In the late nineteenth century, public officials throughout the United States began to experiment with new methods of managing their local economies and meeting the infrastructure needs of a newly urban, industrial nation. Stymied by legal and financial barriers, they created a new class of quasi-public agencies called public authorities. Today these entities operate at all levels of government, and range from tiny operations like the Springfield Parking Authority in Massachusetts, which runs thirteen parking lots and garages, to mammoth enterprises like the Tennessee Valley Authority, with nearly twelve billion dollars in revenues each year.

In The Rise of the Public Authority, Gail Radford recounts the history of these inscrutable agencies, examining how and why they were established, the varied forms they have taken, and how these pervasive but elusive mechanisms have molded our economy and politics over the past hundred years.

Gail Radford is associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo. Radford is the author of Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era.

— Derek Hoff, coauthor of Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, The Contract Clause, and the Great Depression

— Guian A. McKee, author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia

— Nelson Lichtenstein, author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

— American Historical Review

— Perspectives on Politics