At the turn of the century, Colorado's Cripple Creek District captured the national imagination with the extraordinary wealth of its gold mines and the unquestionable strength of the militant Western Federation of Miners. 

Elizabeth Jameson tells the entertaining story of Cripple Creek, the scene in 1894 of one of radical labor's most stunning victories and, in 1903 and 1904, of one of its most crushing defeats. Jameson draws on working-class oral histories, the Victor and Cripple Creek Daily Press published by 34 of the local labor unions, and the 1900 manuscript census. She connects unions with lodges and fraternal associations, ethnic identity, families, households, and partisan politics. Through these ties, she probes the differences in age, skill, gender, marital status, and ethnicity that strained working-class unity and contributed to the fall of labor in Cripple Creek. 

Jameson's book will be required reading for western, ethnic, and working-class historians seeking an alternative interpretation of western mining struggles that emphasizes class, gender, and multiple sources of social identity.

On the surface, Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants to the United States seem to share a common cultural identity but often make uneasy neighbors. Discrimination and assimilationist policies have influenced generations of Mexican Americans so that some now fear that the status they have gained by assimilating into American society will be jeopardized by Spanish-speaking newcomers. Other Mexican Americans, however, adopt a position of group solidarity and work to better the social conditions and educational opportunities of Mexican immigrants.

Focusing on the Mexican-origin, working-class city of La Puente in Los Angeles County, California, this book examines Mexican Americans' everyday attitudes toward and interactions with Mexican immigrants—a topic that has so far received little serious study. Using in-depth interviews, participant observations, school board meeting minutes, and other historical documents, Gilda Ochoa investigates how Mexican Americans are negotiating their relationships with immigrants at an interpersonal level in the places where they shop, worship, learn, and raise their families. This research into daily lives highlights the centrality of women in the process of negotiating and building communities and sheds new light on identity formation and group mobilization in the U.S. and on educational issues, especially bilingual education. It also complements previous studies on the impact of immigration on the wages and employment opportunities of Mexican Americans.

More than ever, international security and economic prosperity depend upon safe access to the shared domains that make up the global commons: maritime, air, space, and cyberspace. Together these domains serve as essential conduits through which international commerce, communication, and governance prosper. However, the global commons are congested, contested, and competitive. In the January 2012 defense strategic guidance, the United States confirmed its commitment “to continue to lead global efforts with capable allies and partners to assure access to and use of the global commons, both by strengthening international norms of responsible behavior and by maintaining relevant and interoperable military capabilities.”

In the face of persistent threats, some hybrid in nature, and their consequences, Conflict and Cooperation in the Global Commons provides a forum where contributors identify ways to strengthen and maintain responsible use of the global commons. The result is a comprehensive approach that will enhance, align, and unify commercial industry, civil agency, and military perspectives and actions.

Managing nature’s playground—where diversity meets design.

A major problem of outdoor recreation management addressed in Hobson Bryan’s Conflict in the Great Outdoors is the difficulty in identifying sportsmen subgroups having distinctive preferences and expectations as to the composition of the “quality” outdoor experience. Land-use managers and planners are faced with the problem of matching resources with more users having increasingly specific motivations. Bryan applies his theory of variations within a leisure activity by addressing what sportsmen do and why they do it in various activities such as mountain climbing, hunting, canoeing, skiing, and backpacking.

Hyper-criminalization and the normalization of violence was an integral aspect of Robert Weide’s formative years growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, where Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs maintained a precarious coexistence, often punctuated by racialized gang violence. His insider status informs Divide & Conquer, which considers how the capitalist economy, the race concept, and nationalist ideology have made gang members the instruments of their own oppression, resulting in racialized sectarian conflicts spanning generations between African American and Latino gangs in Los Angeles and California’s prisons. 

While gang members may fail to appreciate the deeper historical and conceptual foundations of these conflicts, they rarely credit naked bigotry as the root cause. As Weide asserts, they divide themselves according to inherited groupist identities, thereby turning them against one another in protracted blood feuds across gang lines and racial lines. 

Weide explores both the historical foundations and the conceptual and cultural boundaries and biases that divide gang members across racial lines, detailing case studies of specific racialized gang conflicts between Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs. Weide employs mixed-methods research, having spent nearly a decade on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted over one hundred formal interviews with gang members and gang enforcement officers concerning taboo subjects like prison and gang politics, and transracial gang membership. 

Divide & Conquer concludes with encouraging developments in recent years, as gang members themselves, on their own volition, have intervened to build solidarity and bring racialized gang conflicts between them to an end.

Viewed alternately as an obstacle to justice, an impediment to efficient government, and a tool by which some groups gain benefits and privileges at the expense of others, public administration threatens to become the whipping boy of American government. In this innovative look at the nation's bureaucracy, Michael W. Spicer revisits the values of the Constitution in order to reconcile the administrative state to its many critics.

