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U.S. Grant was stumped: "The muddle down there is almost beyond my fathoming," the president told the New York Herald in the summer of 1871. What had him flummoxed was the recently adjourned "Gatling Gun Convention" in New Orleans, a Republican state nominating gathering that reads like a passage from a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The run-up was punctuated by open combat in the trenches and foxholes of countless ward clubs and party conventions—the so-called "War of the Factions." When the sitting Republican governor, the colorful and roguish Henry Clay Warmoth, hobbled by a boating accident earlier in the summer, led delegates supporting his candidacy to the designated meeting place inside the U.S. Customhouse on Canal Street, federal soldiers manning the latest in automatic weaponry turned him and his followers away when they tried to barge into a rival group's caucus. Warmoth thereupon guided his followers to another meeting hall. For the next 18 months, warring Republican factions moved in and out of opportunistic alliances with Conservative-Democrats. They divided into rival legislatures, used force to achieve quorums, and arrested and impeached their own senior leaders. If some of the more scurrilous allegations are to be believed, they even poisoned their lieutenant-governor. Were Louisiana politics on the verge of becoming "Mexicanized"—plunged into chronic crisis and political tumult? That was the question beginning to trouble Republican observers north of the Ohio River.

New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction, analyzes the North's efforts to transform the South, both during and after the war, into a free labor economy and society. In this ground-breaking work, Lawrence N. Powell addresses the role that the twenty to fifty thousand "new masters," or northern planters, had on the post-reconstruction system. Covering evidence of over five hundred northern planters, Powell asserts that northern emigrants provided much of the capital that hard-pressed southern planters used to stave off bankruptcy; showing that these planters became both the catalyst that perpetuated the plantation system of servitude and debt, as well as became the reason behind the revitalization of the South. New Masters deals with a variety of issues, including race relations, Northern planters' motivations, work habits, capital investment patterns, and the planters' gradual disillusionment as problems mounted and profits declined

Today's insurance regulation in the United States is at a crossroads: while some segments of the insurance industry are moving away from a state-based approach toward regulation, others favor a greater role for the federal government-despite the opposition from other stakeholders. Written by leading scholars in risk management, this book addresses some of the most important questions facing the future of state and federal regulation of the insurance industry. Examining not only the impetus behind various reform proposals, but also the historical development of insurance regulation in the Unite

Analysing comparable samples of students from the Cross‐Cultural Variations in Distributive Justice Perception (CVDJP) project, we explore the multidimensionality of attitudes towards the welfare state in Israel compared with countries from liberal and social‐democratic welfare regimes (the USA, Canada‐Ontario, Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands). We derive six different attitudinal dimensions that constitute two distinct sets of opposing welfare ideological frames. The first set, market‐based ideology, entails three coexisting criteria: individualism, internal attribution of inequality, and work ethic. The second set, welfare‐statist ideology, entails three additional coexisting criteria: egalitarian redistribution, external attribution of inequality, and broad scope of welfare. Along with structural similarities, we find considerable variation in levels of aggregate attitudes across the different types of welfare regimes. Israeli respondents stand out because of their strongly ambivalent welfare attitudes. While scoring higher than respondents from the liberal regimes on market‐based measures, they paradoxically record similarly high scores (comparable to social‐democratic regimes) on state‐based measures. On one criterion – attribution of inequality to external causes – Israeli respondents even score higher than respondents from both liberal and social‐democratic regimes. We consider potential explanations for this ambivalence and suggest possible directions for further research.