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Theater of State
A Dramaturgy of the United Nations
James R. Ball III
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In this innovative study of performance in international relations, James R. Ball III asks why states and their representatives come to the United Nations to perform for a global audience and how those audiences may intervene in the spectacle of global politics. Theater of State looks at key spaces in which global politics play out: in debating forums of the UN, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and in peacekeeping operations in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in a variety of related media productions. Ball argues that culture and politics form a unified field organized by the theatricality of its actors and the engaged spectatorship of its audiences. He provides a theory of global political spectatorship: of how the world watches itself in institutions and beyond, and of what citizens and diplomats do by watching.
 
This study of the lived experience of spectacular politics on the world stage draws on theories of theater, performance, and politics to offer new ways of approaching issues of war, cosmopolitanism, international justice, governance, and activism. Situated at the nexus of two disciplines, performance studies and political science, this volume encourages conversations between the two so that each might offer lessons to the other.
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The Theatre of Genocide
Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia
Edited and with an introduction by Robert Skloot
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
In this pioneering volume, Robert Skloot brings together four plays—three of which are published here for the first time—that fearlessly explore the face of modern genocide. The scripts deal with the destruction of four targeted populations: Armenians in Lorne Shirinian’s Exile in the Cradle, Cambodians in Catherine Filloux’s Silence of God, Bosnian Muslims in Kitty Felde’s A Patch of Earth, and Rwandan Tutsis in Erik Ehn’s Maria Kizito. Taken together, these four plays erase the boundaries of theatrical realism to present stories that probe the actions of the perpetrators and the suffering of their victims. A major artistic contribution to the study of the history and effects of genocide, this collection carries on the important journey toward understanding the terror and trauma to which the modern world has so often been witness.
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Theft Is Property!
Dispossession and Critical Theory
Robert Nichols
Duke University Press, 2020
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
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Theodoret of Cyrrhus
The Bishop and the Holy Man
Theresa Urbainczyk
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The writing of a saint's life can be as political as it is pious. In this, her second book, Theresa Urbainczyk demonstrates how one collection of saints' lives--the Religious History of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus--both prescribes and describes the relationship between ascetics and the early Church.
With the conversion of Constantine and his subsequent championing of the Christian cause, the Church rapidly began to increase its wealth and status. As coins filled the coffers of God, some Christians came to feel that their religion had become corrupted. They fled to the desert wastes, seeking a purer, holier life. These recluses and ascetics are the subjects of Theodoret's Religious History. The Syrian bishop had known many of them, some for all his life.
Urbainczyk argues that Theodoret's work was not merely written as an act of piety, but was in fact a very political treatise, addressing the theological disputes of his day. The main tensions of the early fifth century lay between the sees of Syrian Antioch and Egyptian Alexandria. One of Theodoret's aims was to show that Syria had produced individuals as pious as those of Egypt, about whom much had already been written. Urbainczyk studies the social background of these Syrian ascetics, describes the relationship between Theodoret's heroes and the Church community, and investigates how Theodoret presents his own personal relationship with the holy men.
This book is the first to examine Theodoret's role in his own work. Urbainczyk argues that the intimate details of Theodoret's life were not let slip accidentally but were inserted deliberately to buttress his own threatened position and to show how these independent men of God deferred to no one but himself.
Theodoret of Cyrrhus is an invaluable study for students of late antiquity, scholars of early Church history, early medieval historiographers and hagiographers.
Theresa Urbainczyk is College Lecturer in Classics, University College, Dublin.
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The Theological Metaphors of Marx
Enrique Dussel
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Dussel shows that Marx unveils the theology of capitalism in his critique of commodity fetishization. Capitalism constitutes an idolatry of the commodity that undergirds the capitalist expropriation of labor. Dussel examines Marx’s early writings on religion and fetishism and proceeds through what Dussel refers to as the four major drafts of Capital, ultimately situating Marx’s philosophical, economic, ethical, and historical insights in relation to the theological problems of his time. Dussel notes a shift in Marx’s underlying theological schema from a political critique of the state to an economic critique of the commodity fetish as the Devil, or anti-God, of modernity. Marx’s thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel’s historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx’s critiques of political economy and politics.
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Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights
Ethna Regan
Georgetown University Press, 2010

What are human rights? Can theology acknowledge human rights discourse? Is theological engagement with human rights justified? What place should this discourse occupy within ethics?

Ethna Regan seeks to answer these questions about human rights, Christian theology, and philosophical ethics. The main purpose of this book is to justify and explore theological engagement with human rights. Regan illustrates how that engagement is both ecumenical and diverse, citing the emerging engagement with human rights discourse by evangelical theologians in response to the War on Terror. The book examines where the themes and concerns of key modern theologians—Karl Rahner, J. B. Metz, Jon Sobrino, and Ignacio Ellacuría—converge with the themes and concerns of those committed to the advancement of human rights. Regan also critically engages with the “disdain” for rights discourse that is found in the postliberal critiques of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.

This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of systematic theology, theological ethics, human rights, religion and politics, and political theory.

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The Theology of Liberalism
Political Philosophy and the Justice of God
Eric Nelson
Harvard University Press, 2019

One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing.

We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country’s most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake.

Nelson starts by noting that today’s liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism—the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier “liberal” position and shows that Rawls’s philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.

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Theology of Money
Philip Goodchild
Duke University Press, 2009
Theology of Money is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world. Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism.

Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society. With Theology of Money, Goodchild aims to make conscious our collective faith and its dire implications.

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Theories of Dependent Foreign Policy and the Case of Ecuador in the 1980s
Jeanne A. K. Hey
Ohio University Press, 1995

How do economic weakness and dependence influence foreign policy decisions and behavior in third world countries? Theories in Dependent Foreign Policy examines six foreign policy theories: compliance, consensus, counterdependence, realism, leader preferences and domestic politics, and each is applied to a series of case studies of Ecuador’s foreign policy during the 1980s under two regimes: Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984) and his successor León Febres Cordero (1984-1988).

Hey shows that Ecuador during this period represented the third world in many ways. It was a new democracy, having just emerged from years of military rule, extremely indebted to the West, and dependent on primary product export economy that relied heavily on importers, especially the United States.

Jeanne Hey finds that some of the most popular and enduring theories in western research, such as realism and compliance, poorly account for Ecuadorian foreign policy. She explains that poor countries like Ecuador have substantial foreign policy latitude in the diplomatic area. Drawing on archival research and interviews with policy makers including Presidents Hurtado and Febres Cordero, Dr. Hey convincingly argues that many of the traditional foreign policy theories do not “fit” dependent states, and inadequately account for the complexity of foreign policy in the third world.

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Theories Of The New Class
Intellectuals And Power
Lawrence Peter King
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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Theorizing Global Order
The International, Culture and Governance
Edited by Gunther Hellmann
Campus Verlag, 2018
Despite its prominent place in contemporary political discourse and international relations, the idea of the “global order” remains surprisingly sketchy. Though it’s easy to identify the nations and actors who comprise the major players, but pinning down concrete definitions can be more difficult. This book not only clarifies a number of related key terms—including the use of international versus global and system versus order—but also offers a variety of perspectives for theorizing global order.
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Theorizing NGOs
States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism
Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Theorizing NGOs examines how the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has transformed the conditions of women's lives and of feminist organizing. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal suggest that we can understand the proliferation of NGOs through a focus on the NGO as a unified form despite the enormous variation and diversity contained within that form. Theorizing NGOs brings together cutting-edge feminist research on NGOs from various perspectives and disciplines. Contributors locate NGOs within local and transnational configurations of power, interrogate the relationships of nongovernmental organizations to states and to privatization, and map the complex, ambiguous, and ultimately unstable synergies between feminisms and NGOs. While some of the contributors draw on personal experience with NGOs, others employ regional or national perspectives. Spanning a broad range of issues with which NGOs are engaged, from microcredit and domestic violence to democratization, this groundbreaking collection shows that NGOs are, themselves, fields of gendered struggles over power, resources, and status.

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Victoria Bernal, LeeRay M. Costa, Inderpal Grewal, Laura Grünberg, Elissa Helms, Julie Hemment, Saida Hodžic, Lamia Karim, Sabine Lang, Lauren Leve, Kathleen O'Reilly, Aradhana Sharma
 
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Theorizing Social Movements
Joe Foweraker
Pluto Press, 1995

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Theory and Practice of Social Planning
Alfred J. Kahn
Russell Sage Foundation, 1969
Discusses the intellectual processes involved in social planning. Professor Kahn provides critical tools for the analysis of the planning process, and shows what social planning is and can be.  Clarifying the major phases in the planning process, he shows how planning can succeed or fail at any one of these stages.  He examined planners in their various roles: as "neutral" technicians and as advocates, as representatives of interest groups and as public officials.   The book describes both the social aspects of planning and the relationship between social and physical plans.
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Theory in the Practice of the Nicaraguan Revolution
Bruce E. Wright
Ohio University Press, 1995

Even in the period following the electoral defeat of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1990, the revolution of 1979 continues to have a profound effect on the political economy of Nicaragua. Wright’s study, which is based on interviews with people from all walks of life—from government and party officials to academics and campesinos—as well as on the large volume of literature in both English and Spanish, focuses on the FSLN understanding of the relationships between the state, the party, and mass actors, and the nature of social classes. Wright considers the topics of agrarian reform, the development of mass organizations, the role of labor, and other aspects of the Nicaraguan political economy in order to assess their significance in theoretical as well as practical terms.

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Theory of International Law
G. I. Tunkin
Harvard University Press, 1974

The 1970s promised important readjustments in relations among the great powers, perhaps a reconstituted Europe and Asia, as well as a possible new role for "third world" countries. National attitudes toward the law of nations both shaped and reflected developments of this nature. As a great power, the Soviet Union was a principal actor in what transpired, but until now there has been no systematic exposition in the English language of how Soviet jurists regarded the world legal order.

The present volume, published in Moscow in 1970, is the most profound and comprehensive study of international legal theory yet produced by a Soviet jurist. Its author, who holds the Chair of International Law at Moscow State University and for many years was the legal adviser to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is widely credited with elaborating the juridical underpinnings of peaceful coexistence in the USSR from the mid-1950s. This book, earlier versions of which have appeared in Eastern and Western Europe, contains the fullest statement of his views.

