Bureaucracy usually only becomes visible when it stops working—when a system fails, when an event gets off schedule, when someone points to a problem or glitch in a carefully calibrated workflow. But Bureaucracy: A Love Story draws together research done by scholars and students in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas to illuminate how bureaucracy structures our contemporary lives across a range of domains. People have navigated bureaucracy for centuries, by creating and utilizing various literary and rhetorical forms—from indexes to alphabetization to diagrams to blanks—that made it possible to efficiently process large amounts of information. Contemporary bureaucracy is likewise concerned with how to collect and store information, to circulate it efficiently, and to allow for easy access. We are interested both in the conventional definition of bureaucracy as a form of ordering and control connected to institutions and the state, but we also want to uncover how people interacted—often in creative ways—with the material forms of bureaucracy.

Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 and established the ethical foundation for The Wealth of Nations (1776) as well as the important role played by custom and fashion in shaping behaviors and outcomes. Kendall P. Cochran believed in Smith’s emphasis on value-driven analysis and seeking solutions to major problems of the day. Cochran believed that economists moved too far in the direction of analysis free of words like ought and should and devoted his career to establishing that economics is a moral science. A recent study by two Harvard professors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Growth in a Time of Debt (2010), asserted that healthy economic growth and high levels of government debt are incompatible. These conclusions are associated with the austerity movement, which calls for policymakers to reduce government spending in order to reduce the government’s debt and improve long-term growth prospects. The austerity movement has been used to justify the sharp decline in public sector employment that has restrained job growth since the recession of 2007. In 2013, a graduate student named Thomas Herndon discovered an error in the calculations of Reinhart and Rogoff, publishing his findings in a paper co-authored by his professors, …

In 1942, Colonel Curtis E. LeMay and his 305th Bomb Group left Syracuse, New York, bound for England, where they joined the Eighth Air Force and Royal Air Force in war against Germany and her allies. Over the next three years LeMay led American air forces in Europe, India, China, and the Pacific against the Axis powers. His efforts yielded advancement through the chain of command to the rank of Major General in command of the XXIst Bomber Command, the most effective strategic bombing force of the war. LeMay’s activities in World War II are well-documented, but his personal history is less thoroughly recorded. Throughout the war he wrote hundreds of letters to his wife, Helen, and daughter, Jane. They are published for the first time in this volume, weaved together with meticulously researched narrative essays buttressed by both official and unofficial sources and supplemented with extensive footnotes. History remembers “LeMay, the Commander” well. From Wright Field, Ohio, to Hokkaido, Japan, will yield a better understanding of “LeMay, the Man.”

Book discussing the literature and film of the Cold War and AIDS eras in an effort to link the two with the fear they created; "not only the political and biological illnesses...but also the fear and panic they engender." Index starts on page 235.