front cover of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy
Kenneth T. Andrews
University of Chicago Press, 2004
No part of the United States was more resistant to the civil rights movement and its pursuit of racial equality than Mississippi. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle explores the civil rights movement in that state to consider its emergence before the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its impact long after. Did the civil rights movement have a lasting impact, and, if so, how did it bring about change? Kenneth T. Andrews is the first scholar to examine not only the history of the movement but its social and political legacy as well. His study demonstrates how during the 1970s and '80s, local movements worked to shape electoral politics, increase access to better public schools, and secure the administration of social welfare to needy African Americans.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is also the first book of its kind to detail the activities of white supremacists in Mississippi, revealing how white repression and intimidation sparked black activism and simultaneously undermined the movement's ability to achieve far-reaching goals. Andrews shows that the federal government's role was important but reactive as federal actors responded to the sustained struggles between local movements and their opponents. He tracks the mobilization of black activists by the NAACP, the creation of Freedom Summer, efforts to galvanize black voters, the momentous desegregation of public schools and the rise of all-white private academies, and struggles over the economic development of black communities. From this complex history, Andrews shows how the civil rights movement built innovative organizations and campaigns that empowered local leadership and had a lasting legacy in Mississippi and beyond.

Based on an original and creative research design that combines extensive archival research, interviews with activists, and quantitative historical data, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle provides many new insights into the civil rights struggle, and it presents a much broader theory to explain whether and how movements have enduring impacts on politics and society. What results is a work that will be invaluable to students of social movements, democratic politics, and the struggle for racial freedom in the U.S.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
The Great Society and Its Legacy
Twenty Years of U.S. Social Policy
Marshall Kaplan and Peggy Cuciti, eds.
Duke University Press, 1986
A uniquely balanced look at the Great Society and its aftermath, this work describes and evaluates America's key social policy initiatives from Presidents Johnson to Reagan.
[more]

front cover of Inventing the Immigration Problem
Inventing the Immigration Problem
The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy
Katherine Benton-Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2018

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later.

Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics.

The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.

[more]

front cover of Judea under Roman Domination
Judea under Roman Domination
The First Generation of Statelessness and Its Legacy
Nadav Sharon
SBL Press, 2017

Investigate a relatively neglected but momentous period in Judean history

Nadav Sharon closely examines a critical period in Judean history, which saw the end of the Hasmonean dynasty and the beginning of Roman domination of Judea leading up to the kingship of Herod (67-37 BCE). In this period renowned Roman figures such as Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Gaius Cassius (a conspirator against Caesar), and Mark Anthony, led the Roman Republic on the eve of its transformation into an Empire, each having his own dealings with—and holding sway over—Judea at different times. This volume explores the impact of the Roman conquest on the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, enhances the understanding of later Judean-Roman relations and the roots of the Great Revolt, and examines how this early period of Roman domination had on impact on later developments in Judean society and religion.

Features:

  • Part one dedicating to reconstructing Judean history from the death of Alexander to the reign of King Herod
  • Part two examining the effects of Roman domination on Judean society
  • Maps, illustrations, and appendices
[more]

front cover of Periklean Athens and Its Legacy
Periklean Athens and Its Legacy
Problems and Perspectives
Edited by Judith M. Barringer and Jeffrey M. Hurwit
University of Texas Press, 2005

The late fifth century BC was the golden age of ancient Athens. Under the leadership of the renowned soldier-statesman Perikles, Athenians began rebuilding the Akropolis, where they created the still awe-inspiring Parthenon. Athenians also reached a zenith of artistic achievement in sculpture, vase painting, and architecture, which provided continuing inspiration for many succeeding generations.

The specially commissioned essays in this volume offer a fresh, innovative panorama of the art, architecture, history, culture, and influence of Periklean Athens. Written by leading experts in the field, the articles cover a wide range of topics, including:

  • An evaluation of Perikles' military leadership during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War.
  • Iconographical and iconological studies of vase paintings, wall paintings, and sculpture.
  • Explorations of the Parthenon and other monuments of the Athenian Akropolis.
  • The legacy of Periklean Athens and its influence upon later art.
  • Assessments of the modern reception of the Akropolis.

As a whole, this collection of essays proves that even a well-explored field such as Periklean Athens can yield new treasures when mined by perceptive and seasoned investigators.

[more]

front cover of Symbolic Space
Symbolic Space
French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy
Richard A. Etlin
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Richard A. Etlin explores the social and cultural hierarchies established in eighteenth-century France to illustrate how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the eighteenth-century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he shows how the work of these architects was informed by considerations of symbolic space.

For Etlin, the eighteenth-century city was a place in which actual physical space was subjected to a complex mental layering of conceptual spaces. He focuses on the design theory of Boullée and Durand and charts their legacy through the architecture of Paul Philippe Cret, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn. He defines the distinctive features of neoclassicism and outlines the new grammar for classical architecture articulated by theorists and architects such as Laugier, Leroy, and Ledoux.

After discussing the eighteenth-century hôtel, revolutionary space, and the transformation of the image of the cemetery, Etlin examines the space of absence as embodied in commemorative architecture from Boullée and Gilly to Cret, Wright, and Terragni. His book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter