To Enlarge the Machinery of Government ― Congressional Debates and the Growth of the American State, 1858-1891

Hoffer (history, Seton Hall U.) traces changing ideas about the power and limitation of government as the United States shifted from the republican state to the Progressive state between 1858 and 1891. Specifically, he reconstructs the debates on: the Morrill, or Land Grant College, bill in 1858-59 and 1861; the Department of Agriculture and the Freedmen's Bureau during the Civil War; the Department of Education, the Hoar bill for national funding for common schools, and the Department of Justice during Reconstruction; the Blair bill and the Pendleton or Civil Service Reform Act in the Gilded Age; the creation of the Bureau of Labor and the Interstate Commerce Act; the elevation of the Bureau of Labor to a department and the Circuit Court of Appeals Act of 1891; and the Second Morrill Act, thereby covering education, law enforcement, the staffing of the executive branch, labor-management relations, railroad regulations, and the courts. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Williamjames Hull Hoffer is an assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University and coeditor of The Abortion Rights Controversy in America: A Legal Reader.