New Books in Public Policy

In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today.

For centuries, Black women in America have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons, yet their experiences have often been overlooked in favor of Black men’s.

Arguing that the merger between profit and punishment continues to keep Black people bound, LeFlouria traces the connection between enslavement and incarceration, revealing how they have always been intertwined—from the domestic slave trade of 1810-1865, when an estimated one million people were incarcerated in privately owned slave jails, to the post-Civil War era when Black people were enslaved through new systems of state-sponsored mass incarceration, and through to today.
Talitha L. LeFlouria is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. She is an associate professor of history, and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the multi-award-winning book, Chained in Silence. Dr. LeFlouria has received numerous awards for her research, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Root, and Vox. You can find her on her website.
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Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past. That absence is not down to a lack of evidence: it is a forgotten, suppressed history – the result of deliberate choices about whose histories matter. This remarkable book rectifies this.
Disability: A History of Resistance (Random House, 2026) is a story of resistance and ingenuity, full of people who refused to be silenced or pitied. We meet the labourer who fights accusations in court that he’s faking his disability, and wins; the painter who signs her royalty miniatures ‘without hands’; and the one-armed textile worker who turned his injury into reform. We see how disabled people have rallied together to demand equality – fighting for their right to lead ordinary lives like everybody else.
This is a story not of progress led by doctors or philanthropists, but an extraordinary ground-up history of ordinary people demanding dignity and justice. By putting disabled people back into our national story, David Turner reveals a fuller and richer history of modern Britain than ever before.

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Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity.
Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science.
Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.
Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting.

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Discover the untold story of why homeschooling moved from the margins to the mainstream of American education. In this groundbreaking study Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2026), historian Dixie Dillon Lane traces the rise of homeschooling in the United States, from the modern movement's beginnings in the 1950s as a fringe activity to its current status as a widely accepted educational choice. Through compelling nationwide data and vivid case studies from Los Angeles County, Lane uncovers a powerful truth: homeschooling taps into long-held American beliefs in local control and parental rights that have shaped our nation's schools for generations. Writing in an engaging, accessible style, Lane demonstrates how homeschooling's rise reflects Americans' response to the increasing centralization of public education. As public schools have shifted toward consolidation and away from local oversight, parents have rediscovered their voice, choosing homeschooling as an innovative way to renew parental influence in education. Unlike most authors writing on this topic, Lane writes as both a credentialed historian and an experienced homeschooling parent. As such, she offers an honest, balanced view that acknowledges the homeschooling movement's challenges as well as its strengths. Skipping School will be of interest to parents, historians, educators, policymakers, and anyone seeking a fuller understanding of American education.
Dixie Dillon Lane holds a PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame and is a homeschooling mother of four (who writes at The Bad Homeschool Moms substack). She serves as an associate editor of Hearth & Field and a contributing editor of Front Porch Republic.

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As overdose deaths continue to mount and debates rage over harm reduction, drug policy, and homelessness, Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival (U California Press, 2026) offers a crucial on-the-ground perspective pointing to a humane future.
Finding a vein is difficult. As veins collapse and scar over, it becomes almost impossible. For millions of Americans who inject drugs and can’t do it alone, the solution is to find someone who can. Enter the “hit doctor.” Though uncredentialed, hit doctors develop expertise through necessity, providing injection assistance and addressing needs that dominant medical systems exclude or criminalize. They share the same conditions as the people they serve: sleeping in encampments and alleys, living in cramped single-room-occupancy hotels, suffering from untreated illness and trauma, and grieving friends who keep dying. Sarah Brothers spent more than seven years observing and interviewing hit doctors and their clients across San Francisco. Hit Doctors is an intimate portrait of the daily lives, relationships, and ethical worlds of people managing extraordinary hardship at a pivotal moment, when fentanyl arrived and thousands began dying annually. Brothers’s long-term ethnography yields critical insights. People seeking help strongly prefer women hit doctors, perceived as more careful and less likely to turn violent. But even as their expertise is valued, hit doctors are targets for abuse, and they suffer as the people they care for decline and die. That is the cost of trying to keep each other alive when formal systems of support have failed.
Brothers joins host Emily Dufton to discuss the years of work behind her new book, the people she studied and the relationships she built with them.
Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, was released in 2026.

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