During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre—and the decade-long controversy that followed—to set the record straight.
After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators—some of them Jewish émigrés—had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors’ orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution’s true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957.
The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS’s brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war’s most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.
George H. Ryan, Illinois governor from 1999 to 2003, became nationally known for two significant and very different reasons. The first governor in the United States to clear out his state’s death row and put a moratorium on the death penalty, he was also convicted and sent to prison on corruption charges. The Man Who Emptied Death Row: Governor George Ryan and the Politics of Crime details the career of a man who both enhanced and tarnished the image of the highest office in Illinois and examines the political history and culture that shaped him.
Author James L. Merriner explores the two very different stories of George Ryan: the brave crusader against the death penalty and the petty crook. An extensive analysis of the official record, exclusive interviews, and previously undisclosed incidents in Ryan’s career expose why the governor pardoned or commuted the sentences of all 171 prisoners on Illinois’s death row before leaving office and how he later was convicted of eighteen counts of official corruption.
This biography traces Ryan’s family history and the Illinois political climate that influenced his development as a politician. Although Ryan championed “good-government” initiatives—organ donations, tougher drunken-driving and lobbyist disclosure laws—he never overcame a reputation as a wheeler-dealer, notes Merriner.
Merriner goes beyond Ryan’s life and career to explore the politics of crime, highlighting the successes and failures of the criminal justice system and suggesting how both white-collar fraud and violent crime shape politics. A fascinating story that reveals much about the way Illinois politics works, The Man Who Emptied Death Row will help determine how history will judge Illinois governor George Ryan.
As millions of Americans are aware, health care costs continue to increase rapidly. Much of this increase is due to the development of new life-sustaining drugs and procedures, but part of it is due to the increased monopoly power of physicians, insurance companies, and hospitals, as the health care sector undergoes reorganization and consolidation. There are two tools to limit the growth of monopoly power: government regulation and antitrust policy. In this timely book, Deborah Haas-Wilson argues that enforcement of the antitrust laws is the tool of choice in most cases.
The antitrust laws, when wisely enforced, permit markets to work competitively and therefore efficiently. Competitive markets foster low prices and high quality. Applying antitrust tools wisely, however, is a tricky business, and Haas-Wilson carefully explains how it can be done. Focusing on the economic concepts necessary to the enforcement of the antitrust laws in health care markets, Haas-Wilson provides a useful roadmap for guiding the future of these markets.
Through interviews conducted with nonprofit agency managers in the New York City metropolitan area, Susan Bernstein vividly describes their experiences with "contracting out," the principal way that the "reluctant" American welfare state has of providing public services through the private sector. The agency administrators look upon this as a nightmarish game and their stories illuminate how welfare state mechanisms work in practice as well as the tangled nature of bureaucracies Bernstein illustrates and analyzes these administrators’ strategies for managing the administrative, ethical, and political issues of contracted services. Managing Contracted Services is one of the first books to examine how administrators manage contracted services in a bureaucratic and political environment.
Centers for hazard studies have only recently examined the interrelated aspects of disastrous events and recognized the interaction between natural hazards and human systems. As society attempts to acquire the information and develop the skills to reduce the risks and damage from disaster, an increasingly professional public service is reconsidering its strategies and policy direction. Managing Disaster addresses this problem and the need for a new approach to teaching this subject at the university level. Twenty-three professionals and scholars in public policy and administration—rom universities, government, and the private sector—examine the basic issues confronting managers and public agencies in the face of disaster.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, generated a great deal of discussion in public policy and disaster management circles about the importance of increasing national resilience to rebound from catastrophic events. Since the majority of physical and virtual networks that the United States relies upon are owned and operated by the private sector, a consensus has emerged that public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a crucial aspect of an effective resilience strategy. Significant barriers to cooperation persist, however, despite acknowledgment that public–private collaboration for managing disasters would be mutually beneficial.
Managing Disasters through Public–Private Partnerships constitutes the first in-depth exploration of PPPs as tools of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and resilience in the United States. The author assesses the viability of PPPs at the federal level and explains why attempts to develop these partnerships have largely fallen short. The book assesses the recent history and current state of PPPs in the United States, with particular emphasis on the lessons of 9/11 and Katrina, and discusses two of the most significant PPPs in US history, the Federal Reserve System and the War Industries Board from World War I. The author develops two original frameworks to compare different kinds of PPPs and analyzes the critical factors that make them successes or failures, pointing toward ways to improve collaboration in the future.
