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Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada
Historical and Legal Aspects
Kerry Abel
University of Manitoba Press, 1991

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Accelerating Energy Innovation
Insights from Multiple Sectors
Edited by Rebecca M. Henderson and Richard G. Newell
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Accelerating energy innovation could be an important part of an effective response to the threat of climate change. Written by a stellar group of experts in the field, this book complements existing research on the subject with an exploration of the role that public and private policy have played in enabling—and sustaining—swift innovation in a variety of industries, from agriculture and the life sciences to information technology. Chapters highlight the factors that have determined the impact of past policies, and suggest that effectively managed federal funding, strategies to increase customer demand, and the enabling of aggressive competition from new firms are important ingredients for policies that affect innovative activity.

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Accountability Across Borders
Migrant Rights in North America
Edited by Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson
University of Texas Press, 2019

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Covering the role of federal, state, and local governments in both countries of origin and destinations, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these essays range from reflections on labor solidarity among members of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Toronto to explorations of indigenous students from the Maya diaspora living in San Francisco. Case studies in Mexico also discuss the enforcement of the citizenship rights of Mexican American children and the struggle to affirm the human rights of Central American migrants in transit. As policies regarding immigration, citizenship, and enforcement are reaching a flashpoint in North America, this volume provides key insights into the new dynamics of migrant civil society as well as the scope and limitations of directives from governmental agencies.

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Acid Rain and Friendly Neighbors
The Policy Dispute Between Canada and the United States
Jurgen Schmandt, Judith Clarkson, and Hilliard Roderick
Duke University Press, 1988
From reviews of the first edition:

“Covers a wide range of issues with balance and clarity. . . . I can recommend the book highly as an intermediate-level source of information and insight into the international aspects of the acid rain problem.”—J. F. Hornig, Ambio

“A masterful analysis of the policy problems raised by acid rain in the U.S. and Canada . . . detailed, objective, understandable, and compelling. Weaving substantive and institutional factors into their analysis, the authors skillfully portray the controversy’s multifaceted nature.”—Tracy Dobson, American Journal of International Law

“[A] thorough, well-balanced analysis . . . [that] could serve as a model for analysis of complex policy issues.”—Choice

“Reveals the interface between science, technology, and public policy as being the co-extensive network it really is. . . . Timely and welcomed.”—John de la Mothe, Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de Politiques

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After Disaster
Agenda Setting, Public Policy, and Focusing Events
Thomas A. Birkland
Georgetown University Press, 1997

Disasters like earthquakes are known as focusing events—sudden calamities that cause both citizens and policymakers to pay more attention to a public problem and often to press for solutions. This book, the first comprehensive analysis of these dramatic events, explains how and why some public disasters change political agendas and, ultimately, public policies.

Thomas A. Birkland explores important successes and failures in the policy process by analyzing the political outcomes of four types of events: earthquakes, hurricanes, oil spills, and nuclear accidents. Using this empirical data to go beyond an intuitive understanding of focusing events, he presents a theory of where and when these events will gain attention and how they trigger political reactions. Birkland concludes that different types of disasters result in different kinds of agenda politics. Public outrage over the highly visible damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example, ended a fourteen-year logjam holding back Congressional legislation to regulate oil spill cleanups. On the other hand, the intangible effects of Three Mile Island had less concrete results in a political arena that was already highly polarized.

Integrating a variety of theories on the policy process, including agenda setting, policy communities, advocacy coalitions, the political aspects of the news media, and the use of symbols in political debate, Birkland illuminates the dynamics of event-driven policy activity. As the first extensive study of its kind, this book offers new insights into the policy process.

