front cover of Cabal!
Cabal!
The Plot Against General Washington, The Conway Cabal Reconsidered
Mark Edward Lender
Westholme Publishing, 2024
The First Comprehensive Historical Investigation into the Conway Cabal, the Attempt to Remove George Washington from Command
In the spring of 1778, General George Washington wrote to his friend Landon Carter about a rumored “disposition in the Northern Officers to see me superceded in my Command.” This was as candid a statement as the general ever made about the so-called “Conway Cabal” of patriot officers and politicians critical of his leadership. Most early historians of the Revolution took the threat to Washington seriously, but by the mid-twentieth century interpretations had reversed, with the plot—if one existed—posing no real danger to the commander-in-chief. Yet, as historian Mark Edward Lender reveals in his compelling Cabal! The Plot Against General Washington, clues found in original new research provide a more comprehensive understanding of the personalities and political maneuverings of those involved in the Cabal, and the real nature of the challenge to Washington.
    Rather than the “classic Cabal” of Generals Horatio Gates, Thomas Mifflin, and Thomas Conway in a plot to remove Washington quickly, the threat to Washington’s command was a gradual administrative attempt by the Board of War and political allies to take over the war effort. Reorganized in late 1777 under the leadership of Mifflin, with Gates assuming the board presidency in January 1778, the Board of War sought authority to determine military policy and strategic goals, all training, organizational, personnel, and logistical functions, and even the assignment of theater commanders. Had they succeeded, Washington’s title of commander-in-chief would have been utterly hollow. The Cabal tested Washington as few other things did during the war and perhaps tempered him into the man we remember today. Washington adroitly navigated the challenges to his leadership, meeting and defeating every attempt to curtail his authority. His response revealed a leadership style that saw him safely through the war, and gave him overwhelming support from his countrymen to become their first president.
[more]

front cover of The Cabinet
The Cabinet
George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
Lindsay M. Chervinsky
Harvard University Press, 2020

Winner of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Excellence in American History Book Award
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize


“Cogent, lucid, and concise…An indispensable guide to the creation of the cabinet…Groundbreaking…we can now have a much greater appreciation of this essential American institution, one of the major legacies of George Washington’s enlightened statecraft.”
—Ron Chernow

On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries—Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph—for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrection, and constitutional challenges—and finding congressional help distinctly lacking—he decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to for guidance.

Authoritative and compulsively readable, The Cabinet reveals the far-reaching consequences of this decision. To Washington’s dismay, the tensions between Hamilton and Jefferson sharpened partisan divides, contributing to the development of the first party system. As he faced an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, he came to treat the cabinet as a private advisory body, greatly expanding the role of the executive branch and indelibly transforming the presidency.

“Important and illuminating…an original angle of vision on the foundations and development of something we all take for granted.”
—Jon Meacham

“Fantastic…A compelling story.”
—New Criterion

“Helps us understand pivotal moments in the 1790s and the creation of an independent, effective executive.”
Wall Street Journal

[more]

logo for University of London Press
Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico
Edited by Alan Knight and Wil Pansters
University of London Press, 2006

front cover of Cages of Reason
Cages of Reason
The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain
Bernard S. Silberman
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Blending political, historical, and sociological analysis, Bernard S. Silberman offers a provocative explanation for the bureaucratic development of the modern state. The study of modern state bureaucracy has its origins in Max Weber's analysis of the modes of social domination, which Silberman takes as his starting point.

Whereas Weber contends that the administration of all modern nation-states would eventually converge in one form characterized by rationality and legal authority, Silberman argues that the process of bureaucratic rationalization took, in fact, two courses. One path is characterized by permeable organizational boundaries and the allocation of information by "professionals." The other features well-defined boundaries and the allocation of information by organizational rules. Through case studies of France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain, Silberman demonstrates that this divergence stems from differences in leadership structure and in levels of uncertainty about leadership succession in the nineteenth century.

Silberman concludes that the rise of bureacratic rationality was primarily a response to political problems rather than social and economic concerns. Cages of Reason demonstrates how rationalization can have occurred over a wide range of cultures at various levels of economic development. It will be of considerable interest to readers in a number of disciplines: political science, sociology, history, and public administration.

"Silberman has produced an invaluable, densely packed work that those with deep knowledge of public administrative development will find extremely rewarding." —David H. Rosenbloom, American Political Science Review

"An erudite, incisive, and vibrant book, the product of intensive study and careful reflection. Given its innovative theoretical framework and the wealth of historical materials contained in it, this study will generate debate and stimulate research in sociology, political science, and organizational theory. It is undoubtedly the best book on the comparative evolution of the modern state published in the last decade."—Mauro F. Guillen, Contemporary Sociology
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Calamities of Exile
Three Nonfiction Novellas
Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago Press, 1998
From the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile.

"Beautiful but harrowing chronicles of three exiles that probe the moral and personal risks of their encounters with totalitarianism. . . . Piercing and timely."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Weschler . . . combines a novelist's gift for drama with the objectivity and research skills of a journalist. . . . The result is three gripping profiles of very human but also extraordinary men."—Publishers Weekly

"[Weschler's] thorough accounting of the men's covert operations, assumed identities and strained relationships with fathers, wives, and colleagues creates a disturbing triptych of the perils of totalitarianism."—Lance Gould, New York Times Book Review

"Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion."—Francis King, Spectator

"Endlessly absorbing. . . . Breathtaking."—Jeri Laber, Los Angeles Times Book Review
[more]

front cover of Calculated Nationalism in Contemporary South Korea
Calculated Nationalism in Contemporary South Korea
Movements for Political and Economic Democratization in the 21st Century
Gil-Soo Han
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Nationalism in a nation-state reflects its emergent structural, cultural, and personal properties at a given time. In the politico-historical context of South Korea and the globe, the fruits of the 1968 Revolution in France could not reach Korean society under its military regime and exploitative economic structure. This continued to frustrate the grassroots and especially social actors in South Korea, which eventually brought about the June Struggle in 1987 and the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution. Calculated Nationalism in Contemporary South Korea sketches Korean grassroots’ perception of their nation-state, national identities, and what they desire regarding the future direction of their nation-state. The grassroots have openly spoken out about their frustrations through political rallies and media. This book attempts to reflect the minds of Korean progressives regarding, in particular, the forcibly recruited Japanese military “comfort women,” Abe’s trade provocation against South Korea in 2019, reunification, the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution, National Flag-carriers’ struggles, and bullying at work.
[more]

front cover of Calculated Values
Calculated Values
Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age
William Deringer
Harvard University Press, 2018

Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power of numbers to find answers, settle disputes, and explain how the world works. Whether evaluating economic trends, measuring the success of institutions, or divining public opinion, we are told that numbers don’t lie. But numbers have not always been so revered. Calculated Values traces how numbers first gained widespread public authority in one nation, Great Britain.

Into the seventeenth century, numerical reasoning bore no special weight in political life. Complex calculations were often regarded with suspicion, seen as the narrow province of navigators, bookkeepers, and astrologers, not gentlemen. This changed in the decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Though Britons’ new quantitative enthusiasm coincided with major advances in natural science, financial capitalism, and the power of the British state, it was no automatic consequence of those developments, William Deringer argues. Rather, it was a product of politics—ugly, antagonistic, partisan politics. From parliamentary debates to cheap pamphlets, disputes over taxes, trade, and national debt were increasingly conducted through calculations. Some of the era’s most pivotal political moments, like the 1707 Union of England and Scotland and the 1720 South Sea Bubble, turned upon calculative conflicts.

As Britons learned to fight by the numbers, they came to believe, as one calculator wrote in 1727, that “facts and figures are the most stubborn evidences.” Yet the authority of numbers arose not from efforts to find objective truths that transcended politics, but from the turmoil of politics itself.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Caliban's Freedom
The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James
Anthony Bogues
Pluto Press, 1997
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) is one the few political thinkers whose ideas have made a genuinely significant contribution to the development of emancipatory ideas in the twentieth century. In this volume, Anthony Bogues examines the origins of the relationship between the black radical tradition and James's own view of Marxism. Integrating these two political currents provided the basis for a profound critique that became the hallmark of James’s life’s work. Anthony Bogues traces the main features of James’s early political thought, up to his deportation from the United States in the early 1950s, arguing that his work represents a major attempt in the immediate postwar period to establish new frontiers in Marxism and radical political thought in general. This illuminating and scholarly study reinforces James’s position as a political theorist of major standing.
[more]

front cover of California Dreaming
California Dreaming
Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State
Paul J. P. Sandul
West Virginia University Press, 2014
At the turn of the 20th century, the California dream was a suburban ideal where life on the farm was exceptional. Agrarian virtue existed alongside good roads, social clubs, cultural institutions, and business commerce. The California suburban dream was the ultimate symbol of progress and modernity.
 
California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State analyzes the growth, promotion, and agricultural colonization that fed this dream during the early 1900s. Through this analysis, Paul J. P. Sandul introduces a newly identified rural-suburban type: the agriburb, a rural suburb deliberately planned, developed, and promoted for profit. Sandul reconceptualizes California’s growth during this time period, establishing the agriburb as a suburban phenomenon that occurred long before the booms of the 1920s and 1950s.
 
Sandul’s analysis contributes to a new suburban history that includes diverse constituencies and geographies and focuses on the production and construction of place and memory. Boosters purposefully “harvested” suburbs with an eye toward direct profit and metropolitan growth. State boosters boasted of unsurpassable idyllic communities while local boosters bragged of communities that represented the best of the best, both using narratives of place, class, race, lifestyle, and profit to avow images of the rural and suburban ideal.

This suburban dream attracted people who desired a family home, nature, health, culture, refinement, and rural virtue. In the agriburb, a family could live on a small home grove while enjoying the perks of a progressive city. A home located within the landscape of natural California with access to urban amenities provided a good place to live and a way to gain revenue through farming.
 
To uncover and dissect the agriburb, Sandul focuses on local histories from California’s Central Valley and the Inland Empire of Southern California, including Ontario near Los Angeles and Orangevale and Fair Oaks outside Sacramento. His analysis closely operates between the intersections of history, anthropology, geography, sociology, and the rural and urban, while examining a metanarrative that exposes much about the nature and lasting influence of cultural memory and public history upon agriburban communities.
[more]

front cover of The Calling of History
The Calling of History
Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
Dipesh Chakrabarty
University of Chicago Press, 2015
A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar’s career—and poignant obsolescence—as a way into larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life.

Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.

Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
[more]

front cover of Callous Objects
Callous Objects
Designs against the Homeless
Robert Rosenberger
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Uncovering injustices built into our everyday surroundings

Callous Objects unearths cases in which cities push homeless people out of public spaces through a combination of policy and strategic design. Robert Rosenberger examines such commonplace devices as garbage cans, fences, signage, and benches—all of which reveal political agendas beneath the surface. Such objects have evolved, through a confluence of design and law, to be open to some uses and closed to others, but always capable of participating in collective ends on a large scale. Rosenberger brings together ideas from the philosophy of technology, social theory, and feminist epistemology to spotlight the widespread anti-homeless ideology built into our communities and enacted in law.

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.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Campaign ’72
The Managers Speak
Ernest R. May
Harvard University Press, 1973

In January 1973, for the first time in American history, principal participants in a major election met to discuss the science and the art of campaign strategy: the planning, calculation, contrivance, miscalculation, and mischance that determine what the electorate sees. Here campaign managers, pollsters, and journalists met to compare notes on their techniques and tactics and on their successes and failures as they reviewed the events of the primaries and election:

the poor decisions made in the face of complex state primary laws;

the decline of Muskie and the rise of McGovern;

the significance of issues versus Nixon's image;

the effects of party reform on the Democratic convention;

the credentials fights;

the twists of strategy during the final months of the campaign;

the way the press covered the campaign and how reporters were treated by the various staffs;

the lessons for 1976 drawn by reporters and campaign people.