Tunkin traces the development and shaping of international law since 1917, the processes of forming and modifying international legal rules, and the nature of state responsibility under the law of nations. Of special interest to the general reader and specialist in international affairs will be Tunkin's extensive discussion of the interaction among international law, foreign policy, and diplomacy; of the legal nature of international organizations; of the principal factors at work in international politics; and of the nature of legal ties among socialist countries. The latter has been a special concern following the Czechoslovak events of 1968 and the adoption of a comprehensive program for economic integration among socialist states.

For this American edition, Tunkin has brought his book up to date and Dr. Butler has supplied an introduction, a translation note, a list of the author's publications, and a glossary of Russian international legal terms.

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A Theory of Justice
Original Edition
John Rawls
Harvard University Press, 1971

John Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls’s view, much of the extensive literature on his theory refers to the original. This first edition is available for scholars and serious students of Rawls’s work.

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A Theory of Justice
Revised Edition
John Rawls
Harvard University Press, 1999

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

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A Theory of Public Bureaucracy
Politics, Personality, and Organization in the State Department
Donald P. Warwick
Harvard University Press, 1975
Based mainly on State Department materials, but addressing generic problems of organizational politics as well, this book provides a fresh, intelligent, and lively account of bureaucratic behavior.
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A Theory of System Justification
John T. Jost
Harvard University Press, 2020

A leading psychologist explains why nearly all of us—including many of those who are persecuted and powerless—so often defend the social systems that cause misery and injustice.

Why do we so often defend the very social systems that are responsible for injustice and exploitation? In A Theory of System Justification, John Jost argues that we are motivated to defend the status quo because doing so serves fundamental psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance. We want to feel good not only about ourselves and the groups to which we belong, but also about the overarching social structure in which we live, even when it hurts others and ourselves.

Jost lays out the wide range of evidence for his groundbreaking theory and examines its implications for our communities and our democracy. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, he provides an accessible account of system justification theory and its insights. System justification helps to explain deep contradictions, including the feeling among some women that they don’t deserve the same salaries as men and the tendency of some poor people to vote for policies that increase economic inequality.

The theory illuminates the most pressing social and political issues of our time—why has it been so hard to combat anthropogenic climate change?—as well as some of the most intimate—why do some black children prefer white dolls to black ones and why do some people stay in bad relationships? Jost’s theory has far-reaching implications, and he offers numerous insights that political activists and social justice advocates can use to promote change.

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Theoterrorism v. Freedom of Speech
From Incident to Precedent
Paul Cliteur
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The Rushdie Affair, the Danish Cartoon Affair, the assault on Charlie Hebdo, and the earlier Carrell Affair, are examples of religious fanatics' extreme reactions to religious satire and criticism. Perpetrators of these actions consider themselves as true believers. This book aims to understand their motives by means of the concept of theoterrorism: terrorism grounded in religious zealotry.
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'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack'
The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation
Paul Gilroy
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Gilroy demonstrates the enormous complexity of racial politics in England today. Exploring the relationships among race, class, and nation as they have evolved over the past twenty years, he highlights racist attitudes that transcend the left-right political divide. He challenges current sociological approaches to racism as well as the ethnocentric bias of British cultural studies.

"Gilroy demonstrates effectively that cultural traditions are not static, but develop, grow and indeed mutate, as they influence and are influenced by the other changing traditions around them."—David Edgar, Listener Review of Books.

"A fascinating analysis of the discourses that have accompanied black settlement in Britain. . . . An important addition to the stock of critical works on race and culture."—David Okuefuna, Chicago Tribune
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There Goes the Hood
Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up
Lance Freeman
Temple University Press, 2006
In this revealing book, Lance Freeman sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: how does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman does what no scholar before him has done. He interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods. Freeman describes the theoretical and planning/policy implications of his findings, both for New York City and for any gentrifying urban area. There Goes the 'Hood provides a more complete, and complicated, understanding of the gentrification process, highlighting the reactions of long-term residents. It suggests new ways of limiting gentrification's negative effects and of creating more positive experiences for newcomers and natives alike.
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There When We Needed Him
Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior
Judith Kilpatrick
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said of Wiley Austin Branton that he “devoted his entire life to fighting for his own people.” There When We Needed Him is the story of that fight, which began with Branton's being one of the first black students at the University of Arkansas Law School and which took him to the highest levels of business and government. From his private law practice in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Branton became, along with Marshall, counsel for the Little Rock Nine in their 1957 efforts to integrate Central High School. Under his leadership of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project, more than six hundred thousand black voters were registered from 1962 to 1965. He later became executive secretary of President Lyndon Johnson's Council on Equal Opportunity and special assistant to attorneys general Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark. He provided leadership to the United Planning Organization, the Alliance for Labor Action, and the NAACP; and he was dean of Howard University Law School. At Branton’s funeral in 1988, former Arkansas senator David Pryor described him as “quiet and unassuming. . . . It is his humility and desire to always put the goals of the civil rights movement before self which probably accounts for the fact that [he] was not more famous than he was.” The influence of this quiet and unassuming man continues to be felt decades later.
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These American Lands
Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands: Revised and Expanded Edition
Dyan Zaslowsky and T.H. Watkins
Island Press, 1994

Over 634 million acres of the United States -- nearly a million square miles -- are federally owned. These American Lands is both a history and a celebration of that inheritance. First published in 1986, the book was hailed by Wallace Stegner as "the only indispensable narrative history of the public lands." This completely revised and updated edition is an unsurpassed resource for everyone who cares about, visits, or works with public land in the United States. With over 75 pages of new material, the volume covers:

  • national parks
  • national forests
  • national resource lands
  • wildlife refuges
  • designated wildernesses
  • wild and scenic rivers
  • Alaska lands
  • national trails

Each chapter outlines the history of the unit of public lands under discussion, clarifies the resource use and policy conflicts that are currently besetting it, and provides a detailed agenda of management, expansion, and preservation goals.

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These Islands
A Letter to Britain
Ali M. Ansari
Haus Publishing, 2018
Following Brexit and the earlier referendum on Scottish independence, the debate about British identity has been given recent new prominence. Historically conceived to integrate conflicting nationalisms in an “ever more perfect union,” Britain has lately succumbed to particular resurgent nationalisms in a curious reversal of fortune.

With These Islands, Ali M. Ansari considers the idea of Britain as a political entity. This idea of Britain considers some nationalists as suppressed minorities in need of attention, and others as bigoted throwbacks to a more divisive age. Arguing the case for Great Britain from the perspective of the political mythology of the British state—with an emphasis on culture, ideas and narrative constructions—Ansari makes the claim that Britain’s strength lies in its ability to shape the popular imagination, both at home and abroad. He concludes that an “excess of enthusiasm” may yet do untold damage to the fabric of a state and society that has been carefully constructed over the centuries and may not be easily repaired.
 
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These Oppressions Won’t Cease
An Anthology of the Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777-1879
Robert Ross
University of Cincinnati Press, 2018
The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the rigors of European colonization. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as laborers for farmers of European descent. Nevertheless, a portion of them were able to regain a degree of freedom and maintain their independence by taking refuge in the mission stations of the Western and Eastern Cape, most notably in the Kat River valley. Through petitions, speeches at meetings, letters to the newspapers and correspondence between themselves, the Cape Khoesan articulated a continuous critique of the oppressions of colonialism, always stressing the need for equality before the law, as well as their opposition to attempts to limit their freedom of movement through vagrancy legislation and related measures. This was accompanied by a well-grounded distrust of the British settlers in the Eastern Cape and a concomitant hope, rarely realized, in the benevolence of the British government in London. Comprising 98 texts, These Oppressions Won’t Cease – was an utterance expressed by Willem Uithaalder, commander of Khoe rebel forces in the war of 1850-53 – contains the essential documents of Khoesan political thought in the nineteenth century.
 
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They Say Cutback, We Say Fight Back!
Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment
Ellen Reese
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
In 1996, President Bill Clinton hailed the "end of welfare as we know it" when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. The law effectively transformed the nation's welfare system from an entitlement to a work-based one, instituting new time limits on welfare payments and restrictions on public assistance for legal immigrants. In They Say Cutback, We Say Fight Back, Ellen Reese offers a timely review of welfare reform and its controversial design, now sorely tested in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The book also chronicles the largely untold story of a new grassroots coalition that opposed the law and continues to challenge and reshape its legacy. While most accounts of welfare policy highlight themes of race, class and gender, They Say Cutback examines how welfare recipients and their allies contested welfare reform from the bottom-up. Using in-depth case studies of campaigns in Wisconsin and California, Reese argues that a crucial phase in policymaking unfolded after the bill's passage. As counties and states set out to redesign their welfare programs, activists scored significant victories by lobbying officials at different levels of American government through media outreach, protests and organizing. Such efforts tended to enjoy more success when based on broad coalitions that cut across race and class, drawing together a shifting alliance of immigrants, public sector unions, feminists, and the poor. The book tracks the tensions and strategies of this unwieldy group brought together inadvertently by their opposition to four major aspects of welfare reform: immigrants' benefits, welfare-to-work policies, privatization of welfare agencies, and child care services. Success in scoring reversals was uneven and subject to local demographic, political and institutional factors. In California, for example, workfare policies created a large and concentrated pool of new workers that public sector unions could organize in campaigns to change policies. In Wisconsin, by contrast, such workers were scattered and largely placed in private sector jobs, leaving unions at a disadvantage. Large Latino and Asian immigrant populations in California successfully lobbied to restore access to public assistance programs, while mobilization in Wisconsin remained more limited. On the other hand, the unionization of child care providers succeeded in Wisconsin – but failed in California – because of contrasting gubernatorial politics. With vivid descriptions of the new players and alliances in each of these campaigns, Reese paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the modern American welfare state. At a time when more than 40 million Americans live in poverty, They Say Cutback offers a sobering assessment of the nation's safety net. As policymakers confront budget deficits and a new era of austerity, this book provides an authoritative guide for both scholars and activists looking for lessons to direct future efforts to change welfare policy. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933–45
Milton Mayer
University of Chicago Press, 2017
“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
 
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
 
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
 
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
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They'll Cut Off Your Project
A Mingo County Chronicle
Huey Perry, with a foreword by Jeff Biggers
West Virginia University Press, 2010

In old England, if a king didn’t like you, he would cut off your head. Now, if they don’t like you, they’ll cut off your project!

As the Johnson Administration initiated its war on poverty in the 1960s, the Mingo County Economic Opportunity Commission project was established in southern West Virginia. Huey Perry, a young, local history teacher was named the director of this program and soon he began to promote self-sufficiency among low-income and vulnerable populations. As the poor of Mingo County worked together to improve conditions, the local political infrastructure felt threatened by a shift in power. Bloody Mingo County, known for its violent labor movements, corrupt government, and the infamous Hatfield-McCoy rivalry, met Perry’s revolution with opposition and resistance. 

