A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Bound together by segregation, the inherent dangers of mining, and coal company paternalism, it might seem that black miners and mountaineers would be eager to forget their past. Instead, members of the EKSC have chosen to celebrate their Harlan County roots. African American Miners and Migrants uses historical and archival research and extensive personal interviews to explore their reasons and the ties that still bind them to eastern Kentucky. The book also examines life in the model coal towns of Benham and Lynch in the context of Progressive Era policies, the practice of welfare capitalism, and the contemporary national trend of building corporate towns and planned communities.
Asian America is the first comprehensive look at post-1960s Asian American communities in the United States and Canada. From Chinese Americans in Chicagoland to Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, this multi-disciplinary collection spans a wide comparative and panoramic scope. Contributors from an array of academic fields focus on global views of Asian American communities as well as on territorial and cultural boundaries.
Presenting groundbreaking perspectives, Asian America revises worn assumptions and examines current challenges Asian American communities face in the twenty-first century.
Beyond Betrayal charts a nationwide identity shift through the story of one chapter of Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), an organization founded in the scandal’s aftermath. VOTF had three goals: helping survivors of abuse; supporting priests who were either innocent or took risky public stands against the wrongdoers; and pursuing a broad set of structural changes in the church. Patricia Ewick and Marc W. Steinberg follow two years in the life of one of the longest-lived and most active chapters of VOTF, whose thwarted early efforts at ecclesiastical reform led them to realize that before they could change the Catholic Church, they had to change themselves. The shaping of their collective identity is at the heart of Beyond Betrayal, an ethnographic portrait of how one group reimagined their place within an institutional order and forged new ideas of faith in the wake of widespread distrust.
We know a great deal about civil rights organizations during the 1960s, but relatively little about black political organizations since that decade. Questions of focus, accountability, structure, and relevance have surrounded these groups since the modern Civil Rights Movement ended in 1968. Political scientists Ollie A. Johnson III and Karin L. Stanford have assembled a group of scholars who examine the leadership, membership, structure, goals, ideology, activities, accountability, and impact of contemporary black political organizations and their leaders. Questions considered are: How have these organizations adapted to the changing sociopolitical and economic environment? What ideological shifts, if any, have occurred within each one? What issues are considered important to black political groups and what strategies are used to implement their agendas? The contributors also investigate how these organizations have adapted to changes within the black community and American society as a whole.
Organizations covered include well-known ones such as the NAACP, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Urban League, and the Congress of Racial Equality, as well as organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. Religious groups, including black churches and the Nation of Islam, are also considered.
Formed in 1890, during the heady days before the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the Chicago Horticultural Society boasted members with names deeply rooted in Chicago history: Buckingham, McCormick, and Palmer, among others. Today, as it leads the Garden in a model public-private partnership with the Forest Preserves of Cook County, the Society’s horticultural practices have exceeded the vision of its founders.
Chicago and Its Botanic Garden: The Chicago Horticultural Society at 125 is a lushly illustrated and thoughtful history of the Society and its evolution from a producer of monumental flower and botanical shows, through a fallow period, to the opening in 1972 of the Chicago Botanic Garden, a living museum and world leader in horticulture, plant science and conservation, education, and urban agriculture. Author Cathy Jean Maloney combines meticulous scholarship with a flair for storytelling in a narrative that will delight everyone from casual strollers of the grounds to the volunteers, professionals, and scientists who compose the influential society.
In Chicago’s Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago—from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department’s twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle—but too small for the city to keep up with—city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establish and maintain their neighborhood’s particular social dynamics, quality of life, and appearance. Omnipresent yet evanescent, block clubs are sometimes the major outlets for community organizing in the city—especially in neighborhoods otherwise lacking in political strength and clout. Drawing on the stories of hundreds of these groups from across the city, Seligman vividly illustrates what neighbors can—and cannot—accomplish when they work together.
Teachers’ unions are the organizations responsible for safeguarding the conditions of teachers’ employment. Union supporters claim strong synergies between teachers’ interests and students’ interests, but critics of unions insist that the stance of teachers in collective bargaining may disadvantage students as unions reduce the power of administrators to manage, remove, reward or retain excellent teachers.
In A Collective Pursuit, Lesley Laveryunpacks how teachers’ unions today are fighting for contracts that allow them to earn a decent living and build “schools all students deserve.” She explains the form and function of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions. Lavery then explores unionization campaigns in the Twin Cities charter schools. A Collective Pursuit also examines teacher strikes and contract negotiations, school finance and finance reform, and district and union attempts to address racial achievement gaps, to provide a context for understanding the economic, political, and demographic forces that inspire teachers to improve conditions for students.
A Collective Pursuit emphasizes that while teachers’ unions serve a traditional, economic role, they also provide a vast array of valuable services to students, educators, parents, and community members.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 2002
The formation of a group identity has always been a major preoccupation of Mexican American political organizations, whether they seek to assimilate into the dominant Anglo society or to remain separate from it. Yet organizations that sought to represent a broad cross section of the Mexican American population, such as LULAC and the American G.I. Forum, have dwindled in membership and influence, while newer, more targeted political organizations are prospering—clearly suggesting that successful political organizing requires more than shared ethnicity and the experience of discrimination.
