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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Brief History of Robert's Rules: Power, Democracy and the Making of American Parliamentary Procedure

A Brief History of Robert's Rules: Power, Democracy and the Making of American Parliamentary Procedure

Stone, Rylan

Paperback

General Political ScienceGeneral World HistorySocial Movements

ISBN13: 9798254592389
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 1 2026
Pages: 114
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The book that taught America how to govern itself.

In 1863, a United States Army engineer named Henry Martyn Robert attended a church meeting in New Bedford, Massachusetts, failed to chair it, and walked home with a problem he could not leave alone. Thirteen years later, he published a 176-page pocket manual that would sell fifteen million copies and govern the deliberations of everyone from union halls and women's clubs to the United States Senate. This is the story of that book, and of the oldest unsolved problem in democratic life.

What you will find in these pages:

  • The untold story of how women's clubs adopted Robert's Rules decades before Congress did, turning a procedural manual into an instrument of civic power
  • How the same rules designed to protect minority voices became the weapons used to block civil rights legislation for generations
  • The civil rights organizers, from Septima Clark to Fannie Lou Hamer, who reclaimed parliamentary procedure as a tool of liberation
  • The intellectual rivals who challenged Robert's framework and forced his heirs to defend the principles underneath the rules
  • Why the digital age has made procedural order more necessary and more absent than at any point since 1863
A Brief History of Robert's Rules of Order is popular narrative history at its most engaged: rigorously researched, character-driven, and built around the conviction that the grammar of democratic deliberation is one of the most consequential and least examined forces in American civic life.

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