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After the Czars and Commissars
Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia
Eric Freedman
Michigan State University Press, 2011
From Czarism and Bolshevism to the current post-communist era, the media in Central Asia has been tightly constrained. Though the governments in the region assert that a free press is permitted to operate, research has shown this to be untrue. In all five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the media has been controlled, suppressed, punished, and often outlawed. This enlightening collection of essays investigates the reasons why these countries have failed to develop independent and sustainable press systems. It documents the complex relationship between the press and governance, nation-building, national identity, and public policy. In this book, scholars explore the numerous and broad-reaching implications of media control in a variety of contexts, touching on topics such as Internet regulation and censorship, press rights abuses, professional journalism standards and self-censorship, media ownership, ethnic newspapers, blogging, Western broadcasting into the region, and coverage of terrorism.
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Against the Deportation Terror
Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century
Rachel Ida Buff
Temple University Press, 2017

Despite being characterized as a “nation of immigrants,” the United States has seen a long history of immigrant rights struggles. In her timely book Against the Deportation Terror, Rachel Ida Buff uncovers this multiracial history. She traces the story of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) from its origins in the 1930s through repression during the early Cold War, to engagement with “new” Latinx and Caribbean immigrants in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Functioning as a hub connecting diverse foreign-born communities and racial justice advocates, the ACPFB responded to various, ongoing crises of what they called “the deportation terror.” Advocates worked against repression, discrimination, detention, and expulsion in migrant communities across the nation at the same time as they supported reform of federal immigration policy. Prevailing in some cases and suffering defeats in others, the story of the ACPFB is characterized by persistence in multiracial organizing even during periods of protracted repression.

By tracing the work of the ACPFB and its allies over half a century, Against the Deportation Terror provides important historical precedent for contemporary immigrant rights organizing. Its lessons continue to resonate today.

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The Agile City
Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change
James Russell
Island Press, 2011
In a very short time America has realized that global warming poses real challenges to the nation's future. The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it?
 
Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming-and blunt its effects-by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly.
Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.
 
Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero. These cuts can be affordably achieved in the windshield-shattering heat of the desert and the bone-chilling cold of the north. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. Agility, Russell argues, also means learning to adapt to the effects of climate change, which means redesigning the obsolete ways real estate is financed; housing subsidies are distributed; transportation is provided; and water is obtained, distributed and disposed of. These engines of growth have become increasingly more dysfunctional both economically and environmentally.
 
The Agile City highlights tactics that create multiplier effects, which means that ecologically driven change can shore-up economic opportunity, can make more productive workplaces, and can help revive neglected communities. Being able to look at multiple effects and multiple benefits of political choices and private investments is essential to assuring wealth and well-being in the future. Green, Russell writes, grows the future.
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The Aging
A Guide to Public Policy
Bennett M. Rich
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of federal programs for the aging, and their origins. Landmark federal legislation affecting the aging was enacted in the 1930s, and the intervening decades have witnesses a dramatic increase in the number and scope of programs. But far from constituting a cohesive national policy for the elderly, the many programs reflect the particular political and social conditions surrounding their origin and implementation. The multiplicity and complexity of resources and services available make achieving even a reasonable grasp of this field extremely difficult. This study offers a coherent and readable summary of this important area of federal legislation.

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AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States
Patricia D. Siplon
Georgetown University Press, 2002

Lucid and compellingly written, Patricia Siplon has immersed herself in the history and ongoing firestorms of how AIDS policies are influenced, fought over, and enacted in the United States. AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States is equally as engrossing and as revealing in its own way as And the Band Played On. With an initial chapter that clearly follows the tangled historical string from the first realizations of a medical emergency to today's overwhelming worldwide epidemical crisis, she goes on to look at how medical treatments have changed and grown; how blood policies were formed; how value-based debates raged and continue to rage over prevention; how communities developed to first respond to the crisis, and later organized to fight for health care; and finally-now that AIDS is recognized for the global crisis it is-how foreign policy is being shaped.

Invaluable for activists and anyone involved in fighting for the humane treatment of people with HIV/AIDS around the world, this is also an important and insightful guide to the how and what of public policy as it is fashioned out of the clay of U.S. democratic institutions.

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The AIDS Bureaucracy
Why Society Failed to Meet the AIDS Crisis and How We Might Improve Our Response
Sandra Panem
Harvard University Press, 1988

AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us.

Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis.

She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.

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AIDS in Industrialized Democracies
Passions, Politics, and Policies
Bayer, Ronald
Rutgers University Press, 1992

In the ten years since the first cases of AIDS were reported, the disease has spread around the world. Every country has had to come up with policies suited to its own conditions, economy, culture, and institutions. The differences among their approaches are striking. This volume, the first international comprehensive comparison of responses to AIDS, is a unique guide to the world's most urgent public health crisis.