The straightforward exchanges took place at the Harvard Conference on Campaign Decision-Making. Eighteen key people participated, including those in the campaigns of Nixon, McGovern, Wallace, Muskie, Humphrey, Jackson, and McCloskey. Four political correspondents--David Broder, James Naughton, Al Otten, and James Perry--expertly guided the conversation, probing for additional insights.

The transcript of the conference--oral history at its best--has been carefully edited and makes absorbing reading. Included are brief sketches of the participants, a chronology of major events of the campaign, tables of campaign statistics, and a full index.

[more]

front cover of Campaign
Campaign
A Cartoon History of Bill Clinton's Race for the White House
Mary Ann Barton
University of Arkansas Press, 1993
This fascinating record chronicles Governor Bill Clinton’s 1992 bid for the presidency by gathering editorial cartoons from some of the nation’s premier magazines and newspapers. His meteoric rise from obscure origins as governor of a small southern state to his current position as the world’s most powerful head of state presents political cartoonists with a unique challenge.

For many people, in the United States and abroad, the dramas of the campaign created the character of Clinton. From the Gennifer Flowers debacle to Clinton’s
resurrection at the Democratic National Convention and the triumph of the election win, the incisive cartoons in this collection capture Clinton’s emerging image in a way that no written word can. The forty-five contributing artists use these cartoons to depict the breathtaking and colorful events that only a presidential campaign can produce and offer hours of entertainment for any reader.
[more]

front cover of Campaign Advertising and American Democracy
Campaign Advertising and American Democracy
Michael M. Franz, Paul B. Freedman, Kenneth M. Goldstein and Travis N. Ridout
Temple University Press, 2007
It has been estimated that more than three million political ads were televised leading up to the elections of 2004.  More than $800,000,000 was spent on TV ads in the race for the White House alone and presidential candidates, along with their party and interest group allies, broadcast over a million ads -- more than twice the number aired before the 2000 elections.  What were the consequences of this barrage of advertising?

Were viewers turned off by political advertising to the extent that it disuaded them from voting, as some critics suggest?  Did they feel more connected to political issues and the political system or were they alienated?  These are the questions this book answers, based on a unique, robust, and extensive database dedicated to political advertising.

Confronting prevailing opinion, the authors of this carefully researched work find that political ads may actually educate, engage, and mobilize American voters.  Only in the rarest of circumstances do they have negative impacts.
[more]

front cover of Campaign Crossroads
Campaign Crossroads
Presidential Politics in Indiana from Lincoln to Obama
Andrew E. Stoner
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2017
Campaign Crossroads looks back over the varied, sometimes important, sometimes irrelevant, but always interesting presidential campaign cycles in Indiana’s history. By taking in the influences of technology, transportation and communication itself, we see an evolution in the political process that is not only altogether Hoosier, but also altogether American in its quality and importance. Using a narrative approach with a mix of primary and secondary sources, the work examines not only the rhetoric of presidents and presidential hopefuls, but also the nature of campaigns and their impact on Indiana communities. While Indiana enjoyed the position of being a battleground state for the better part of a century from the 1870s until the 1960s, it has also been ignored, dismissed, and has on occasion created unexpected political drama.
[more]

front cover of Campaign Dynamics
Campaign Dynamics
The Race for Governor
Thomas M. Carsey
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor explores the dynamic interaction between candidates and voters that takes place during campaigns. It finds that voters respond in a meaningful way to what candidates say and do during their campaigns.
Candidates for state-wide and national offices spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to convey their messages to voters. Do voters hear them and respond? More specifically, do the issues candidates stress on the campaign trail influence the choices voters make when casting their ballots? The evidence presented in this book suggests that the answer is a resounding yes.
Campaign Dynamics examines more than one hundred gubernatorial elections from 1982 through 1994, beginning with case studies of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey in 1993. Combining interviews and observations with empirical analysis of public opinion polls, the case studies develop the basic understanding of how campaigns define the set of important issues in an election. Then the analysis is expanded to consider the abortion issue in thirty-four gubernatorial elections in 1990. Later chapters test these ideas in over one hundred gubernatorial elections, combining exit poll data on upwards of 100,000 voters from dozens of races with measures of campaign themes developed out of a content analysis of newspaper coverage.
This book employs multiple methods and sources of data and represents one of the most comprehensive theoretical and empirical efforts to understand the role of campaigns in voting behavior ever undertaken.
Campaign Dynamics will be of interest to those who study state politics, voting behavior and campaigns, and democratic theory. It should also guide students and scholars interested in performing empirical tests of formal models and those wishing to combine multiple methods in their research.
Thomas M. Carsey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.
[more]

front cover of Campaign Finance and American Democracy
Campaign Finance and American Democracy
What the Public Really Thinks and Why It Matters
David M. Primo and Jeffrey D. Milyo
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In recent decades, and particularly since the US Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision, lawmakers and other elites have told Americans that stricter campaign finance laws are needed to improve faith in the elections process, increase trust in the government, and counter cynicism toward politics. But as David M. Primo and Jeffrey D. Milyo argue, politicians and the public alike should reconsider the conventional wisdom in light of surprising and comprehensive empirical evidence to the contrary.

Primo and Milyo probe original survey data to determine Americans’ sentiments on the role of money in politics, what drives these sentiments, and why they matter. What Primo and Milyo find is that while many individuals support the idea of reform, they are also skeptical that reform would successfully limit corruption, which Americans believe stains almost every fiber of the political system. Moreover, support for campaign finance restrictions is deeply divided along party lines, reflecting the polarization of our times. Ultimately, Primo and Milyo contend, American attitudes toward money in politics reflect larger fears about the health of American democracy, fears that will not be allayed by campaign finance reform.
 
[more]

front cover of Campaign Finance and Political Polarization
Campaign Finance and Political Polarization
When Purists Prevail
Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Efforts to reform the U.S. campaign finance system typically focus on the corrupting influence of large contributions. Yet, as Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner argue, reforms aimed at cutting the flow of money into politics have unintentionally favored candidates with extreme ideological agendas and, consequently, fostered political polarization.

Drawing on data from 50 states and the U.S. Congress over 20 years, La Raja and Schaffner reveal that current rules allow wealthy ideological groups and donors to dominate the financing of political campaigns. In order to attract funding, candidates take uncompromising positions on key issues and, if elected, take their partisan views into the legislature. As a remedy, the authors propose that additional campaign money be channeled through party organizations—rather than directly to candidates—because these organizations tend to be less ideological than the activists who now provide the lion’s share of money to political candidates. Shifting campaign finance to parties would ease polarization by reducing the influence of “purist” donors with their rigid policy stances.

La Raja and Schaffner conclude the book with policy recommendations for campaign finance in the United States. They are among the few non-libertarians who argue that less regulation, particularly for political parties, may in fact improve the democratic process.
[more]

front cover of Campaign Inc.
Campaign Inc.
How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White House
Henry F. De Sio., Jr.
University of Iowa Press, 2014
It takes more than an excellent candidate to win elections; it takes an outstanding campaign organization, too. Campaign Inc. is the story of how leadership and organization propelled Barack Obama to the White House. As the chief operating officer of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Henry F. De Sio, Jr., was positioned to view this historic campaign as few others could. In this fascinating behind-the-scenes account, he whisks readers into Obama’s national election headquarters in Chicago to glimpse the decision-making processes and myriad details critical to running a successful and innovative presidential campaign. From the campaign’s early chaos to the jubilation and drama of winning the Iowa caucus, to the drawn-out Democratic nomination process, to Obama’s eventual election as president of the United States, De Sio guides readers through the challenges faced by the Obama for America campaign in its brief twenty-one-month lifespan.

De Sio shows readers that Obama himself was direct about his vision for the campaign when he instructed his staff to “run it like a business.” Thus, this is less the story of Barack Obama, candidate, and more the story of Barack Obama, CEO. Because campaigns are launched from scratch during every election cycle, they are the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. In the course of the election, the Obama campaign scaled up from a scrappy start-up to a nearly $1 billion operation, becoming a hothouse environment on which the glare of the media spotlight was permanently trained.

Campaign Inc. allows readers to peek behind the curtain at the underdog organization that brought down the Clinton campaign and later went on to defeat the Republican machine, while offering lessons in leadership and organization to innovators, executives, and entrepreneurs.
[more]

front cover of Campaign Reform
Campaign Reform
Insights and Evidence
Larry M. Bartels and Lynn Vavreck, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
What is wrong with American political campaigns? How could the campaign process be improved? This volume brings the expertise of leading political scientists to the public debate about campaign reform. These scholars probe the reality behind the conventional wisdom that nasty, vacuous campaigns dominated by big money and cynical media coverage are perverting our political process and alienating our citizenry.
Some of their conclusions will be startling to campaigners and critics alike. For example, "attack" advertisements prove to be no more effective than self-promotional advertisements, but are more substantive. Indeed, candidates in their advertisements and speeches focus more on policy and less on strategy and process than any major news outlet, including the New York Times. The volume suggests that, as a result, prospective voters in 1996 knew more about the candidates' issue positions than in any presidential election in decades, yet turnout and public faith in the electoral process continued to decline.
For aspiring reformers, Bartels and his colleagues provide a bracing reality check. For students and scholars of electoral politics, political communication, and voting behavior, they provide an authoritative summary and interpretation of what we know about the nature and impact of political campaigns. The insights and evidence contained in this volume should be of interest to anyone concerned about the present state and future prospects of American electoral process.
Larry M. Bartels is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Lynn Vavreck is Assistant Professor of Government, Dartmouth College. Other contributors are Bruce Buchanan, Tami Buhr, Ann Crigler, John G. Geer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Marion Just, Daron R. Shaw, and John Zaller.
[more]

front cover of Campaigning for Hearts and Minds
Campaigning for Hearts and Minds
How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work
Ted Brader
University of Chicago Press, 2005
It is common knowledge that televised political ads are meant to appeal to voters' emotions, yet little is known about how or if these tactics actually work. Ted Brader's innovative book is the first scientific study to examine the effects that these emotional appeals in political advertising have on voter decision-making. 

At the heart of this book are ingenious experiments, conducted by Brader during an election, with truly eye-opening results that upset conventional wisdom. They show, for example, that simply changing the music or imagery of ads while retaining the same text provokes completely different responses. He reveals that politically informed citizens are more easily manipulated by emotional appeals than less-involved citizens and that positive "enthusiasm ads" are in fact more polarizing than negative "fear ads." Black-and-white video images are ten times more likely to signal an appeal to fear or anger than one of enthusiasm or pride, and the emotional appeal triumphs over the logical appeal in nearly three-quarters of all political ads.

Brader backs up these surprising findings with an unprecedented survey of emotional appeals in contemporary political campaigns. Politicians do set out to campaign for the hearts and minds of voters, and, for better or for worse, it is primarily through hearts that minds are won. Campaigning for Hearts and Minds will be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how American politics is influenced by advertising today.
[more]

front cover of Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies
Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies
Argentina in Comparative Perspective
Edited by Noam Lupu, Virginia Oliveros, and Luis Schiumerini
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Voting behavior is informed by the experience of advanced democracies, yet the electoral context in developing democracies is significantly different. Civil society is often weak, poverty and inequality high, political parties ephemeral and attachments to them weak, corruption rampant, and clientelism widespread. Voting decisions in developing democracies follow similar logics to those in advanced democracies in that voters base their choices on group affiliation, issue positions, valence considerations, and campaign persuasion. Yet developing democracies differ in the weight citizens assign to these considerations. Where few social identity groups are politically salient and partisan attachments are sparse, voters may place more weight on issue voting. Where issues are largely absent from political discourse, valence considerations and campaign effects play a larger role. Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies develops a theoretical framework to specify why voter behavior differs across contexts.
[more]

front cover of Can a City Be Sustainable? (State of the World)
Can a City Be Sustainable? (State of the World)
The Worldwatch Institute
Island Press, 2016
Cities are the world’s future. Today, more than half of the global population—3.7 billion people—are urban dwellers, and that number is expected to double by 2050. There is no question that cities are growing; the only debate is over how they will grow. Will we invest in the physical and social infrastructure necessary for livable, equitable, and sustainable cities? In the latest edition of State of the World, the flagship publication of the Worldwatch Institute, experts from around the globe examine the core principles of sustainable urbanism and profile cities that are putting them into practice.

