A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America

Event Details

BRIAN BALOGH is Associate Professor of History at U.Va. and Chair of the Governing America in a Global Era Program (GAGE) at the Miller Center. In A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteen Century America (Cambridge, 2009), he argues that Americans have always turned to the national government but have done so in ways that did not involve growth of a centralized bureaucracy, at least until the mid-20th century. He is the author of Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, 1991).