This book should be of interest to researchers and students in public policy, public administration, disaster management, infrastructure protection, and security; practitioners who work on public–private partnerships; and corporate as well as government emergency management professionals and specialists.
Communities across the country are turning to the concept of "growth management" to help plan for the future, as they seek to control the location, impact, character and timing of development in order to balance environmental and economic needs and concerns. Managing Growth in America's Communities presents practical information about proven strategies, programs and techniques of growth management for urban and rural communities. Topics examined include:
Managing Growth in America's Communities is essential reading for community development specialists including government officials, planners, environmentalists, designers, developers, business people, and concerned citizens seeking innovative and feasible ways to manage growth.
Macroeconomic policy involves government action intended to influence the overall operation of the economy and to deal with such important public problems as economic growth, inflation, unemployment, and recession. In this first comprehensive treatment of presidential management of such policy for any presidency, authors James E. Anderson and Jared E. Hazleton focus on four tasks: developing and maintaining an information and decision-making system; coordination of policies in different macroeconomic areas; building support or consent for presidential policies; and administrative leadership. Drawing extensively upon presidential documents and interviews with Johnson administration officials, the authors pay particular attention to fiscal, monetary, wage-price, and international economic (especially balance of payments) policies during Johnson’s terms.
The authors use the concept of the subpresidency, as defined by Redford and Blisset in Organizing the Executive Branch: The Johnson Presidency (University of Chicago Press, 1981), to show how Johnson managed the macro-economic institutions of the council of Economic Advisors, the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget), the Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board in pursuit of his economic goals. What emerges is a vivid portrait of an activist president.
In evaluating management of macroeconomic policy in the Johnson administration, the authors focus on how presidential policies are developed and adopted rather than on the substance of the policies themselves. They conclude that the Johnson administration competently managed policy development during its presidential years.
This book is a volume in the Administrative History of the Johnson Presidency Series sponsored by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, the first two volumes of which were published by the University of Chicago Press. Managing Macroeconomic Policy: The Johnson Presidency was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Eisenhower administration’s intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath. This book uses the concept of “counterrevolution” to trace the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to restore U.S. hegemony in a nation whose reform governments had antagonized U.S. economic interests and the local elite.
Comparing the Guatemalan case to U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutions in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile reveals that Washington’s efforts to roll back “communism” in Latin America and elsewhere during the Cold War represented in reality a short-term strategy to protect core American interests from the rising tide of Third World nationalism.
In Managing the Environmental Crisis William R. Mangun and Daniel H. Henning provide a balanced and comprehensive guide to the management of complex environmental and natural resource policy issues. Taking into account new developments, trends, and issues that have arisen in recent years, the authors begin with the recognition, often overlooked, that it is not the environment that needs to be managed but human action relating to the environment.
The authors review issues associated with a range of environmental policy concerns, including energy considerations, renewable and non renewable resource management, pollution control, wilderness management, and urban and regional policy. The history of these issues, recent actions pertaining to their management, difficulties associated with their continued presence, and the consequences of a failure to address these concerns are explored. Though focused on specific political issues, Mangun and Henning direct their attention to two large-scale trends—globalization and the political polarization of the environmental movement. At the level of the decision-making process, the incorporation of values—specifically addressed from multicultural and cross-disciplinary perspectives—is also discussed. International in scope, the book provides descriptions of the roles of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the formulations and implementation of national and global environmental policy.
This thoroughly revised second edition discusses various successes in the arenas of environmental cooperation and management strategy while pointing to the new challenges that have emerged in the last decade.
Managing the Fiscal Metropolis: The Financial Policies, Practices, and Health of Suburban Municipalities is an important book. This first comprehensive analysis of the financial condition, management, and policy making of local governments in a metropolitan region offers local governments currently dealing with the Great Recession a better understanding of what affects them financially and how to operate with less revenue.
Hendrick’s groundbreaking study covers 264 Chicago suburban municipalities from the late 1990s to the present. In it she identifies and describes the primary factors and events that affect municipal financial decisions and financial conditions, explores the strategies these governments use to manage financial conditions and solve financial problems, and looks at the impact of contextual factors and stresses on government financial decisions. Managing the Fiscal Metropolis offers new evidence about the role of contextual factors— including other local governments—in the financial condition of municipalities and how municipal financial decisions and practices alter these effects. The wide economic and social diversity of the municipalities studied make its findings relevant on a national scale.