State of the World first puts our current moment in context, tracing cities in the arc of human history. It also examines the basic structural elements of every city: materials and fuels; people and economics; and biodiversity. In part two, professionals working on some of the world’s most inventive urban sustainability projects share their first-hand experience. Success stories come from places as diverse as Ahmedabad, India; Freiburg, Germany; and Shanghai, China. In many cases, local people are acting to improve their cities, even when national efforts are stalled. Parts three and four examine cross-cutting issues that affect the success of all cities. Topics range from the nitty-gritty of handling waste and developing public transportation to civic participation and navigating dysfunctional government.

Throughout, readers discover the most pressing challenges facing communities and the most promising solutions currently being developed. The result is a snapshot of cities today and a vision for global urban sustainability tomorrow.    
[more]

front cover of Can a Liberal be a Chief? Can a Chief be a Liberal?
Can a Liberal be a Chief? Can a Chief be a Liberal?
Some Thoughts on an Unfinished Business of Colonialism
Olúfémi Táíwò
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2021
An argument against the idea of the indigenous chief as a liberal political figure.

Across Africa, it is not unusual for proponents of liberal democracy and modernization to make room for some aspects of indigenous culture, such as the use of a chief as a political figure. Yet for Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, no such accommodation should be made. Chiefs, he argues, in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging pamphlet, cannot be liberals—and liberals cannot be chiefs. If we fail to recognize this, we fail to acknowledge the metaphysical underpinnings of modern understandings of freedom and equality, as well as the ways in which African intellectuals can offer a distinctive take on the unfinished business of colonialism.
[more]

front cover of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?
Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?
American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century
Mary Drake McFeely
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001
In the rural America of the past, a woman's reputation was sometimes made by her cherry pie—or her chocolate layer cake, or her biscuits. As America modernized and as women left the home, entered the paid labor force, and battled their way to success in the professions, mastery of cooking remained an accepted sign that a woman took her gendered responsibilities seriously. Ironically, over the course of the twentieth century, as ready-made foods and kitchen appliances made home cooking less essential and labor-intensive, skill in the kitchen continued to be perceived not only by society but often by women themselves as a measure of a woman's true value.

This book shows how cooking developed and evolved during the twentieth century. From Fannie Farmer to Julia Child, new challenges arose to replace the old. Women found themselves still tied to the kitchen, but for different reasons and with the need to acquire new skills. Instead of simply providing sustenance for the family, they now had to master more complex cooking techniques, the knowledge of "ethnic" cuisines, the science of nutrition, the business of consumerism, and, perhaps most important of all, the art of keeping their husbands and children happy and healthy.
[more]

front cover of Can the Subaltern See?
Can the Subaltern See?
Photographs as History, Volume 84
Fernando Coronil , ed.
Duke University Press
In the words of guest editor Fernando Coronil, this special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review on photography contributes “an expanding discussion across disciplinary boundaries of the role of visuality in social life.” Helping to overcome the split between image and word in Western theory, the essays pinpoint the need to recognize the “play of all senses in the construction of reality.” Turning photos and collections of photos into historical documents, the four authors read images as texts to be analyzed in the context of their production and circulation.

Each essay looks at the role of a particular photographic genre in the making of modern Latin American identities. Articles cover the adaptation in late-nineteenth-century Oaxaca of European type photography as a tool of imperialist enterprise and science, state consolidation, and consumer culture; the use of portrait photography by the K’iche Mayans of Quetzaltenango; and the family album—made up of snapshots, postcards, and other memorabilia—as a historical document.

Contributors. Greg Grandin, Daniel James, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Deborah Poole


[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Canada at the Polls, 1984
A Study of the Federal General Elections
Howard R. Penniman, ed.
Duke University Press, 1988
This is the most recent in the At the Polls series, in which Duke University Press has joined with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research to publish studies on the electoral process as it functions throughout the world. Cited by Choice for its "high standards of scholarly analysis and objectivity," At the Polls provides both a chronicle of events and a thorough analysis of the elections results.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Canadian Military Intelligence
Operations and Evolution from the October Crisis to the War in Afghanistan
Georgetown University Press

The most comprehensive history of Canadian military intelligence and its influence on key military operations

Canadian intelligence has become increasingly central to the operations of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Canadian Military Intelligence: Operations and Evolution from the October Crisis to the War in Afghanistan is the first comprehensive history that examines the impact of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence on the Canadian military.

Drawing upon a wide range of original documents and interviews with participants in specific operations, author David A. Charters provides an inside perspective on the development of military intelligence since the Second World War. He shows how intelligence influenced key military operations, from domestic internal security to peacekeeping efforts to high-intensity air campaigns—including the October Crisis of 1970, the Oka Crisis, the Gulf War, peacekeeping and enforcement operations in the Balkans, and the war in Afghanistan. He describes how decades of experience, innovation, and increasingly close cooperation with its Five Eyes and NATO allies allowed Canada’s military intelligence to punch above its weight. Its tactical effectiveness and ability to overcome challenges reshaped the outlook of military commanders, and intelligence emerged from the margins to become a central feature of military and defense operations.

Canadian Military Intelligence offers lessons from the past and critical implications for future intelligence support with the creation of the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command. This book will be essential to both intelligence history and military history readers and collections.

[more]

front cover of Canarsie
Canarsie
The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism
Jonathan Rieder
Harvard University Press, 1985
What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in the mid-1980s? Why was the Republican Party able to steal away so many ethnic Democrats of modest means in recent presidential elections? Jonathan Rieder explores these questions in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing. Proud bootstrappers, the children of immigrants, Canarsians may speak with piquant New York accents, but their story has a more universal appeal. Canarsie is Middle America, Brooklyn-style.
[more]

front cover of Cancel Wars
Cancel Wars
How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy
Sigal R. Ben-Porath
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An even-handed exploration of the polarized state of campus politics that suggests ways for schools and universities to encourage discourse across difference. 

College campuses have become flashpoints of the current culture war and, consequently, much ink has been spilled over the relationship between universities and the cultivation or coddling of young American minds. Philosopher Sigal R. Ben-Porath takes head-on arguments that infantilize students who speak out against violent and racist discourse on campus or rehash interpretations of the First Amendment. Ben-Porath sets out to demonstrate the role of the university in American society and, specifically, how it can model free speech in ways that promote democratic ideals.

In Cancel Wars, she argues that the escalating struggles over “cancel culture,” “safe spaces,” and free speech on campus are a manifestation of broader democratic erosion in the United States. At the same time, she takes a nuanced approach to the legitimate claims of harm put forward by those who are targeted by hate speech. Ben-Porath’s focus on the boundaries of acceptable speech (and on the disproportional impact that hate speech has on marginalized groups) sheds light on the responsibility of institutions to respond to extreme speech in ways that proactively establish conversations across difference. Establishing these conversations has profound implications for political discourse beyond the boundaries of collegiate institutions. If we can draw on the truth, expertise, and reliable sources of information that are within the work of academic institutions, we might harness the shared construction of knowledge that takes place at schools, colleges, and universities against truth decay. Of interest to teachers and school leaders, this book shows that by expanding and disseminating knowledge, universities can help rekindle the civic trust that is necessary for revitalizing democracy.
 
[more]

front cover of Cancel Wars
Cancel Wars
How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy
Sigal R. Ben-Porath
University of Chicago Press, 2023
This is the audiobook version of this book.

An even-handed exploration of the polarized state of campus politics that suggests ways for schools and universities to encourage discourse across difference. 


College campuses have become flashpoints of the current culture war and, consequently, much ink has been spilled over the relationship between universities and the cultivation or coddling of young American minds. Philosopher Sigal R. Ben-Porath takes head-on arguments that infantilize students who speak out against violent and racist discourse on campus or rehash interpretations of the First Amendment. Ben-Porath sets out to demonstrate the role of the university in American society and, specifically, how it can model free speech in ways that promote democratic ideals.

In Cancel Wars, she argues that the escalating struggles over “cancel culture,” “safe spaces,” and free speech on campus are a manifestation of broader democratic erosion in the United States. At the same time, she takes a nuanced approach to the legitimate claims of harm put forward by those who are targeted by hate speech. Ben-Porath’s focus on the boundaries of acceptable speech (and on the disproportional impact that hate speech has on marginalized groups) sheds light on the responsibility of institutions to respond to extreme speech in ways that proactively establish conversations across difference. Establishing these conversations has profound implications for political discourse beyond the boundaries of collegiate institutions. If we can draw on the truth, expertise, and reliable sources of information that are within the work of academic institutions, we might harness the shared construction of knowledge that takes place at schools, colleges, and universities against truth decay. Of interest to teachers and school leaders, this book shows that by expanding and disseminating knowledge, universities can help rekindle the civic trust that is necessary for revitalizing democracy.
 
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism
From Crisis to Cure
John McMurtry
Pluto Press, 2013

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is a modern classic of critical philosophy and political economy, renowned for its depth and comprehensive research. It provides a step by step diagnosis of the continuing economic collapse in the US and Europe and has had an enormous influence on new visions of economic alternatives.

John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the ‘social immune response’ required to fight the ‘macro cancer’, something which has already been shown in developments such as the Occupy movement and the democratic social transformation of Latin America.

In an official global culture increasingly destructive of life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to life and nature.

[more]

front cover of Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy
Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy
Linda L. Fowler
University of Michigan Press, 1993

In Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy Linda L. Fowler provides a wide-ranging examination of candidacy as a source of both stability and change in U.S. politics. An expert on political candidates, she brings a novel perspective to the topic by emphasizing that candidates are necessary instruments for popular control of government.

Fowler maintains that the ambitions of individual candidates are essential to the functioning of the nation's constitutional system and are important factors in its political history. She traces the influence of candidates in fostering electoral competition, promoting the representation of such newly mobilized groups of citizens as women and ethnic minorities, and transforming political institutions and parties. Despite the importance of candidacy, the institution is poorly understood because both scholars and voters tend to limit their focus on candidates to the narrow context of election campaigns. The author argues that a broader view reveals how candidates are linked to a variety of trends and contradictions in contemporary U.S. politics.