Sixteen leading experts in public health, social science, government, and public policy from USA, Canada, Germany, Australia, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan candidly recount and analyze the responses of their own nations and comment on the lessons that can be drawn from each country's experience. For each country, they look critically at the tragic statistics of AIDS incidence; the circumstances of AIDS's first appearance; public health traditions of mandatory screening, contact tracing, and quarantine; attitudes toward drug abuse, homosexuality, sex education; publicity about AIDS; legal and customary protections of civil rights, minority groups, medical confidentiality; access to health care and insurance; and the interplay of formal and informal interest groups in shaping policy. The spectrum of AIDS policy ranges from severe "contain-and-control" programs to much more liberal plans based on education, cooperation, and inclusion.

No matter what policy a nation has constructed to deal with AIDS, the coming decade will test how well that policy conforms to democratic ideals. By scrutinizing the responses to AIDS so far, this book aims to give countries around the world a chance to learn from each others' mistakes and triumphs. It will be essential reading for all students and professionals in public health and public policy.

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AIDS, The Winter War
Arthur Kahn
Temple University Press, 1993
"The most complete history of how AIDS treatment activism began--and an appalling look at the government AIDS mismanagement." --John S. James, AIDS Treatment News Arthur Kahn traces the history of the struggle for recognition of and action on behalf of the AIDS epidemic. He describes the heroic struggle for survival by persons with AIDS and their allies for survival. He documents the sophisticated and effective mobilization of AIDS activists in the face of apathy from the Reagan and Bush administrations. Kahn presents a case study of the difficulties involved in bringing new drugs for AIDS to U.S. markets. He outlines the frustrating attempts to promote egg lecithin as the potential medicine for HIV patients after its use showed some signs of success in Israel. Obstruction by the federal bureaucracy, greed and incompetence on the part of the drug industry, stonewalling by scientific mandarins, and impediments to evaluation testing--these are shown to be the cruel realities faces by patients and activists. After setting this background, Kahn details the work of President Reagan's commission on AIDS. Although news of the establishment of this committee was met with scorn and cynicism, the results of its study were both effective and humane. Led by Admiral James Watkins, whose sensitivity won the respect of both commissions members and gay activists, the Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Epidemic issued a final report that seriously addressed the ramifications of the epidemic for American society as a whole. "In persuasive detail...Kahn demonstrates [that] the struggle against AIDS requires a continuous fight against vested interests that have little regard for alternative ideas and against egotists who put self-aggrandizement above a worldwide crisis.... Arthur Kahn's book presents the history of the clinical struggle and identifies heroes, many of whom have died fighting for all of us. Their efforts must be recognized. Their struggle is not over." --William Regelson, M.D., Professor, College of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University (from the Introduction)
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Alone in the Mainstream
A Deaf Woman Remembers Public School
Gina A. Oliva
Gallaudet University Press, 2004

When Gina Oliva first went to school in 1955, she didn’t know that she was “different.” If the kindergarten teacher played a tune on the piano to signal the next exercise, Oliva didn’t react because she couldn’t hear the music. So began her journey as a “solitary,” her term for being the only deaf child in the entire school. Gina felt alone because she couldn’t communicate easily with her classmates, but also because none of them had a hearing loss like hers. It wasn’t until years later at Gallaudet University that she discovered that she wasn’t alone and that her experience was common among mainstreamed deaf students. Alone in the Mainstream recounts Oliva’s story, as well as those of many other solitaries.

In writing this important book, Oliva combined her personal experiences with responses from the Solitary Mainstream Project, a survey that she conducted of deaf and hard of hearing adults who attended public school. Oliva matched her findings with current research on deaf students in public schools and confirmed that hearing teachers are ill-prepared to teach deaf pupils, they don’t know much about hearing loss, and they frequently underestimate deaf children. The collected memories in Alone in the Mainstream add emotional weight to the conviction that students need to be able to communicate freely, and they also need peers to know they are not alone.

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Altogether Fitting and Proper
Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861–2015
Timothy B. Smith
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

In the century and a half since the Civil War, various entities, both private and public, have earnestly sought to safeguard the legacy of that seismic conflict through the preservation of its battlefields. In Altogether Fitting and Proper—a title taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—Timothy B. Smith provides the most comprehensive synthesis ever written of the long, often fraught history of those preservation efforts, which began even as the war was still raging and have continued up through the present day.