In They’ll Cut Off Your Project, Huey Perry reveals his efforts to help the poor of an Appalachian community challenge a local regime. He describes this community’s attempts to improve school programs and conditions, establish cooperative grocery stores to bypass inflated prices, and expose electoral fraud. Along the way, Perry unfolds the local authority’s hostile backlash to such change and the extreme measures that led to an eventual investigation by the FBI. They’ll Cut Off Your Project chronicles the triumphs and failures of the war on poverty, illustrating why and how a local government that purports to work for the public’s welfare cuts off a project for social reform.

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Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015
Botkin, Frances R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018

The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels.  A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.

Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.

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Think Tanks in America
Thomas Medvetz
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of “research” do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become?
 
In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.
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Thinking Small
The United States and the Lure of Community Development
Daniel Immerwahr
Harvard University Press, 2014

Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award

Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.

“Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them…This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking… How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.”
—Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review

“As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement…Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.”
—Jamie Martin, The Nation

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The Third City
Chicago and American Urbanism
Larry Bennett
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Our traditional image of Chicago—as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends—is such a powerful shaper of the city’s identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City—inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko—with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city.

Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley’s charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.

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The Third Sector
Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits
Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Civil society organizations, nonprofits, national and international nongovernmental organizations, and a variety of formal and informal associations have coalesced into a world political force. Though the components of this so-called third sector vary by country, their cumulative effects play an ever-greater role in global affairs. Looking at relief and welfare organizations, innovation organizations, social networks, and many other kinds of groups, Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark explore the functions, impacts, and composition of the nonprofit sector in six key countries. Chinese organizations, for example, follow the predominantly Asian model of government funding that links their mission to national political goals. Western groups, by contrast, often explicitly challenge government objectives, and even gain relevance and cache by doing so. In addition, Kallman and Clark examine groups in real-world contexts, providing a wealth of political-historical background, in-depth consideration of interactions with state institutions, region-by-region comparisons, and suggestions for how groups can borrow policy options across systems. Insightful and forward-seeing, The Third Sector provides a rare international view of organizations and agendas driving change in today's international affairs.
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Third Sector Management
The Art of Managing Nonprofit Organizations
William B. Werther Jr. and Evan Berman
Georgetown University Press, 2001

Trying to do good deeds does not guarantee that a nonprofit organization will succeed. The organization must do good deeds well. This textbook offers a blueprint for nonprofit success, adopting a strategic perspective that assumes vision, mission, strategy, and execution as the pillars upon which success is built.

While many experts on nonprofits argue that fundraising is the single key to success, William B. Werther Jr., and Evan M. Berman show that effective fundraising depends largely on how the nonprofit is positioned and how it performs. They address such issues as leadership and board development, strategic planning, staffing, fundraising, partnering, productivity improvement, and accountability.

Emphasizing the context of nonprofits and detailing improvements than can be made by managers at all levels, the book strikes a balance between policy discussion and practical usefulness. Written for use in graduate courses in nonprofit management, Third Sector Management will also be invaluable to directors, staff, volunteers, and board members of nonprofit organizations.

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The Third Space of Sovereignty
The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations
Kevin Bruyneel
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The imposition of modern American colonial rule has defined U.S.–indigenous relations since the time of the American Civil War. In resistance, Kevin Bruyneel asserts, indigenous political actors work across American spatial and temporal boundaries, demanding rights and resources from the government while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule over their lives. This resistance engenders what he calls a “third space of sovereignty,” which resides neither inside nor outside the U.S. political system but rather exists on its boundaries, exposing both the practices and limitations of American colonial rule. 

The Third Space of Sovereignty offers fresh insights on such topics as the crucial importance of the formal end of treaty-making in 1871, indigenous responses to the prospect of U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, native politics during the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s, the question of indigenousness in the special election of California’s governor in 2003, and the current issues surrounding gaming and casinos.

In this engaging and provocative work, Bruyneel shows how native political actors have effectively contested the narrow limits that the United States has imposed on indigenous people’s ability to define their identity and to develop economically and politically on their own terms.

Kevin Bruyneel is assistant professor of politics at Babson College.

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Third Thoughts
The Universe We Still Don’t Know
Steven Weinberg
Harvard University Press, 2018

“The phrase ‘public intellectual’ is much bandied about. Just a few real heavyweights in the world merit the title, and Steven Weinberg is preeminent among them.”
—Richard Dawkins


“Weinberg has a knack for capturing a complex concept in a succinct, unforgettable image… One of the smartest and most diligent scientists around.”
Nature


In this wise and wide-ranging meditation, one of the most captivating science communicators of our time challenges us to reconsider the entanglement of science and society. From the cosmological to the personal, from astronomy and quantum physics to the folly of manned spaceflight and the rewards of getting things wrong, Steven Weinberg shares his views on the workings of the universe and our aspirations and limitations. Third Thoughts aims to provoke and inform and never loses sight of the human dimension of scientific discovery.

“One of the 20th century’s greatest physicists…shares his strongly-held opinions on everything from the Higgs boson to the state of theoretical physics and the problems of science and society.”
Forbes

“This book should be read not only for its insightful and illuminating explanations of a wide range of physical phenomena but also for the opportunity it affords to follow the wanderings of a brilliant mind through topics ranging from high-energy physics and the makeup of the cosmos to poetry, and from the history and philosophy of science to the dangers of economic inequality… [A] captivating book.”
—Mario Livio, Science

[more]

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A Third University Is Possible
la la paperson
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

A Third University is Possible unravels the intimate relationship between the more than 200 US land grant institutions, American settler colonialism, and contemporary university expansion. Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion.

Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. 

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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A Third Way
The Origins of China’s Current Economic Development Strategy
Lawrence C. Reardon
Harvard University Press, 2020

From 1949 to 1978, communist elites held clashing visions of China’s economic development. Mao Zedong advocated the “first way” of semi-autarchy characteristic of revolutionary Stalinism (1929–34), while Zhou Enlai adapted bureaucratic Stalinism (1934–53) to promote the “second way” of import substitution industrialization. A Third Way tells the story of Deng Xiaoping’s experimentation with export-led development inspired by Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the economic reforms of Eastern Europe and Asia.

Having uncovered an extraordinary collection of internal party and government documents, Lawrence Reardon meticulously traces the evolution of the coastal development strategy, starting with special economic zones in 1979 and evolving into the fourteen open coastal cities, the Hainan SEZ, and eventual accession to the global trade regime in 2001. Reardon details how Deng and Zhao Ziyang tackled large-scale smuggling operations, compromised with Chen Yun’s conservative views, and overcame Deng Liqun’s ideological opposition. Although Zhao Ziyang was airbrushed out of official Chinese history after June 4, 1989, Reardon argues that Zhao was the true architect of China’s opening strategy. A Third Way provides important new insights about the crucial period of the 1980s and how it paved the way for China’s transformation into a global economic superpower.

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The Third World
A Vital New Force in International Affairs
Peter Worsley
University of Chicago Press, 1970
Today the colonial empires of the world are shrinking, and the new nations which have emerged from the colonial past are rapidly developing into an important force in international affairs—the "third world." They are faced by a common problem, the urgent necessity to transform a peasant society into a modern industrial economy, and they are united by a common outlook, absolute opposition to all forms of colonialism and neocolonialism.

In this work Peter Worsley analyzes the unique political forms that have evolved as a result of these two basic conditions. In his view the third world has rejected both of the great ideologies of today. Their new solutions are unique in world history, being based on populism, socialism, and, often, the one-party state, which, although anathema to the Western liberal, is a natural development in societies united by the common enemy of colonialism.

"No one seriously concerned with the greatest problem of our time, the division of the world between the developed, industrialized, 'affluent' countries and les nations prolétaires, can afford to miss this book. . . . Professor Worsley has succeeded in giving us more solid information about underdeveloped parts of the world than can be found in any other book of comparable length."—The Times Literary Supplement

"Peter Worsley . . . has written an excellent descriptive analysis of the evolution and present state of a third force in world politics. Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have . . . given society not only a new philosophy with new goals but charismatic philosophers who have the potential to make the philosophy of the third world a vital presence to be reckoned with. . . . a brilliant book."—Peter Schwab, Journal of Modern African Studies
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Third World Politics
China and the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization, 1957-1967
Charles Neuhauser
Harvard University Press

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Third World Studies
Theorizing Liberation
Gary Y. Okihiro
Duke University Press, 2024
In this revised and expanded second edition of Third World Studies, Gary Y. Okihiro considers the methods and theories that might constitute the formation of Third World studies. Proposed in 1968 at San Francisco State College by the Third World Liberation Front but replaced by faculty and administrators with ethnic studies, Third World studies was over before it began. As opposed to ethnic studies, which Okihiro critiques for its liberalism and US-centrism, Third World studies begins with the colonized world and the anti-imperial, anticolonial, and antiracist projects located therein as was described by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1900. Third World studies analyzes the locations and articulations of power around the axes of race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class, and nation. In this new edition, Okihiro emphasizes the work of Third World intellectuals such as M. N. Roy, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Oliver Cromwell Cox, foregrounds the importance of Bandung and the Tricontinental, and adds discussions of eugenics, feminist epistemologies, and religion. With this work, Okihiro establishes Third World studies as a theoretical formation and a liberatory practice.
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Thirst for Growth
Water Agencies as Hidden Government in California
Robert Gottlieb
University of Arizona Press, 1991
An overview of the key issues of public accountability and water policy innovation that confront urban and agricultural water agencies throughout the country--notably in California where the prospects for future water development have become especially problematic. Focusing on six agencies in the Southern California region, they offer a series of case studies analyzing the issues of water quality, including groundwater contamination and disinfection by-products; reallocation and transfer of existing supplies; and management programs based on pricing changes, the conjunctive use of surface and groundwater supplies, and increased storage capacity aimed at greater efficiencies in stretching those existing supplies.
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Thirty Years of Radical History
The Long March, Volume 2001
Van Gosse, ed.
Duke University Press
This special issue of Radical History Review (RHR) offers not only a self-portrait of the journal but also a retrospective of radical history as a movement, an ideology, and a transformative force in historical scholarship. In an engaging combination of interviews, articles, and round-table discussions, this issue highlights the relentless challenge that radical history has posed to liberal and conservative paradigms.
Recognizing the creative power of pluralism, the RHR editors have marshalled a diverse troop of historical scholars in this issue. In “Forum on Radical History,” sixteen historians discuss how the notion of radicalism has affected the way they write, teach, and live, and in "A Conversation about the Radical History Review," past and present members of the editorial board zero in on the journal itself and the political and academic context in which it was born. Offering a more personal perspective, Mike Wallace, Pulitzer Prize winner and radical history founder, shares his thoughts on RHR and the movement. Other articles in this special issue tackle the state of radicalism today, analyzing the academic labor movement, the significance of physical space in Pinochet’s reign of terror, and the enduring symbolism of a particular statue in Prague.
This retrospective issue celebrates the journal’s past, but it also reflects on the present and looks forward to a future in which radicalism will continue to shape the landscape of historical and political discourse.

Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dan Bender, Paul Buhle, Gabriela Cano, Anna Clark, Martin Duberman, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Rob Gregg, Harry D. Harootunian, Winston James, Nikki R. Keddie, Dave Kinkela, Staughton Lynd, Teresa Meade, Joanne Pope Melish, Ellen Noonan, Enrique C. Ochoa, Gary Y. Okihiro, Cynthia Paces, Max Page, Vijay Prashad, David Price, David Roediger, Andor Skotnes, Mike Wallace

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The Thirty-Year Genocide
Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924
Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi
Harvard University Press, 2019

A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year


“A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.”
Times Literary Supplement


“Brilliantly researched and written…casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects…Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.”
—Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.

“A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.”
—Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

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This America We Dream of
Rodo and "Ariel" One Hundred Years on
Edited by Gustavo San Roman
University of London Press, 2001

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This Contested Land
The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America's National Monuments
McKenzie Long
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii
 

This land is your land. When it comes to national monuments, the sentiment could hardly be more fraught. Gold Butte in Nevada, Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks in New Mexico, Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, Cascade–Siskiyou in Oregon and California: these are among the thirteen natural sites McKenzie Long visits in This Contested Land, an eye-opening exploration of the stories these national monuments tell, the passions they stir, and the controversies surrounding them today.

Starting amid the fragrant sagebrush and red dirt of Bears Ears National Monument on the eve of the Trump Administration’s decision to reduce the site by 85 percent, Long climbs sandstone cliffs, is awed by Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings and is intrigued by 4,000-year-old petroglyphs. She hikes through remote pink canyons recently removed from the boundary of Grand Staircase–Escalante, skis to a backcountry hut in Maine to view a truly dark night sky, snorkels in warm Hawaiian waters to plumb the meaning of marine preserves, volunteers near the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, and witnesses firsthand the diverse forms of devotion evoked by the Rio Grande. In essays both contemplative and resonant, This Contested Land confronts an unjust past and imagines a collaborative future that bears witness to these regions’ enduring Indigenous connections. 

From hazardous climate change realities to volatile tensions between economic development and environmental conservation, practical and philosophical issues arise as Long seeks the complicated and often overlooked—or suppressed—stories of these incomparable places. Her journey, mindfully undertaken and movingly described, emphasizes in clear and urgent terms the unique significance of, and grave threats to, these contested lands.

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This Is Not Civil Rights
Discovering Rights Talk in 1939 America
George I. Lovell
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Since at least the time of Tocqueville, observers have noted that Americans draw on the language of rights when expressing dissatisfaction with political and social conditions. As the United States confronts a complicated set of twenty-first-century problems, that tradition continues, with Americans invoking symbolic events of the founding era to frame calls for change. Most observers have been critical of such “rights talk.” Scholars on the left worry that it limits the range of political demands to those that can be articulated as legally recognized rights, while conservatives fear that it creates unrealistic expectations of entitlement.
 
Drawing on a remarkable cache of Depression-era complaint letters written by ordinary Americans to the Justice Department, George I. Lovell challenges these common claims. Although the letters were written prior to the emergence of the modern civil rights movement—which most people assume is the origin of rights talk—many contain novel legal arguments, including expansive demands for new entitlements that went beyond what authorities had regarded as legitimate or required by law. Lovell demonstrates that rights talk is more malleable and less constraining than is generally believed. Americans, he shows, are capable of deploying idealized legal claims as a rhetorical tool for expressing their aspirations for a more just society while retaining a realistic understanding that the law often falls short of its own ideals.
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This Is Our Land
Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century
Ferguson, Cody
Rutgers University Press, 2015
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the environmental movement experienced a quiet revolution. In This is Our Land, Cody Ferguson documents this little-noted change as he describes the efforts of three representative grassroots groups—in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee—revealing how quite ordinary citizens fought to solve environmental problems. 
 
Here are stories of common people who, confronting environmental threats to the health and safety of their families and communities, bonded together to protect their interests. These stories include successes and failures as citizens learned how to participate in their democracy and redefined what participation meant. Equally important, Ferguson describes how several laws passed in the seventies—such as the National Environmental Policy Act—gave citizens the opportunity and the tools to fight for the environment. These laws gave people a say in the decisions that affected the world around them, including the air they breathed, the water they drank, the land on which they made their living, and the communities they called home. Moreover, Ferguson shows that through their experiences over the course of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, these citizen activists broadened their understanding of “this is our land” to mean “this is our community, this is our country, this is our democracy, and this is our planet.” As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world. 
 
Challenging us to see activism in a new way, This is Our Land recovers the stories of often-unseen citizens who have been vitally important to the environmental movement. It will inspire readers to confront environmental threats and make our world a safer, more just, and more sustainable place to live.    
 
 
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This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Duke University Press, 2015
Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles E. Cobb Jr. recovers this history, describing the vital role that armed self-defense has played in the survival and liberation of black communities.  Drawing on his experiences in the civil rights movement and giving voice to its participants, Cobb lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the long history and importance of African Americans taking up arms to defend themselves against white supremacist violence. 
 
 
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This Radical Land
A Natural History of American Dissent
Daegan Miller
University of Chicago Press, 2018
“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision.
 
But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today.
 
Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.
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This Sovereign Land
A New Vision For Governing The West
Daniel Kemmis
Island Press, 2001

In the eight states of the interior West (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), 260 million acres -- more than 48 percent of the land base -- are owned by the federal government and managed by its Washington, D.C.-based agencies. Like many other peoples throughout history who have bristled under the controlling hand of a remote government, westerners have long nursed a deep resentment toward our nation's capital. Rumblings of revolution have stirred for decades, bolstered in recent years by increasing evidence of the impossibility of a distant, centralized government successfully managing the West's widespread and far-flung lands.

In This Sovereign Land, Daniel Kemmis offers a radical new proposal for giving the West control over its land. Unlike those who wish to privatize the public lands and let market forces decide their fate, Kemmis, a leading western Democrat and committed environmentalist, argues for keeping the public lands public, but for shifting jurisdiction over them from nation to region. In place of the current centralized management, he offers a regional approach that takes into account natural topographical and ecological features, and brings together local residents with a vested interest in ensuring the sustainability of their communities. In effect, Kemmis carries to their logical conclusion the recommendations about how the West should be governed made by John Wesley Powell more than a century ago.

Throughout, Kemmis argues that the West no longer needs to be protected against itself by a paternalistic system and makes a compelling case that the time has come for the region to claim sovereignty over its own landscape. This Sovereign Land provides a provocative opening to a much-needed discussion about how democracy and ecological sustainability can go hand in hand, and will be essential reading for anyone interested in the West and western issues, as well as for all those concerned with place-based conservation, public lands management, bioregionalism, or related topics.


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This Vast Southern Empire
Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
Matthew Karp
Harvard University Press, 2016

Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association
Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
Winner of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics.

“At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail.”
—Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

“Matthew Karp’s illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.”
—David S. Reynolds, New York Review of Books

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Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition
Norberto Bobbio
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Pre-eminent among European political philosophers, Norberto Bobbio has throughout his career turned to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. Gathered here for the first time are the most important of his essays which together provide both a valuable introduction to Hobbes's thought and a fresh understanding of Hobbes's place in the theory of modern politics.

Tracing Hobbes's work through De Cive and Leviathan, Bobbio identifies the philosopher's relation to the tradition of natural law. That Hobbes must now be understood in both this tradition as well as in the seemingly contradictory positivist tradition becomes clear for the first time in Bobbio's account. Bobbio also demonstrates that Hobbes cannot be easily labelled "liberal" or "totalitarian"; in Bobbio's provocative analysis of Hobbes's justification of the state, Hobbes emerges as a true conservative.

Though his primary concern is to reconstruct the inner logic of Hobbes's thought, Bobbio is also attentive to the philosopher's biography and weaves into his analysis details of Hobbes's life and world—his exile in France, his relation with the Mersenne circle, his disputes with Anglican bishops, and accusations of heresy leveled against him. The result is a revealing, thoroughly new portrait of the first theorist of the modern state.

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Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama
Reception and Afterlives
Amy Garnai
Bucknell University Press, 2023
A key figure in British literary circles following the French Revolution, novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft promoted ideas of reform and equality informed by the philosophy of his close friend William Godwin. Arrested for treason in 1794 and released without trial, Holcroft was notorious in his own time, but today appears mainly as a supporting character in studies of 1790s literary activism. Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama authoritatively reintroduces and reestablishes this central figure of the revolutionary decade by examining his life, plays, memoirs, and personal correspondence. In engaging with theatrical censorship, apostacy, and the response of audiences and critics to radical drama, this thoughtful study also demonstrates how theater functions in times of political repression. Despite his struggles, Holcroft also had major successes: this book examines his surprisingly robust afterlife, as his plays, especially The Road to Ruin, were repeatedly revived worldwide in the nineteenth century.
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Those Without A Country
The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists
Michael Miller Topp
University of Minnesota Press, 2001

In the first book-length history of the Italian American syndicalist movement—the Italian Socialist Federation—Michael Miller Topp presents a new way of understanding the Progressive Era labor movement in relation to migration, transnationalism, gender, and class identity. Those without a Country demonstrates that characterizations of "old" (pre-1960s) social movements as predominantly class-based are vastly oversimplified—and contribute to current debates about the implications of identity politics for the American Left and American culture generally.

    

Topp traces the rise and fall of the Italian American syndicalist movement from the turn of the twentieth century to the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. His use of Italian-language sources, combined with his attention to transnationalism and masculinity, provides new vantage points on a range of related topics, including the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers’ strike, the impact of World War I on this immigrant community, and the genesis of both fascism and antifascism. Those without a Country brings forward fascinating new material to revise and refine our views of not only Progressive Era radicalism but immigration, gender, and working-class history as well.