[more]

front cover of Cannon Mills and Kannapolis
Cannon Mills and Kannapolis
Persistent Paternalism in a Textile Town
Timothy W. Vanderburg
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Cannon Mills was once the country’s largest manufacturer of household textiles, and in many ways it exemplified the textile industry and paternalism in the postbellum South. At the same time, however, its particular brand of paternalism was much stronger and more enduring than elsewhere, and it remained in place long after most of the industry had transitioned to modern, bureaucratic management.
     In Cannon Mills and Kannapolis, Tim Vanderburg critically examines the rise of the Cannon Mills textile company and the North Carolina community that grew up around it. Beginning with the founding of the company and the establishment of its mill town by James W. Cannon, the author draws on a wealth of primary sources to show how, under Cannon’s paternalism, workers developed a collective identity and for generations accepted the limits this paternalism placed on their freedom. After exploring the growth and maturation of Cannon Mills against the backdrop of World War I and its aftermath, Vanderburg examines the impact of the Great Depression and World War II and then analyzes the postwar market forces that, along with federal policies and unionization, set in motion the industry’s shift from a paternalistic model to bureaucratic authority. The final section of the book traces the decline of paternalism and the eventual decline of Cannon Mills when the death of the founder’s son, Charles Cannon, led to three successive sales of the company. Pillowtex, its final owner, filed for bankruptcy and was liquidated in 2003.
    Vanderburg uses Cannon Mills’s intriguing history to help answer some of the larger questions involving industry and paternalism in the postbellum South. Complete with maps and historic photographs, this authoritative, highly readable account of one company and the town it created adds a captivating layer of complexity to our understanding of southern capitalism.
[more]

front cover of Can't Pay, Won't Pay
Can't Pay, Won't Pay
The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax
Simon Hannah
Pluto Press, 2020
Thirty years ago, a social movement helped bring down one of the most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century. For the 30th anniversary of the Poll Tax rebellion, Simon Hannah looks back on those tumultuous days of resistance, telling the story of the people that beat the bailiffs, rioted for their rights and defied a government.

Starting in Scotland where the 'Community Charge' was first trialled, Can't Pay, Won't Pay immerses the reader in the gritty history of the rebellion. Amidst the drama of large scale protests and blockaded estates a number of key figures and groups emerge: Neil Kinnock and Tommy Sheridan; Militant, Class War and the Metropolitan Police. 

Assessing this legacy today, Hannah demonstrates the centrality of the Poll Tax resistance as a key chapter in the history of British popular uprisings, Labour Party factionalism, the anti-socialist agenda and failed Tory ideology.
[more]

front cover of Cantankerous Essays
Cantankerous Essays
Musings of a Disillusioned Japanophile
Ronald Dore
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Prompted by increasing evidence of the world’s shift to the right, not least among the industrialised nations, here is a cri de coeur from almost the last survivor from the post-war crop of European sociologists and scholars of Japanese Studies. After six decades following developments in Japanese society, economy and culture and as a well-known ‘leftie’ – he describes the evolution of his cognitive and evaluative/emotional perceptions of Japan, and explains why he can no longer be described as a Japanophile. To which are added essays on more general issues of the day, such as events in the Ukraine, Iran and Israel. The key words are indeed ‘cantankerous’ (because he is greatly exercised by the ‘conspiracies of silence’ embedded in the culture of modern political and public life); ‘musings’ (because this is not so much a single-focus monograph, rather a collection of spontaneous, but deeply-considered reflections on matters of the moment) and ‘disillusioned’ (both by Japan’s reversion to chauvinistic nationalism, and because, as a youth, he hoped for and expected an enhancement of the role of reason in international affairs.) This will be of special interest to all who know or have accessed the author’s vast literary output relating to Japan; but it also has considerably wider relevance among those who are in any way connected with contemporary society, politics and economics and wish to confront the ‘conspiracy of silence’ within our interdependent world.
[more]

front cover of The Capacity Contract
The Capacity Contract
Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship
Stacy Clifford Simplican
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today.

Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma.
Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.

[more]

front cover of Capital and Ideology
Capital and Ideology
Thomas Piketty
Harvard University Press, 2020

A New York Times Bestseller
An NPR Best Book of the Year


The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.

Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.

[more]

front cover of Capital Choices
Capital Choices
Sectoral Politics and the Variation of Sovereign Wealth
Juergen Braunstein
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Sovereign wealth funds are state-controlled pools of capital that hold financial and real assets, including shares of state enterprises, and manage them to grow the nation’s base of sovereign wealth. The dramatic rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in both number and size—this group is now larger than the size of global private equity and hedge funds, combined—and the fact that most are located in non-OECD countries, has raised concern about the direction of capitalism. Yet SWFs are not a homogenous group of actors. Why do some countries with large current account surpluses, notably China, create SWFs while others, such as Switzerland and Germany, do not? Why do other countries with no macroeconomic justification, such as Senegal and Turkey, create SWFs? And why do countries with similar macroeconomic features, such as Kuwait and Qatar or Singapore and Hong Kong, choose different types of SWFs?

Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.

[more]

front cover of Capital Choices
Capital Choices
Sectoral Politics and the Variation of Sovereign Wealth
Juergen Braunstein
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Sovereign wealth funds are state-controlled pools of capital that hold financial and real assets, including shares of state enterprises, and manage them to grow the nation’s base of sovereign wealth. The dramatic rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in both number and size—this group is now larger than the size of global private equity and hedge funds, combined—and the fact that most are located in non-OECD countries, has raised concern about the direction of capitalism. Yet SWFs are not a homogenous group of actors. Why do some countries with large current account surpluses, notably China, create SWFs while others, such as Switzerland and Germany, do not? Why do other countries with no macroeconomic justification, such as Senegal and Turkey, create SWFs? And why do countries with similar macroeconomic features, such as Kuwait and Qatar or Singapore and Hong Kong, choose different types of SWFs?

Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.

[more]

front cover of Capital Development
Capital Development
Mandate Era Amman and the Construction of the Hashemite State (1921–1946)
Harrison B. Guthorn
Gingko, 2021
The history of the city of Amman under the British mandate government of Transjordan.

Amman, the capital of Jordan, contends with a crisis of identity rooted in how it grew to become a symbol for the Anglo-Hashemite government first, and a city second. As a representation of the new centralized authority, Amman became the seat of the Mandatory government that orchestrated the development of Transjordan, the British mandate established in 1921.
 
Despite its diminutive size, the city grew to house all the components necessary for a thriving and cohesive state by the end of the British mandate in 1946. However, in spite of its modernizing and regulatory ambitions, the Transjordan government did not control all facets of life in the region. Instead, the story of Transjordan is one of tensions between the state and the realities of the region, and these limitations forced the government to scale down its aspirations. This book presents the history of Amman’s development under the rule of the British mandate from 1921–46 and illustrates how the growth of the Anglo-Hashemite state imbued the city with physical, political, and symbolic significance.
 
[more]

front cover of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
Harvard University Press, 2014

A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award


What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

[more]

front cover of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
Harvard University Press, 2014

A New York Times #1 Bestseller
An Amazon #1 Bestseller
A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Sunday Times Bestseller
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
Winner of the British Academy Medal
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award


“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.”
—Paul Krugman, New York Times

“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.”
The Economist

“Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.”
—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

“Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

“A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”
—John Cassidy, New Yorker

“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.”
—Timothy Shenk, The Nation

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Capital, Interrupted
Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India
Vinay Gidwani
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide.

With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies’ critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation.

Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism.

Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.

[more]

front cover of Capital of the American Century
Capital of the American Century
The National and International Influence of New York City
Martin Shefter
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
Capital of the American Century investigates the remarkable influence that New York City has exercised over the economy, politics, and culture of the nation throughout much of the twentieth century. New York's power base of corporations, banks, law firms, labor unions, artists and intellectuals has played a critical role in shaping areas as varied as American popular culture, the nation's political doctrines, and the international capitalist economy. If the city has lost its unique prominence in recent decades, the decline has been largely—and ironically—a result of the successful dispersion of its cosmopolitan values. The original essays in Capital of the American Century offer objective and intriguing analyses of New York City as a source of innovation in many domains of American life. Postwar liberalism and modernism were advanced by a Jewish and WASP coalition centered in New York's charitable foundations, communications media, and political organizations, while Wall Street lawyers and bankers played a central role in fashioning national security policies. New York's preeminence as a cultural capital was embodied in literary and social criticism by the "New York intellectuals," in the fine arts by the school of Abstract Expressionism, and in popular culture by Broadway musicals. American business was dominated by New York, where the nation's major banks and financial markets and its largest corporations were headquartered. In exploring New York's influence, the contributors also assess the larger social and economic conditions that made it possible for a single city to exert such power. New York's decline in recent decades stems not only from its own fiscal crisis, but also from the increased diffusion of industrial, cultural, and political hubs throughout the nation. Yet the city has taken on vital new roles that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, reflect an increasingly global era: it is the center of U.S. foreign trade and the international art market: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have emerged as international newspapers; and the city retains a crucial influence in information-intensive sectors such as corporate law, accounting, management consulting, and advertising. Capital of the American Century provides a fresh link between the study of cities and the analysis of national and international affairs. It is a book that enriches our historical sense of contemporary urban issues and our understanding of modern culture, economy, and politics.
[more]

front cover of Capital Rules
Capital Rules
The Construction of Global Finance
Rawi Abdelal
Harvard University Press, 2007

Listen to a short interview with Rawi AbdelalHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy.

In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s--trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies--had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier.

How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, "managed" globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today.

[more]

front cover of Capital, the State, and War
Capital, the State, and War
Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years' Crisis, 1914-1945
Alexander Anievas
University of Michigan Press, 2014

The history of the modern social sciences can be seen as a series of attempts to confront the challenges of social disorder and revolution wrought by the international expansion of capitalist social relations. In Capital, the State, and War, Alexander Anievas focuses on one particularly significant aspect of this story: the inter-societal or geo-social origins of the two world wars, and, more broadly, the confluence of factors behind the Thirty Years’ Crisis between 1914 and 1945.

Anievas presents the Thirty Years’ Crisis as a result of the development of global capitalism with all its destabilizing social and geopolitical consequences, particularly the intertwined and co-constitutive nature of imperial rivalries, social revolutions, and anti-colonial struggles. Building on the theory of “uneven and combined development,” he unites geopolitical and sociological explanations into a single framework, thereby circumventing the analytical stalemate between “primacy of domestic politics” and “primacy of foreign policy” approaches.

Anievas opens new avenues for thinking about the relations among security-military interests, the making of foreign policy, political economy and, more generally, the origins of war and the nature of modern international order.

[more]

front cover of The Capital Times
The Capital Times
A Proudly Radical Newspaper’s Century Long Fight for Justice and for Peace
John Nichols
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017

As Madison’s Capital Times marks its 100th anniversary in 2017, editors Dave Zweifel and John Nichols recall the remarkable history of a newspaper that served as the tribune of Robert M. La Follette and the progressive movement, earned the praise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for its stalwart opposition to fascism, battled Joe McCarthy during the "Red Scare," championed civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights, opposed the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq, and stood with Russ Feingold when he cast the only US Senate vote against the Patriot Act. The Capital Times did not do this from New York or Washington but from the middle of America, with a readership of farmers, factory workers, teachers, and shopkeepers who stood by The Cap Times when the newspaper was boycotted, investigated, and attacked for its determination.

At a point when journalism is under assault, when newspapers struggle to survive, and "old media" struggles to find its way in a digital age, The Capital Times remains unbowed—still living up to the description Lord Francis Williams, the British newspaper editor, wrote 50 years ago: "The vast majority of American papers are as dull as weed-covered ditch-water; vast Saharas of cheap advertising with occasional oases of editorial matter written to bring happiness to the Chamber of Commerce and pain and irritation to none; the bland leading the bland.… Just here and there are a few relics of the old fighting muckraking tradition of American journalism, like The Capital Times of Madison."

