Democratic Party Presidential Primary Campaigns and the Left, 1980-1988

本项目将使用爱德华·肯尼迪和杰西·杰克逊的美国民主党总统初选活动来评估20世纪80年代美国左派的力量。运用比较历史的方法和弗里登的形态分析，该项目将研究肯尼迪和杰克逊的竞选材料，以确定民主党左翼的基本原则是否在里根担任总统后的十年中发生了变化，以及左翼利益集团能够影响这些竞选的程度。它将研究民主党内部不断变化的机构权力中心，以及这些运动与种族和民族政治之间的关系，特别是左翼选区（例如工会和民权团体）在国家和政党明显向右漂移的背景下可能影响运动的程度。我的分析将依赖于对C-SPAN在线竞选视频档案的详细探索，牛津大学维尔·哈姆斯沃斯图书馆的竞选媒体评论，波士顿约翰·f·肯尼迪图书馆爱德华·肯尼迪收藏的材料，以及芝加哥公共图书馆中与杰克逊有关的人物的收藏，比如芝加哥市长哈罗德·华盛顿。在我的工作中，我一直专注于这一时期，写了一篇一流的本科论文，讨论了两位杰出的非裔美国运动员在“漫长的70年代”与黑人政治的互动。为此，我获得了“2019年体育历史本科生论文奖”和诺丁汉大学人文学院硕士奖学金。我正在通过我的硕士论文的重点肯尼迪和杰克逊的运动和他们的意义上的理解自由主义意识形态在20世纪80年代建立这项工作。在诺丁汉大学期间，我与我未来的导师乔·默顿建立了牢固的工作关系，他监督过我之前的两个项目，并且在种族和民族政治方面具有专业知识，这是项目的关键部分。此外，该大学的美国和加拿大研究部门提供了进一步的研究专业知识，尤其是林教授作为第二导师，以及种族与权利研究中心和政治意识形态研究中心，这些使诺丁汉成为研究我的项目所研究主题的理想中心。

This project will use the American Democratic Party Presidential primary election campaigns of Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson to assess the power of the American left during the 1980s. Applying the methods of comparative history and Freeden's morphological analysis, the project will examine the campaign material of Kennedy and Jackson to ascertain whether the fundamentals of the Democratic Left shifted over the decade in response to the Reagan presidency, and the degree to which interest groups on the left were able to influence these campaigns. It will examine the changing centres of institutional power within the Democratic Party and the relationship between these campaigns and the politics of race and ethnicity, especially the extent to which constituencies of the Left (e.g. unions and civil rights groups) could influence campaigns in the context of apparent rightward drift in the nation and the party. My analysis will rely on a detailed exploration of C-SPAN's online campaign video archive, campaign media commentary from the Vere Harmsworth Library at the University of Oxford, material from the Edward Kennedy collections at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and collections from figures connected to Jackson like Chicago Mayor Harold Washington in the Chicago Public Library. I have consistently focused on this period in my work, writing a first-class undergraduate dissertation that considered two prominent African-American athletes' interaction with black politics during the 'long1970s'. For this, I won the 'Sport in History Undergraduate Essay Prize 2019' and the University of Nottingham's School of Humanities Masters Bursary. I am building on this work through my MA dissertation's focus on the Kennedy and Jackson campaigns and their significance for understanding liberal ideology in the 1980s. Through my time at the University of Nottingham I have developed a strong working relationship with my prospective supervisor Joe Merton, who supervised both my previous projects, and has expertise on the politics of race and ethnicity that comprise a key part of the project. Moreover, the university's American and Canadian Studies department provides further research expertise, not least Professor Ling as second supervisor, as well as the Centre for Research in Race and Rights and the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies that make Nottingham the ideal centre forstudying the subjects my project examines.