Drawing on political and social philosophy, Spicer argues that there is a fundamental philosophical conflict over the role of reason in society between writers in public administration and the designers of the American Constitution. This examination of worldviews illuminates the problem that American government faces in trying to ground a legitimate public administration in the Constitution. Defending and developing the Founders' idea that political power, whatever its source, must be checked, he critically examines existing ideas about the role of public administration in American governance and offers an alternative vision of public administration more in line with the Founders' constitutional design. This book will provide fresh insights for anyone interested in the role of public administration in the United States today.

God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land analyzes Mormon history from the Utah Expedition and Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 through subsequent decades of federal legislative and judicial actions aimed at ending polygamy and limiting church power. It also focuses on the Lakota Ghost Dancers and the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota (1890), and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (1993). In sharp contrast to the mythic image of the West as the "Land of the Free," these three tragic episodes reveal the West as a cultural battleground--in the words of one reporter, "a collision of guns, God, and government." Asking important questions about what happens when groups with a deep trust in their differing inner truths meet, Kerstetter exposes the religious motivations behind government policies that worked to alter Mormonism and extinguish Native American beliefs.

Where should physicians get their ethics? Professional codes such as the Hippocratic Oath claim moral authority for those in a particular field, yet according to medical ethicist Robert Veatch, these codes have little or nothing to do with how members of a guild should understand morality or make ethical decisions. While the Hippocratic Oath continues to be cited by a wide array of professional associations, scholars, and medical students, Veatch contends that the pledge is such an offensive code of ethics that it should be summarily excised from the profession. What, then, should serve as a basis for medical morality?

Building on his recent contribution to the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Veatch challenges the presumption that professional groups have the authority to declare codes of ethics for their members. To the contrary, he contends that role-specific duties must be derived from ethical norms having their foundations outside the profession, in religious and secular convictions. Further, these ethical norms must be comprehensible to lay people and patients. Veatch argues that there are some moral norms shared by most human beings that reflect a common morality, and ultimately it is these generally agreed-upon religious and secular ways of knowing—thus far best exemplified by the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights—that should underpin the morality of all patient-professional relations in the field of medicine.

Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics is the magnum opus of one of the most distinguished medical ethicists of his generation.

Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community-level power structures that incorporated concepts of kinship, gender, and generation. Showing the ways in which these complex histories are interlinked with wartime and enduring family/class conflicts, Maya after War provides a nuanced account of a unique transitional postwar situation, including the complex influence of neoliberal intervention.

Drawing on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period, Jennifer L. Burrell explores the after-war period in a locale where community struggles span culture, identity, and history. Investigating a range of tensions from the local to the international, Burrell employs unique methodologies, including mapmaking, history workshops, and an informal translation of a historic ethnography, to analyze the role of conflict in animating what matters to Todosanteros in their everyday lives and how the residents negotiate power. Examining the community-based divisions alongside national postwar contexts, Maya after War considers the aura of hope that surrounded the signing of the peace accords, and the subsequent doubt and waiting that have fueled unrest, encompassing generational conflicts. This study is a rich analysis of the multifaceted forces at work in the quest for peace, in Guatemala and beyond.

Metropolitan Governance is the first book to bring together competing perspectives on the question and consequences of centralized vs. decentralized regional government. Presenting original contributions by some of the most notable names in the field of urban politics, this volume examines the organization of governments in metropolitan areas, and how that has an effect on both politics and policy.

Existing work on metropolitan governments debates the consequences of interjurisdictional competition, but neglects the role of cooperation in a decentralized system. Feiock and his contributors provide evidence that local governments successfully cooperate through a web of voluntary agreements and associations, and through collective choices of citizens. This kind of "institutional collective action" is the glue that holds institutionally fragmented communities together.

The theory of institutional collective action developed here illustrates the dynamics of decentralized governance and identifies the various ways governments cooperate and compete. Metropolitan Governance provides insight into the central role that municipal governments play in the governance of metropolitan areas. It explores the theory of institutional collective action through empirical studies of land use decisions, economic development, regional partnerships, school choice, morality issues, and boundary change—among other issues.

A one-of-a-kind, comprehensive analytical inquiry invaluable for students of political science, urban and regional planning, and public administration—as well as for scholars of urban affairs and urban politics and policymakers—Metropolitan Governance blazes new territory in the urban landscape.

The Mexican American orquesta is neither a Mexican nor an American music. Relying on both the Mexican orquesta and the American dance band for repertorial and stylistic cues, it forges a synthesis of the two. The ensemble emerges historically as a powerful artistic vehicle for the expression of what Manuel Peña calls the "dialectic of conflict." Grounded in ethnic and class conflict, this dialectic compels the orquesta and its upwardly mobile advocates to waver between acculturation and ethnic resistance. The musical result: a complex mesh of cultural elements—Mexican and American, working- and middle-class, traditional and contemporary.

In this book, Manuel Peña traces the evolution of the orquesta in the Southwest from its beginnings in the nineteenth century through its pinnacle in the 1970s and its decline since the 1980s. Drawing on fifteen years of field research, he embeds the development of the orquesta within a historical-materialist matrix to achieve the optimal balance between description and interpretation. Rich in ethnographic detail and boldly analytical, his book is the first in-depth study of this important but neglected field of artistic culture.