Arguing that too many studies focus on president's personalities, and not their relationships with advisers and the machinery of the office, Campbell describes the institutional development of the presidency and assesses the Carter and Regan administrations within a historical context. Interviews with senior members of the White House staff and other high-ranking officials add color and depth to his study.
Tourism is by many measures the world's largest and fastest growing industry, and it provides myriad benefits to hosts and visitors alike. Yet if poorly managed, tourism can have serious negative impacts on tourist communities-their environment, physical appearance, economy, health, safety, and even their social values.
Managing Tourism Growth analyzes and evaluates methods by which communities can carefully control tourism in order to maximize the positive aspects while minimizing the detrimental effects. The authors offer vivid examples of the ways in which uncontrolled tourism can adversely affect a community, and explain how to create an effective strategy that can protect tourism resources for current and future generations.
Specific chapters provide detailed descriptions and evaluations of various approaches that communities around the world have successfully used. The authors examine alternative legal and regulatory measures, management techniques, and incentives that target tourism growth at all levels, from the quality of development, to its amount and rate of growth, to the locations in which it takes place. Approaches examined include: quality differentiation, performance standards, and trade-off strategies; preservation rules, growth limitations, and incremental growth strategies; expansion, dispersal, and concentration strategies, and identification of new tourism resources. The final chapter presents a concise and useful checklist of the elements of successful strategies that can help guide destination communities in the planning process.
An outstanding feature of the book is the numerous and varied case studies it offers, including Santa Fe, New Mexico; Milford Sound, New Zealand; Nusa Dua, Bali; Great Barrier Reef, Australia; Sanibel, Florida; Canterbury, England; Republic of Maldives; Bruges, Belgium; Times Square, New York; Papua New Guinea; Park City, Utah; Whistler, British Columbia; and many others.
The depth and accessibility of information provided, along with the wealth of global case studies, make the book must-reading for planning professionals, government officials, tourism industry executives, consultants, and faculty and students of geography, planning, or tourism.
The real work of many governments is done not in stately domed capitols but by a network of federal and state officials working with local governments and nongovernmental organizations to address issues that cross governmental boundaries. Managing within Networks analyzes the structure, operations, and achievements of these public management networks that are trying to solve intractable problems at the field level.
It examines such areas as transportation, economic and rural development, communications systems and data management, water conservation, wastewater management, watershed conservation, and services for persons with developmental disabilities. Robert Agranoff draws a number of innovative conclusions about what these networks do and how they do it from data compiled on fourteen public management networks in Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Ohio.
Agranoff identifies four different types of networks based on their purposes and observes the differences between network management and traditional management structures and leadership. He notes how knowledge is managed and value added within intergovernmental networks. This volume is useful for students, scholars, and practitioners of public management.
Most research on two-party elections has considered the outcome as a single, dichotomous event: either one or the other party wins. In this groundbreaking book, James Fowler and Oleg Smirnov investigate not just who wins, but by how much, and they marshal compelling evidence that mandates-in the form of margin of victory-matter. Using theoretical models, computer simulation, carefully designed experiments, and empirical data, the authors show that after an election the policy positions of both parties move in the direction preferred by the winning party-and they move even more if the victory is large. In addition, Fowler and Smirnov not only show that the divergence between the policy positions of the parties is greatest when the previous election was close, but also that policy positions are further influenced by electoral volatility and ideological polarization.
This pioneering book will be of particular interest to political scientists, game theoreticians, and other scholars who study voting behavior and its short-term and long-range effects on public policy.
Inspired by one of Nelson Mandela’s recurring nightmares, Mandela’s Dark Years offers a political reading of dream-life. Sharon Sliwinski guides the reader through the psychology of apartheid, recasting dreaming as a vital form of resistance to political violence, away from a rational binary of thinking.
This short, provocative study blends political theory with clinical psychoanalysis, opening up a new space to consider the politics of reverie.
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.