Smith traces the story of battlefield park establishment from the war and the Reconstruction era through the “Golden Age of Preservation” at the turn of the century, to the New Deal period and well beyond. He pays close attention to the evolution of public policy, as the creation and oversight of parks shifted from the War Department to the National Park Service, and explores the evolving ways in which the Civil War has been remembered over the years, most significantly with regard to its causes: slavery and race. While Smith’s primary focus is on the famous national parks—Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga, and others—he also examines the endeavors of state and local governments, as well as an assortment of private organizations, to establish parks and monuments for lesser-known battle sites. The ongoing conflicts between preservationists and commercial developers form another key element of the narrative.

As Smith makes clear, the story of battlefield preservation is in many ways a story of people—from Civil War veterans like Henry Boynton, the Medal of Honor winner who oversaw the development of the first national military park at Chickamauga, to Jim Lighthizer, the president of the Civil War Trust, the private charitable organization spearheading the twenty-first-century preservation movement. In their dedication to this particular cause, such individuals and the groups they represent have kept a central event in American history alive in our collective memory.

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America Classifies the Immigrants
From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census
Joel Perlmann
Harvard University Press, 2018

When more than twenty million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920, the government attempted to classify them according to prevailing ideas about race and nationality. But this proved hard to do. Ideas about racial or national difference were slippery, contested, and yet consequential—were “Hebrews” a “race,” a “religion,” or a “people”? As Joel Perlmann shows, a self-appointed pair of officials created the government’s 1897 List of Races and Peoples, which shaped exclusionary immigration laws, the wording of the U.S. Census, and federal studies that informed social policy. Its categories served to maintain old divisions and establish new ones.

Across the five decades ending in the 1920s, American immigration policy built increasingly upon the belief that some groups of immigrants were desirable, others not. Perlmann traces how the debates over this policy institutionalized race distinctions—between whites and nonwhites, but also among whites—in immigration laws that lasted four decades.

Despite a gradual shift among social scientists from “race” to “ethnic group” after the 1920s, the diffusion of this key concept among government officials and the public remained limited until the end of the 1960s. Taking up dramatic changes to racial and ethnic classification since then, America Classifies the Immigrants concentrates on three crucial reforms to the American Census: the introduction of Hispanic origin and ancestry (1980), the recognition of mixed racial origins (2000), and a rethinking of the connections between race and ethnic group (proposed for 2020).

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American Fish and Wildlife Policy
The Human Dimension
Edited by William R. Mangun
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

These eleven original essays by leading wildlife management and public policy scholars deal with policy issues, management perspectives, and the public attitudes about wildlife that shape the world of the wildlife manager.

Part 1 contains William R. Mangun’s introductory essay "Fish and Wildlife Policy Issues" and Daniel J. Decker et al.’s "Toward a Comprehensive Paradigm of Wildlife."

Ann H. Harvey’s "Interagency Conflict and Coordination in Wildlife Management," Philip S. Cook and Ted T. Cable’s "Developing Policy for Public Access to Private Land," and Debra A. Rose’s "Implementing Endangered Species Policy" make up part 2.

Part 3 consists of Cliff Hamilton’s "Pursuing a New Paradigm in Funding State Fish and Wildlife Programs" and Trellis G. Green’s "Use of Economics in Federal and State Fishery Allocation Decisions."

The fourth part includes James J. Kennedy and Jack Ward Thomas’s "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty of Wildlife Biologists in Public Natural Resource/Environmental Agencies"; Jean C. Mangun et al.’s "Nonconsumptive Wildlife-Associated Recreation in the United States"; and Barbara A. Knuth’s "Natural Resource Hazards: Managing to Protect People from the Resource."

In part 5, Joseph F. Coates looks to the future in "Public Policy Actors and Futures."

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American Pentimento
The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches
Patricia Seed
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

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America's Children
Resources from Family, Government, and the Economy
Donald J. Hernandez
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
America's Children offers a valuable overview of the dramatic transformations in American childhood over the past fifty years, a period of historic shifts that reduced the human and material resources available to our children. Alarmingly, one fifth of all U.S. children now grow up in poverty, many are without health insurance, and about 30 percent never graduate from high school. Despite such conditions, economic, family, and educational programs for children earn low national priority and must depend on inconsistent state and local management. Drawing upon both historical and recent data, including census information from 1940 to 1980, Donald J. Hernandez provides a vivid portrait of children in America and puts forth a forceful case for overhauling our national child welfare policies. Hernandez shows how important revolutions in household composition and income, parental education and employment, childcare, and levels of poverty have affected children's well-being. As working wives and single mothers increasingly replace the traditional homemaker, children spend greater portions of time in educational and daycare facilities outside the home, and those with single mothers stand the greatest chance of being welfare dependent. Wider changes in society have created even greater stress for children in certain groups as they age: out-of-wedlock births are on the rise for white teenagers, half of all Hispanic youths never graduate high school, and violence accounts for nearly 90 per cent of all black teenage deaths. America's Children explores the interaction of many trends in children's lives and the fundamental social, demographic, and economic processes that lie at their core. The book concludes with a thoughtful analysis of the ability of families and government to provide for a new age of children, with emphasis on reducing racial inequities and providing greater public support for families, comparable to the family policies of other developed countries. As the traditional "Ozzie and Harriet" family recedes into collective memory, the importance of creating strong national policies for children is amplified, particularly in the areas of financial assistance, health insurance, education, and daycare. America's Children provides a compelling guide for reassessing the forces that shape our children and the resources available to safeguard their future.   "In this conceptually creative, methodologically rigorous, and empirically rich book, Hernandez uses census and survey data to describe several quite profound changes that have characterized the life courses of America's children and their families over the last 50 to 150 years....this erudite book is destined to be a classic." —Richard M. Lerner, Contemporary Psychology "America's Children goes a long way toward informing the debate on the causes of increasing poverty, and it challenges some widely held misperceptions....its study of resources available to children (and their families) lays a valuable foundation for surveying trends in family structure, education, and income sources....Anyone interested in the changing lives of children should read it; anyone interested in understanding the causes and patterns of poverty, and in designing a better welfare system, must read it." —Ellen B. Magenheim, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management   A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity
Frank D. Bean
Russell Sage Foundation, 2003
The attacks of September 11, 2001, facilitated by easy entry and lax immigration controls, cast into bold relief the importance and contradictions of U.S. immigration policy. Will we have to restrict immigration for fear of future terrorist attacks? On a broader scale, can the country's sense of national identity be maintained in the face of the cultural diversity that today's immigrants bring? How will the resulting demographic, social, and economic changes affect U.S. residents? As the debate about immigration policy heats up, it has become more critical than ever to examine immigration's role in our society. With a comprehensive social scientific assessment of immigration over the past thirty years, America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity provides the clearest picture to date of how immigration has actually affected the United States, while refuting common misconceptions and predicting how it might affect us in the future. Frank Bean and Gillian Stevens show how, on the whole, immigration has been beneficial for the United States. Although about one million immigrants arrive each year, the job market has expanded sufficiently to absorb them without driving down wages significantly or preventing the native-born population from finding jobs. Immigration has not led to welfare dependency among immigrants, nor does evidence indicate that welfare is a magnet for immigrants. With the exception of unauthorized Mexican and Central American immigrants, studies show that most other immigrant groups have attained sufficient earnings and job mobility to move into the economic mainstream. Many Asian and Latino immigrants have established ethnic networks while maintaining their native cultural practices in the pursuit of that goal. While this phenomenon has led many people to believe that today's immigrants are slow to enter mainstream society, Bean and Stevens show that intermarriage and English language proficiency among these groups are just as high—if not higher—as among prior waves of European immigrants. America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity concludes by showing that the increased racial and ethnic diversity caused by immigration may be helping to blur the racial divide in the United States, transforming the country from a biracial to multi-ethnic and multi-racial society. Replacing myth with fact, America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity contains a wealth of information and belongs on the bookshelves of policymakers, pundits, scholars, students, and anyone who is concerned about the changing face of the United States. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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America's Struggle against Poverty, 1900-1980
James T. Patterson
Harvard University Press, 1981

