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Fathers Under Fire
The Revolution in Child Support Enforcement
Irwin Garfinkel
Russell Sage Foundation, 1998
"This important and highly informative collection of studies on nonresidentfathers and child support should be of great value to scholars and policymakers alike." —American Journal of Sociology Over half of America's children will live apart from their fathers at some point as they grow up, many in the single-mother households that increasingly make up the nation's poor. Federal efforts to improve the collection of child support from fathers appear to have little effect on payments, and many critics have argued that forcing fathers to pay does more harm than good. Much of the uncertainty surrounding child support policies has stemmed from a lack of hard data on nonresident fathers. Fathers Under Fire presents the best available information on the financial and social circumstances of the men who are at the center of the debate. In this volume, social scientists and legal scholars explore the issues underlying the child support debate, chief among them on the potential repercussions of stronger enforcement. Who are nonresident fathers? This volume calls upon both empirical and theoretical data to describe them across a broad economic and social spectrum. Absentee fathers who do not pay child support are much more likely to be school dropouts and low earners than fathers who pay, and nonresident fathers altogether earn less than resident fathers. Fathers who start new families are not significantly less likely to support previous children. But can we predict what would happen if the government were to impose more rigorous child support laws? The data in this volume offer a clearer understanding of the potential benefits and risks of such policies. In contrast to some fears, stronger enforcement is unlikely to push fathers toward. But it does seem to have more of an effect on whether some fathers remarry and become responsible for new families. In these cases, how are subsequent children affected by a father's pre-existing obligations? Should such fathers be allowed to reduce their child support orders in order to provide for their current families? Should child support guidelines permit modifications in the event of a father's changed financial circumstances? Should government enforce a father's right to see his children as well as his obligation to pay support? What can be done to help under- or unemployed fathers meet their payments? This volume provides the information and insight to answer these questions. The need to help children and reduce the public costs of welfare programs is clear, but the process of achieving these goals is more complex. Fathers Under Fire offers an indispensable resource to those searching for effective and equitable solutions to the problems of child support.
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Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas
Karen Kampwirth
Ohio University Press, 2004

In many Latin American countries, guerrilla struggle and feminism have been linked in surprising ways. Women were mobilized by the thousands to promote revolutionary agendas that had little to do with increasing gender equality. They ended up creating a uniquely Latin American version of feminism that combined revolutionary goals of economic equality and social justice with typically feminist aims of equality, nonviolence, and reproductive rights.

Drawing on more than two hundred interviews with women in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Mexican state of Chiapas, Karen Kampwirth tells the story of how the guerrilla wars led to the rise of feminism, why certain women became feminists, and what sorts of feminist movements they built. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas explores how the violent politics of guerrilla struggle could be related to the peaceful politics of feminism. It considers the gains, losses, and internal conflicts within revolutionary women’s organizations.

Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution challenges old assumptions regarding revolutionary movements and the legacy of those movements for the politics of daily life. It will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in political science, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and Latin American studies as well as to general readers with an interest in international feminism.

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The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos
Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution
Francesco Manzini
University of London Press, 2010

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Fields of Revolution
Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964
Carmen Soliz
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Winner, 2023 Susan Socolow-Lyman Johnson Book Prize

Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.
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Food and Revolution
Fighting Hunger in Nicaragua, 1960-1993
Christiane Berth
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Food policy and practices varied widely in Nicaragua during the last decades of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and ‘80s, food scarcity contributed to the demise of the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista revolution. Although faced with widespread scarcity and political restrictions, Nicaraguan consumers still carved out spaces for defining their food choices. Despite economic crises, rationing, and war limiting peoples’ food selection, consumers responded with improvisation in daily cooking practices and organizing food exchanges through three distinct periods. First, the Somoza dictatorship (1936–1979) promoted culture and food practices from the United States, which was an option only for a minority of citizens. Second, the 1979 Sandinista revolution tried to steer Nicaraguans away from mass consumption by introducing an austere, frugal consumption that favored local products. Third, the transition to democracy between 1988 and 1993, marked by extreme scarcity and economic crisis, witnessed the re-introduction of market mechanisms, mass advertising, and imported goods. Despite the erosion of food policy during transition, the Nicaraguan revolution contributed to recognizing food security as a basic right and the rise of peasant movements for food sovereignty.
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For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution
An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature
Edited by Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period.

Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression.  Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers, lovers of literature, were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the “red decade” long buried in modern Japanese literary history.
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The Forgotten Fifth
African Americans in the Age of Revolution
Gary B. Nash
Harvard University Press, 2006

As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the country's population was African American. The experiences of these men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's future.

Nash tells of revolutionary fervor arousing a struggle for freedom that spiraled into the largest slave rebellion in American history, as blacks fled servitude to fight for the British, who promised freedom in exchange for military service. The Revolutionary Army never matched the British offer, and most histories of the period have ignored this remarkable story. The conventional wisdom says that abolition was impossible in the fragile new republic. Nash, however, argues that an unusual convergence of factors immediately after the war created a unique opportunity to dismantle slavery. The founding fathers' failure to commit to freedom led to the waning of abolitionism just as it had reached its peak. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as Nash demonstrates, their decision enabled the ideology of white supremacy to take root, and with it the beginnings of an irreparable national fissure. The moral failure of the Revolution was paid for in the 1860s with the lives of the 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War.

The Forgotten Fifth is a powerful story of the nation's multiple, and painful, paths to freedom.

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Forgotten Wars
Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper
Harvard University Press, 2007

In September 1945, after the fall of the atomic bomb--and with it, the Japanese empire--Asia was dominated by the British. Governing a vast crescent of land that stretched from India through Burma and down to Singapore, and with troops occupying the French and Dutch colonies in southern Vietnam and Indonesia, Britain's imperial might had never seemed stronger.

