front cover of Ukrainians in Michigan
Ukrainians in Michigan
Paul M. Hedeen
Michigan State University Press, 2023
This history of Ukrainian immigrants in Michigan and their American descendants examines both the choices people made and the social forces that impelled their decisions to migrate and to make new homes in the state. Michigan’s Ukrainians came in four waves, each unique in time and character, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twenty-first. Detroit attracted many of them with the opportunities it offered in its booming automobile industry. Yet others put down roots in cities and towns across the state. Wherever they settled, they established churches and community centers and continued to practice the customs of their homeland. Many Ukrainian Americans have made significant contributions to Michigan and the United States, including those who are showcased in this book. This comprehensive text also highlights cultural practices and traditional foods cherished by community members.
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The Unauthorized Audubon
Anita Skeen and Laura B. DeLind
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In an age of experts and individualism, metrics and competition, The Unauthorized Audubon is something of an anachronism. In fact, its creators, printmaker Laura B. DeLind and poet Anita Skeen, never set out to produce a book at all when they began exchanging prints and poems, but something happened along the way. As they began to appreciate at a deeper level the skill involved in each other’s work, they began to find meaning in small things—a pattern, a memory, a carefully chosen word. In his essay “Plugging into Essential Sources,” Eric Booth introduces the concept of “response-ability.” He describes it as the capacity to connect with the artful work of another. It represents both our need and our promise to respond in an open, eager, and multi-sensual way to a world of possibility. Without this capacity we are crippled in our ability to imagine and to grow. This book is all about response-ability as experienced by the two artists and the visitors to an exhibit of their work at the Michigan State University Museum. This concept and activity animates the twenty-two bird-like spirits found herein, reminding us that there are other such spirits hovering expectantly just beyond the pages, simply waiting for the imagining.
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front cover of Under a Bad Sun
Under a Bad Sun
Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia
Paul Bleakley
Michigan State University Press, 2021
Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? This question seems all the more urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. Historical criminologist Paul Bleakley addresses this by examining a series of intersecting cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia. The protection and extortion of illegal gambling operators and sex workers were only the most visible features of a decades-long, pervasive culture of corruption in the state’s law enforcement agency. Even more dangerous—and far harder to prosecute—was the corrupt bargain between the police and the state’s conservative government, which gave law enforcement free rein to profit from criminalized vice in return for supporting the government’s repression and persecution of its political enemies, from punk music fans to gay men to left-wing protestors. While intimidating members of the political opposition, the police also protected friends and allies from criminal prosecution, even for offenses as serious as child sex abuse. When journalists and investigators revealed this corrupt bargain in 1987, the premier was forced from office and the police commissioner went to prison. But untangling politics from policing proved—and continues to prove—far more difficult in societies around the world. This true crime story goes beyond the everyday violations of law and ethics to underscore how central honest, equitable policing is to a truly democratic society.
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Undocumented
Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice
Ronald Riekki
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Focusing on contemporary issues, this text showcases a large collection of regional poets laureate writing on subjects critical to understanding social justice as it relates to the Great Lakes region. Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice includes writing by seventy-eight poets who truly represent the diversity of the Great Lakes region, including Rita Dove, Marvin Bell, Crystal Valentine, Kimberly Blaeser, Mary Weems, Karen Kovacik, Wendy Vardaman, Zora Howard, Carla Christopher, Meredith Holmes, Karla Huston, Joyce Sutphen, and Laren McClung, among others. City, state, and national poets laureate with ties to Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin appear in these pages, organized around themes from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide,” calling on readers to act on behalf of victims of social injustice.
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The United States Army in the War of 1812
Robert Quimby
Michigan State University Press, 1997

This two-volume work by historian Robert Quimby presents a comprehensive and detailed analysis of military strategy, operations, and management during one of America’s most neglected and least understood military campaigns, the War of 1812. With causes that can be traced to the epic contest against Napoleon in Europe beginning in 1803, the war itself was the first conducted by the young Constitutional government of the United States. Quimby demonstrates that failed American initiatives at the beginning of hostilities shattered the unrealistic optimism of the war’s staunchest advocates; and while initial failures were followed by military success in 1813, whatever advantage might have been gained was soon lost to incompetent leadership. Major exceptions occurred in the Old Northwest, and in what was then the Southwest, where U.S. forces finally broke the strength of the long-successful Indian-British alliance.  
      In retrospect, what occurred during the War of 1812 demonstrated the necessity for gaining citizen support before committing the nation to armed conflict; it also provided a series of object lessons on how not to conduct a military campaign. Finally Quimby argues that, notwithstanding several victories at war’s end, including the fabled Battle of New Orleans, American perceptions that the United States "won" the war are erroneous; at best the struggle ended in a draw. The United States Army in the War of 1812 is an up-to-date and long overdue reassessment of military actions conducted during a pivotal conflict in American history, one that shaped U.S. military doctrine for a half century.