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Thou Shalt Forget
Indigenous sovereignty, resistance and the production of cultural oblivion in Canada
Pierrot Ross-Tremblay
University of London Press, 2019
What are “cultural oblivion” and “psychological colonialism,” and how are they affecting the capacity of indigenous peoples in Canada to actively resist systematic and territorial oppression by the state? Following a decade-long research project, this new book by Pierrot Ross-Tremblay examines the production of oblivion among his own community, the Essipiunnuat (“People of the Brook Shells River”), and the relationship between oblivion and the colonial imperative to forget. This book not only illustrates how the cultural oblivion of vulnerable minority communities is a critical human rights issue, but also asks us to reflect upon both the role of the state and the local elite in creating and warping our perception and understanding of history.
[more]

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The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-State
Hu Ping
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This authoritative work on the Chinese Communist party’s practices of reeducation and indoctrination, supersedes all previous works by bringing into account recent events. Hu Ping has provided a rich and rigorous study based not only in historical research and numerous compelling case studies of Chinese intellectuals, but also in a first person account of his own experience of Maoist thought “remolding.” The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-State is an important history not only of the reeducation programs, but of the interrogation processes of the Party, and the strategies of either evasion or rebellion that released prisoners adopted.
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Thoughts on Machiavelli
Leo Strauss
University of Chicago Press, 1958
Leo Strauss argued that the most visible fact about Machiavelli's doctrine is also the most useful one: Machiavelli seems to be a teacher of wickedness. Strauss sought to incorporate this idea in his interpretation without permitting it to overwhelm or exhaust his exegesis of The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. "We are in sympathy," he writes, "with the simple opinion about Machiavelli [namely, the wickedness of his teaching], not only because it is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion seriously prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli: the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech." This critique of the founder of modern political philosophy by this prominent twentieth-century scholar is an essential text for students of both authors.
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A Thousand Steps to Parliament
Constructing Electable Women in Mongolia
Manduhai Buyandelger
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A Thousand Steps to Parliament traces how the complicated, contradictory paths to political representation that women in Mongolia must walk mirror those the world over.

Mongolia has often been deemed an “island of democracy,” commended for its rapid adoption of free democratic elections in the wake of totalitarian socialism. The democratizing era, however, brought alongside it a phenomenon that Manduhai Buyandelger terms “electionization”—a restructuring of elections from time-grounded events into a continuous neoliberal force that governs everyday life beyond the electoral period. In this way, electoral campaigns have come to substitute for the functions of governing, from social welfare to the private sector, requiring an accumulation of wealth and power beyond the reach of most women candidates. In A Thousand Steps to Parliament, Buyandelger shows how successful women candidates instead use strategies of self-polishing to cultivate charisma and a reputation for being oyunlag, or intellectful. This carefully crafted identity can be called the “electable self”: treating their bodies and minds as pliable and renewable, women candidates draw from the same practices of neoliberalism that have unsustainably commercialized elections. By tracing the complicated, contradictory paths to representation that women in Mongolia must walk, A Thousand Steps to Parliament holds a mirror up to democracies the world over, revealing an urgent need to grapple with the encroaching effects of neoliberalism in our global political systems.
[more]

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Threat Multiplier
Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security
Sherri Goodman
Island Press, 2024
Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. More than thirty years ago, when Sherri Goodman became the Pentagon’s first Chief Environmental Officer, no one would have imagined this role for our armed forces.

Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the Department of Defense (DOD) was better known for containing the Soviet nuclear threat than protecting the environment. And yet, today, the military has moved from an environmental laggard to a clean energy and climate leader, recognizing that a warming world exacerbates every threat—from hurricanes and forest fires, to competition for increasingly scarce food and water, to terrorism and power plays by Russia and China. The Pentagon now considers climate in war games, disaster relief planning, international diplomacy, and even the design of its own bases.
 
What was the key to this dramatic change in military thinking? What keeps today’s generals and admirals up at night? How can we safeguard our national defense and our planet? No one is better poised to answer these questions than Sherri Goodman, who was at the vanguard of environmental leadership among our armed forces and civilian representatives. In Threat Multiplier, she tells the inside story of the military’s fight for global security, a tale that is as hopeful as it is harrowing.

 
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The Threat of Liberation
Imperialism and Revolution in Zanzibar
Amrit Wilson
Pluto Press, 2013

The Threat of Liberation returns to the tumultuous years of the Cold War, when, in a striking parallel with today, imperialist powers were seeking to institute ‘regime change’ and install pliant governments.

Using iconic photographs, declassified US and British documents, and in-depth interviews, Amrit Wilson examines the role of the Umma Party of Zanzibar and its leader, the visionary Marxist revolutionary, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu. Drawing parallels between US paranoia about Chinese Communist influence in the 1960s with contemporary fears about Chinese influence, it looks at the new race for Africa’s resources, the creation of AFRICOM and how East African politicians have bolstered US control. The book also draws on US cables released by Wikileaks showing Zanzibar's role in the ‘War on Terror’ in Eastern Africa today.

The Threat of Liberation reflects on the history of a party which confronted imperialism and built unity across ethnic divisions, and considers the contemporary relevance of such strategies.

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Threatening Anthropology
McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists
David H. Price
Duke University Press, 2004
A vital reminder of the importance of academic freedom, Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David H. Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the fbi and congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for racial justice. Demonstrating that the fbi’s focus on anthropologists lessened as activist work and Marxist analysis in the field tapered off, Price argues that the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology extended far beyond the lives of those who lost their jobs. Its messages of fear and censorship had a pervasive chilling effect on anthropological investigation. As critiques that might attract government attention were abandoned, scholarship was curtailed.

Price draws on extensive archival research including correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of fbi and government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of Information Act. He describes government monitoring of activism and leftist thought on college campuses, the surveillance of specific anthropologists, and the disturbing failure of the academic community—including the American Anthropological Association—to challenge the witch hunts. Today the “war on terror” is invoked to license the government’s renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as Price reveals in the appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the present.

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The Three Axial Ages
Moral, Material, Mental
Torpey, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
How should we think about the “shape” of human history since the birth of cities, and where are we headed? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age” of the first millennium BCE, when some of the world’s major religious and intellectual developments first emerged, was only one of three such decisive periods that can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction.
 
Torpey’s argument advances the idea that there are in fact three “Axial Ages,” instead of one original Axial Age and several subsequent, smaller developments. Each of the three ages contributed decisively to how humanity lives, and the difficulties it faces. The earliest, or original, Axial Age was a moral one; the second was material, and revolved around the creation and use of physical objects; and the third is chiefly mental, and focused on the technological. While there are profound risks and challenges, Torpey shows how a worldview that combines the strengths of all three ages has the potential to usher in a period of exceptional human freedom and possibility.
 
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Three Capitals
St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba, 1818-1826
William H. Brantley Jr
University of Alabama Press, 1976

 "Three Capitals is an in-depth study of Alabama's first three seats of government--St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba.... The University of Alabama Press has reprinted the book in a handsome new edition with a pertinent introduction by Malcolm C. McMillan. Brantley's study is a tribute to the accomplishments of an amateur historian and contains a wealth of useful information."

--Bulletin of the History of the Early American Republic

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Three Civilizations, Two Cultures, One State
Canada’s Political Traditions
Douglas Verney
Duke University Press, 1986
This volume examines 150 years of Canadian political life in light if one of the country's most intractable problems, its cultural identity. Although many thoughtful Canadians remain dubious about the existence of a truly Canadian way of life, Douglas Verney argues that in fact Canada's political traditions embody and reflect a unique culture; and that although the Canadian government has been the primary instrument for nurturing this culture, it has been at the same time the entity most guilty of obscuring and ignoring it.
[more]

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The Three Orders
Feudal Society Imagined
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1980

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The Three Worlds of Social Democracy
A Global View
Edited by Ingo Schmidt
Pluto Press, 2016
The twentieth century saw social democracy emerge to become the dominant ideology of governance in Western Europe, and today its influence spreads far beyond the continent, reaching into the Global South. At the same time, however, social democracy appears to be on shakier ground than ever, its programs eroded by new geopolitical and sociopolitical realities.
            The Three Worlds of Social Democracy presents a view of the current state of social democracy through close looks at the experiences of social democratic parties and governments in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, India, and South Africa. The contributors review the ideas and policies of the different parties and discuss efforts to deal with contemporary economic and social challenges. The result is a volume that will be of value to students of comparative politics even as it furthers the debate about the future of social democratic policies.
 
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Three's a Crowd
The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence
Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone
University of Michigan Press, 2011
"A significant contribution to our understanding of minor parties and party system change. The authors develop a new theory and provide strong empirical evidence in support of it. They show that the Perot's candidacy has had a strong and lasting impact on partisan competition in elections.
---Paul Herrnson, Director, Center for American Politics and Citizenship Professor, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland

"Powerfully persuasive in its exhaustive research, Three's a Crowd may surprise many by revealing the long- ignored but pivotal impact of Perot voters on every national election since 1992."
---Clay Mulford, Jones Day and General Counsel to the 1992 Perot Presidential Campaign and to the Reform Party.

"Rapaport and Stone have written an engaging and important book. They bring fresh perspectives, interesting data, and much good sense to this project. Three's a Crowd is fundamentally about political change, which will, in turn, change how scholars and pundits think of Ross Perot in particular, and third parties in general."
---John G. Geer, Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and Editor of The Journal of Politics

"The definitive analysis of the Perot movement, its role in the 1994 GOP victory, and the emergence of an enduring governing majority."
---L. Sandy Maisel, Director, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, Colby College

Three's a Crowd begins with the simple insight that third parties are creatures of the American two-party system, and derive their support from the failures of the Democratic and Republican parties.

While third parties flash briefly in the gaps left by those failures, they nevertheless follow a familiar pattern: a sensation in one election, a disappointment in the next. Rapoport and Stone conclude that this steep arc results from one or both major parties successfully absorbing the third party's constituency. In the first election, the third party raises new issues and defines new constituencies; in the second, the major parties move in on the new territory. But in appropriating the third party's constituents, the major parties open themselves up to change. This is what the authors call the "dynamic of third parties."

The Perot campaign exemplified this effect in 1992 and 1996. Political observers of contemporary electoral politics missed the significance of Perot's independent campaign for the presidency in 1992. Rapoport and Stone, who had unfettered-and unparalleled-access to the Perot political machine, show how his run perfectly embodies the third-party dynamic. Yet until now no one has considered the aftermath of the Perot movement through that lens.

For anyone who seeks to understand the workings of our stubbornly two-party structure, this eagerly awaited and definitive analysis will shed new light on the role of third parties in the American political system.
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Three-Way Street
Strategic Reciprocity in World Politics
Joshua S. Goldstein and John R. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 1990
How can the world's most powerful nations cooperate despite their conflicting interests? In Three-Way Street, Joshua S. Goldstein and John R. Freeman analyze the complex intersection defined by relations among the United States, the Soviet Union, and China over the past forty years.

The authors demonstrate that three major schools of international relations theory—all game-theoretic, psychological, and quantitative-empirical approaches—have all advocated a strategy that employs cooperative initiatives and reciprocal responses in order to elicit cooperation from other countries. Critics have questioned whether such approaches can model how countries actually behave, but Goldstein and Freeman provide a wealth of detailed empirical evidence showing the existence and effectiveness of strategic reciprocity among the three countries between 1948 and 1989. Specifically, they establish that relations among the three countries have improved in recent decades through a "two steps forward, one step back" pattern. Their innovative and remarkably accessible synthesis of leading theoretical perspectives brilliantly illuminates the nature and workings of international cooperation.
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Threshold
How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out
Heather Suzanne Woods
University of Alabama Press, 2024
An urgent and cautionary examination of the totalizing effect of smart home technology on the lives of those who live in them—and those who don’t

Smart homes are here—domestic spaces bristling with networked technologies that appear to enhance work, entertainment, logistics, health, and security. But these technologies may also extract a cost in attention, money, and privacy. In Threshold, communication and technology expert Heather Suzanne Woods applies rhetorical theory to answer the urgent question of how swiftly proliferating smart homes alter those who inhabit them.

Building on extensive research into smart homes in the United States, Woods recounts how smart homes arose and predicts the trajectory of their future form. She pulls back the curtain on the technology, probes who is in control, and questions whether a home can be too smart. She reveals how smart homes incentivize ubiquitous computing as a daily practice, priming smart home occupants for permanent transactional existence largely controlled by corporate interests.

Woods suggests a dynamic cultural framework for understanding smart homes that takes into account sociotechnical variables such as gender, class, income, race, criminal justice, and more through which smart homes shape human life. Woods’s framework reveals how smart homes both reflect social norms about technology as well as whet consumer appetites for an ever more totalizing relationship with technology. She argues that this progression leads to “living in digitality,” a cultural state of constant use and reliance on technology.

Written for homeowners, policymakers, technology enthusiasts, and scholars, Threshold interweaves meticulously researched critical analysis with matter-of-fact graphics that map relationships between digital tools and social life. Readers will appreciate this bracing assessment of smart technologies that empowers smart home users to make informed decisions about their dwellings.
 
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Throne and Mandarins
China’s Search for a Policy during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880–1885
Lloyd Eastman
Harvard University Press

This study of the policy-making process in China during the Sino–French controversy of 1880–1885 adds a new dimension to our understanding of China’s response to the West in the nineteenth century. The implicit threat presented by French efforts to extend her control into northern Vietnam was the catalyst in Chinese policy decisions, and Lloyd Eastman traces the dramatic process by which the problem was eventually resolved. Analyzing the complicated balance of internal political forces in the Ch’ing dynasty in the late nineteenth century, he makes the first thorough study of the factors which shaped Chinese foreign policy in this period.

Three major power groups affected the decision-making process: the throne, high administrative officials, and lesser officials whose role was largely ideological. Eastman shows the considerable extent to which the throne’s power was limited by the interests of the officials (or mandarins); discusses the role of ch’ing-i, or literati opinion; and emphasizes the importance of the conservative, low-ranking officials who stood overwhelmingly in opposition to the few proponents of reform and modernization and strongly influenced the course of Chinese policy. Discussing the diplomatic objectives involved—preservation of hegemony in Vietnam, reluctance to fight a war that might expose its military weakness, desire to save face—as manifestations of underlying cultural assumptions and values, Eastman offers a fresh perspective on the formulation of policy during the Ch’ing government’s confrontation with the Western powers.

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Through the Grapevine
Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy
Taylor N. Carlson
University of Chicago Press, 2024

An enlightening examination of what it means when Americans rely on family and friends to stay on top of politics.

Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass media, but the reality is that many Americans today do not learn about politics from direct engagement with the news. Rather, about one-third of Americans learn chiefly from information shared by their peers in conversation or on social media. How does this socially transmitted information differ from that communicated by traditional media? What are the consequences for political attitudes and behavior?

Drawing on evidence from experiments, surveys, and social media, Taylor N. Carlson finds that, as information flows first from the media then person to person, it becomes sparse, more biased, less accurate, and more mobilizing. The result is what Carlson calls distorted democracy. Although socially transmitted information does not necessarily render democracy dysfunctional, Through the Grapevine shows how it contributes to a public that is at once underinformed, polarized, and engaged.

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Thucydides’s Trap?
Historical Interpretation, Logic of Inquiry, and the Future of Sino-American Relations
Steve Chan
University of Michigan Press, 2020

The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) ostensibly arose because of the fear that a rising Athens would threaten Sparta’s power in the Mediterranean. The idea of Thucydides’ Trap warns that all rising powers threaten established powers. As China increases its power relative to the United States, the theory argues, the two nations are inevitably set on a collision course toward war. How enlightening is an analogy based on the ancient Greek world of 2,500 years ago for understanding contemporary international relations? How accurate is the depiction of the history of other large armed conflicts, such as the two world wars, as a challenge mounted by a rising power to displace an incumbent hegemon?Thucydides’s Trap?: Historical Interpretation, Logic of Inquiry, and the Future of Sino-American Relations offers a critique of the claims of Thucydides’s Trap and power-transition theory. It examines past instances of peaceful accommodation to uncover lessons that can ease the frictions in ongoing Sino-American relations.

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Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad
How to Be a Counterintelligence Officer
William R. Johnson. Foreword by William Hood
Georgetown University Press, 2009

A Classic in Counterintelligence—Now Back in Print

Originally published in 1987, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad is a unique primer that teaches the principles, strategy, and tradecraft of counterintelligence (CI). CI is often misunderstood and narrowly equated with security and catching spies, which are only part of the picture. As William R. Johnson explains, CI is the art of actively protecting secrets but also aggressively thwarting, penetrating, and deceiving hostile intelligence organizations to neutralize or even manipulate their operations.

Johnson, a career CIA intelligence officer, lucidly presents the nuts and bolts of the business of counterintelligence and the characteristics that make a good CI officer. Although written during the late Cold War, this book continues to be useful for intelligence professionals, scholars, and students because the basic principles of CI are largely timeless. General readers will enjoy the lively narrative and detailed descriptions of tradecraft that reveal the real world of intelligence and espionage. A new foreword by former CIA officer and noted author William Hood provides a contemporary perspective on this valuable book and its author.

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Time and Chance
Gerald Ford's Appointment with History
James Cannon
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Gerald Ford came to the presidency at the time of one of our nation's greatest constitutional crises, the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate affair. His service as president concluded a distinguished career in the House of Representatives during which he served as leader of the Republican Party in the House. With unrestricted access to Gerald Ford's papers, James M. Cannon tells the story of Ford's rise and Nixon's ruin, providing new insights into this troubling period of our history and Ford's role in guiding the nation through it. Cannon tells the story of Ford's difficult early life and the beginnings of his career in politics in the period immediately after World War II. He tells the story of Ford's rise to prominence in the House of Representatives during the 1950s and 1960s, giving us a fascinating picture of the Congress. In addition, in telling us about the personal life of Gerald Ford, he gives us a sense of the price Ford paid for his success.
"James Cannon, formerly national affairs editor at Newsweek and Ford's domestic policy advisor, has written a superbly provocative and arresting biography that traces Ford's life from his July 4, 1913, birth in Omaha, Nebraska, to his September 8,1974, decision to pardon Nixon of the Watergate conspiracy." --Washington Post Book World
James M. Cannon is a journalist and was Domestic Policy Adviser to President Ford and Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.
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A Time for Tea
Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation
Piya Chatterjee
Duke University Press, 2001
In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system.
Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion.
A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism.

Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

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Time Matters
On Theory and Method
Andrew Abbott
University of Chicago Press, 2001
What do variables really tell us? When exactly do inventions occur? Why do we always miss turning points as they transpire? When does what doesn't happen mean as much, if not more, than what does? Andrew Abbott considers these fascinating questions in Time Matters, a diverse series of essays that constitutes the most extensive analysis of temporality in social science today. Ranging from abstract theoretical reflection to pointed methodological critique, Abbott demonstrates the inevitably theoretical character of any methodology.

Time Matters focuses particularly on questions of time, events, and causality. Abbott grounds each essay in straightforward examinations of actual social scientific analyses. Throughout, he demonstrates the crucial assumptions we make about causes and events, about actors and interaction and about time and meaning every time we employ methods of social analysis, whether in academic disciplines, market research, public opinion polling, or even evaluation research. Turning current assumptions on their heads, Abbott not only outlines the theoretical orthodoxies of empirical social science, he sketches new alternatives, laying down foundations for a new body of social theory.
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The Time of Liberty
Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850
Peter Guardino
Duke University Press, 2005
Between 1750 and 1850 Spanish American politics underwent a dramatic cultural shift as monarchist colonies gave way to independent states based at least nominally on popular sovereignty and republican citizenship. In The Time of Liberty, Peter Guardino explores the participation of subalterns in this grand transformation. He focuses on Mexico, comparing local politics in two parts of Oaxaca: the mestizo, urban Oaxaca City and the rural villages of nearby Villa Alta, where the population was mostly indigenous. Guardino challenges traditional assumptions that poverty and isolation alienated rural peasants from the political process. He shows that peasants and other subalterns were conscious and complex actors in political and ideological struggles and that popular politics played an important role in national politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Guardino makes extensive use of archival materials, including judicial transcripts and newspaper accounts, to illuminate the dramatic contrasts between the local politics of the city and of the countryside, describing in detail how both sets of citizens spoke and acted politically. He contends that although it was the elites who initiated the national change to republicanism, the transition took root only when engaged by subalterns. He convincingly argues that various aspects of the new political paradigms found adherents among even some of the most isolated segments of society and that any subsequent failure of electoral politics was due to an absence of pluralism rather than a lack of widespread political participation.