Despite America's pluralistic, fragmented, and generally adversarial political culture, participants in pollution control politics have begun to collaborate to reduce the high costs of developing, implementing, and enforcing regulations. Edward P. Weber uses examples from this traditionally combative policy arena to propose a new model for regulation, "pluralism by the rules," a structured collaborative format that can achieve more effective results at lower costs than typically come from antagonistic approaches.

Weber cites the complexity and high implementation costs of environmental policy as strong but insufficient incentives for collaboration. He shows that cooperation becomes possible when opposing sides agree to follow specific rules that include formal binding agreements about enforcement, commitment to the process by political and bureaucratic leaders, and the ensured access and accountability of all parties involved. Such rules establish trust, create assurances that agreements will be enforced, and reduce the perceived risks of collaboration. Through case studies dealing with acid rain, reformulated gasoline, and oil refinery pollution control, Weber demonstrates the potential of collaboration for realizing a cleaner environment, lower compliance costs, and more effective enforcement.

Challenging the prevailing view that endless conflict in policymaking is inevitable, Pluralism by the Rules establishes a theoretical framework for restructuring the regulatory process.

A compelling study of the origins of racial conflict and violence in America.

“We’ll just be hanging out, partying. And somebody will say, ‘Hey, let’s go on a mission.’ That’s when you go looking for people who don’t belong in the neighborhood, and you beat ’em up. Sometimes we go out lookin’ for blacks to jump. Sometimes we look for anybody who ain’t supposed to be there.” —Sal, Avenue T Boys

In this book, Sam Mitrani cogently examines the making of the police department in Chicago, which by the late 1800s had grown into the most violent, turbulent city in America. Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions.

Tracing the Chicago police department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, Mitrani demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.

2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS)

A study of the intersection of rural populations, state formation, and the origins of political conflict in Peru.

On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, The Rural State, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru’s rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today.

Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, The Rural State offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos.

Russia has deployed cyber operations to interfere in foreign elections, launch disinformation campaigns, and cripple neighboring states—all while maintaining a thin veneer of deniability and avoiding strikes that cross the line into acts of war. How should a targeted nation respond? In Russian Cyber Operations, Scott Jasper dives into the legal and technical maneuvers of Russian cyber strategies, proposing that nations develop solutions for resilience to withstand future attacks.

Jasper examines the place of cyber operations within Russia’s asymmetric arsenal and its use of hybrid and information warfare, considering examples from French and US presidential elections and the 2017 NotPetya mock ransomware attack, among others. A new preface to the paperback edition puts events since 2020 into context. Jasper shows that the international effort to counter these operations through sanctions and indictments has done little to alter Moscow’s behavior. Jasper instead proposes that nations use data correlation technologies in an integrated security platform to establish a more resilient defense.

Russian Cyber Operations provides a critical framework for determining whether Russian cyber campaigns and incidents rise to the level of armed conflict or operate at a lower level as a component of competition. Jasper’s work offers the national security community a robust plan of action critical to effectively mounting a durable defense against Russian cyber campaigns.

"An invaluable resource to teachers of Latin American theater, with texts that provide an accurate panorama of Latin American theater."
---Adam Versenyi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Stages of Conflict brings together a vast array of dramatic texts, ambitiously tracing the intersection of theater and social and political life in the Americas over the past five centuries. Including eighteen works faithfully translated into English, the collection moves from a sixteenth century Mayan dance-drama to a 2003 production by the first published indigenous playwright in Mexico. Historical pieces from the sixteenth century to the present highlight the encounter between indigenous tradition and colonialism, while contributions from modern playwrights such as Virgilio Pinero, Jose Triana, and Denise Stolkos take on the tumultuous political and social upheavals of the past century.

The editors have added comprehensive critical commentary that details the origins of each play, affording scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and Latin American studies the opportunity to view the history of a continent through its rich and diverse theatrical traditions.

Diana Taylor is Director of The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. Her books include the award-winning volume The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.

Sarah J. Townsend is a doctoral student at New York University.

Is the purpose of political philosophy to articulate the moral values that political regimes would realize in a virtually perfect world and show what that implies for the way we should behave toward one another? That model of political philosophy, driven by an effort to draw a picture of an ideal political society, is familiar from the approach of John Rawls and others. Or is political philosophy more useful if it takes the world as it is, acknowledging the existence of various morally non-ideal political realities, and asks how people can live together nonetheless?

The latter approach is advocated by “realist” thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. In Value, Conflict, and Order, Edward Hall builds on the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams in order to establish a political realist’s theory of politics for the twenty-first century. The realist approach, Hall argues, helps us make sense of the nature of moral and political conflict, the ethics of compromising with adversaries and opponents, and the character of political legitimacy. In an era when democratic political systems all over the world are riven by conflict over values and interests, Hall’s conception is bracing and timely.