[more]

front cover of Capital without Borders
Capital without Borders
Wealth Managers and the One Percent
Brooke Harrington
Harvard University Press, 2020

“A timely account of how the 1% holds on to their wealth…Ought to keep wealth managers awake at night.”
Wall Street Journal

“Harrington advises governments seeking to address inequality to focus not only on the rich but also on the professionals who help them game the system.”
—Richard Cooper, Foreign Affairs

“An insight unlike any other into how wealth management works.”
—Felix Martin, New Statesman

“One of those rare books where you just have to stand back in awe and wonder at the author’s achievement…Harrington offers profound insights into the world of the professional people who dedicate their lives to meeting the perceived needs of the world’s ultra-wealthy.”
Times Higher Education

How do the ultra-rich keep getting richer, despite taxes on income, capital gains, property, and inheritance? Capital without Borders tackles this tantalizing question through a groundbreaking multi-year investigation of the men and women who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world’s richest people. Brooke Harrington followed the money to the eighteen most popular tax havens in the world, interviewing wealth managers to understand how they help their high-net-worth clients dodge taxes, creditors, and disgruntled heirs—all while staying just within the letter of the law. She even trained to become a wealth manager herself in her quest to penetrate the fascinating, shadowy world of the guardians of the one percent.

[more]

front cover of Capitalism, Alone
Capitalism, Alone
The Future of the System That Rules the World
Branko Milanovic
Harvard University Press, 2019

An Economist Book of the Year
A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
A Prospect Best Book of the Year
A ProMarket Book of the Year
An Omidyar Network “8 Storytellers Informing How We’ve been Reimagining Capitalism” Selection


“Brilliant…Poses all the important questions about our future.”
—Gordon Brown

“A scholar of inequality warns that while capitalism may have seen off rival economic systems, the survival of liberal democracies is anything but assured.”
The Economist

We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the world is dominated by one economic system. At some level capitalism has triumphed because it works: it delivers prosperity and gratifies our desire for autonomy. But this comes at a moral price, pushing us to treat material success as the ultimate goal, and offers no guarantee of stability. While Western liberal capitalism creaks under the strains of inequality and excess, some are flaunting the virtues of political capitalism, exemplified by China, which may be more efficient, but is also vulnerable to corruption and social unrest.

One of the outstanding economists of his generation, Branko Milanovic mines the data to tell his ambitious and compelling story. Capitalism gets a lot wrong, he argues, but also much right—and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Our task is to improve it in the hopes that a more equitable capitalism can take hold.

“Erudite, illuminating…Engaging to read…As a virtuoso economist, Milanovic is superb when he is compiling and assessing data.”
—Robert Kuttner, New York Review of Books

“Leaves little doubt that the social contract no longer holds. Whether you live in Beijing or New York, the time for renegotiation is approaching.”
—Edward Luce, Financial Times

[more]

front cover of Capitalism and Christianity, American Style
Capitalism and Christianity, American Style
William E. Connolly
Duke University Press, 2008
Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality.

Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.

[more]

front cover of Capitalism and Freedom
Capitalism and Freedom
Milton Friedman
University of Chicago Press, 2020
One of TIME magazine’s All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books
One of Times Literary Supplement’s 100 Most Influential Books Since the War
One of National Review’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century
​One of Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 50 Best Books of the 20th Century


How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of an immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.

First published in 1962, Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom is one of the most significant works of economic theory ever written. Enduring in its eminence and esteem, it has sold nearly a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and continues to inform economic thinking and policymaking around the world. This new edition includes prefaces written by Friedman for both the 1982 and 2002 reissues of the book, as well as a new foreword by Binyamin Appelbaum, lead economics writer for the New York Times editorial board.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Capitalism and Its Economics
A Critical History
Douglas Dowd
Pluto Press, 2004

logo for Pluto Press
Capitalism and the Dialectic
The Uno-Sekine Approach to Marxian Political Economy
John R. Bell
Pluto Press, 2009

From the 1960s to the 1990s the ground-breaking Japanese economists Kozo Uno and Thomas Sekine developed a masterful reconfiguration of Marxist economics. The most well-known aspect of which is the levels of analysis approach to the study of capitalism.

Written in Japanese, the Uno-Sekine approach to Marx's work is little understood in West. John Bell seeks to correct this, explaining how problematic elements of Marxian Political Economy such as the law of value and the law of relative surplus population can be solved by using a more rigorous dialectical analysis.

Bell's clear and accessible synthesis provides economists with the tools to interrogate capitalism in a more powerful way than ever before.

[more]

front cover of Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France
Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France
William H. Sewell Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2021
There is little doubt that the French Revolution of 1789 changed the course of Western history. But why did the idea of civic equality—a distinctive signature of that revolution—find such fertile ground in France? How might changing economic and social realities have affected political opinions?
 
William H. Sewell Jr. argues that the flourishing of commercial capitalism in eighteenth-century France introduced a new independence, flexibility, and anonymity to French social life. By entering the interstices of this otherwise rigidly hierarchical society, expanded commodity exchange colored everyday experience in ways that made civic equality thinkable, possible, even desirable, when the crisis of the French Revolution arrived. Sewell ties together masterful analyses of a multitude of interrelated topics: the rise of commerce, the emergence of urban publics, the careers of the philosophes, commercial publishing, patronage, political economy, trade, and state finance. Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France offers an original interpretation of one of history’s pivotal moments.
[more]

front cover of Capitalism as Religion? A Study of Paul Tillich's Interpretation of Modernity
Capitalism as Religion? A Study of Paul Tillich's Interpretation of Modernity
Francis Ching-Wah Yip
Harvard University Press, 2010

The relationship between religion and modern culture remains a controversial issue within Christian theology. This book focuses on Paul Tillich's interpretation of modern culture and the influence of capitalism, highlighting the context of his work in relation to Karl Marx and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. When Tillich moved to the United States he sharpened his focus on the cultural dimensions of capitalism. Using the concept of "cultural modernity," Francis Ching-Wah Yip reconstructs Tillich's interpretation of modernity with the key categories of autonomy, self-sufficient finitude, technical reason, objectification, and dehumanization, and shows that Tillich's notion of theonomy served to underscore the problems of modernity and to develop a response.

The final section of the book relates Tillich's theology to contemporary theological interpretations of global capitalism and modernity. Yip appeals to the work of Jürgen Moltmann to argue that one should go beyond Tillich's analysis by placing much more emphasis on the material-economic basis of culture and by moving away from the Eurocentric viewpoint to a more global perspective. Finally, he draws on Émile Durkheim to show the quasi-religious dimension of capitalism as a global civil religion and as the culture of modern society.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology
Departing from Marx
Timothy W. Luke
University of Illinois Press, 1999
The world that was revolutionized by industrialization is being remade by the information revolution. But this is mostly a revolution from above, increasingly shaped by a new class of technocrats, experts, and professionals in the service of corporate capitalism.

Using Marx as a touchstone, Timothy W. Luke warns that if communities are not to be overwhelmed by new class economic and political agendas, then the practice of democracy must be reconstituted on a more populist basis. However, the galvanizing force for this new, more community-centered populism will not be the proletariat, as Marx predicted, nor contemporary militant patriotic groups. Rather, Luke argues that many groups unified by a concern for ecological justice present the strongest potential opposition to capitalism.

Wide-ranging and lucid, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology is essential reading in the age of information.

[more]

front cover of Capitalism in the 21st Century
Capitalism in the 21st Century
Through the Prism of Value
Michael Roberts
Pluto Press, 2022
A sweeping, authoritative, and accessible overview of major issues in the global economy from a Marxist perspective.

Contemporary capitalism is always evolving. From digital technologies to cryptocurrencies, current trends in political economy are much discussed, but often little understood. So where can we turn for clarity? As Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi argue, new trends don't necessarily call for a new theory.

In Capitalism in the 21st Century, the authors show how Marx's law of value explains numerous issues in our modern world. In both advanced economies and the periphery, value theory provides a piercing analytical framework through which we can approach topics as varied as labor, profitability, technology, the environment, the role of China, imperialism, and the state.

An ambitious work that will appeal to both heterodox economists and labor movement activists alike, as it demonstrates the ongoing contemporary relevance of Marxist theory to current trends in political economy.
[more]

front cover of Capitalism, Not Globalism
Capitalism, Not Globalism
Capital Mobility, Central Bank Independence, and the Political Control of the Economy
William Roberts Clark
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Capitalism, Not Globalism shows that, while much has been made of recent changes in the international economy, the mechanisms by which politicians control the economy have not changed throughout the postwar period. Challenging both traditional and revisionist globalization theorists, William Roberts Clark argues that increased financial integration has led to neither a widening nor a narrowing of partisan differences in macroeconomic polices or outcomes. Rather, he shows that the absence of partisan differences in macroeconomic policy is a long-standing feature of democratic capitalist societies that can be traced to politicians' attempts to use the economy to help them survive in office.
Changes in the structural landscape such as increased capital mobility and central bank independence do not necessarily diminish the ability of politicians to control the economy, but they do shape the strategies they use to do so. In a world of highly mobile capital, politicians manipulate monetary policy to create macroeconomic expansions prior to elections only if the exchange rate is flexible and the central bank is subservient. But they use fiscal policy to induce political business cycles when the exchange rate is fixed or the central bank is independent.
William Roberts Clark is Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, New York University.
[more]

front cover of Capitalism Reconnected
Capitalism Reconnected
Toward a Sustainable, Inclusive and Innovative Market Economy in Europe
Jan Peter Balkenende
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Capitalism has gone astray. Today we face ecological exhaustion, persistent inequality, financialization, stress on communities, short-termism, and new power concentrations. An avalanche of new economic thinking and a reorientation of European values show the way toward a different economy. A new perspective is necessary if we want to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and if we consider our planet as ‘Our Common Home,’ for present and future generations. This book argues that European economies should be the initiators of a global transition toward a sustainable and inclusive world economy. Together, amid severe geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges, they need to develop their own perspective on what a good economy really is, in distinction to Chinese state capitalism and American big business capitalism. Crucially, this requires the rediscovery of key European values, a coherent view on responsible capitalism, and a new self-awareness as a global player for the Common Good in today’s and tomorrow’s world.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Capitalist Development and Democracy
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens
University of Chicago Press, 1992
It is a commonplace claim of Western political discourse that capitalist development and democracy go hand in hand. Cross-national statistical research on political democracy supports this claim. By contrast, comparative historical studies carried out within a political economy approach argue that economic development was and is compatible with multiple political forms.

The authors offer a fresh and persuasive resolution to the controversy arising out of these contrasting traditions. Focusing on advanced industrial countries, Latin America, and the Caribbean, they find that the rise and persistence of democracy cannot be explained either by an overall structural correspondence between capitalism and democracy or by the role of the bourgeoisie as the agent of democratic reform. Rather, capitalist development is associated with democracy because it transforms the class structure, enlarging the working and middle classes, facilitating their self-organization, and thus making it more difficult for elites to exclude them. Simultaneously, development weakens the landed upper class, democracy's most consistent opponent.

The relationship of capitalist development to democracy, however, is not mechanical. As the authors show, it depends on a complex interplay of three clusters of power: the balance of power among social classes, power relations between the state and society, and transnational structures of economic and political power. Looking to the future, the book concludes with some reflections on current prospects for the development of stable democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
[more]

front cover of Capitalizing on Crisis
Capitalizing on Crisis
The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance
Greta R. Krippner
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the context of the recent financial crisis, the extent to which the U.S. economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In Capitalizing on Crisis, Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation.

Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state’s attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979.

Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.

[more]

front cover of Capitol Investments
Capitol Investments
The Marketability of Political Skills
Glenn R. Parker
University of Michigan Press, 2011

“Who would spend millions for a job that pays $250k? Parker’s answer will surprise you. Required reading for Congress jocks.”
—Michael C. Munger, Duke University

“A unique and interesting approach to the study of legislators and legislative institutions.”
—David Brady, Stanford University

What would you do if, the very day you were hired, you knew you could be unemployed in as little as two years? You’d seek opportunities in your current job to develop a portfolio of skills and contacts in order to make yourself more attractive to future employers. Representatives and senators think about their jobs in Congress in precisely this way, according to Glenn R. Parker.

