This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter examines the impact of judicial discretion and left-digit bias on criminal sentencing outcomes. Judicial discretion allows judges to make nuanced decisions, taking into account details of legal cases that are not directly covered by law. However, judicial discretion can also expose behavioral biases and lead to irrational decision-making. I test for the existence of a particular behavioral bias: age-based left-digit bias. Specifically, I use a regression discontinuity design to test for changes in sentencing decisions occurring on an offender's 20th birthday using data on sentencing decisions from the state of Pennsylvania. I find that an offender sentenced just after his/her 20th birthday is 3.5 percentage points more likely to be sentenced to incarceration than an offender sentenced just before his/her 20th birthday. I test for evidence of conscious mechanisms underlying this effect and find no such evidence, leaving an unconscious bias as the best available explanation. Chapter two examines the impact of highly publicized police killings of black individuals on the racial gap in birth outcomes. Police killings of Black Americans are increasingly being met with significant media coverage and public response, including civil unrest. Given the frequency with which these events occur, it is vital to understand both their direct and indirect impacts. Using national birth certificate data and an event study design, I test for the impact of high-profile police-involved killings of Black Americans on racial disparities in maternal stress levels and birth outcomes. I find a large, statistically significant, and persistent increase in gestational hypertension of Black mothers relative to White mothers, strongly indicating an increase in the racial gap in maternal stress following these high-profile killings. I find limited evidence of an accompanying effect on the racial gap in birth outcomes. However, many existing papers similarly find no impacts of maternal stress on birth outcomes while simultaneously finding significant impacts on later-life outcomes, leaving room for additional future work based on these findings. How does the content of public communication by elected representatives change in response to highly salient, politically polarizing events? In Chapter 3, I examine this question using the text of tweets from members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, an n-gram text regression model and sentiment analysis alogorithms, and an event study design focused on mass shootings in the U.S. Observable effects on communication are concentrated on the day of and the day following a mass shooting. Republican members of Congress exhibit a reduced tweet frequency relative to Democratic members of Congress in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, while Democratic members of Congress speak with a more clearly differentiated Democratic vocabulary. Members from both parties speak with a more negative vocabulary. With Republicans collectively disengaging and Democrats collectively highlighting their partisan identification, this may suggest that Democrats are taking advantage of an opportunity for a political and/or policy win while Republicans in the same period are choosing to avoid additional political and/or policy losses.

The late 1990's was a time of great wealth and prosperity in the United States. With this economic fervor came a new era of deregulation of the financial services industry. During this time, Congress passed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, otherwise referred to as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GBLA). This law removed the final barrier (contained in Depression-era Glass-Steagall legislation) between mixing investment banking and commercial banking in the United States. The purpose of this report is to explain the intentions of the law's supporters and detractors, to discuss why this period was a particularly ripe time for such a policy, to examine the leadership decisions that contributed to the passage of GLBA, and to understand the motives behind a "new Glass-Steagall" bill today. This paper focuses only on the deregulatory parts of GLBA relevant to Glass-Steagall's repeal. It does not examine the privacy protections, et al. of GLBA at any length. Also contained in the analysis is a brief discussion of whether GLBA's stated intentions have been violated through the mixing of banking and commerce that has emerged in the present day. Finally, this report ends with a discussion on the fidelity of our national debate on banking regulation, and what it means for the federal government to manage risk in American financial markets in support of the public interest. / text

Between 1830 and 1842, the United States coastwise slave trade raised several issues and provoked numerous debates in Congress. The purpose of this study is to determine the role of the coastwise slave trade and its effect upon attitudes toward slavery in Congress during this period. The primary sources used include official government documents, unpublished and published papers, correspondence, diaries, speeches, and memoirs. This study concludes that the issues raised by the coastwise slave trade crisis and debated in Congress between 1830 and 1842 contributed to the decline of southern dominance in national politics and provided abolitionists with a vital motivation of antislavery agitation in the United States Congress.

No description available.

The Coast Reservation of Oregon was established under Executive Order of President Franklin Pierce in November, 1855, as a homeland for the southern Oregon tribes. It was an immense, isolated wilderness, parts of which had burned earlier in the century. There were some prairies where farming was possible, but because the reservation system itself and farming, particularly along the coast, were unknown entities, life for the Indians was a misery for years. Those responsible for the establishment of the reservation were subject to the vagaries of the weather, the wilderness, the Congress, and the Office of Indian Affairs. Agents were accountable, not only for the lives of Oregon Indians, but also for all of the minute details involved in answering to a governmental agency. Some of the agents were experienced with the tribes of western Oregon; others were not. All of them believed that the only way to keep the Indians from dying out was to teach them the European American version of agriculturalism. Eventually, if possible, Oregon Indians would be assimilated into the dominant culture. Most agents held out little hope for the adults of the tribes. This thesis lays out the background for the development of United States Indian policies. European Americans' ethnocentric ideas about what constituted civilization became inextricably woven into those policies. Those policies were brought in their infant stage to Oregon. Thus, the work on the reservations was experimental, costing lives and destroying community. How those policies were implemented on the Coast Reservation from 1856-1877 concludes this study. / Graduation date: 2000 / Best scan available for photos. Original is a black and white photocopy.