Before this book first appeared in 1963, most historians wrote as if the continental expansion of the United States were inevitable. “What is most impressive,” Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris declared in 1956, “is the ease, the simplicity, and seeming inevitability of the whole process.” The notion of inevitability, however, is perhaps only a secular variation on the theme of the expansionist editor John L. O’Sullivan, who in 1845 coined one of the most famous phrases in American history when he wrote of “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Frederick Merk rejected inevitability in favor of a more contingent interpretation of American expansionism in the 1840s. As his student Henry May later recalled, Merk “loved to get the facts straight.”
—From the Foreword by John Mack Faragher
Contributors. Ellen Barry, Laurie Beck, Joan Bertin, Janet Calvo, Wendy Chavkin, Kay Dickersin, Abigail English, Elizabeth Fee, Carol Gill, Nancy Krieger, Joyce McConnell, Judy Norsigian, Ann Scales, Susan Stefan, Lauren Schnaper, Catherine Teare
In 1992, at the end of a twelve-year civil war, El Salvador was poised for a transition to democracy. Yet, after longstanding dominance by a small oligarchy that continually used violence to repress popular resistance, El Salvador’s democracy has proven to be a fragile one, as social ills (poverty chief among them) have given rise to neighborhoods where gang activity now thrives. Mano Dura examines the ways in which the ruling ARENA party used gang violence to solidify political power in the hands of the elite—culminating in draconian “iron fist” antigang policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and policy analysis, Mano Dura examines the activities of three nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have advocated for more nuanced policies to eradicate gangs and the societal issues that are both a cause and an effect of gang proliferation. While other studies of street gangs have focused on relatively distant countries such as Colombia, Argentina, and Jamaica, Sonja Wolf’s research takes us to a country closer to the United States, where forced deportation has brought with it US gang culture. Charting the limited success of NGOs in influencing El Salvador’s security policies, the book brings to light key contextual aspects—including myopic media coverage and the ironic populist support for ARENA, despite the party’s protection of the elite at the expense of the greater society.
Banks failed, credit contracted, inequality grew, and people everywhere were out of work while political paralysis and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. As financial crises always have, the Panic of 1837 drew forth a plethora of reformers who promised to restore America to greatness. Animated by an ethic of individualism and self-reliance, they became prophets of a new moral order: if only their fellow countrymen would call on each individual’s God-given better instincts, the most intractable problems could be resolved.
Inspired by this reformist fervor, Americans took to strict dieting, water cures, phrenology readings, mesmerism, utopian communities, free love, mutual banking, and a host of other elaborate self-improvement schemes. Vocal activists were certain that solutions to the country’s ills started with the reformation of individuals, and through them communities, and through communities the nation. This set of assumptions ignored the hard political and economic realities at the core of the country’s malaise, however, and did nothing to prevent another financial panic twenty years later, followed by secession and civil war.
Focusing on seven individuals—George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry David Thoreau, and John Brown—Philip Gura explores their efforts, from the comical to the homicidal, to beat a new path to prosperity. A narrative of people and ideas, Man’s Better Angels captures an intellectual moment in American history that has been overshadowed by the Civil War and the pragmatism that arose in its wake.
Man's Quest for Political Knowledge was first published in 1964. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Considering the importance of political science as an academic subject in our time, it is surprising that more attention has not been given, until now, to the history of political study and teaching. As Professor Anderson's book makes clear, an understanding of this history throws light on questions significantly related to basic problems of contemporary political science.
By placing in their historical context pertinent developments in ancient times, Professor Anderson shows how the study and teaching of politics may flourish under certain conditions and falter or fail under others. Throughout the book he demonstrates the truth of what Aristotle said about the study of politics: "In this subject as in others the best method of investigation is to study things in the process of development from the beginning."
In early chapters the author examines three literate societies of the ancient Near East—Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel. He then discusses, in the major section of the book, the accomplishments of the Greeks, who, with their many self-governing city-states and their secular attitude toward politics, opened up the study of politics in a realistic way. Here he gives Aristotle the most prominent role and finds Plato less important than most scholars might expect. Finally, he traces the decline of the political study and teaching in the Hellenistic period and in the time of the Roman Empire.
The volume will be of particular interest not only to political scientists but to historians, philosophers, and classical scholars.
Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Fully revised and updated, The Many Faces of Political Islam thoroughly analyzes the many facets of this political ideology and shows its impact on global relations.
Taking power in Nicaragua in 1979 as a revolutionary party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was willing to put its fate in the hands of the Nicaraguan people twice, in 1984 and 1990. The party wrote a democratic constitution and then, remarkably, accepted the decision of the majority by relinquishing power upon its defeat in the 1990 election.
