The most controversial component of the War on Poverty in the 1960s was its Community Action Program (CAP). Controversy resulted largely from the CAP because it employed activist professionals, mandated massscale resident participation, and encouraged federal-agency-sponsored institutional conflict as a mechanism for social reform. These strategies were tested earlier in the Mobilization for Youth program founded in the late 1950s, and in the early 1960s in the Ford Foundation Gray Areas programs and the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency projects. Indeed, the basic models of social expertise and community action employed in those programs were used in Chicago two decades before.

The first major piece of national transit legislation was enacted in 1964. By 1969 the Urban Mass Transportation Administration was the subject of a highly critical analysis by staff investigators for a Congressional Appropriations Committee, and in the early 1970s industry analysts sharply critiqued the rationality of urban transit policy in general. In 1981 the Comptroller General of the U.S. reported to Congress that the demand for transit subsidies was approaching crisis proportions. The U.S. government has come to play a greater role in the transit industry than do most European counterparts, provides more passenger subsidy per ride than any other country, and, though transit is everywhere subsidized, the U.S. federal government subsidizes a greater share of industry costs than most other national governments. This article examines the circumstances under which this particular industry-government relationship developed. As part of this industrial policy discussion, the article also looks at the culture of discourse that was present during the early intervention period and that has been characteristic of the transit policy community since that time.

I am of course pleased that Professor Becker finds my view of the character and sources of early twentieth-century American economic policy to be “well supported” by the evidence. I value the fact that he does not regard as heresy my failing to call the American economy “corporate” and regulation “corporatist” or “corporate liberal.” And I appreciate his recognition that my book deals with more than that old standby big-business-and-antitrust: that it talks about the impact of new technology (radio, the movies, airplanes, telephones, electricity, motor vehicles) on regulatory policy; about the regulation of farm prices and natural resources; about urban housing and zoning; about labor and taxation and tariffs and banking and investment—in short, about a complex and rapidly changing regulatory order, and not just government and big business.

The pariah garbage barge on a two-month odyssey with 3,100 tons of unwanted trash drew throngs of sightseers and reporters Sunday as it anchored just outside New York Harbor while city officials decide its fate.

The trek of the Mobro is well known. On 22 March 1987 the fully loaded garbage barge left Islip, New York, looking for a landfill that would take its unwanted cargo. Five states—North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida—as well as three countries, Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas, had banned the barge from unloading. Reluctantly, the captain turned the Mobro toward home, where it received an unceremonious, and dispirited, welcome.

Soon after American entry into World War I, Colonel Charles Keller of the Army Corps of Engineers confronted an emergency on the home front that threatened to stymie victory abroad. For several years, the West Point career officer had been in charge of overseeing the development of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls, New York. Now Keller began receiving urgent messages from manufacturers in nearby Buffalo complaining that shortages of electricity were preventing them from producing vital materials such as high-grade steel for shell casings, aluminum for airplanes, chlorine for poison gas, and other electrochemicals.

Let me take you on a Cook's tour of urban historic preservation outcomes in the United States. The undertaking is doubly complicated. First, I am an outsider from Australia, a nation that is known more for its sheep farms than for its cities—or, indeed, for a significant national history or a non- Aboriginal cultural heritage that is worth preserving. Second, the dislocation between subject matter and observer is further compounded because I am writing from the ancient Italian city of Parma. Here, in contrast both to the United States and Australia, a multiplicity of structures and artifacts dating back to Etruscan times makes manifest the depth and richness of the surrounding historical texture.