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The Timeline of Presidential Elections
How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter
Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In presidential elections, do voters cast their ballots for the candidates whose platform and positions best match their own? Or is the race for president of the United States come down largely to who runs the most effective campaign? It’s a question those who study elections have been considering for years with no clear resolution. In The Timeline of Presidential Elections, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien reveal for the first time how both factors come into play.
 
Erikson and Wlezien have amassed data from close to two thousand national polls covering every presidential election from 1952 to 2008, allowing them to see how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. Polls from the beginning of the year, they show, have virtually no predictive power. By mid-April, when the candidates have been identified and matched in pollsters’ trial heats, preferences have come into focus—and predicted the winner in eleven of the fifteen elections. But a similar process of forming favorites takes place in the last six months, during which voters’ intentions change only gradually, with particular events—including presidential debates—rarely resulting in dramatic change.
 
Ultimately, Erikson and Wlezien show that it is through campaigns that voters are made aware of—or not made aware of—fundamental factors like candidates’ policy positions that determine which ticket will get their votes. In other words, fundamentals matter, but only because of campaigns. Timely and compelling, this book will force us to rethink our assumptions about presidential elections.
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Time’s Monster
How History Makes History
Priya Satia
Harvard University Press, 2020

A New Statesman Best Book of the Year

“Powerful and radically important.”
—Robert Gildea, Times Literary Supplement

“Bracingly describes the ways imperialist historiography has shaped visions of the future as much as the past.”
—Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books

“An account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonization…A coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians, and empire.”
—Kenan Malik, The Guardian

For generations, the history of the British Empire was written by its victors, whose accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. British historians’ narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two world wars compromised decolonization. In this brilliant work, Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

From the imperial histories of John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill to the works of anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. P. Thompson, Satia captures two opposing approaches to the discipline of history and illuminates the ethical universe that came with them. Against the backdrop of enduring inequalities and a crisis in the humanities, hers is an urgent moral voice.

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Timing and Turnout
How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups
Sarah F. Anzia
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Public policy in the United States is the product of decisions made by more than 500,000 elected officials, and the vast majority of those officials are elected on days other than Election Day. And because far fewer voters turn out for off-cycle elections, that means the majority of officials in America are elected by a politically motivated minority of Americans. Sarah F. Anzia is the first to systemically address the effects of election timing on political outcomes, and her findings are eye-opening.
           
The low turnout for off-cycle elections, Anzia argues, increases the influence of organized interest groups like teachers’ unions and municipal workers. While such groups tend to vote at high rates regardless of when the election is held, the low turnout in off-cycle years enhances the effectiveness of their mobilization efforts and makes them a proportionately larger bloc. Throughout American history, the issue of election timing has been a contentious one. Anzia’s book traces efforts by interest groups and political parties to change the timing of elections to their advantage, resulting in the electoral structures we have today. Ultimately, what might seem at first glance to be mundane matters of scheduling are better understood as tactics designed to distribute political power, determining who has an advantage in the electoral process and who will control government at the municipal, county, and state levels.

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Timor-Leste’s Long Road to Independence
Transnational Perspectives
Zelia Pereira
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
From a much neglected Portuguese colony to independence, Timor-Leste travelled a belated, long and troubled journey that included a 24-year Indonesian occupation. A classic process of European decolonization (1974–1975) was followed by a nationalist struggle against “Third World Colonialism” (1975–1999), and a final phase under the direct aegis of the United Nations (1999–2002). More than a direct relation between coloniser and colonised, this turbulent process involved the participation of many different actors scattered around the world. The “Timor Issue” brought to the scene a martyred people’s determination, the diplomacy of several nations (friends or foes), the involvement of the United Nations, and the activism of solidarity networks. This collection adopts a transnational approach that highlights the complexity of Timor-Leste’s road to independence.
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Tiny Publics
A Theory of Group Action and Culture
Gary Alan Fine
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
If all politics is local, then so is almost everything else, argues sociologist Gary Alan Fine. We organize our lives by relying on those closest to us—family members, friends, work colleagues, team mates, and other intimates—to create meaning and order. In this thoughtful and wide-ranging book, Fine argues that the basic building blocks of society itself are forged within the boundaries of such small groups, the "tiny publics" necessary for a robust, functioning social order at all levels. Action, meaning, authority, inequality, organization, and institutions all have their roots in small groups. Yet for the past twenty-five years social scientists have tended to ignore the power of groups in favor of an emphasis on organizations, societies, or individuals. Based on over thirty-five years of Fine's own ethnographic research across an array of small groups, Tiny Publics presents a compelling new theory of the pivotal role of small groups in organizing social life. No social system can thrive without flourishing small groups. They provide havens in an impersonal world, where faceless organizations become humanized. Taking examples from such diverse worlds as Little League baseball teams, restaurant workers, high school debate teams, weather forecasters, and political volunteers, Fine demonstrates how each group has its own unique culture, or idioculture—the system of knowledge, beliefs, behavior, and customs that define and hold a group together. With their dense network of relationships, groups serve as important sources of social and cultural capital for their members. The apparently innocuous jokes, rituals, and nicknames prevalent within Little League baseball teams help establish how teams function internally and how they compete with other teams. Small groups also provide a platform for their members to engage in broader social discourse and a supportive environment to begin effecting change in larger institutions. In his studies of mushroom collectors and high school debate teams, Fine demonstrates the importance of stories that group members tell each other about their successes and frustrations in fostering a strong sense of social cohesion. And Fine shows how the personal commitment political volunteers bring to their efforts is reinforced by the close-knit nature of their work, which in turn has the power to change larger groups and institutions. In this way, the actions and debates begun in small groups can eventually radiate outward to affect every level of society. Fine convincingly demonstrates how small groups provide fertile ground for the seeds of civic engagement. Outcomes often attributed to large-scale social forces originate within such small-scale domains. Employing rich insights from both sociology and social psychology, as well as vivid examples from a revealing array of real-work groups, Tiny Publics provides a compelling examination of the importance of small groups and of the rich vitality they bring to social life. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
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Tippecanoe and Tyler Too
Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History
Jan R. Van Meter
University of Chicago Press, 2008

“By necessity, by proclivity, by delight,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1876, “we all quote.” But often the phrases that fall most readily from our collective lips—like “fire when ready,”  “speak softly and carry a big stick,” or “nice guys finish last”—are those whose origins and true meanings we have ceased to consider. Restoring three-dimensionality to more than fifty of these American sayings, Tippecanoe and Tyler Too turns clichés back into history by telling the life stories of the words that have served as our most powerful battle cries, rallying points, laments, and inspirations.

In individual entries on slogans and catchphrases from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century, Jan Van Meter reveals that each one is a living, malleable entity that has profoundly shaped and continues to influence our public culture. From John Winthrop’s “We shall be as a city upon a hill” and the 1840 Log Cabin Campaign’s “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” and Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” each of Van Meter’s selections emerges as a memory device for a larger political or cultural story. Taken together in Van Meter’s able hands, these famous slogans and catchphrases give voice to our common history even as we argue about where it should lead us.

“As Van Meter argues, these are important ‘memory devices for a larger story.’ . . . The author has thoroughly researched all the catchphrases . . . . This book would make delightful in-flight reading or a nice gift for a trivia buff. Recommended.”—Choice

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Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee's Trailblazers
50 Years, 50 Stories
Mary Ellen Pethel
University of Tennessee Press, 2022
In June 1972, President Richard Nixon put pen to paper and signed the Educational Amendments of 1972 into law. The nearly 150-page document makes no mention of “gender,” “athletics,” “girls,” or “women.” The closest reference to “sport” is transportation. In fact, the bill did not appear to contain anything earth shattering. But tucked into its final pages, a heading appears, “Title IX—Prohibition of Sex Discrimination.” These 37 words would change the world for girls and women across the United States. On its face, Title IX legally guaranteed equal opportunity in education. In time, Title IX would serve as the tipping point for the modern era of women’s sport. Slowly but surely, women’s athletics at the high school and collegiate levels grew to prominence, and Tennessee fast emerged as a national leader.
 
In Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers, Mary Ellen Pethel introduces readers to past and present pioneers—each instrumental to the success of women’s athletics across the state and nation. Through vibrant profiles, Pethel celebrates the lives and careers of household names like Pat Summitt and Candace Parker, as well as equally important forerunners such as Ann Furrow and Teresa Phillips. Through their lived experiences, these fifty individuals laid the foundation for athletic excellence in Tennessee, which in turn shaped the national landscape for women’s sports. The book also provides readers with a fuller understanding of Title IX, as well as a concise history of women’s athletics in the pre- and post-Title IX eras.

With interviewees ranging from age 20 to 93, Pethel artfully combines storytelling with scholarship. Guided by the voices of the athletes, coaches, and administrators, Pethel vividly documents achievement and adversity, wins and losses, and advice for the next generation. This book represents the first statewide compilation of its kind—offering readers a behind-the- scenes perspective of Tennessee women who dedicated their lives to the advancement of sport and gender equality. Readers will delight in Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers: 50 Years, 50 Stories.
 
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Titles, Conflict, and Land Use
The Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier
Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap, and Bernardo Mueller
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The Amazon, the world's largest rain forest, is the last frontier in Brazil. The settlement of large and small farmers, squatters, miners, and loggers in this frontier during the past thirty years has given rise to violent conflicts over land as well as environmental duress. Titles, Conflict, and Land Use examines the institutional development involved in the process of land use and ownership in the Amazon and shows how this phenomenon affects the behavior of the economic actors. It explores the way in which the absence of well-defined property rights in the Amazon has led to both economic and social problems, including lost investment opportunities, high costs in protecting claims, and violence. The relationship between land reform and violence is given special attention.
The book offers an important application of the New Institutional Economics by examining a rare instance where institutional change can be empirically observed. This allows the authors to study property rights as they emerge and evolve and to analyze the effects of Amazon development on the economy. In doing so they illustrate well the point that often the evolution of economic institutions will not lead to efficient outcomes.
This book will be important not only to economists but also to Latin Americanists, political scientists, anthropologists, and scholars in disciplines concerned with the environment.
Lee Alston is Professor of Economics, University of Illinois, and Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Gary Libecap is Professor of Economics and Law, University of Arizona, and Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Bernardo Mueller is Assistant Professor, Universidade de Brasilia.
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Tito and His Comrades
Jože Pirjevec, Foreword by Emily Greble
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
This landmark biography reveals the life of one of the most powerful figures of the Cold War era. Josip Broz (1892–1980), nicknamed Tito, led Yugoslavia for nearly four decades with charisma, cunning, and an iron fist.