The Many Faces of Sandinista Democracy explores the conflicts involving different visions of political and economic democracy, as well as new radical thought on participatory democracy. The latter addresses the problems popular organizations encountered as they moved from subservience to the FSLN in the 1980s to the liberating but disorientating electoral defeat of 1990. Up until the moment of defeat, the Sandinistas saw themselves as the true vanguard of the Nicaraguan people, able to submit themselves to free elections, because they felt they truly represented the general will of the people.
Dr. Hoyt brings to an international audience for the first time a study of the ideas of several Nicaraguan thinkers. She examines the conflicts surrounding the development of ideas within the FSLN, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of its rare combination of democratic and vanguard principles.
Voters do not always choose their preferred candidate on election day. Often they cast their ballots to prevent a particular outcome, as when their own preferred candidate has no hope of winning and they want to prevent another, undesirable candidate’s victory; or, they vote to promote a single-party majority in parliamentary systems, when their own candidate is from a party that has no hope of winning. In their thought-provoking book The Many Faces of Strategic Voting, Laura B. Stephenson, John H. Aldrich, and André Blais first provide a conceptual framework for understanding why people vote strategically, and what the differences are between sincere and strategic voting behaviors. Expert contributors then explore the many facets of strategic voting through case studies in Great Britain, Spain, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the European Union.
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation.
Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves—who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites—gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil.
As the nature of the slaves’ labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
New details about the founding of China’s Navy reveals critical historical context and insight into future strategy
From 1949 to 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to establish a navy and secure China’s periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China’s earliest island-seizing campaigns.
In this definitive account of a little-known yet critical moment in China’s naval history, Toshi Yoshihara shows that Chinese leaders refashioned the stratagems and tactics honed over decades of revolutionary struggle on land for nautical purposes. Despite significant challenges, the PLA ultimately scored important victories over its Nationalist foes as it captured offshore islands to secure its position.
Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this book reveals how the navy-building process, sea battles, and contested offshore landings had a lasting influence on the PLA. Even today, the institution’s identity, strategy, doctrine, and structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea will help US policymakers and scholars place China’s recent maritime achievements in proper historical context—and provide insight into how its navy may act in the future.
Observers have been predicting the demise of China’s political system since Mao Zedong’s death over thirty years ago. The Chinese Communist state, however, seems to have become increasingly adept at responding to challenges ranging from leadership succession and popular unrest to administrative reorganization, legal institutionalization, and global economic integration. What political techniques and procedures have Chinese policymakers employed to manage the unsettling impact of the fastest sustained economic expansion in world history?
As the authors of these essays demonstrate, China’s political system allows for more diverse and flexible input than would be predicted from its formal structures. Many contemporary methods of governance have their roots in techniques of policy generation and implementation dating to the revolution and early PRC—techniques that emphasize continual experimentation. China’s long revolution had given rise to this guerrilla-style decisionmaking as a way of dealing creatively with pervasive uncertainty. Thus, even in a post-revolutionary PRC, the invisible hand of Chairman Mao—tamed, tweaked, and transformed—plays an important role in China’s adaptive governance.
The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. Before 1966, China was a typical communist state, with a command economy and a powerful party able to keep the population under control. But during the Cultural Revolution, in a move unprecedented in any communist country, Mao unleashed the Red Guards against the party. Tens of thousands of officials were humiliated, tortured, and even killed. Order had to be restored by the military, whose methods were often equally brutal.
In a masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications conceal). In often horrifying detail, they document the Hobbesian state that ensued. The movement veered out of control and terror paralyzed the country. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing—Mao’s wife and leader of the Gang of Four—while Mao often played one against the other.
After Mao’s death, in reaction to the killing and the chaos, Deng Xiaoping led China into a reform era in which capitalism flourishes and the party has lost its former authority. In its invaluable critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a culture in turmoil, Mao’s Last Revolution offers the most authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event in the history of China.
"How do we apply Chairman Mao's Thought to get fat pigs?" Squad Leader Ho (who knew the most about pigs) replied that, according to Chairman Mao, one must investigate the problem fully from all sides, and then integrate practice and theory. Ho concluded that the reason for our skinny pigs had to be found in one of three areas: the relationship between the pigs and their natural environment (excluding man); the relationship between the cadres and the pigs; and the relationship among the pigs themselves.
