UConn President's Book Receives Top Honors from American Political Science Association

The following article was posted by Elyssa M. Millspaugh. It was reported and written by Stephanie Reitz and originally published on the UConn Today Web site on July 9, 2013.

University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst’s latest book, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics, has been awarded the 2013 Doris Graber Book Award.

The award is given by the Political Communication Division of the American Political Science Association, and recognizes the best book in political communication published in the past 10 years.

Rude Democracy was published in 2010 by the Temple University Press, and is Herbst’s fourth sole-authored book. Drawing from a variety of scholarly disciplines, it explores the political history of civility in the United States, and outlines ways to create a more civil national culture.

A summary of the book as well as the first chapter can be found at the Temple website: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2119_reg.html.

Herbst is the author of many books and articles on American politics and public opinion, including Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (University of Chicago Press 1993); Politics at the Margin: Historical Studies of Public Expression outside the Mainstream (Cambridge University Press 1994); and Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process (University of Chicago Press 1998).

Before coming to UConn, Herbst was professor of public policy at Georgia Tech and chief academic officer of the University System of Georgia; officer in charge and provost of the University at Albany (SUNY); dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University; and chair of the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.

The front cover of the book features an image of Rep. Preston Smith Brooks severely beating Sen. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, on the floor of the U.S. Senate in May 1856 in a pre-Civil War dispute over slavery.