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A University Turns to the World
Ralph H. Smuckler
Michigan State University Press, 2003

A University Turns to the World examines the growth of Michigan State University’s pacesetting International program beginning in 1956, when President John Hannah named the nation’s first international dean, Glen Taggart, to head a university-wide effort. In the years that followed, MSU’s technical assistance projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were an important contribution to economic growth and development, and they were integral to broad efforts to strengthen the international dimension at home. The faculty members who went to Okinawa, Colombia, Brazil, South Vietnam, and Pakistan in the early years defined important goals and they learned much. As the years passed, their experiences led to increased sensitivity to the complexities of development activity and the need for patience.
     Smuckler’s leadership of the international program and intimate involvement in MSU’s work at home and abroad enable him to recapture the dreams and disappointments of the development promise. Ultimately, Smuckler demonstrates that the development programs of the mid-twentieth century paved the way for valuable new research activities and long-term mutually beneficial ties between MSU faculty and institutions and colleagues overseas.

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Unknown Tongues
Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830-1860
Gayle T. Tate
Michigan State University Press, 2003

Unknown Tongues examines the social and economic factors of northern industrialization, social reform, and black nationalism, all of which undergirded black women’s political consciousness during the decades before the American Civil War. The linkages between black women’s roles in the “culture of resistance” in slave communities and their transformations in the urban market economy fueled the development of black women’s political consciousness. As community activists and then as abolitionists, black urban women organized and protested against slavery, racism, sexism, and its attendant ills. Driven by market forces of nascent capitalism, black women created broad- based protest responses to the white power structure. Unknown Tongues explores the material realities that underpinned black women’s political development as well as the transformative stages of their political consciousness and activity.

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front cover of Up from Nothing
Up from Nothing
The Michigan State University Cyclotron Laboratory
Sam M. Austin
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Up from Nothing is the story of the Michigan State University Cyclotron Laboratory and its growth from the appointment of a single individual in 1958 to when the university earned the right to build the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) in 2008.
The cyclotron laboratory at MSU has been known for years as the best university nuclear physics laboratory in the United States, and perhaps in the world. But very few, even in its hometown of East Lansing, know how it achieved that status or why it prospered when laboratories at many other famous universities faded.
In this book Austin, a nuclear physicist who has been at the laboratory since the beginning of its ascent, gives us a remarkable story. It begins with an exceptional individual, Henry Blosser, who founded the laboratory, built a cyclotron accelerator of uniquely high precision, and recruited a team of nuclear physicists that used it to establish the laboratory’s reputation. Its credibility led to a sequence of accelerators, each operating in a different sub?eld while continuing a tradition of forefront science, and to a laboratory culture that fostered the courage and foresight to compete for the FRIB in the face of daunting odds.
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Uprising
How Women Used the US West to Win the Right to Vote
Tiffany Lewis
Michigan State University Press, 2021
Decades before white women won the right to vote throughout the United States, they first secured that right in its Western region—beginning in Wyoming in 1869. Many scholars have studied why and how the Western states enfranchised women before the Eastern ones; this book instead examines the influence of the West on the national US suffrage movement. As the campaign for woman suffrage intensified, US suffragists often invoked the West in their verbal, visual, and embodied advocacy. In deploying this region as a persuasive resource, they challenged the traditional meanings of the West and East, thus gaining additional persuasive strategies. Tiffany Lewis’s analysis of the public discourse, images, and performances of suffragists and their opponents shows that the West played a pivotal role in the successful campaign for white women’s enfranchisement that culminated in 1920. In addition to offering a history of this political movement’s rhetorical strategy, Lewis illustrates the usefulness of region in protest—the way social movements can tactically employ region to motivate social change.
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front cover of Urban Centers and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity
Urban Centers and Rural Contexts in Late Antiquity
Thomas S. Burns
Michigan State University Press, 2001
Recent publications on urbanism and the rural environment in Late Antiquity, most of which explore a single region or narrow chronological niche, have emphasized either textual or archeological evidence. None has attempted the more ambitious task of bringing together the full range of such evidence within a multiregional perspective and around common themes. Urban Centers and Rural Contexts seeks to redress this omission. 
      While ancient literature and the physical remains of cities attest to the power that urban values held over the lives of their inhabitants, the rural areas in which the majority of imperial citizens lived have not been well served by the historical record. Only recently have archeological excavations and integrated field surveys sufficiently enhanced our knowledge of the rural contexts to demonstrate the continuing interdependence of urban centers and rural communities in Late Antiquity. These new data call into question the conventional view that this interdependence progressively declined as a result of governmental crises, invasions, economic dislocation, and the success of Christianization. 
     The essays in this volume require us to abandon the search for a single model of urban and rural change; to reevaluate the cities and towns of the Empire as centers of habitation, rather than archeological museums; and to reconsider the evidence of continuous and pervasive cultural change across the countryside. Deploying a wide range of material as well as literary evidence, the authors provide access not only into the world of élites, but also to the scarcely known lives of those without a voice in the literature, those men and women who worked in the shops, labored in the fields, and humbled themselves before their gods. They bring us closer to the complexity of life in late ancient communities and, in consequence, closer to both urban and rural citizens.
 