And so the city slickers, sent down to the countryside for political reeducation, set out to find the Thousand-Dollar Pig, much to the bemusement of the local peasants.
The sixteen stories collected in this remarkable book give firsthand accounts of daily life in contemporary China. From 250 interviews conducted in Hong Kong between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Frolic has created charming vignettes that show how individuals from all parts of China led their lives in the midst of rapid social change and political unrest. We hear about oil prospectors, rubber growers, and factory workers, Widow Wang and her sit-in to get a larger apartment, the thoroughly corrupt Man Who Loved Dog Meat, the young people who flew kites to protest antidemocratic tendencies.
As fresh and original as the individual accounts are, common and timeless themes emerge: the sluggishness of an agrarian society in responding to modernization; the painful lack of resources in a poor and gigantic country; the constraints imposed on common people by the bureaucracy; the way in which individuals outwardly support the system and inwardly resist it; the limitations of heavy and conflicting doses of ideology in motivating individuals.
But there are also recurrent motifs of economic and social progress: production rises, illiteracy declines, and socialist values have impact. A new China has emerged, though change is occurring far more slowly than its leaders had intended.
Mao's People contains much new information on China both for the general reader and for specialists in the field. Above all, it is a completely engrossing and vivid glimpse into the ways of a nation we are only beginning to discover.
The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.
More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess—words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.
Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.
A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.
By the end of World War II, strategists in Washington and London looked ahead to a new era in which the United States shouldered global responsibilities and Britain concentrated its regional interests more narrowly. The two powers also viewed the Muslim world through very different lenses. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo–American perceptions of geography shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.
Aiyaz Husain shows that American and British postwar strategy drew on popular notions of geography as well as academic and military knowledge. Once codified in maps and memoranda, these perspectives became foundations of foreign policy. In South Asia, American officials envisioned an independent Pakistan blocking Soviet influence, an objective that outweighed other considerations in the contested Kashmir region. Shoring up Pakistan meshed perfectly with British hopes for a quiescent Indian subcontinent once partition became inevitable. But serious differences with Britain arose over America’s support for the new state of Israel. Viewing the Mediterranean as a European lake of sorts, U.S. officials—even in parts of the State Department—linked Palestine with Europe, deeming it a perfectly logical destination for Jewish refugees. But British strategists feared that the installation of a Jewish state in Palestine could incite Muslim ire from one corner of the Islamic world to the other.
As Husain makes clear, these perspectives also influenced the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and blueprints for the UN Security Council and shaped French and Dutch colonial fortunes in the Levant and the East Indies.
The American Revolutionary War began when Massachusetts militiamen and British troops clashed at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Two months later, a much larger engagement occurred at Bunker Hill in Boston. The conflict then expanded into a continent-wide war for independence from Great Britain. Or so we are taught. A closer look at events in the South in the eighteen months following Lexington and Concord tells different story. The practice of teaching the Revolutionary War as one generalized conflict between the American colonies and Great Britain assumes the South’s support for the Revolutionary War was a foregone conclusion. However, once shots were fired, it was not certain that the southern colonies would support the independence movement. What is clear is that both the fledgling American republic and the British knew that the southern colonies were critical to any successful prosecution of the war by either side.
In March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775–1776, historian Michael Cecere, consulting primary source documents, examines how Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ended up supporting the colonies to the north, while East Florida remained within the British sphere. South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida all retained their royal governors through the summer of 1775, and no military engagements occurred in any of the southern colonies in the six months following the battles in Massachusetts. The situation changed significantly in the fall, however, with armed clashes in Virginia and South Carolina; by early 1776 the war had spread to all of the southern colonies except East Florida. Although their march to independence did not follow the exact route as the colonies to the north, events in the South pulled the southern colonists in the same direction, culminating with a united Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This book explores the crucial events in the southern colonies that led all but East Florida to support the American cause.
Marcha is a multidisciplinary survey of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that have given shape and power to the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Chicago. A city with longstanding historic ties to immigrant activism, Chicago has been the scene of a precedent-setting immigrant rights mobilization in 2006 and subsequent mobilizations in 2007 and 2008.
