beyond Tocqueville's myth : rethinking the model of the American state / Stephen W. Sawyer -- Inventing the US-Mexico border / C.J. Alvarez -- Rumors of empire : tracking the image of Britain at the dawn of the American century / James T. Sparrow -- The great transformation : the state and the market in the postwar world / Jason Scott Smith -- Governing the child : the state, the family, and the compulsory school in the early twentieth century / Tracy Steffes -- Youth as infrastructure : 4-H and the intimate state in 1920s rural America / Gabriel N. Rosenberg -- Good citizens of a world power : postwar reconfigurations of the obligation to give / Elisabeth Clemens -- The rise of the public religious welfare state : black religion and the negotiation of church/state boundaries during the war on poverty / Omar M. McRoberts -- Private power and American bureaucracy : the state, the EEOC, and civil rights enforcement / Robert C. Lieberman -- From political economy to civil society : Arthur W. Page, corporate philanthropy, and the reframing of the past in post-New Deal America / Richard R. John -- Conclusion : the concept of the state in American history / William J. Novak.

The question of how the American state defines its power has become central to a range of historical topics, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system to the functions of agencies and America's place in the world. Yet conventional histories of the state have not reckoned adequately with the roots of an ever-expanding governmental power, assuming instead that the American state was historically and exceptionally weak relative to its European peers. Here, James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer assemble definitional essays that search for explanations to account for the extraordinary growth of US power without resorting to exceptionalist narratives. Turning away from abstract, metaphysical questions about what the state is, or schematic models of how it must work, these essays focus instead on the more pragmatic, historical question of what it does. By historicizing the construction of the boundaries dividing America and the world, civil society and the state, they are able to explain the dynamism and flexibility of a government whose powers appear so natural as to be given, invisible, inevitable, and exceptional.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One: The Challenge of Carl Schmitt -- 1. What Is the State of Exception? -- 2. Negotiating the Rule of Law: Dilemmas of Security and Liberty Revisited -- 3. Beyond the Exception -- Part Two: The American Experience with Emergency Powers -- 4. The American Law of Overruling Necessity: The Exceptional Origins of State Police Power -- 5. To Save the Country: Reason and Necessity in Constitutional Emergencies -- 6. Powers of War in Times of Peace: Emergency Powers in the United States after the End of the Civil War -- 7. Was There an American Concept of Emergency Powers? John Dewey, Carl Schmitt, and the Democratic Politics of Exception -- 8. Charles Merriam and the Search for Democratic Power After Sovereignty -- 9. Constitutional Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century American Political Thought -- Part Three: Broadening the Exception -- 10. Frederick Douglass and Constitutional Emergency: An Homage to the Political Creativity of Abolitionist Activism -- 11. Delegated Governance as a Structure of Exceptions -- 12. Spaces of Exception in American History -- Afterword -- Contributors -- Index