While in office, members of Congress plan not merely for the next election but for the next stage of their careers. By networking, serving on committees, and championing particular legislation, they deliberately accumulate human capital—expertise, networks, and reputation—which later gives them advantages on the job market. Parker’s study of the postelective careers of more than 200 former members of Congress who left office during the last half century shows that, in most cases, the human capital these politicians amassed while in office increased their occupational mobility and earning power.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Captive Revolution
Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System
Nahla Abdo
Pluto Press, 2014

Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are few books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance.

Nahla Abdo's Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on stories of the women themselves, as well as her own experiences as a former political prisoner, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse their anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their appalling treatment as political detainees.

Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of female political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the 'Nakba' have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.

[more]

front cover of Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings
Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings
Michel De Certeau
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

front cover of Captured Peace
Captured Peace
Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador
Christine J. Wade
Ohio University Press, 2015

El Salvador is widely considered one of the most successful United Nations peacebuilding efforts, but record homicide rates, political polarization, socioeconomic exclusion, and corruption have diminished the quality of peace for many of its citizens. In Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador, Christine J. Wade adapts the concept of elite capture to expand on the idea of “captured peace,” explaining how local elites commandeered political, social, and economic affairs before war’s end and then used the peace accords to deepen their control in these spheres.

While much scholarship has focused on the role of gangs in Salvadoran unrest, Wade draws on an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how day-to-day violence is inextricable from the economic and political dimensions. In this in-depth analysis of postwar politics in El Salvador, she highlights the local actors’ primary role in peacebuilding and demonstrates the political advantage an incumbent party—in this case, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA—has throughout the peace process and the consequences of this to the quality of peace that results.

[more]

front cover of Capturing Campaign Effects
Capturing Campaign Effects
Henry E. Brady and Richard Johnston, eds.
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Capturing Campaign Effects is the definitive study to date of the influence of campaigns on political culture. Comprising a broad exploration of campaign factors (debates, news coverage, advertising, and polls) and their effects (priming, learning, and persuasion), as well as an impressive survey of techniques for the collection and analysis of campaign data, Capturing Campaign Effects examines different kinds of campaigns in the U.S. and abroad and presents strong evidence for significant campaign effects.

"Capturing Campaign Effects is an accessible and penetrating account of modern scholarship on electoral politics. It draws critical insights from a range of innovative analyses."
--Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan

"What a wonderful way to usher in the new era of election studies! This book spotlights fascinating paradoxes in the literature of voting behavior, highlights many promising approaches to resolving those paradoxes, and shows how these strategies can yield important findings with terrific payoffs for our understanding of contemporary democracy. Fasten your seatbelts, folks: scholarship on elections is about to speed up thanks to this collection of great essays."
--Jon Krosnick, Stanford University

"The past decade has seen a renewed interest in understanding campaign effects. How and when do voters learn? Does the election campaign even matter at all? Capturing Campaign Effects draws on leading political scientists to address these matters. The result is a collection that will become the major reference for the study of campaigns. The lesson that emerges is that campaigns do affect voter decision making, usually for the better."
--Robert S. Erikson, Columbia University

Henry E. Brady is Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, and Director of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Richard Johnston is Professor and Head of Political Science and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.
[more]

front cover of Capturing the German Eye
Capturing the German Eye
American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany
Cora Sol Goldstein
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Shedding new light on the American campaign to democratize Western Germany after World War II, Capturing the German Eye uncovers the importance of cultural policy and visual propaganda to the U.S. occupation.

        Cora Sol Goldstein skillfully evokes Germany’s political climate between 1945 and 1949, adding an unexpected dimension to the confrontation between the United States and the USSR. During this period, the American occupiers actively vied with their Soviet counterparts for control of Germany’s visual culture, deploying film, photography, and the fine arts while censoring images that contradicted their political messages. Goldstein reveals how this U.S. cultural policy in Germany was shaped by three major factors: competition with the USSR, fear of alienating German citizens, and American domestic politics. Explaining how the Americans used images to discredit the Nazis and, later, the Communists, she illuminates the instrumental role of visual culture in the struggle to capture German hearts and minds at the advent of the cold war.

[more]

front cover of The Carbon Calculation
The Carbon Calculation
Global Climate Policy, Forests, and Transnational Governance in Brazil and Mozambique
Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro
University of Arizona Press, 2023
The Carbon Calculation examines how climate science, the policy world, and neoliberalism have mutually informed each other to define the problem of climate change as one of “market failure”—precluding alternatives to market-based solutions.

Focusing on REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), the book demonstrates how industrialized countries are able to maintain their socioeconomic models largely unaltered while claiming to address global warming using forests in the Global South to offset their pollution. By examining the creation and implementation of REDD+ historically and ethnographically, the book traces the social life of this mechanism as it travels across a complex network spanning several interacting levels: international, national, and local. Through cases in the Brazilian state of Acre and the Zambézia province in Mozambique, the author demonstrates how global climate policy has created new opportunities and rationales for unprecedented levels of intervention in the Global South—all under the guise of saving the planet.

The Carbon Calculation critically highlights the ways in which politics has reinforced a scientific focus on one possible solution to the problem of climate change—namely those that largely absolve the industrialized world from undertaking politically painful transformations in its own economic model.
[more]

front cover of Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes
Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes
Ronald C. Kramer
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.
[more]

front cover of Carbon Sovereignty
Carbon Sovereignty
Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation
Andrew Curley
University of Arizona Press, 2023
For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.

This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change. The rise and fall of coal magnify the nuance and complexity of change. Historical and contemporary issues intermingle in everyday life with lasting consequences.
 
[more]

front cover of Carbon Technocracy
Carbon Technocracy
Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
Victor Seow
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.

Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
[more]

front cover of Carbon Technocracy
Carbon Technocracy
Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
Victor Seow
University of Chicago Press, 2021

Audiobook edition

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.


The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.

Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.

[more]

front cover of Carceral Afterlives
Carceral Afterlives
Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda
Katherine Bruce-Lockhart
Ohio University Press, 2022
Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal detention spaces known as “safe houses” and wartime camps—and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and “disappearance” by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda’s postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state’s violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement—both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment—remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison’s expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison’s transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison’s enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.
[more]

front cover of Carceral Humanitarianism
Carceral Humanitarianism
Logics of Refugee Detention
Kelly Oliver
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Coopted by military operations, humanitarianism has never been neutral. Rather than welcoming refugees, host countries assess the relative risks of taking them in versus turning them away, using a risk-benefit analysis that often reduces refugees to collateral damage in proxy wars fought in the war on terrorism. Carceral Humanitarianism testifies that humanitarian aid and human rights discourse are always political and partisan.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. 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.

[more]

front cover of Care Activism
Care Activism
Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care
Ethel Tungohan
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society’s legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Career Diplomacy
Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service
Harry W. Kopp and Charles A. Gillespie
Georgetown University Press, 2008

The U.S. Foreign Service is sometimes derided, often underappreciated, occasionally praised, rarely examined, and almost never understood. And yet whether America's diplomacy succeeds or fails depends to a large extent on its foreign service professionals. Career Diplomacy is an insider's guide that examines the foreign service as an institution, a profession, and a career.

Harry W. Kopp and Charles A. Gillespie, both of whom had long and distinguished careers in the foreign service, provide a full and well-rounded picture of the organization, its place in history, its strengths and weaknesses, and its role in American foreign affairs. Based on their own experiences and through interviews with over 85 current and former foreign service officials, the authors lay out what to expect in a foreign service career, from the entrance exam through midcareer and into the senior service—how to get in, get around, and get ahead.

The book concludes with a stirring chapter on tomorrow's diplomats and the future of the foreign service as an institution. Readers will benefit from several appendices, which include a Department of State organization chart, core precepts of the foreign service, and internet resources.

Career Diplomacy reveals what America's professional diplomats do and how they do it. It is a rare, first-hand look in to the life and work of this country's professional diplomats, who advance and protect U.S. national security interests around the globe.

[more]

front cover of Career Diplomacy
Career Diplomacy
Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service, Second Edition
Harry W. Kopp and Charles A. Gillespie
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Career Diplomacy—now in its second edition—is an insider's guide that examines the foreign service as an institution, a profession, and a career. Harry W. Kopp and Charles A. Gillespie, both of whom had long and distinguished careers in the foreign service, provide a full and well-rounded picture of the organization, its place in history, its strengths and weaknesses, and its role in American foreign affairs. Based on their own experiences and through interviews with over 100 current and former foreign service officers and specialists, the authors lay out what to expect in a foreign service career, from the entrance exam through midcareer and into the senior service—how the service works on paper, and in practice.

The second edition addresses major changes that have occurred since 2007: the controversial effort to build an expeditionary foreign service to lead the work of stabilization and reconstruction in fragile states; deepening cooperation with the U.S. military and the changing role of the service in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ongoing surge in foreign service recruitment and hiring at the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development; and the growing integration of USAID’s budget and mission with those of the Department of State.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Career Diplomacy
Life and Work in the US Foreign Service, Third Edition
Harry W. Kopp and John K. Naland
Georgetown University Press

Career Diplomacy is an insider's guide to the Foreign Service as an institution, a profession, and a career.  In this thoroughly revised third edition, Kopp and Naland provide an up-to-date, authoritative, and candid account of the life and work of professional US diplomats, who advance and protect this country’s national security interests around the globe. The authors explore the five career tracks—consular, political, economic, management, and public diplomacy—through their own experience and through interviews with more than a hundred current and former members of the Foreign Service. They lay out what to expect in a Foreign Service career, from the entrance exam through midcareer and into the senior service—how to get in, get around, and get ahead.

New in the third edition: • A discussion of the relationship of the Foreign Service and the Department of State to other agencies, and to the combatant commands • An expanded analysis of hiring procedures• Commentary on challenging management issues in the Department of State, including the proliferation of political appointments in high-level positions and the difficulties of running an agency with employees in two personnel systems (Civil Service and Foreign Service) • A fresh examination of the changing nature and demographics of the Foreign Service

[more]

front cover of Careers in City Politics
Careers in City Politics
The Case for Urban Democracy
Timothy Bledsoe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
Careers in City Politics provides an in-depth view of the vital aspects of local politics-access to political office, individual office holder's accountability to the public, the performance of councils as collective political bodies, and the often high turnover of personnel.

Timothy Bledsoe bases his findings on the political careers of more than eight-hundred city council members representing cities with large and medium populations. Tracing how some officials' careers unfolded over five years, Bledsoe studies their reasons for seeking office and examines how successful they were in adapting to their jobs. He evaluates office-holders whose council careers were cut short and those whose lengthy service qualified them as “careerists,” paying special attention to first-term officials and to those who used their seats as stepping-stones to higher political offices. In this first-of-its-kind study, Bledsoe offers specific recommendations for restoring some of the lost vigor to local politics.
[more]

front cover of Careers in International Affairs
Careers in International Affairs
Ninth Edition
Laura E. Cressey, Barrett J. Helmer, and Jennifer E. Steffensen, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2014

This is the essential resource and job-hunting guide for all those interested in international careers in the US government, multinational corporations, banks, consulting companies, international and nongovernmental organizations, the media, think tanks, universities, and more. Careers in International Affairs, now in its ninth edition, provides up-to-date insights about the range of possibilities in the global workplace and tips on how to get these jobs—along with profiles of hundreds of important employers.

This helpful guide includes a directory of more than 250 organizations who offer internationally oriented jobs such as the US Department of State, CIA, United Nations, World Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Google, McKinsey & Company, and dozens more. The book also includes insightful testimonies about what these careers are really like from both junior and senior professionals in these fields. Careers in International Affairs gives advice on academic paths that will prepare students for demanding international careers and guidance on how to write resumes, interview for jobs, network, and maintain their online profile.

