BiblioVault - Books about Government policy

The Harvest of American Racism

The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967

Robert Shellow

University of Michigan Press, 2018

In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 U.S. cities, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, a.k.a. the Kerner Commission, was formed. The Commission sought reasons for the disturbances, including the role that law enforcement played. Chief among its research projects was a study of 23 American cities, headed by social psychologist Robert Shellow. An early draft of the scientists’ analysis, titled “The Harvest of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967,” provoked the Commission’s staff in November 1967 by uncovering political causes for the unrest; the team of researchers was fired, and the controversial report remained buried at the LBJ Presidential Library until now.

The first publication of the Harvest report half a century later reveals that many of the issues it describes are still with us, including how cities might more effectively and humanely react to groups and communities in protest. In addition to the complete text of the suppressed Harvest report, the book includes an introduction by Robert Shellow that provides useful historical context; personal recollections from four of the report’s surviving social scientists, Robert Shellow, David Boesel, Gary T. Marx, and David O. Sears; and an appendix outlining the differences between the unpublished Harvest analysis and the well-known Kerner Commission Report that followed it.

“The [Harvest of American Racism] report was rejected by Johnson administration functionaries as being far too radical—politically ‘unviable’… Social science can play an extremely positive role in fighting racial and other injustice and inequality, but only if it is matched with a powerful political will to implement the findings. That will has never come from within an American presidential administration—that will has only been forged in black and other radical communities’ movements for justice. The political power for change, as incremental as it has been, has come from within those communities. Washington responds, it does not lead."
—from the Foreword by Michael C. Dawson

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Hatred at Home

al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest

Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Ohio University Press, 2011

One day in 2002, three friends—a Somali immigrant, a Pakistan–born U.S. citizen, and a hometown African American—met in a Columbus, Ohio coffee shop and vented over civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan. Their conversation triggered an investigation that would become one of the most unusual and far–reaching government probes into terrorism since the 9/11 attacks.

Over several years, prosecutors charged each man with unrelated terrorist activities in cases that embodied the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism at home.

Government lawyers spoke of catastrophes averted; defense attorneys countered that none of the three had done anything but talk. The stories of these homegrown terrorists illustrate the paradox the government faces after September 11: how to fairly wage a war against alleged enemies living in our midst.

Hatred at Home is a true crime drama that will spark debate from all political corners about safety, civil liberties, free speech, and the government’s war at home.

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Hazing in the U.S. Armed Forces

Recommendations for Hazing Prevention Policy and Practice

Kirsten M. Keller

RAND Corporation, 2015

This report documents research focused on helping the Department of Defense build a more-systematic approach to hazing prevention and response. The report documents theory and research on the root causes of hazing and findings and recommendations regarding how best to define hazing, practices to prevent and respond to incidents of hazing, and how the armed forces can improve the tracking of hazing incidents.

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Health Care Reform and the Battle for the Body Politic

Dan Beauchamp

Temple University Press, 1996

"Dan Beauchamp's important book melds a personal odyssey, an abiding, passionate commitment to one version of comprehensive health reform, and highly disciplined political analysis. His years in the Cuomo Administration provide him with rich insight into how that scion of liberalism inched toward, but ultimately shied away from, major health reform in the Empire State. His provocative assessment of the missed opportunities represented by the Clinton health plan also deserves the attention of any serious student of health politics and policy." --Frank J. Thompson, Professor of Dean, Graduate School of Public Affairs, State University of New York at Albany While most studies of health care reform have focused on solving the market's failure, controlling costs, or providing universal access, Dan E. Beauchamp adeptly discusses health care reform as a strategy for dealing with the failures of politics--not just the failures of the health care market. As the former Deputy Commissioner for Policy and Planning for the New York State Department of Health, Beauchamp presents a revelatory first-person narrative about his work to develop a universal health care and insurance plan for New York State. His enlightening personal account includes discussions of his efforts to develop a national model of the New York plan for Mario Cuomo (during the period when the governor considered running for the Democratic nomination for president), and his perceptive critique of the failed Clinton plan for reform. Beauchamp gets beyond topics like global budgets, rate-setting, and managed competition to outline the idea of health plans as a means for the public to come together in a way that will change forever the way we think about health care, which he calls "the battle for the body politic." A large part of engaging in the "battle," he argues, involves addressing and resolving racial and class divisions that have always underscored America's political reality. Ultimately, Beauchamp argues for a reform that would promote health and social equality, one that would change and strengthen our social awareness of health care as a common good. "Dan Beauchamp is a singular and important voice in the ongoing health care debate. Instead of focusing on the technical details of health reform, he spins a compelling personal narrative, entices the reader into the truly important questions: How do health plans work politically? How can they change the way we think about health, health care and ourselves as a country? While economists focus on financing schemes, and bioethicists search for underlying values, Beauchamp probes how a health care system shapes our politics and affects our experience of who we are as Americans. His book is exceedingly valuable; it reveals just how much is at stake in health care reform." --Larry R. Churchill, Professor and Chair, Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Hidden Arguments

Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy

Sylvia Noble Tesh

Rutgers University Press, 1988

In this provocative book, Sylvia Tesh shows how "politics masquerades as science" in the debates over the causes and prevention of disease. Tesh argues that ideas about the causes of disease which dominate policy at any given time or place are rarely determined by scientific criteria alone. The more critical factors are beliefs about how much government can control industry, who should take risks when scientists are uncertain, and whether the individual or society has the ultimate responsibility for health. Tesh argues that instead of lamenting the presence of this extra-scientific reasoning, it should be brought out of hiding and welcomed. She illustrates her position by analyzing five different theories of disease causality that have vied for dominance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and discusses in detail the political implications of each theory. Tesh also devotes specific chapters to the multicausal theory of disease, to health education policy in Cuba, to the 1981 air traffic controller's strike, to the debate over Agent Orange, and to an analysis of science as a belief system.

Along the way she makes these principal points: She criticizes as politically conservative the idea that diseases result from a multifactorial web of causes. Placing responsibility for disease prevention on "society" is ideological, she argues. In connection with the air traffic controllers she questions whether it is in a union's best interests to claim that workers' jobs are stressful. She shows why there are no entirely neutral answers to questions about the toxicity of environmental pollutants. In a final chapter, Tesh urges scientists to incorporate egalitarian values into their search for the truth, rather than pretending science can be divorced from that political ideology.

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A History of Japan’s Government-Business Relationship

The Passenger Car Industry

Phyllis A. Genther

University of Michigan Press, 1990

Despite the economic and political importance of the U.S.-Japan relationship and the extensive attention paid to automotive trade, few American scholars or policy makers are familiar with the history of Japanese government-business relations, either generally or for specific industries such as passenger cars. This book hopefully helps in a small way to fill that gap in our knowledge and, thus, to help strengthen the foundation from which we make public policy decisions about bilateral trade. [ix]

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HIV Exceptionalism

Development through Disease in Sierra Leone

Adia Benton

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

WINNER, 2017 RACHEL CARSON PRIZE, SOCIETY FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE

In 2002, Sierra Leone emerged from a decadelong civil war. Seeking international attention and development aid, its government faced a dilemma. Though devastated by conflict, Sierra Leone had a low prevalence of HIV. However, like most African countries, it stood to benefit from a large influx of foreign funds specifically targeted at HIV/AIDS prevention and care.

What Adia Benton chronicles in this ethnographically rich and often moving book is how one war-ravaged nation reoriented itself as a country suffering from HIV at the expense of other, more pressing health concerns. During her fieldwork in the capital, Freetown, a city of one million people, at least thirty NGOs administered internationally funded programs that included HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Benton probes why HIV exceptionalism—the idea that HIV is an exceptional disease requiring an exceptional response—continues to guide approaches to the epidemic worldwide and especially in Africa, even in low-prevalence settings.

In the fourth decade since the emergence of HIV/AIDS, many today are questioning whether the effort and money spent on this health crisis has in fact helped or exacerbated the problem. HIV Exceptionalism does this and more, asking, what are the unanticipated consequences that HIV/AIDS development programs engender?

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Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia

Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw

Brian LaPierre

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Swearing, drunkenness, promiscuity, playing loud music, brawling—in the Soviet Union these were not merely bad behavior, they were all forms of the crime of "hooliganism." Defined as "rudely violating public order and expressing clear disrespect for society," hooliganism was one of the most common and confusing crimes in the world's first socialist state. Under its shifting, ambiguous, and elastic terms, millions of Soviet citizens were arrested and incarcerated for periods ranging from three days to five years and for everything from swearing at a wife to stabbing a complete stranger.

Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia offers the first comprehensive study of how Soviet police, prosecutors, judges, and ordinary citizens during the Khrushchev era (1953–64) understood, fought against, or embraced this catch-all category of criminality. Using a wide range of newly opened archival sources, it portrays the Khrushchev period—usually considered as a time of liberalizing reform and reduced repression—as an era of renewed harassment against a wide range of state-defined undesirables and as a time when policing and persecution were expanded to encompass the mundane aspects of everyday life. In an atmosphere of Cold War competition, foreign cultural penetration, and transatlantic anxiety over "rebels without a cause," hooliganism emerged as a vital tool that post-Stalinist elites used to civilize their uncultured working class, confirm their embattled cultural ideals, and create the right-thinking and right-acting socialist society of their dreams.

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How It Works

Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia

Robert P. Fairbanks II

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.

To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

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How Many Is Too Many?

The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States

Philip Cafaro

University of Chicago Press, 2015

From the stony streets of Boston to the rail lines of California, from General Relativity to Google, one of the surest truths of our history is the fact that America has been built by immigrants. The phrase itself has become a steadfast campaign line, a motto of optimism and good will, and indeed it is the rallying cry for progressives today who fight against tightening our borders. This is all well and good, Philip Cafaro thinks, for the America of the past—teeming with resources, opportunities, and wide open spaces—but America isn’t as young as it used to be, and the fact of the matter is we can’t afford to take in millions of people anymore. We’ve all heard this argument before, and one might think Cafaro is toeing the conservative line, but here’s the thing: he’s not conservative, not by a long shot. He’s as progressive as they come, and it’s progressives at whom he aims with this book’s startling message: massive immigration simply isn’t consistent with progressive ideals.

Cafaro roots his argument in human rights, equality, economic security, and environmental sustainability—hallmark progressive values. He shows us the undeniable realities of mass migration to which we have turned a blind eye: how flooded labor markets in sectors such as meatpacking and construction have driven down workers’ wages and driven up inequality; how excessive immigration has fostered unsafe working conditions and political disempowerment; how it has stalled our economic maturity by keeping us ever-focused on increasing consumption and growth; and how it has caused our cities and suburbs to sprawl far and wide, destroying natural habitats, driving other species from the landscape, and cutting us off from nature.

In response to these hard-hitting truths, Cafaro lays out a comprehensive plan for immigration reform that is squarely in line with progressive political goals. He suggests that we shift enforcement efforts away from border control and toward the employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. He proposes aid and foreign policies that will help people create better lives where they are. And indeed he supports amnesty for those who have, at tremendous risk, already built their lives here. Above all, Cafaro attacks our obsession with endless material growth, offering in its place a mature vision of America, not brimming but balanced, where all the different people who constitute this great nation of immigrants can live sustainably and well, sheltered by a prudence currently in short supply in American politics.

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How the Indians Lost Their Land

Law and Power on the Frontier

Stuart Banner

Harvard University Press, 2007

Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth,nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from AmericanIndians to whites. This dramatic transformation has been understood in two very different ways--as a series of consensual transactions, but also as a process of violent conquest. Both views cannot be correct. How did Indians actually lose their land?

Stuart Banner provides the first comprehensive answer. He argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles. As whites' power grew, they were able to establish the legal institutions and the rules by which land transactions would be made and enforced.

This story of America's colonization remains a story of power, but a more complex kind of power than historians have acknowledged. It is a story in which military force was less important than the power to shape the legal framework within which land would be owned. As a result, white Americans--from eastern cities to the western frontiers--could believe they were buying land from the Indians the same way they bought land from one another. How the Indians Lost Their Land dramatically reveals how subtle changes in the law can determine the fate of a nation, and our understanding of the past.

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How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic

Remedying Institutional Failures

Allen Buchanan, with contributions by Cécile Fabre and Sir Paul Tucker

University of Utah Press, 2024

There is no shortage of criticisms of U.S. COVID-19 policy. This book argues that officials at the highest levels lied to the public or deliberately suppressed relevant information, shamelessly over-sold the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and enacted lock-down policies of unproven value that caused massive economic, educational, and psycho-social damage.

In How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic Allen Buchanan argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the primary cause of flawed COVID-19 policy was not defective leadership, but rather institutional failure. Decisions were made through processes that lacked the most basic safeguards against the large-institution “yes-man” and group-think phenomena and included virtually no provisions for holding decision makers accountable. More fundamentally, policy makers did not fulfill the crucial duty to provide plausible public justifications for their decisions. They disguised the fact that scientific opinion was divided on the appropriateness of the policies they endorsed and labeled those who disagreed with them as anti-scientific. In some cases, they responded to criticism, not by engaging it on the issues, but by branding their critics as quacks.

