In Volume 4:3 of the Journal of Policy History, Walter E. Williams was incorrectly identified as a member of the faculty at George Washington University. Professor Williams teaches at George Mason University.

In 1913 the California legislature took a momentous step to improve the wages and working conditions of its women workers by passing a controversial new form of social welfare legislation, a minimum-wage bill, which established the Industrial Welfare Commission. The mandate gave the commission extensive power: not only to establish a minimum wage for each industry employing women, but to regulate hours and working conditions as well. Although reformers had been building an edifice of protective legislation for women for three decades, the creation of a government body with such wide-ranging authority over virtually every aspect of women's wage work was unprecedented. A handful of states passed similar legislation, but few rose above the challenges by opponents to actually implement the law in a meaningful way. The California Industrial Welfare Commission, in contrast, established wage, hour, and sanitary standards in women's occupations from canneries to movie studios. Responsibility for the success of the California law rested on the administrative brilliance of one woman, Katherine Philips Edson, the law's chief sponsor and then leading commission member. Under her guidance the commission slowly and judiciously improved working women's conditions and won public acceptance of the innovative form of state intervention.

The presidential years of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are synonymous with the culmination of the Second Reconstruction. This study examines the civil rights legislative strategies of presidents Kennedy and Johnson as they dealt with what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On 30 June 1971, the tradition-bound U.S. Post Office, long steeped in politics, ceased operating as a cabinet-level department. The next day marked the birth of the U.S. Postal Service, a government corporation. This transformation, arguably the most fundamental restructuring of a major federal agency in American history, ended 180 years of congressional postal ratemaking. By ceding ratemaking authority to a commission, Congress hoped to elevate sound pricing principles and scrupulous administrative procedures over the impressionistic claims and political influences that had characterized the legislative process. Yet the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act could not wipe away two centuries of history. Ratemakers—whether legislators before 1971 or administrators thereafter—frequently found themselves confronted with mailers invoking tradition, history, and social values to bolster their arguments. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the struggle to find junk mail's proper place in postal policy.