This book sheds new light on the process of political identity formation through a study of the identity politics practiced by four major Mexican American political organizations—the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation, the Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, and the Mexican American Women's National Association (now known as MANA—A National Latina Organization). Through interviews with activists in each organization and research into their records, Benjamin Marquez clarifies the racial, class-based, and cultural factors that have caused these organizations to create widely differing political identities. He likewise demonstrates why their specific goals resonate only with particular segments of the Mexican American community.
Itamar Dubinsky’s extensive ethnographic research offers an innovative theoretical approach by assessing three institutions—Mandela Soccer Academy, Kumasi Sports Academy, and Unistar Soccer Academy—through an Africapitalist prism. He demonstrates that these business endeavors, when viewed from the perspective of local interests, realize many of the educational, financial, and community building ambitions of the region. This pioneering examination of locally owned academies in Ghana reflects Dubinsky’s aim of illuminating the entrepreneurs and programs whose success passes to participating youth and their families, while also exposing the contradictions of for-profit development initiatives that purport to reap collective social benefits.
The approach not only deepened UMS’s engagement with the university and southeast Michigan communities, it led to exemplary partnerships with distinguished artists across the world. Under Fischer’s leadership, UMS hosted numerous breakthrough performances, including the Vienna Philharmonic’s final tour with Leonard Bernstein, appearances by then relatively unknown opera singer Cecilia Bartoli, a multiyear partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and artists as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Elizabeth Streb, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Though peppered with colorful anecdotes of how these successes came to be, this book is neither a history of UMS nor a memoir of Fischer’s significant accomplishments with the organization. Rather it is a reflection on the power of the performing arts to engage and enrich communities—not by handing down cultural enrichment from on high, but by meeting communities where they live and helping them preserve cultural heritage, incubate talent, and find ways to make community voices heard.
This collection of twenty-six original essays looks at contemporary feminist organizations, how they've survived, the effects of their work, the problems they face, the strategies they develop, and where the women's movement is headed. The contributors, leading feminist scholars from nine social science disciplines, examine a wide variety of local feminist organizations, past and preset, illuminating the struggles of feminist organizers and activists.
In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.
Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women’s clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
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.
Who were the Jacobins and what are Jacobinism's implications for today? In a book based on national and local studies--on Marseilles, Nîmes, Lyons, and Paris--one of the leading scholars of the Revolution reconceptualizes Jacobin politics and philosophy and rescues them from recent postmodernist condescension.
Patrice Higonnet documents and analyzes the radical thought and actions of leading Jacobins and their followers. He shows Jacobinism's variety and flexibility, as it emerged in the lived practices of exceptional and ordinary people in varied historical situations. He demonstrates that these proponents of individuality and individual freedom were also members of dense social networks who were driven by an overriding sense of the public good. By considering the most retrograde and the most admirable features of Jacobinism, Higonnet balances revisionist interest in ideology with a social historical emphasis on institutional change. In these pages the Terror becomes a singular tragedy rather than the whole of Jacobinism, which retains value today as an influential variety of modern politics. Higonnet argues that with the recent collapse of socialism and the general political malaise in Western democracies, Jacobinism has regained stature as a model for contemporary democrats, as well as a sober lesson on the limits of radical social legislation.
As this "Greater Ireland" flourished, new opportunities arose for women and working-class men to contribute within Irish-American society. Exploring the complex interplay of ethnicity, class, and gender, Janis demonstrates the broad range of ideological, social, and political opinion held by Irish Americans in the 1880s. Participation in the Land League deeply influenced a generation that replaced their old county and class allegiances with a common cause, shaping the future of Irish-American nationalism.
During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, approximately two dozen Protestant mission societies, which since 1812 had been sending Americans abroad to evangelize non-Christians, coordinated their enterprise and expanded their operations with unprecedented urgency and efficiency. Ambitious innovations characterized the work in traditional and new foreign mission fields, but the most radical changes occurred in the institutionalization of what contemporaries referred to as the home base of the mission movement.
Valentin Rabe focuses on the recruitment of personnel, fundraising, administration, promotional propaganda, and other logistical problems faced by the agencies in the United States. When generalizations concerning the American base require demonstration or references to the field of operations, China—the country in which American missionaries applied the greatest proportion of the movement's resources by the 1920s—is used as the primary illustration.
Honor Among Thieves examines associations of craftsmen in the framework of ancient economics and transaction costs. Scholars have long viewed such associations primarily as social or religious groups that provided mutual support, proper burial, and sociability, and spaces where nonelite individuals could seek status supposedly denied them in their contemporary society. However, the analysis presented here concentrates on how craftsmen, merchants, and associations interacted with each other and with elite and nonelite constituencies; managed economic, political, social, and legal activities; represented their concerns to the authorities; and acquired and used social capital—a new and important view of these economic engines.