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to analyze and assess the attitude of Lincoln and Congress toward emancipation of slaves during the Civil War.Hypotheses1. Abraham Lincoln, as the sixteenth President of the United States, was determined to preserve the Union and to preserve slavery where it existed.2. The Thirty-Seventh Congress of the United States was determined to preserve the Union and to preserve slavery where it existed.3. Lincoln showed enthusiasm toward emancipation of slaves.4. Lincoln was sensitive to the needs and desires of freed slaves.5. The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves.Historical FindingsThe five historical hypotheses evaluated in this study reveal significant information and they are explained below:1. Abraham Lincoln, as the sixteenth President of the United States, was determined to save the Union. Therefore, the hypothesis that Abraham Lincoln, as the sixteenth President of the United States, was determined to abolish slavery is historically rejected.2. The Thirty-Seventh Congress of the United States was determined to save the Union. Therefore, the hypothesis that the Thirty-Seventh Congress of the United States was determined to abolish slavery is historically rejected.3. Lincoln showed enthusiasm toward gradual emancipation of slaves with compensation. Therefore, the hypothesis that Lincoln showed enthusiasm toward outright emancipation of slaves is historically rejected. 4. Lincoln was not sensitive to the needs and desires of Negroes, because this concern was overshadowed by his immediate desires to retain the Union. Therefore, the hypothesis that Lincoln was sensitive to the needs and desires of Negroes is historically rejected.5. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves because of the following three reasons:(1) the Emancipation Proclamation applied to slaves in areas still under the control of the Confederacy; (2) the limitations of the Emancipation Proclamation made it a paper tiger; (3) the Emancipation Proclamation applied to slaves located where it had no power to execute its provisions.

Typescript. / Bibliography: leaves [238]-245. / xvii, 245 leaves ill

This dissertation is motivated by a straightforward question about a drastic change to American politics: why has the process of staffing the circuit courts of appeals, once so agreeable and bipartisan, seemed to have descended into almost complete partisan bitterness? Across the entire time series, these are, after all, the same courts endowed with the same power of judicial review. And when the process of staffing them was harmonious, the courts were nevertheless deciding the fate of major, controversial policies of national importance---such as the New Deal in the 1930s and civil rights in the 1950s---just as they do today. Yes, many other aspects of American politics have changed through the decades. But what could possibly explain such a complete reversal of course? I argue that this change, toward divisiveness and partisan warfare, is actually about the judiciary itself and the substantive manner by which the nominees are thought of---namely, the entry of judicial ideology into the debate through the innovation of circuit judges being evaluated on ideological terms. While taken for granted as central today, any ideological assessment of circuit court nominees, and in particular viewing them as having a comprehensive judicial philosophy as opposed to just a position on singular pressing issue of the day, was almost nonexistent for generations. Its entry into the process was piecemeal and somewhat complicated, but it eventually came to dominate and irrevocably polarize the business of staffing the courts. I argue that this was the key factor that leaves us where we are today. Broadly speaking, I consider the contributions and particular strengths of my dissertation, relative to previous scholarship, to be threefold. First is my argument and accompanying analyses which put the crucial (and severely understudied) role of judicial ideology front and center. Second, I analyze the entire lifespan of the circuit courts, whereas the previous scholarship looks only at (often relatively brief) subsets of their history. As far as I know, this is the first study to systematically look at all circuit court nominations from the establishment of these courts in 1891 through the modern era. Third, I collect and analyze a great deal of new data. In particular I focus on systematically utilizing extensive archival resources and build two original data sets related to the Senate's public and private evaluation of judicial nominees; and while there is certainly a qualitative aspect to much of this research, I also synthesize and make sense of it with quantitative analysis. In chapter 1, I explain the puzzle motivating this research, elaborate my argument, and lay out the theoretical, methodological, and data collection contributions of this dissertation. I also review the literature and describe the three existing schools of thought. In chapter 2, I give an overview of the history of the circuit courts from their founding to the present. In this data-heavy chapter, I examine multiple metrics individually, and using several of these I build a robust composite score of divisiveness for each nominee ever made to the circuit courts, from 1891 through 2020. As far as I know this has never been done before. I find overwhelming evidence that the process has fundamentally changed and become more divisive. In chapter 3, I dig more deeply into the timing of this change, and begin to explore how and why it happened---and begin my attempt at demonstrating how the evaluation of judicial ideology is central to this change. To do this I examine a massive data source that has never been utilized: the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for all nominees. With both qualitative and quantitative analysis, I show that the evaluation of nominees has varied widely over time. Prior to 1979, nominees were evaluated almost exclusively based on their qualifications, with ideology examined only under special circumstances, which I explore in depth. In this time period, ideological scrutiny predicted a contentious confirmation process, providing evidence for my argument that ideological evaluation drove divisiveness. Also in this chapter, I analyze the post-1979 transition to the routine ideological evaluation that permanently altered the confirmation process. I find that Republicans and comprehensive judicial philosophies both played a key role. In chapter 4, I examine the senators' private evaluation of nominees, in part to serve as a check on the validity of my earlier data analysis and also to see if there is any difference between the senators' public and private goals in relation to the judiciary. To do this, I build an original data set of over 1000 internal letters and memoranda from senators, by searching the archival records of nearly every president since Benjamin Harrison as well as over 150 senators. Studying this material qualitatively and quantitatively, the findings here largely align with the analysis of the public committee hearings: for much of history senators were concerned mainly about qualifications, with ideological concern rare and under special circumstances, but eventually ideology came to be the predominant concern which ended the consensual and placid process. This immense historical record also brings to light additional senatorial goals, such as ensuring residents of their own state as well as personal friends obtain judicial appointments. In chapter 5, I focus in on the post-1979 era and I find that the more ideologically distant a nominee is from the Senate, the more divisive the confirmation process is. This provides evidence that the process is defined by ideology related to the nominees, not garden variety polarization of the system. In chapter 6, I conclude, trying to synthesize all of my findings as well as offer some thoughts on areas of future research.

California has been traditionally a Republican state, yet the Republicans have been unable to regain their traditional dominance since their defeat in 1958. The 1958 election represented a fundamental shift in the nature of California politics. More than that, the defeat of the Republicans pointed up a fundamental weakness in the Republican party.