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A Political Turn: Highways And Mass Transit In American Mobility History, Michael R. Fein Ph.D. Jan 2009

A Political Turn: Highways And Mass Transit In American Mobility History, Michael R. Fein Ph.D.

Humanities Department Faculty Publications & Research

Mark Rose’s Interstate: Express Highway Politics (1979) and Bruce Seely’s Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (1987) signaled the opening of U.S. highway politics as a field for sustained scholarly investigation. In Interstate, Rose examined the political competition among interest groups, such as truck operators, that produced the landmark 1956 highway legislation. Seely’s focus was the road engineers themselves, led by Thomas MacDonald, whose uncanny ability to present themselves as ‘apolitical’ experts paradoxically allowed them to dominate the highly politicized drafting of the main contours of American highway policy. Together these two texts opened a range of …


Radio Regulation Revisited: Coase, The Fcc, And The Public Interest, David A. Moss, Michael R. Fein Ph.D. Jan 2003

Radio Regulation Revisited: Coase, The Fcc, And The Public Interest, David A. Moss, Michael R. Fein Ph.D.

Humanities Department Faculty Publications & Research

It is now more than forty years since Ronald Coase’s seminal article on the Federal Communications Commission first appeared in the pages of the Journal of Law and Economics.1 The article remains important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it offered his first articulation of the Coase Theorem.2 Of even greater importance for our purposes, the article literally redefined the terms of debate over American broadcast regulation, in both historical and contemporary treatments of the subject. Focusing particularly on the development of radio regulation, Coase rejected the prevailing notion that the establishment of the Federal …