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How Welfare States Care

Culture, Gender and Parenting in Europe

Monique Kremer

Amsterdam University Press, 2007

Though women’s employment patterns in Europe have been changing drastically over several decades, the repercussions of this social revolution are just beginning to garner serious attention. Many scholars have presumed that diversity and change in women’s employment is based on the structures of welfare states and women’s responses to economic incentives and disincentives to join the workforce; How Welfare States Care provides in-depth analysis of women’s employment and childcare patterns, taxation, social security, and maternity leave provisions in order to show this logic does not hold. Combining economic, sociological, and psychological insights, Kremer demonstrates that care is embedded in welfare states and that European women are motivated by culturally and morally-shaped ideals of care that are embedded in welfare states—and less by economic reality.

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The Huddled Masses Myth

Immigration And Civil Rights

Kevin R. Johnson

Temple University Press, 2003

Despite rhetoric that suggests that the United States opens its doors to virtually anyone who wants to come here, immigration has been restricted since the nation began. In this book, Kevin R. Johnson argues that immigration policy reflects the social hierarchy that prevails in American society as a whole and that immigration reform is intertwined with the struggle for civil rights.The "Huddled Masses" Myth focuses on the exclusion of people of color, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, the poor, political dissidents, and other disfavored groups, showing how bias shapes the law. In the nineteenth century, for example, virulent anti-Asian bias excluded would-be immigrants from China and severely restricted those from Japan. In our own time, people fleeing persecution and poverty in Haiti generally have been treated much differently from those fleeing Cuba. Johnson further argues that although domestic minorities (whether citizens or lawful immigrants) enjoy legal protections and might even be courted by politicians, they are regarded as subordinate groups and suffer discrimination. This book has particular resonance today as the public debates the uncertain status of immigrants from Arab countries and of the Muslim faith.

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The Human Cost of Food

Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy

Edited by Charles D. Thompson, Jr., and Melinda F. Wiggins

University of Texas Press, 2002

Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues.

The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.

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Human Gene Therapy

Eve Nichols

Harvard University Press, 1988

This is a landmark introduction to the facts and hopes of gene therapy: an exciting, albeit controversial, technique that could bring about a new age in medical treatment. Modern medicine has had relatively little to offer children with disorders such as thalassemia and severe combined immune deficiency. Many of these young patients still face repeated hospitalizations and, often, an early death. In gene therapy, a child with life-threatening genetic disease caused by a defect in a single gene will he treated with the gene’s normal counterpart. Successful development of somatic cell gene therapy is potentially the most effective new therapeutic approach to helping these children lead normal lives.

With unusual clarity of style, Eve K. Nichols (author of the acclaimed Mobilizing Against AIDS) explores the potential for gene therapy and identifies those who are candidates for it. She reviews methods for diagnosing genetic diseases and evaluates current forms of therapy. Having provided a biomedical background for understanding somatic cell gene therapy, Nichols takes a thoughtful look at complex and sensitive issues surrounding ethical, economic, and policy aspects of manipulating human genes. A straightforward analysis of the current limitations and future potential of gene therapy concludes her broadly accessible account.

This book is is derived from the annual session of the prestigious Institute of Medicine. Distinguished participants in this meeting, such as Leon Rosenberg (Dean of the Yale Medical School), Philip Leder (Harvard Medical School), David Martin (Vice President, Genentech, Inc.), James Wyngaarden (Director of the National Institutes of Health), and LeRoy Walters (Director of the Center for Bioethics, Georgetown University), have contributed expert perspectives that will establish this book as a standard of excellence for future studies. A preface by Frank Press, President of the National Academy of Sciences, provides an insightful overview of this promising new therapy.

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Human Trafficking, Human Security, and the Balkans

H. Richard Friman

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007

In the aftermath of four Yugoslav wars, ongoing efforts at reconstruction in South Eastern Europe have devoted relatively limited attention to dimensions of human security that enhance protections for the region's most vulnerable populations in their daily lives. It is in this context that South Eastern Europe, and especially the Western Balkan region, has emerged as a nexus point in human trafficking.

Human Trafficking, Human Security, and the Balkans brings together leading scholars, NGO representatives, and government officials to analyze and offer solutions to this challenge. The contributors explore the economic dynamics of human trafficking in an era of globalization, which has greatly facilitated not only the flow of goods and services but also the trade in human beings. They also examine the effectiveness of international and transnational policies and practice, the impact of peacekeeping forces, and the emergence of national and regional action plans in the Western Balkans and, more broadly, in South Eastern Europe. Finally, they consider the nature and ramifications of the gap between human security rhetoric and institutional policy steps against human trafficking.

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