Positing Chicago as a microcosm of the immigrant rights movement on national level, these essays plumb an extraordinarily rich set of data regarding recent immigrant rights activities, defining the cause as not just a local quest for citizenship rights, but a panethnic, transnational movement. The result is a timely volume likely to provoke debate and advance the national conversation about immigration in innovative ways.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union. Yet the union's Ladies' Auxiliary played an essential role in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice.
Melinda Chateauvert explores the history of the Ladies' Auxiliary and the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters who made up its membership and used the union to claim respectability and citizenship. As she shows, the Auxiliary actively educated other women and children about the labor movement, staged consumer protests, and organized local and national civil rights campaigns ranging from the 1941 March on Washington to school integration to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chateauvert also sheds light on the plight of Pullman maids, who—relegated to the Auxiliary—found their problems as working women neglected in favor of the rhetoric of racial solidarity.
The Marikana Massacre of August 16, 2012, was the single most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of apartheid. Those killed were mineworkers in support of a pay raise. Through a series of interviews conducted with workers who survived the attack, this account documents and examines the controversial shootings in great detail, beginning with a valuable history of the events leading up to the killing of workers, and including eyewitness accounts of the violence and interviews with family members of those who perished.
While the official Farlam Commission investigation of the massacre is still ongoing, many South Africans do not hold much confidence in the government’s ability to examine its own complicity in these events. Marikana, on the other hand, examines the various roles played by the African National Congress, the mine company, and the National Union of Mineworkers in creating the conditions that led to the massacre. While the commission’s investigations take place in a courtroom setting tilted toward those in power, Marikana documents testimony from the mineworkers in the days before official statements were even gathered, offering an unusually immediate and unfiltered look at the reality from the perspective of those most directly affected. Enhanced by vivid maps that make clear the setting and situation of the events, Marikana is an invaluable work of history, journalism, sociology, and activism.
The United States Marine Corps has a unique culture that ensures comradery, exacting standards, and readiness to be the first to every fight. Yet even in a group that is known for innovation, culture can push leaders to fall back on ingrained preferences. Jeannie L. Johnson takes a sympathetic but critical look at the Marine Corps's long experience with counterinsurgency warfare. Which counterinsurgency lessons have been learned and retained for next time and which have been abandoned to history is a story of battlefield trial and error—but also a story of cultural collisions.
The book begins with a fascinating and penetrating look inside the culture of the Marine Corps through research in primary sources, including Marine oral histories, and interviews with Marines. Johnson explores what makes this branch of the military distinct: their identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens. She then traces the history of the Marines' counterinsurgency experience from the expeditionary missions of the early twentieth century, through the Vietnam War, and finally to the Iraq War. Her findings break new ground in strategic culture by introducing a methodology that was pioneered in the intelligence community to forecast behavior. Johnson shows that even a service as self-aware and dedicated to innovation as the Marine Corps is constrained in the lessons-learned process by its own internal predispositions, by the wider US military culture, and by national preferences. Her findings challenge the conclusions of previous counterinsurgency scholarship that ignores culture. This highly readable book reminds us of Sun Tzu's wisdom that to be successful in war, it is important to know thyself as well as the enemy. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the Marines Corps, counterinsurgency warfare, military innovation, or strategic culture.
Taken for granted as the natural order of things, peace at sea is in fact an immense and recent achievement—but also an enormous strategic challenge if it is to be maintained in the future. In Maritime Strategy and Global Order, an international roster of top scholars offers historical perspectives and contemporary analysis to explore the role of naval power and maritime trade in creating the international system.
The book begins in the early days of the industrial revolution with the foundational role of maritime strategy in building the British Empire. It continues into the era of naval disorder surrounding the two world wars, through the passing of the Pax Britannica and the rise of the Pax Americana, and then examines present-day regional security in hot spots like the South China Sea and Arctic Ocean. Additional chapters engage with important related topics such as maritime law, resource competition, warship evolution since the end of the Cold War, and naval intelligence.
A first-of-its-kind collection, Maritime Strategy and Global Order offers scholars, practitioners, students, and others with an interest in maritime history and strategic issues an absorbing long view of the role of the sea in creating the world we know.
Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Elaine Weiner's Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe.
"Market Dreams is a conceptually-sophisticated and empirically-rich account of how the discourses and practices of the free market penetrated the hearts and minds of everyday Czech citizens. Weiner's provocative analysis takes readers inside the worlds of female factory workers to expose the discontinuities between their radiant market dreams and their everyday realities--and juxtaposes them to the continuities experienced by female managers. In the process, it challenges many of our ideas about post/socialism, marketization, and gender and reveals the enduring power of stories in shaping social identities and actions."