Published in cooperation with the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, the oldest school of international affairs in the United States, Careers in International Affairs will encourage job seekers to consider their goals and talents, widen their horizons to consider new possibilities, and help them realize that their future can hold several careers, while reminding all that it is never too early—or too late—to consider the realm of opportunities that await them throughout the world.

[more]

logo for Rutgers University Press
Caribbean Inhospitality
The Poetics of Strangers at Home
Natalie Lauren Belisle
Rutgers University Press, 2025
The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation/state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.
[more]

front cover of Caribbean Migrations
Caribbean Migrations
The Legacies of Colonialism
Anke Birkenmaier
Rutgers University Press, 2021
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

With mass migration changing the configuration of societies worldwide, we can look to the Caribbean to reflect on the long-standing, entangled relations between countries and areas as uneven in size and influence as the United States, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. More so than other world regions, the Caribbean has been characterized as an always already colonial region. It has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres in the new world, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation over the last five centuries. In Caribbean Migrations, an interdisciplinary group of humanities and social science scholars study migration from a long-term perspective, analyzing the Caribbean's "unincorporated subjects" from a legal, historical, and cultural standpoint, and exploring how despite often fractured public spheres, Caribbean intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age.
[more]

front cover of Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader
Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader
Volume I: The Years 1914-1960
By John W. F. Dulles
University of Texas Press, 1991

Playwright, journalist, and spectacularly successful governor, Carlos Lacerda was Brazil's foremost orator in the 20th century and its most controversial politician. He might have become president in the 1960s had not the military taken over. In the words of eminent historian José Honório Rodrigues, "No one person influenced the Brazilian historical process as much as Carlos Lacerda from 1945 to 1968."

In this volume, the first of a two-volume biography, Professor Dulles paints a portrait of a rebellious youth, who had the willfulness of his prominent father and who crusaded for Communism before becoming its most outspoken foe. Recalling Lacerda's rallying cry, "Brazil must be shaken up," Dulles traces the career of the journalist whose unsparing attacks on the men in power led authorities to imprison him and employ thugs who pummeled him physically. The story covers events in which Lacerda helped alter Brazil, such as the redemocratization in 1945 and his revelation of scandals in high places in the early 1950s. An unsuccessful attempt by government men to murder him in 1954 led to the suicide of President Getulio Vargas in 1954.

Lacerda's spirited oratory helped him become Brazil's most popular congressman, but it scared the rulers of Brazil and they prohibited the broadcast of his speeches after he returned from exile in 1956. Their effort to deprive him of his mandate stirred the entire nation and culminated in one of the most dramatic sessions ever held in the Chamber of Deputies.

Dulles, who knew Lacerda well and had access to his papers, sheds light on Lacerda the man, ardent in courtship and in all his undertakings, intellectually restless, and scornful of routine and mediocrity. Lacerda had a vitriolic pen that made bitter enemies, but, as disclosed in these pages, his courage and incorruptibility attracted an enthusiastic following, evident in the landslide election victories that brought him seats on Rio de Janeiro's city council and in the federal Congress.

[more]

front cover of Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader
Carlos Lacerda, Brazilian Crusader
Volume II: The Years 1960-1977
By John W. F. Dulles
University of Texas Press, 1991

From reviews of Volume I:

"Brazilian Crusader is no doubt the best biography yet produced on Lacerda and the second volume . . . is certainly worth waiting for."

Luso-Brazilian Review

Journalist and spectacularly successful governor, Carlos Lacerda was Brazil's foremost orator in the 20th century and its most controversial politician. He might have become president in the 1960s had not the military taken over.

In the first volume, John F. W. Dulles paints a portrait of a rebellious youth, who had the willfulness of his prominent father and who crusaded for Communism before becoming its most outspoken foe. Recalling Lacerda's rallying cry, "Brazil must be shaken up," Dulles traces the career of the journalist whose unsparing attacks on the men in power led authorities to imprison him and employ thugs who pummeled him physically. Lacerda's spirited oratory helped him become Brazil's most popular congressman, but it scared the rulers of Brazil, who prohibited the broadcast of his speeches after he returned from exile in 1956. Their effort to deprive him of his mandate stirred the entire nation and culminated in one of the most dramatic sessions ever held in the Chamber of Deputies.

In the second and final volume, Dulles explores the political and private life of Lacerda from 1960, when he became governor of Brazil's Guanabara state, until his death in 1977. Dulles focuses particularly on the years 1960 to 1968, in which Lacerda played a central role in some of the most drastic political changes that Brazil has experienced in this century.

Lacerda's story ranges from the headlines constantly generated by his political attacks and journalistic sensationalism to private moments of personal tragedy. In telling his story, Dulles draws on hundreds of interviews, as well as extensive research in press archives, Lacerda's public papers, and the private collections of Lacerda's family and associates. This material paints a compelling portrait of an honest administrator who alienated top figures in politics, the press, and the military.

[more]

front cover of The Carrot or the Stick for School Desegregation Policy
The Carrot or the Stick for School Desegregation Policy
Magnet Schools or Forced Busing
Christine H. Rossell
Temple University Press, 1991
"An in-depth, carefully researched analysis.... The book is particularly useful for public policymakers, school administrators, and faculty and for graduate students in educational policy studies." --Choice This is the first study comparing the long-term effectiveness of voluntary desegregation plans with magnet programs to mandatory reassignment plans. In a survey of school personnel and parents in 119 school districts, Christine H. Rossell finds that the voluntary plans with incentives (magnets) ultimately produce more interracial exposure than the mandatory plans. Her conclusion contradicts three decades of research that judged mandatory reassignment plans more effective than voluntary plans in desegregating schools. Rossell examines the evolution of school desegregation and addresses a number of issues with regard to public policy. She questions how to measure the effectiveness of school desegregation remedies, suggesting interracial exposure as a criterion because it reflects the white flight that threatens to minimize the effects of such programs. She analyzes the characteristics of magnet schools that are attractive to white and black parents and the effect of magnet schools on the quality of education. The magnet plans studied here are qualitatively different from the old freedom-of-choice plans implemented in the South and majority-to-minority plans implemented in the North in the 1950s and 1960s. Rossell compares this public choice model of policy-making with previous mandatory efforts and examines court decisions that indicate a growing belief in the effectiveness of voluntary compliance for achieving school desegregation. "A significant achievement.... Assembling the most comprehensive data base and the most persuasive analysis to date on relative effectiveness of voluntary versus mandatory desegregation plans, Rossell concludes not only that mandatory desegregation techniques cause long-term white flight, but also that the white loss is large enough to render 'mandatory magnet' plans less effective than 'voluntary magnet' plans." --Contemporary Sociology "A very well-written analysis of...a topic of major policy significance...to policy researchers, educational policy-makers, lawyers and judges, sociologists, and members of the sophisticated public involved in school desegregation matters." --Jeffrey A. Raffel, University of Delaware
[more]

front cover of Carter's Conversion
Carter's Conversion
The Hardening of American Defense Policy
Brian J. Auten
University of Missouri Press, 2008
When presidential candidate Jimmy Carter advocated defense budget cuts, he did so not only to save money but also with the hope of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons. Three yearslater, when President Carter announced his support of full-scale development of the MX missile and modernization of NATO’s Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force, it marked a dramatic policy shift for his administration.
In light of Carter’s cost-cutting in the first year of his administration, previous observers have attributed Carter’s subsequent shift either to the “shocks of 1979”—the Soviet Union’s move into Afghanistan and the seizure of power by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran—or to domestic political pressure, such as interest group activity, executive-legislative bargaining, or interbureaucratic conflict. Brian Auten now argues that these explanations only partially explain this midterm policy change.
In Carter’s Conversion, Auten reveals how strategic ideas and studies, allied relations, and arms control negotiations each worked to deflect Carter’s initial defense stance away from the policy path suggested by the prevailing international military environment. He also shows how the administration’s MX and Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force decisions subsequently hardened following significant adjustments to these three variables.
Employing the approach to international relations known as neoclassical realism, Auten demonstrates that Carter reassessed his strategic thinking and revised his policy stance accordingly. Integrating declassified documents, interviews, and private archives with a mountain of secondary sources, he provides a historical analysis of defense policy transformation over the first three years of the Carter administration and a detailed examination of how Carter and his national security team addressed challenges posed by the expansion of Soviet military power.
Full of rich history and cogent analysis, Carter’s Conversion presents a wealth of detailed arguments about how Carter adjusted his policy outlook, couched in a thorough understanding of weapons, arms control dynamics, and defense policy-making. As a revision ofcommon interpretations, it provides both an example of self-correcting policy change and a realist argument about the end of superpower détente and the start of the “Second Cold War.”
[more]

front cover of Cartographies of Danger
Cartographies of Danger
Mapping Hazards in America
Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago Press, 1997
No place is perfectly safe, but some places are more dangerous than others. Whether we live on a floodplain or in "Tornado Alley," near a nuclear facility or in a neighborhood poorly lit at night, we all co-exist uneasily with natural and man-made hazards. As Mark Monmonier shows in this entertaining and immensely informative book, maps can tell us a lot about where we can anticipate certain hazards, but they can also be dangerously misleading.

California, for example, takes earthquakes seriously, with a comprehensive program of seismic mapping, whereas Washington has been comparatively lax about earthquakes in Puget Sound. But as the Northridge earthquake in January 1994 demonstrated all too clearly to Californians, even reliable seismic-hazard maps can deceive anyone who misinterprets "known fault-lines" as the only places vulnerable to earthquakes.

Important as it is to predict and prepare for catastrophic natural hazards, more subtle and persistent phenomena such as pollution and crime also pose serious dangers that we have to cope with on a daily basis. Hazard-zone maps highlight these more insidious hazards and raise awareness about them among planners, local officials, and the public.

With the help of many maps illustrating examples from all corners of the United States, Monmonier demonstrates how hazard mapping reflects not just scientific understanding of hazards but also perceptions of risk and how risk can be reduced. Whether you live on a faultline or a coastline, near a toxic waste dump or an EMF-generating power line, you ignore this book's plain-language advice on geographic hazards and how to avoid them at your own peril.

"No one should buy a home, rent an apartment, or even drink the local water without having read this fascinating cartographic alert on the dangers that lurk in our everyday lives. . . . Who has not asked where it is safe to live? Cartographies of Danger provides the answer."—H. J. de Blij, NBC News

"Even if you're not interested in maps, you're almost certainly interested in hazards. And this book is one of the best places I've seen to learn about them in a highly entertaining and informative fashion."—John Casti, New Scientist

[more]

front cover of Cartography and the Political Imagination
Cartography and the Political Imagination
Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya
Julie MacArthur
Ohio University Press, 2016

After four decades of British rule in colonial Kenya, a previously unknown ethnic name—“Luyia”—appeared on the official census in 1948. The emergence of the Luyia represents a clear case of ethnic “invention.” At the same time, current restrictive theories privileging ethnic homogeneity fail to explain this defiantly diverse ethnic project, which now comprises the second-largest ethnic group in Kenya.

In Cartography and the Political Imagination, which encompasses social history, geography, and political science, Julie MacArthur unpacks Luyia origins. In so doing, she calls for a shift to understanding geographic imagination and mapping not only as means of enforcing imperial power and constraining colonized populations, but as tools for articulating new political communities and dissent. Through cartography, Luyia ethnic patriots crafted an identity for themselves characterized by plurality, mobility, and cosmopolitan belonging.

While other historians have focused on the official maps of imperial surveyors, MacArthur scrutinizes the ways African communities adopted and adapted mapping strategies to their own ongoing creative projects. This book marks an important reassessment of current theories of ethnogenesis, investigates the geographic imaginations of African communities, and challenges contemporary readings of community and conflict in Africa.

