BiblioVault - Books about Civic Life

The Paradoxes of Integration

Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multiethnic America

J. Eric Oliver

University of Chicago Press, 2010

The United States is rapidly changing from a country monochromatically divided between black and white into a multiethnic society. The Paradoxes of Integration helps us to understand America’s racial future by revealing the complex relationships among integration, racial attitudes, and neighborhood life.

J. Eric Oliver demonstrates that the effects of integration differ tremendously, depending on which geographical level one is examining. Living among people of other races in a larger metropolitan area corresponds with greater racial intolerance, particularly for America’s white majority. But when whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans actually live in integrated neighborhoods, they feel less racial resentment. Paradoxically, this racial tolerance is usually also accompanied by feeling less connected to their community; it is no longer "theirs." Basing its findings on our most advanced means of gauging the impact of social environments on racial attitudes, The Paradoxes of Integration sensitively explores the benefits and at times, heavily borne, costs of integration.

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Plato

A Civic Life

Carol Atack

Reaktion Books, 2024

A new reading of Plato’s philosophy that reveals it as deeply shaped by his experiences in Athens.

Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born during a war that would lead to Athens’ decline, Plato lived in turbulent times. Carol Atack explores how Plato’s life in Athens influenced his thought, how he developed the Socratic dialogue into a powerful philosophical tool, and how he used the institutions of Athenian society to create a compelling imaginative world. Accessibly written, this book shows how Plato made Athens the place where diverse ideas were integrated into a new way of approaching the big questions about our lives, then and now.

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State of Ambiguity

Civic Life and Culture in Cuba's First Republic

Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, Amparo Sánchez Cobos, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

Cuba's first republican era (1902–1959) is principally understood in terms of its failures and discontinuities, typically depicted as an illegitimate period in the nation's history, its first three decades and the overthrow of Machado at best a prologue to the "real" revolution of 1959. State of Ambiguity brings together scholars from North America, Cuba, and Spain to challenge this narrative, presenting republican Cuba instead as a time of meaningful engagement—socially, politically, and symbolically. Addressing a wide range of topics—civic clubs and folkloric societies, science, public health and agrarian policies, popular culture, national memory, and the intersection of race and labor—the contributors explore how a broad spectrum of Cubans embraced a political and civic culture of national self-realization. Together, the essays in State of Ambiguity recast the first republic as a time of deep continuity in processes of liberal state- and nation-building that were periodically disrupted—but also reinvigorated—by foreign intervention and profound uncertainty.

Contributors. Imilcy Balboa Navarro, Alejandra Bronfman, Maikel Fariñas Borrego, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Marial Iglesias Utset, Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras Arenas, Ricardo Quiza Moreno, Amparo Sánchez Cobos, Rebecca J. Scott, Robert Whitney

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The Wired City

Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age

Dan Kennedy

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

In The Wired City, Dan Kennedy tells the story of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit community website in Connecticut that is at the leading edge of reinventing local journalism. Through close attention to city government, schools, and neighborhoods, and through an ongoing conversation with its readers, the Independent's small staff of journalists has created a promising model of how to provide members of the public with the information they need in a self-governing society.

Although the Independent is the principal subject of The Wired City, Kennedy examines a number of other online news projects as well, including nonprofit organizations such as Voiceof San Diego and the Connecticut Mirror and for-profit ventures such as the Batavian, Baristanet, and CT News Junkie. Where legacy media such as major city newspapers are cutting back on coverage, entrepreneurs are now moving in to fill at least some of the vacuum.

The Wired City includes the perspectives of journalists, activists, and civic leaders who are actively re-envisioning how journalism can be meaningful in a hyperconnected age of abundant news sources. Kennedy provides deeper context by analyzing the decline of the newspaper industry in recent years and, in the case of those sites choosing such a path, the uneasy relationship between nonprofit status and the First Amendment.

At a time of pessimism over the future of journalism, The Wired City offers hope. What Kennedy documents is not the death of journalism but rather the uncertain and sometimes painful early stages of rebirth.

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