Yet within a few violent years, British power in the region would crumble, and myriad independent nations would struggle into existence. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper show how World War II never really ended in these ravaged Asian lands but instead continued in bloody civil wars, anti-colonial insurrections, and inter-communal massacres. These years became the most formative in modern Asian history, as Western imperialism vied with nascent nationalist and communist revolutionaries for political control.

Forgotten Wars, a sequel to the authors' acclaimed Forgotten Armies, is a panoramic account of the bitter wars of the end of empire, seen not only through the eyes of the fighters, but also through the personal stories of ordinary people: the poor and bewildered caught up in India's Hindu-Muslim massacres; the peasant farmers ravaged by warfare between British forces and revolutionaries in Malaya; the Burmese minorities devastated by separatist revolt. Throughout, we are given a stunning portrait of societies poised between the hope of independence and the fear of strife. Forgotten Wars vividly brings to life the inescapable conflicts and manifold dramas that shaped today's Asia.

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From Arcadia to Revolution
The Neapolitan Monitor and Other Writings
Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel
Iter Press, 2019
Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was a poet, a political writer, a journalist, and a politician. She was the editor, and virtually the only writer of the Monitore Napoletano (Neapolitan Monitor), the journal in which she recorded the events and debates that took place in the short-lived Neapolitan Jacobin Republic of 1799. She sought to influence both government policy and public opinion. As a political analyst she also put forward with this journal one of the first analyses ever of popular culture and its political implications, and confronted the challenge of trying to implement a revolutionary political project in a situation of abject poverty intertwined with a deeply conservative populist mind-set.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Volume 67
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From Enemy to Brother
The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965
John Connelly
Harvard University Press, 2012

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?

The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture.

From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church’s only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.

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From Enlightenment to Revolution
Eric Voegelin
Duke University Press

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From Quills to Tweets
How America Communicates about War and Revolution
Adrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest, and S. C. M. Paine, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2020

While today's presidential tweets may seem a light-year apart from the scratch of quill pens during the era of the American Revolution, the importance of political communication is eternal. This book explores the roles that political narratives, media coverage, and evolving communication technologies have played in precipitating, shaping, and concluding or prolonging wars and revolutions over the course of US history. The case studies begin with the Sons of Liberty in the era of the American Revolution, cover American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with a look at the conflict against ISIS in the Trump era. Special chapters also examine how propagandists shaped American perceptions of two revolutions of international significance: the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. Each chapter analyzes its subject through the lens of the messengers, messages, and communications-technology-media to reveal the effects on public opinion and the trajectory and conduct of the conflict. The chapters collectively provide an overview of the history of American strategic communications on wars and revolutions that will interest scholars, students, and communications strategists.

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From Reform to Revolution
The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union
Minxin Pei
Harvard University Press, 1994
The demise of communism in the former Soviet Union and the massive political and economic changes in China are the stunning transformations of our century. Two central questions are emerging: Why did different communist systems experience different patterns of transition? Why did partial reforms in the Soviet Union and China turn into revolutions?
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From Revolution to War
State Relations in a World of Change
Patrick J. Conge
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In the history of international relations, few events command as much attention as revolution and war. Over the centuries, revolutionary transformations have produced some of the most ruinous and bloody wars. Nevertheless, the breakdown of peace in time of revolution is poorly understood. Patrick Conge offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship between war and revolution.
How can we best understand the effect of revolutionary transformations on the politics of war and peace? Conge argues that it is only by bringing in, first, the organizational capacity of revolutionary regimes to extract resources and convert them into military strength and, second, the power of transformative ideas to transcend national boundaries and undermine the ability of opposing regimes to compromise that we are best able to understand the effect of revolution on the origins and persistence of war. By incorporating such key elements, this book provides a new, more comprehensive explanation of the relationship between revolution, war, and peace.
Conditions that lead to and sustain wars in general are identified and placed in the light of revolutionary transformations. Once the argument is presented, historical case studies are used to test its plausibility. Conge demonstrates the importance of the effect of revolutionary organization and ideas on the outcome of conflicts.
Political scientists, historians, sociologists, and the general reader interested in the politics of war and peace in revolutionary times are given new perspectives on the relationship between revolution and war as well as on the implications of political organization for military power and the process of consolidation of new regimes.
Patrick J. Conge is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Arkansas.
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From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras
Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Duke University Press, 2005
From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras is a major contribution to the study of globalization, labor, and women’s movements. Jennifer Bickham Mendez presents a detailed ethnographic account of the Nicaraguan Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement, “María Elena Cuadra” (mec), which emerged as an autonomous organization in 1994. Most of its efforts revolve around organizing women workers in Nicaragua’s free trade zones and working to improve conditions in maquiladora factories. Mendez examines the structural and cultural elements of mec in order to demonstrate how globalization affects grassroots advocacy for social and economic justice. She argues that globalization has created opportunities for new forms of organizing among those local populations that suffer its effects and that mec, which has forged vital links with transnational feminist and labor groups, exemplifies the possibilities—and pitfalls—of this new type of organizing.

Mendez draws on interviews with leaders and program participants, including maquiladora workers; her participant observation while she worked as a volunteer within the organization; and analysis of the public statements, speeches, and texts written by mec members. She provides a sense of the day-to-day operations of the group as well as its strategies. By exploring the tension between mec and transnational feminist, labor, and solidarity networks, she illustrates how mec women’s outlooks are shaped by both their revolutionary roots within the Sandinista regime and their exposure to global discourses of human rights and citizenship. The complexities of the women’s labor movement analyzed in From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras speak to social and economic justice movements in the many locales around the world.

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