[more]

front cover of The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, Revised Edition
The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, Revised Edition
Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein
Island Press, 2022
When The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change was first published in 2014, it offered something entirely new: a fun, illustrated guide to a planetary crisis. If that sounds like an oxymoron, you’ve never seen the carbon cycle demonstrated through yoga poses or a polar bear explaining evolution to her cubs.
 
That creativity comes from the minds of Yoram Bauman, the world’s first and only “stand-up economist,” and award-winning illustrator Grady Klein. After seeing their book used in classrooms and the halls of Congress alike, the pair has teamed up again to fully update the guide with the latest scientific data from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
 
A lot has happened to the climate over the last decade, and the authors tackle the daunting statistics with their trademark humor. They realize it’s better to laugh than cry when confronting mind-blowing facts about our changing world. Readers will become familiar with critical concepts, but they’ll also smile as they learn about climate science, projections, and policy.
 
Sociologists have argued that we don’t address climate change because it’s too big and frightening to get our heads around. The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change takes the intimidation and gloom out of one of the most important challenges of our time.


 
[more]

front cover of Carving Out the Commons
Carving Out the Commons
Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.
Amanda Huron
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

An investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities

Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them. 

In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life. 

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Carving Up the Globe
An Atlas of Diplomacy
Malise Ruthven
Harvard University Press, 2018

Where do you draw the line? In the context of geopolitics, much hinges on the answer to that question. For thousands of years, it has been the work of diplomats to draw the lines in ways that were most advantageous to their leaders, fellow citizens, and sometimes themselves. Carving Up the Globe offers vivid documentation of their handiwork. With hundreds of full-color maps and other images, this atlas illustrates treaties that have determined the political fates of millions. In rich detail, it chronicles everything from ancient Egyptian and Hittite accords to the first Sino-Tibetan peace in 783 CE, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, and the 2014 Minsk Protocol looming over the war in Ukraine.

But there is more here than shifting territorial frontiers. Throughout history, diplomats have also drawn boundaries around valuable resources and used treaties to empower, liberate, and constrain. Carving Up the Globe encompasses these agreements, too, across land, sea, and air. Missile and nuclear pacts, environmental treaties, chemical weapons conventions, and economic deals are all carefully rendered.

Led by Malise Ruthven, a team of experts provides lively historical commentary, which—together with finely crafted visuals—conjures the ceaseless ambition of princes and politicians. Whether they sought the glory and riches of empire or pursued hegemony, security, stability, and GDP within the modern international system, their efforts culminated in lines on a map—and the enormous real-life consequences those lines represent and enforce.

[more]

front cover of Cas Walker
Cas Walker
Stories on His Life and Legend
Joshua S. Hodge
University of Tennessee Press, 2019

Businessman, politician, broadcasting personality, and newspaper publisher, Cas Walker (1902–1998) was, by his own estimation, a “living legend” in Knoxville for much of the twentieth century. Renowned for his gravelly voice and country-boy persona, he rose from blue-collar beginnings to make a fortune as a grocer whose chain of supermarkets extended from East Tennessee into Virginia and Kentucky. To promote his stores, he hosted a local variety show, first on radio and then TV, that advanced the careers of many famed country music artists from a young Dolly Parton to Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, and Bill Monroe. As a member of the Knoxville city council, he championed the “little man” while ceaselessly irritating the people he called the “silk-stocking crowd.” 

This wonderfully entertaining book brings together selections from interviews with a score of Knoxvillians, various newspaper accounts, Walker’s own autobiography, and other sources to present a colorful mosaic of Walker’s life. The stories range from his flamboyant advertising schemes—as when he buried a man alive outside one of his stores—to memories of his inimitable managerial style—as when he infamously canned the Everly Brothers because he didn’t like it when they began performing rock ’n’ roll. Further recollections call to mind Walker’s peculiar brand of bare-knuckle politics, his generosity to people in need, his stance on civil rights, and his lifelong love of coon hunting (and coon dogs). The book also traces his decline, hastened in part by a successful libel suit brought against his muckraking weekly newspaper, the Watchdog. 

It’s said that any Knoxvillian born before 1980 has a Cas Walker story. In relating many of those stories in the voices of those who still remember him, this book not only offers an engaging portrait of the man himself and his checkered legacy, but also opens a new window into the history and culture of the city in which he lived and thrived. 

[more]

front cover of The Case against Perfection
The Case against Perfection
Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering
Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2007

“Sandel explores a paramount question of our era: how to extend the power and promise of biomedical science to overcome debility without compromising our humanity. His arguments are acute and penetrating, melding sound logic with compassion.”
—Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think


Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature?

The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda.

In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.

[more]

front cover of The Case for a Carbon Tax
The Case for a Carbon Tax
Getting Past Our Hang-ups to Effective Climate Policy
Shi-Ling Hsu
Island Press, 2012
There's a simple, straightforward way to cut carbon emissions and prevent the most disastrous effects of climate change-and we're rejecting it because of irrational political fears. That's the central argument of The Case for a Carbon Tax, a clear-eyed, sophisticated analysis of climate change policy.
 
Shi-Ling Hsu examines the four major approaches to curbing CO2: cap-and-trade; command and control regulation; government subsidies of alternative energy; and carbon taxes. Weighing the economic, social, administrative, and political merits of each, he demonstrates why a tax is currently the most effective policy. Hsu does not claim that a tax is the perfect or only solution-but that unlike the alternatives, it can be implemented immediately and paired effectively with other approaches.
 
In fact, the only real barrier is psychological. While politicians can present subsidies and cap-and-trade as "win-win" solutions, the costs of a tax are immediately apparent. Hsu deftly explores the social and political factors that prevent us from embracing this commonsense approach. And he shows why we must get past our hang-ups if we are to avert a global crisis.
[more]

front cover of The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era
The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era
Michael C. Alexander
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Much of the modern world's knowledge of criminal court trials in the Late Roman Republic derives from the orations of Cicero. His eleven court trial speeches have provided information about the trials and the practices of the time period. Records of the prosecution's case are lost; these speeches, our only transcripts of the time, were delivered by the defense. The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era attempts to restore the judicial balance by depicting the lost side of the trial.
Guided by Cicero's argument, Michael C. Alexander recreates the prosecution's case against the defendants in the trials.
Organized into eleven chapters, each detailing one trial, the core of the work discusses the different dimensions of each trial, the circumstances surrounding the cases, those involved, the legal charges and allegations made by the prosecution, the ways in which the prosecution might have countered Cicero's rebuttal and the outcome. There is also a discussion concerning particular problems the prosecution may have faced in preparing for the trial. This book reveals strong points in favor of the prosecution; justifies the hope of the prosecutor, a private citizen who had volunteered to undertake the case; and asks why the prosecutors believed they would come out victorious, and why they eventually failed.
The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era draws on ancient rhetorical theory and on Roman law to shed light on these events. It will interest historians and classicists interested in Ciceronian oratory and those intrigued by legal history.
Michael C. Alexander is Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois, Chicago.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Case Selection in the United States Supreme Court
Doris Marie Provine
University of Chicago Press, 1980
For decades the Supreme Court has received more requests for review than it can possibly grant; it now rejects more than ninety percent of the petitions which fulfill jurisdictional requirements. Consequently, the process by which the justices select cases must be recognized as one of the most important aspects of the Court's work. But because it is hidden from public view and proceeds by secret ballot, the case-selection process has never been thoroughly analyzed.

This concise and accessible study provides an intimate view of the Court's case-selection process through an analysis of the docket books and other papers of Justice Harold H. Burton, who kept scrupulous records of the Court's work from 1945 to 1957. In her analysis of these invaluable records—the only records of case-selection votes made public since the advent of discretionary review in 1925—Provine provides two perspectives on the problematic issue of judicial motivation in case selection. The first perspective is an institutional one in which the Court is treated as the unit of analysis: the second is personal, in which differences among decision makers are the focus of analysis. Provine suggests that judicial role perceptions go far to explain both agreement and disagreement in case selection. She also considers the impact of the process upon litigants, since the system seems to favor petitioners with litigation expertise, especially the U.S. government. Yet, she claims, the secrecy of case selection fosters the popular misperception that any worthwhile case can be appealed "all the way to the Supreme Court." The Court thus maintains its image as a forum equally available to all litigants.
[more]

front cover of Cases in Public Policy Analysis
Cases in Public Policy Analysis
Third Edition
George M. Guess and Paul G. Farnham
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Combining the insights of an economist and a political scientist, this new third edition of Cases in Public Policy Analysis offers real world cases to provide students with the institutional and political dimensions of policy problems as well as easily understood principles and methods for analyzing public policies.

Guess and Farnham clearly explain such basic tools as problem-identification, forecasting alternatives, cost-effectiveness analysis, and cost-benefit analysis and show how to apply these tools to specific cases. The new edition offers a revised framework for policy analysis, practical guidelines for institutional assessment, and five new action-forcing cases. Up-to-date materials involving complex policy issues, such as education reform, cigarette smoking regulation, air pollution control, public transit capital planning, HIV/AIDS prevention strategies, and prison overcrowding are also included.

Bridging the gap between methods and their application in real life, Cases in Public Policy Analysis will be of interest to professors involved with upper-division and graduate-level policy courses, as well as an excellent sourcebook in applied policy training for government practitioners and consultants.

[more]

front cover of Cash, Clothes, and Construction
Cash, Clothes, and Construction
Rethinking Value in Bolivia's Pluri-economy
Kate Maclean
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A groundbreaking feminist perspective on Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) rule in Bolivia and the country’s radical transformation under Evo Morales
 

The presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–2019) has produced considerable academic scholarship, much of it focused on indigenous social movements or extractivism, and often triumphalist about the successes of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Turning a new lens on the movement, Cash, Clothes, and Construction presents the first gender-based analysis of “pluri-economy,” a central pillar of Bolivia’s program under Morales, evaluating the potential of this vision of “an economy where all economies fit” to embrace feminist critiques of capitalism and economic diversity. 

 

Based on more than twelve years of empirical research exploring the remarkable transformations in Bolivia since 2006, this book focuses on three sectors—finance, clothing, and construction—in which indigenous women have defied gendered expectations. Kate Maclean presents detailed case studies of women selling secondhand high street clothes from the United States in the vast, peri-urban markets of Bolivian cities; Aymaran designers of new pollera (traditional Andean dress) fashions, one of whom exhibited her collection in New York City; and the powerful and rich chola paceña, whose real estate investments have transformed the cultural maps of La Paz and El Alto. 

 

Cash, Clothes, and Construction offers a gendered analysis of the mission of MAS to dismantle neoliberalism and decolonize politics and economy from the perspective of the Indigenous women who have radically transformed Bolivia’s economy from the ground up.

[more]

front cover of Cast in Deathless Bronze
Cast in Deathless Bronze
Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire
Donald Tunnicliff Rice
West Virginia University Press, 2016
In 1898, when war with Spain seemed inevitable, Andrew Summers Rowan, an American army lieutenant from West Virginia, was sent on a secret mission to Cuba. He was to meet with General Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban rebels, in order to gather information for a U.S. invasion. Months later, after the war was fought and won, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Elbert Hubbard wrote an account of Rowan’s mission titled “A Message to García.” It sold millions of copies, and Rowan became the equivalent of a modern-day rock star. His fame resulted in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, radio shows, and two movies. Even today he is held up as an exemplar of bravery and loyalty. The problem is that nothing Hubbard wrote about Rowan was true.
 
Donald Tunnicliff Rice reveals the facts behind the story of “A Message to García” while using Rowan’s biography as a window into the history of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, and the Moro Rebellion. The result is a compellingly written narrative containing many details never before published in any form, and also an accessible perspective on American diplomatic and military history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter