Chapter 10 jumps ahead to the centuries after 1492, to explore how the past is still present, both in its role and importance to contemporary Native Americans, and its influence on legislation for the protection and repatriation of ancient human remains. It also looks at how the peopling of the Americas that unfolded more than 10,000 years earlier made Native Americans especially susceptible to epidemic diseases (such as smallpox) brought by Europeans.

Chapter 9 covers the later Paleoindian period that follows Clovis, when the continent was finally freed from the grip of the Ice Age, and the descendants of the first peoples began to settle in to different regions, adapting to the distinctive resources of those regions (such as bison on the Plains), and drifting apart – a process of diversification that distanced people from one another and their once common ancestors.

Chapter 3 explores the nearly century-long scientific controversy, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, of whether people had reached the Americas in Ice Age times, and how the resolution of that debate in the 1920s and 1930s at such late Pleistocene sites as Folsom and Clovis in turn set the foundation – and a barrier not to be reached – for the next round of controversy over just how far back human antiquity in Americas might reach.

In this chapter, we continue to consider environments with multiple policymakers, though the emphasis is different from that in Chapter 4. Rather than assuming that the agreement of all actors is necessary to change policy, the models here mostly assume a single principal, which may either act on its own or delegate policy authority to an agent. In political science, the principal is typically a legislature, whereas the agent is often a bureaucratic agency of the executive branch.

The models in the previous two chapters assume that voting in elections is the only avenue by which citizens may influence policy. Groups of individuals who have overcome their collective-action problems, however, may have other opportunities to exert influence. In this chapter, we examine various models of special interest politics, taking the organization of those interests as given. We first consider a model of pure campaign finance, where campaign spending is the only choice variable. We then explore the interaction between campaign finance and policy choice in a model of electoral competition. Both models simply assume that campaign spending influences voter behavior; we unpack this assumption in a model of informative advertising. We then move to an environment in which organized groups bargain with public officials over policy. We conclude by considering competition for influence in a lobbying model with several organized groups.

In this chapter we examine electoral competition under various forms of uncertainty. The models here depart from those in the previous chapter in assuming that voters behave stochastically—in how they cast their vote, or even in whether they vote at all. As we will see, the incorporation of stochastic voting behavior can resolve many of the issues associated with the models in the previous chapter, including nonexistence of equilibrium and full convergence of campaign platforms in equilibrium.