---Lynne Haney, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University
"Through interviews and a careful analysis of newspaper articles written in the first decade after the collapse of state socialism, Weiner explores the complicated interconnections between personal stories and the emerging neoliberal metanarrative of the free market in the Czech Republic after 1989. Her book transcends many of the dichotomies with which researchers of post-state socialism have been struggling: 'East' vs. 'West,' losers and winners, emancipation vs. oppression, etc., and thus makes a truly novel contribution to our understanding of women's lives after state socialism."
---Éva Fodor, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Central European University
"Weiner's rich and innovative study of female Czech managers and workers exemplifies the importance of narrative analysis for understanding why gender and class have not (yet) reconfigured the sense of postcommunism's alternatives. This is critical reading for feminists, class analysts, and students of postcommunist social change."
---Michael Kennedy, Director, Center for European Studies, University of Michigan
Elaine Weiner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Visit the author's website at: www.mcgill.ca/sociology/faculty/weiner/.
Cover Credit: Frank Scherschel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
A colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success.
American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education.
Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research.
Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.
Critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric
The nine essays in this volume offer critical studies of the range of King’s public discourse as forms of sermonic rhetoric. They focus on five diverse and relative short examples from King’s body of work: “Death of Evil on the Seashore,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I Have a Dream,” “A Time to Break Silence,” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
Taken collectively, these five works span both the duration of King’s career as a public advocate but also represent the broad scope of his efforts to craft and project a persuasive vision a beloved community that persists through time.
Educating and uniting the players as a workforce, Miller embarked on a long campaign to win the concessions that defined his legacy: decent workplace conditions, a pension system, outside mediation of player grievances and salary disputes, a system of profit sharing, and the long-sought dismantling of the reserve clause that opened the door to free agency. Through it all, allies and adversaries alike praised Miller's hardnosed attitude, work ethic, and honesty.
Comprehensive and illuminating, Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary tells the inside story of a time of change in sports and labor relations, and of the contentious process that gave athletes in baseball and across the sporting world a powerful voice in their own games.
In this book Marx's observations on history, which are found scattered throughout his voluminous writings, are brought together and subjected to searching analysis.
D. Ross Gandy writes in refreshingly direct language, without resorting to jargon. For the first time we have a thoughtful assessment of Marx's views on all the epochs that cross his historical vision. Gandy treats Marx's ideas on primitive societies, on ancient Roman and Asiatic civilization, on the structure of feudalism, on strategies for overthrowing capitalism, and on the hypothetical communist future. Among the author's departures from traditional readings of Marx are his interpretations of class struggle, his conception of social strata, and his cogent analysis of the "new Marxism."
Since many aspects of Marxist historical theory have been neglected or distorted, Gandy's remarkably clear commentary, based on extensive research—including an exhaustive study of the forty-volume Marx-Engels Werke—will doubtless stimulate debate among sociologists and other students of social change, political scientists, and historians.
In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well.
Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.
How does one explain the presence of educated recruits in movements that were overwhelmingly working class in composition? How did intellectuals function within the movements? In the first in-depth exploration of this question, Stanley Pierson examines the rise, development, and ultimate failure of the German Social Democrats, the largest of the European socialist parties, from 1887 to 1912. Prominent figures, such as Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eduard Bernstein are discussed, but the book focuses primarily on the younger generation. These forgotten intellectuals—Max Schippel, Paul Kampffmeyer, Conrad Schmidt, Paul Ernst, and others—struggled most directly with the dilemmas arising out of the attempt to translate Marxist doctrines into practical and personal terms.
These young writers, speakers, and politicians set out to supplant old ways of thinking with a Marxist understanding of history and society. Pierson weaves together over thirty intellectual biographies to explore the relationship between ideology and politics in Germany. He examines the conflict within Social Democracy between the “revisionist” intellectuals, who sought to adapt Marxist theory to changing economic and social realities, and those “orthodox” and “radical” intellectuals who attempted to remain faithful to the Marxist vision. By examining the struggles of the socialist intellectuals in Germany, Pierson brings out the special features of German cultural, social, and political life before World War I. His study of this critical time in the development of the German Social Democratic party also illuminates the wider development of Marxism in Europe during the twentieth century.
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