With his Partisans he fought Hitler during World War II, and after the war he shrewdly resisted the Soviet Union's grasp. A leader of the non-aligned nations, he long enjoyed a reputation in the West as "the only good Communist" despite a dubious human rights record at home. Jože Pirjevec employs impressive research from archives in eight languages to offer this illuminating, definitive portrait of a complex man in turbulent times.

Pirjevec recounts how Tito, with little schooling but an astute intellect and driving ambition, rose through Communist Party ranks to shape and rule the Yugoslav federation. Surviving multiple assassination attempts by Nazis, Soviet spies, and others, Tito boldly threatened Stalin in return and may have, Pirjevec reveals, contrived Stalin's death. The narrative follows Tito's personal and political life into old age, as the specter of a Soviet invasion haunted him until his death at age eighty-seven. Available in English for the first time, this edition includes new material from Pirjevec and a foreword by Emily Greble.
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To Agree or Not to Agree
Leadership, Bargaining, and Arms Control
Lisa A. Baglione
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Why were the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union able to negotiate a series of arms control agreements despite the deep and important differences in their interests during the Cold War? Lisa A. Baglione considers a variety of explanations for the successes--and failures--of these negotiations drawn from international relations theories. Focusing on the goals and strategies of individual leaders--and their ability to make these the goals and strategies of their nation--the author develops a nuanced understanding that better explains the outcome of these negotiations. Baglione then tests her explanation in a consideration of negotiations surrounding the banning of above-ground nuclear tests, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s, the negotiations for the limitation of intermediate-range nuclear forces in the 1980s, and the last negotiations between the Americans and the disintegrating Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. How these great rivals were able to negotiate significant arms control agreements not only will shed light on international relations during an important period of history but will help us understand how such agreements might develop in the post-Cold War period, when arms proliferation has become a serious problem.
This book will appeal to scholars of international relations and arms control as well as those interested in bargaining and international negotiations and contemporary military history.
Lisa A. Baglione is Assistant Professor of Political Science, St. Joseph's University.
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To Catch a Spy
The Art of Counterintelligence
James M. Olson
Georgetown University Press, 2019

How the US is losing the counterintelligence war and what the country should do to better protect our national security and trade secrets

The United States is losing the counterintelligence war. Foreign intelligence services, particularly those of China, Russia, and Cuba, are recruiting spies in our midst and stealing our secrets and cutting-edge technologies. In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets. Olson takes the reader into the arcane world of counterintelligence as he lived it during his thirty-year career in the CIA. After an overview of what the Chinese, Russian, and Cuban spy services are doing to the United States, Olson explains the nitty-gritty of the principles and methods of counterintelligence. Readers will learn about specific aspects of counterintelligence such as running double-agent operations and surveillance. The book also analyzes twelve real-world case studies to illustrate why people spy against their country, the tradecraft of counterintelligence, and where counterintelligence breaks down or succeeds. A “lessons learned” section follows each case study.

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To Defend This Sunrise
Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua
Courtney Desiree Morris
Rutgers University Press, 2023
To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
 
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To Feast on Us as Their Prey
Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic
Rachel B. Herrmann
University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Winner, 2020 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award, Edited Volume

Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609–1610—one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history—cannibalism played an important role in shaping the human relationship to food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus’s reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles?

Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world.

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To Keep the Republic
Thinking, Talking, and Acting Like a Democratic Citizen
Elizabeth C. Matto
Rutgers University Press, 2024
American democracy is at an inflection point. With voting rights challenged, election results undermined, and even the US Capitol violently attacked, many Americans feel powerless to save their nation’s democratic institutions from the forces dismantling them. Yet, as founders like Benjamin Franklin knew from the start, the health of America’s democracy depends on the actions its citizens are willing to take to preserve it. 
 
To Keep the Republic is a wake-up call about the responsibilities that come with being a citizen in a participatory democracy. It describes the many ways that individuals can make a difference on both local and national levels—and explains why they matter. Political scientist Elizabeth C. Matto highlights the multiple facets of democratic citizenship, identifies American democracy’s sometimes competing values and ideals, and explains how civic engagement can take various forms, including political conversation. Combining political philosophy with concrete suggestions for how to become a more engaged citizen, To Keep the Republic reminds us that democracy is not a spectator sport; it only works when we get off the sidelines and enter the political arena to make our voices heard.


 
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To Live and Die in America
Class, Power, Health and Healthcare
Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson
Pluto Press, 2013

To Live and Die in America details how the United States has among the worst indicators of health in the industrialised world and at the same time spends significantly more on its health care system than any other industrial nation.

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson explain this contradictory phenomenon as the product of the unique brand of capitalism that has developed in the US. It is this particular form of capitalism that created both the social and economic conditions that largely influence health outcomes and the inefficient, unpopular and inaccessible health care system that is incapable of dealing with them.

The authors argue that improving health in America requires a change in the conditions in which people live and work as well as a restructured health care system.

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To Live Here, You Have to Fight
How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice
Jessica Wilkerson
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Launched in 1964, the War on Poverty quickly took aim at the coalfields of southern Appalachia. There, the federal government found unexpected allies among working-class white women devoted to a local tradition of citizen caregiving and seasoned by decades of activism and community service.

Jessica Wilkerson tells their stories within the larger drama of efforts to enact change in the 1960s and 1970s. She shows white Appalachian women acting as leaders and soldiers in a grassroots war on poverty--shaping and sustaining programs, engaging in ideological debates, offering fresh visions of democratic participation, and facing personal political struggles. Their insistence that caregiving was valuable labor clashed with entrenched attitudes and rising criticisms of welfare. Their persistence, meanwhile, brought them into unlikely coalitions with black women, disabled miners, and others to fight for causes that ranged from poor people's rights to community health to unionization.

Inspiring yet sobering, To Live Here, You Have to Fight reveals Appalachian women as the indomitable caregivers of a region--and overlooked actors in the movements that defined their time.

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To Make a Nation
The Rediscovery of American Federalism
Samuel H. Beer
Harvard University Press, 1993

Lyndon Johnson heralded a “new federalism,” as did Ronald Reagan. It was left to the public to puzzle out what such a proclamation, coming from both ends of the political spectrum, could possibly mean. Of one thing we can be certain: theories of federalism, in whatever form they take, are still shaping our nation. The origin of these theories—what they meant to history and how they apply today—becomes clear in this book by one of our most distinguished writers on political thought.

The great English republicans of the seventeenth century appear in this story along with their American descendants, who took the European idea of a federal republic and recast it as new and unique. Samuel Beer’s extraordinary knowledge of European political thought, displayed especially in discussions of Thomas Aquinas and James Harrington, allows him to show at every turn the historical precedents and the originality of American federalism in theory and practice. In deft comparisons with Hume, Burke, Blackstone, and Montesquieu, the familiar figures of Madison and Hamilton emerge with new substance and depth, while some who would seem fully known by now, such as Ben Franklin, reveal unsuspected dimensions, and others, such as James Wilson, are lifted from obscurity.

Beer uses this history to highlight the contrast between the nation-centered federalism of the framers of the Constitution and the state-centered federalism of its opponents. His concern is not only with historical origins but, more important, with a conflict of ideas which reaches far into our history and continues on to this day. The result is the clearest articulation ever given of the provenance and purpose of the ideas of nationalism and federalism in American political philosophy. A masterpiece of historical and political analysis, this book provides an innovative interpretive framework for understanding democracy and the American Constitution.

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To Make a World Safe for Revolution
Cuba’s Foreign Policy
Jorge I. Domínguez
Harvard University Press, 1989

The twentieth-century history of Cuba borders on fantasy. This diminutive country boldly and repeatedly exercises the foreign policy of a major power. Although closely tied to the United States through most of its modern history, Cuba successfully defied the U.S. government after 1959, consolidated its own power, and defeated an invasion of U.S.-backed exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Fidel Castro then brought the world alarmingly close to nuclear war in 1962.

Jorge Domínguez presents a comprehensive survey of Cuban international relations since Castro came to power. Domínguez unravels Cuba’s response to the 1962 missile crisis and the U.S.–Soviet understandings that emerged from that. He explores the ties that link Cuba to the U.S.S.R. and other Communist countries; analyzes Cuban support for revolutionary movements throughout the world, especially in Latin America and Africa; and assesses the significance of Cuban political and economic relations with Western Europe, Canada, and Japan.

Some have charged that Cuba does not have a foreign policy, that Fidel Castro merely takes orders from his Soviet bosses. Domínguez argues that there is indeed a specifically Cuban foreign policy, poised not only between hegemony and autonomy, between compliance and self-assertion, but also between militancy and pragmatism. He believes that within the context of Soviet hegemony Cuba’s foreign policy is very much its own, and he marshals impressive evidence to support this belief. His book is based on extensive documentation from Cuba, the United States, and other countries, as well as from many in-depth interviews carried out during trips to Cuba.

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To Make the Earth Bear Fruit
Ethnographic Essays on Fertility, Work and Gender in Highland Bolivia
Olivia Harris
University of London Press, 1999

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To See Ourselves as Others See Us
How Publics Abroad View the United States after 9/11
Ole R. Holsti
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"Holsti, the authority on American foreign policy attitudes, investigates others' views of us. It's not pretty. It matters. Read this."
---Bruce Russett, Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations, Yale University, and editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution

"Clearly and engagingly written, Holsti's book ranks among the most important---and most objective---of the post-9/11 scholarly studies. It deserves a large readership, both within and beyond academe."
---Ralph Levering, Vail Professor of History, Davidson College

In terms of military and economic power, the United States remains one of the strongest nations in the world. Yet the United States seems to have lost the power of persuasion, the ability to make allies and win international support.

Why? Immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, leaders and citizens of foreign nations generally expressed sympathy for the United States. Since then, attitudes have changed. Drawing upon public opinion surveys conducted in 30 nations, Ole R. Holsti documents an increasing anti-American sentiment. His analysis suggests that the war in Iraq, human rights violations, and unpopular international policies are largely responsible. Consequently, the United States can rebuild its repute by adopting an unselfish, farsighted approach to global issues.

Indeed, the United States must restore goodwill abroad, Holsti asserts, because public opinion indirectly influences the leaders who decide whether or not to side with the Americans.

Ole R. Holsti is George V. Allen Professor Emeritus of International Affairs in the Department of Political Science at Duke University and author of Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy.

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