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America's Struggle against Poverty, 1900-1985
James T. Patterson
Harvard University Press, 1986

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America’s Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century
Enlarged Edition
James T. Patterson
Harvard University Press, 2000
This new edition of Patterson's widely used book carries the story of battles over poverty and social welfare through what the author calls the "amazing 1990s," those years of extraordinary performance of the economy. He explores a range of issues arising from the economic phenomenon--increasing inequality and demands for use of an improved poverty definition. He focuses the story on the impact of the highly controversial welfare reform of 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic President Clinton, despite the laments of anguished liberals.
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Animals under the Swastika
J. W. Mohnhaupt, translated by John R. J. Eyck
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Never before or since have animals played as significant a role in German history as they did during the Third Reich. Potato beetles and silkworms were used as weapons of war, pigs were used in propaganda, and dog breeding served the Nazis as a model for their racial theories. Paradoxically, some animals were put under special protection while some humans were simultaneously declared unworthy of living. Ultimately, the ways in which Nazis conceptualized and used animals—both literally and symbolically—reveals much about their racist and bigoted attitudes toward other humans.
 
Drawing from diaries, journals, school textbooks, and printed propaganda, J.W. Mohnhaupt tells these animals’ stories vividly and with an eye for everyday detail, focusing each chapter on a different facet of Nazism by way of a specific animal species: red deer, horses, cats, and more. Animals under the Swastika illustrates the complicated, thought-provoking relationship between Nazis and animals.
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Assets for the Poor
The Benefits of Spreading Asset Ownership
Thomas M. Shapiro
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Over the past three decades, average household wealth in the United States has declined among all but the richest families, with a near 80 percent drop among the nation's poorest families. Although the national debate about inequality has focused on income, it is wealth—the private assets amassed and passed on within families—that provides the extra economic cushion needed to move beyond mere day-to-day survival. Assets for the Poor is the first full-scale investigation into the importance of family wealth and the need for policies to encourage asset-building among the poor. Assets for the Poor shows how institutional mechanisms designed to encourage acquisition of capital and property favor middle-class and high-income families. For example, the aggregate value of home mortgage tax deductions far outweighs the dollar amount of the subsidies provided by Section 8 rental vouchers and public housing. Banking definitions of creditworthiness largely exclude minorities, and welfare rules have made it nearly impossible for single mothers to accumulate savings, let alone stocks or real estate. Due to persistent residential segregation, even those minority families who do own homes are often denied equal access to better schools and public services. The research in this volume shows that the poor do make use of the assets they have. Cash gifts—although small in size—are frequent within families and often lead to such positive results as homebuying and debt reduction, while tangible assets such as tools and cars help increase employment prospects. Assets for the Poor examines policies such as Individual Development Account tax subsidies to reward financial savings among the poor, and more liberal credit rules to make borrowing easier and less costly. The contributors also offer thoughtful advice for bringing the poor into mainstream savings institutions and warn against developing asset building policies at the expense of existing safety net programs. Asset-building for low-income families is a powerful idea that offers hope to families searching for a way out of poverty. Assets for the Poor challenges current thinking regarding poverty reduction policies and proposes a major shift in the way we think about families and how they make a better life. A Volume in the Ford Foundation Series on Asset Building
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Atomic Environments
Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960
Neil S. Oatsvall
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Demonstrates how policymakers influenced environmental science during the early nuclear age
 
In Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960, Neil S. Oatsvall examines how top officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations used environmental science to develop nuclear strategy at the beginning of the Cold War. While many people were involved in research and analysis during the period in question, it was at highest levels of executive decision-making where environmental science and nuclear science most clearly combined to shape the nation’s policies.

Oatsvall clearly demonstrates how the natural world and the scientific disciplines that study it became integral parts of nuclear science rather than adversarial fields of knowledge. But while nuclear technologies heavily depended on environmental science to develop, those same technologies frequently caused great harm to the natural world. Moreover, while some individuals expressed real anxieties about the damage wrought by nuclear technologies, policymakers as a class consistently made choices that privileged nuclear boosterism and secrecy, prioritizing institutional values over the lives and living systems that they were ostensibly charged to protect.

