The New Deal is hot! As US politicians promise a Green New Deal and pundits compare the current US president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, historians are grappling afresh with the legacy of that crucial moment in US state-building. Indeed, the University of Pennsylvania Press has published two anthologies, Beyond the New Deal Order and Capitalism Contested, that contribute to this reappraisal of the New Deal's impact on American life since the 1930s.
Each volume takes as a starting point an earlier essay collection edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton University Press, 1989). That tome argued that the political alignments, moral commitments, and ideology established by the New Deal in the 1930s dominated US politics into the 1970s. It proclaimed, moreover, that this set of political alliances and ideals had by the late 1980s been obliterated by the triumph...