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Urban Sustainability
A Global Perspective
Igor Vojnovic
Michigan State University Press, 2012

More than half the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and virtually all of the world’s population growth over the next three decades is expected to be in cities. What impact will this growth have on the environment? What can we do now to pave the way for resource longevity? Sustainability has received considerable attention in recent years, though conceptions of the term remain vague. Using a wide array of cities around the globe as case studies, this timely book explores the varying nature of global urban-environmental stresses and the complexities involved in defining sustainability policies. Working with six core themes, the editor examines the past, present, and future of urban sustainability within local, national, and global contexts.

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front cover of U.S. Latinos and Criminal Injustice
U.S. Latinos and Criminal Injustice
Lupe S. Salinas
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Latinos in the United States encompass a broad range of racial, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical identities. Originating from the Caribbean, Spain, Central and South America, and Mexico, they have unique justice concerns. The ethnic group includes U.S. citizens, authorized resident aliens, and undocumented aliens, a group that has been a constant partner in the Latino legal landscape for over a century. This book addresses the development and rapid growth of the Latino population in the United States and how race-based discrimination, hate crimes, and other prejudicial attitudes, some of which have been codified via public policy, have grown in response. Salinas explores the degrading practice of racial profiling, an approach used by both federal and state law enforcement agents; the abuse in immigration enforcement; and the use of deadly force against immigrants. The author also discusses the barriers Latinos encounter as they wend their way through the court system. While all minorities face the barrier of racially based jury strikes, bilingual Latinos deal with additional concerns, since limited-English-proficient defendants depend on interpreters to understand the trial process. As a nation rich in ethnic and racial backgrounds, the United States, Salinas argues, should better strive to serve its principles of justice.
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front cover of The U.S.–China Trade War
The U.S.–China Trade War
Global News Framing and Public Opinion in the Digital Age
Louisa Ha
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Drawing on data from three national surveys, three content analyses, computational topic modeling, and rhetorical analysis, The U.S.–China Trade War sheds light on the twenty-first century’s most high-profile contest over global trade to date. Through diverse empirical studies, the contributors examine the effects of news framing and agenda-setting during the trade war in the Chinese and U.S. news media. Looking at the coverage of Chinese investment in the United States, the use of peace and war journalism frames, and the way media have portrayed the trade war to domestic audiences, the studies explore how media coverage of the trade war has affected public opinion in both countries, as well as how social media has interacted with traditional media in creating news. The authors also analyze the roles of traditional news media and social media in international relations and offer insights into the interactions between professional journalism and user-generated content—interactions that increasingly affect the creation and impact of global news. At a time when social media are being blamed for spreading misinformation and rumors, this book illustrates how professional and user-generated media can reduce international conflicts, foster mutual understanding, and transcend nationalism and ethnocentrism.
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