By scrutinizing institutional policymaking practices and agendas at the birth of the nuclear age, a constant set of values becomes clear. Oatsvall reveals an emerging technocratic class that routinely valued knowledge about the environment to help create and maintain a nuclear arsenal, despite its existential threat to life on earth and the negative effects many nuclear technologies had on ecosystems and the American people alike. Although policymakers took their charge to protect and advance the welfare of the United States and its people seriously, Atomic Environments demonstrates how they often failed to do so because their allegiance to the US nuclear hierarchy blinded them to the real risks and dangers of the nuclear age.
 
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Attacking Terrorism
Elements of a Grand Strategy
Audrey Kurth Cronin and James M. Ludes, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2004

The definition and understanding of "terrorism" is in a state of unprecedented evolution. No longer are acts of terrorism rare and far-flung. Following the horrendous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, U.S. citizens have had their eyes opened to a new world where this nightmare stalks the daily news and is never far from consciousness.

Attacking Terrorism brings together some of the world's finest experts, people who have made the study of this rising menace their life's work, to provide a comprehensive picture of the challenges and opportunities of the campaign against international terrorism. Part one, "The Nature of Terrorism," provides an overview and foundation for the current campaign, placing it within the political and historical context of previous threats and responses. Part two, "The Responses to Terrorism," looks at the range of policy instruments required in an effective strategy against terrorism.

The contributors to this volume bring finely honed analyses and nuanced perspectives to the terrorist realities of the twenty-first century—history, analyses, and perspectives that have been too often oversimplified or myopic. They bring a new depth of understanding and myriad new dimensions to the crisis of terrorism. And they reach into aspects of counterterrorism that broaden our grasp on such important tools as diplomacy, intelligence and counterintelligence, psycho-political means, international law, criminal law enforcement, military force, foreign aid, and homeland security, showing not only how these tools are currently being employed but how often they are being underutilized as well.

Attacking Terrorism demonstrates that there are no easy answers—and that the road toward victory will be long and arduous, frightening and dangerous—but as Audrey Kurth Cronin states in her introduction, "As the campaign against international terrorism unfolds, a crucial forward-looking process of strategic reassessment is under way in the United States, and this book is intended to be a part of it."

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front cover of Autonomous Vehicle Technology
Autonomous Vehicle Technology
A Guide for Policymakers
James M. Anderson
RAND Corporation, 2014
The automotive industry appears close to substantial change engendered by “self-driving” technologies. This technology offers the possibility of significant benefits to social welfare—saving lives; reducing crashes, congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution; increasing mobility for the disabled; and ultimately improving land use. This report is intended as a guide for state and federal policymakers on the many issues that this technology raises.
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front cover of The Aztec Palimpsest
The Aztec Palimpsest
Mexico in the Modern Imagination
Daniel Cooper Alarcón
University of Arizona Press, 1997
Mexico is more than a country; it is a concept that is the product of a complex network of discourses as disparate as the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda. The idea of "Mexicanness," says Daniel Cooper Alarcón, "has arisen through a process of erasure and superimposition as these discourses have produced contentious and sometimes contradictory descriptions of their subject." By considering Mexicanness as a palimpsest of these competing yet interwoven narratives, Cooper offers a paradigm through which the construction and representation of cultural identity can be studied.

He shows how the Chicano myth of Aztlan was constructed upon earlier Mesoamerican myths, discusses representations of Mexico in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and analyzes the content of tourist literature, thereby revealing the economic, social, and political interests that drive the production of Mexicanness today. This original linking of seemingly incongruous discourses corrects the misconception that Mexicanness is produced only by hegemonic groups. Cooper shows how Mexico has been defined and represented, by both Mexicans and non-Mexicans, as more than a political or geographic entity, and he particularly reveals how Mexicanness has been exploited by Mexicans themselves through the promotion of tourism as a form of neocolonialism.

Cooper's work is valuable both for identifying attempts to revise and control Mexican myth, history, and culture and for defining the intricate relationship between history, historiography, and cultural nationalism. The Aztec Palimpsest extends existing analyses of Mexicanness into new theoretical realms and provides a fresh perspective on the relationship between the United States and Mexico at a time when these two nations are becoming more intimately linked.
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