Christine Barbour 
AmGov [EPUB ebook] 
Long Story Short

Acknowledgments
Read This First (or Nothing Else Will Make Sense)
1: Politics and Citizenship
1.1 Coming to Terms: Politics, Government, and Economics
1.2 Political-Economic Systems
1.3 POV: When Your Textbook Makes Certain Assumptions About the World That May Be Different from Your Own
1.4 American Political Culture
1.5 American Political Ideologies
1.6 Political Narratives and the Media
1.7 Mediated Citizenship
Big Think
Key Terms
2: The United States’ Founding
2.1 Classical Liberalism, the Social Contract, and the Declaration of Independence
2.2 The Articles of Confederation
2.3 The Constitutional Convention
2.4 Ratification
2.5 Translating Basic Constitutional Principles Into a New Government
2.6 Federalism
2.7 The Evolution of Federalism
Big Think
Key Terms
3: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights
3.1 The Bill of Rights
3.2 Civil Liberties–Understanding the First Amendment
3.3 Civil Liberties–Understanding Due Process Rights
3.4 Civil Liberties–Understanding the Right to Privacy
3.5 Civil Rights–Battling Political Inequality
3.6 Civil Rights–The Case of Race
3.7 Civil Rights–The Case of Gender
3.8 The Persistence of Inequality in America
Big Think
Key Terms
4: The Legislative Branch
4.1 How the Constitution Structures Congress
4.2 How Congress Organizes Itself
4.3 The Congressional Role in Checks and Balances
4.4 Doing the Hard Work of Making Laws
4.5 Tensions That Challenge Congress’s Ability to Do Its Job
4.6 Congressional Elections
4.7 Who Runs and Who Wins?
Big Think
Key Terms
5: The Executive Branch
5.1 The Job of the American President
5.2 The Evolution of the American Presidency
5.3 Presidents, Popularity, and Congress
5.4 What Is Bureaucracy, and Why Do We Need It?
5.5 The Purpose and Organization of the White House Bureaucracy
5.6 The Purpose and Organization of the Federal Bureaucracy: The Rest of the Executive Branch
5.7 Power Plays in the Bureaucracy
Big Think
Key Terms
6: The Judicial Branch
6.1 Kinds of Laws
6.2 The American Legal System
6.3 Who’s Who and What’s What in a Court of Law?
6.4 Equality and the Criminal Justice System
6.5 The Constitution, Congress, and the Dual Court System
6.6 The Supreme Court
Big Think
Key Terms
7: Parties and Interest Groups
7.1 Parties and Interest Groups Defined
7.2 The Role of Parties in a Democracy
7.3 Party Organization and Decision Making
7.4 The Parties Today
7.5 Interest Group Basics
7.6 Interest Group Politics
7.7 Was Madison Right to Worry?
Big Think
Key Terms
8: Public Opinion, Campaigns, and Elections
8.1 The Quality of Public Opinion
8.2 How Do We Know What Americans Think?
8.3 How Do We Form Our Opinions?
8.4 The Ultimate Poll–Voting in U.S. Elections
8.5 Presidential Elections
8.6 The General Election and the Electoral College
Big Think
Key Terms
9: Media and Political Communication
9.1 Where We Get Our Information
9.2 Media Ownership and Government Regulation
9.3 What Do Journalists Do?
9.4 How Those in the Media Can Shape Political Narratives
9.5 The Stakeholders Strike Back
9.6 Imagine: How Citizens Can Reclaim the Narrative
Key Terms
10: Domestic and Foreign Policy
10.1 Making Public Policy
10.2 Social Policy
10.3 Policy Making for Health Care
10.4 Economic Policy
10.5 Foreign Policy
Big Think
Key Terms
Afterword
Glossary

Christine Barbour teaches in the Political Science Department at Indiana University, and directs the department’s IU POLS DC internship program. She is a faculty liaison for the University’s dual-credit program, which delivers an online version of her Intro to American Politics class to high school students across the state. At Indiana, Professor Barbour has been a Lilly Fellow, working on a project to increase student retention in large introductory courses, and a member of the Freshman Learning Project, a university-wide effort to improve the first-year undergraduate experience. She has served on the New York Times College Advisory Board, working with other educators to develop ways to integrate newspaper reading into the undergraduate curriculum. She has won multiple teaching honors, but the two awarded by her students mean the most to her: the Indiana University Student Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Faculty and the Indiana University Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists Brown Derby Award. When not teaching or writing textbooks, Professor Barbour enjoys traveling with her coauthor, blogging about food and travel, and playing with her dogs and cat. She contributes to Bloom Magazine of Bloomington and is a coauthor several cookbooks. She also makes jewelry from precious metals and rough gemstones. If she ever retires, she will open a jewelry shop in a renovated Airstream on the beach in Apalachicola, Florida, where she plans to write another cookbook and a book about the local politics, development, and fishing industry.