Anthony’s work focuses on the construction of state power, its intellectual and policy history.
Building Law and Order: How New Deal Liberals Made the Security State
Anthony’s current book project, under contract with Harvard University Press, is a political, legal, and intellectual history of the New Deal war on crime, and the ways it legitimated national authority and transformed American liberalism. The Roosevelt administration and Attorney General Homer Cummings created a war on crime coalition that transcended the partisan, regional, and institutional divisions that had previously obstructed the consolidation of federal power. Anthony’s manuscript addresses the end of alcohol prohibition, the modernization of the FBI, the launching of a new war on drugs, the sociology of knowledge in criminology and penology, and the rise of a new kind of security state, more stable than the unsustainable architecture of repression from past crises like World War I.
He has presented research from the project at various conferences for historians and other scholars, from Stanford, California, and Tempe, Arizona, to Philadelphia and Paris.
“Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations”
This article, published in Law and History Review, is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation.
“‘Formed for Empire’: The Continental Congress Responds to the Carlisle Peace Commission”
This article, published in the Journal of the Early Republic, is on constitutionalism and diplomacy during the American Revolution. It argues that Britain’s desperate attempts at retaining its colonies in 1778 provoked a new formulation of sovereignty.
American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth Amendment
This book, published by University of Wisconsin Press, is a synthetic history of U.S. intelligence operations, a deconstructionist analysis of the Fourth Amendment, and a philosophical reflection on questions of privacy.
The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror
Anthony’s first major academic work, this book, published by Cambridge University Press, is a legal treatise on the theory and history of habeas corpus from medieval England through the American war on terrorism.
Anthony Gregory 