Philip F. Venticinque offers a study of associations from a social, economic, and legal point of view, and in the process examines how they helped their members overcome high transaction costs—the “costs of doing business”—through the development of social capital. He explores associations from the “bottom up,” in order to see how their members create status and reputation outside of an elite framework. He thus explores how occupations regarded as thieves in elite ideology create their own systems of honor.
Honor Among Thieves will be of interest to scholars of the ancient economy, of social groups, and Roman Egypt in all periods.
The Patrons of Husbandry—or the Grange—is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.
In Essentials, Unity takes as its focus Grange founder Oliver Kelley and his home organization in Minnesota. Jenny Bourne draws upon numerous historical records to present a lively picture of a fraternal organization devoted to improving the lot of farmers but whose legacies extend far beyond agriculture. From struggles over minimum wage, birth control, and environmental regulation to the conflicts surrounding the Affordable Care Act, and from lunch-counter sit-ins to Occupy Wall Street, the Grange has shaped the very notion of collective action and how it is deployed even today. As this compact book so effectively illustrates, the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and determining how the spoils are split.
The 1940s offered ever-increasing outlets for writers in book publishing, magazines, radio, film, and the nascent television industry, but the standard rights arrangements often prevented writers from collecting a fair share of the profits made from their work. To remedy this situation, novelist and screenwriter James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice,Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce) proposed that all professional writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and screenwriters, should organize into a single cartel that would secure a fairer return on their work from publishers and producers. This organization, conceived and rejected within one turbulent year (1946), was the American Authors' Authority (AAA).
In this groundbreaking work, Richard Fine traces the history of the AAA within the cultural context of the 1940s. After discussing the profession of authorship as it had developed in England and the United States, Fine describes how the AAA, which was to be a central copyright repository, was designed to improve the bargaining position of writers in the literary marketplace, keep track of all rights and royalty arrangements, protect writers' interests in the courts, and lobby for more favorable copyright and tax legislation.
Although simple enough in its design, the AAA proposal ignited a firestorm of controversy, and a major part of Fine's study explores its impact in literary and political circles. Among writers, the AAA exacerbated a split between East and West Coast writers, who disagreed over whether writing should be treated as a money-making business or as an artistic (and poorly paid) calling. Among politicians, a move to unite all writers into a single organization smacked of communism and sowed seeds of distrust that later flowered in the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era.
Drawing insights from the fields of American studies, literature, and Cold War history, Fine's book offers a comprehensive picture of the development of the modern American literary marketplace from the professional writer's perspective. It uncovers the effect of national politics on the affairs of writers, thus illuminating the cultural context in which literature is produced and the institutional forces that affect its production.
How did the vast number of Jewish immigrants from different regions of Eastern Europe form their American ethnic identity?
In his answer to this question, Daniel Soyer examines how Jewish immigrant hometown associations (landsmanshaftn) transformed old-world communal ties into vehicles for integration into American society. Focusing on New York--where some 3,000 associations enrolled nearly half a million members--this study is one of the first to explore the organizations' full range of activities, and to show how the newcomers exercised a high degree of agency in their growing identification with American society.
The wide variety of landsmanshaftn--from politically radical and secular to Orthodox and from fraternal order to congregation--illustrates the diversity of influences on immigrant culture. But nearly all of these societies adopted the democratic benefits and practices that were seen as the most positive aspects of American civic culture. In contrast to the old-country hierarchical dispensers of charity, the newcomers' associations relied on mutual aid for medical care, income support, burial, and other traditional forms of self-help. During World War I, the landsmanshaftn sent aid to their war-ravaged hometowns; by the 1930s, the common identity centered increasingly upon collective reminiscing and hometown nostalgia.
The example of the Jewish landsmanshaftn suggests that many immigrants cultivated their own identification with American society to a far greater extent than is usually recognized. It also suggests that they selectively identified with those aspects of American culture that allowed them to retain emotional attachments to old-country landscapes and a sense of kinship with those who shared their heritage.
For thousands of young women in the 1950s and 1960s, involvement with the student Christian movement (SCM) changed their worldviews. Religious organizations fostered women’s leadership at a time when secular groups like Students for a Democratic Society, and the Left in general, relegated most female participants to stereotypical roles.
The SCM introduced young women to activism in other parts of the country and around the world. As leaders, thinkers, and organizers, they encountered the social realities of poverty and racial prejudice and worked to combat them. The SCM took women to Selma and Montgomery, to Africa and Latin America, and to a lifelong commitment to work for social justice.
Kibbutz Buchenwald is the story of a nightmare that became a dream and a dream that became a reality. Emerging from the depths of the liberated concentration camp Buchenwald in the spring of 1945, a group of sixteen gaunt and battered young men organized and formed Kibbutz Buchenwald, the first agricultural collective in postwar Germany designed to prepare Jews for emigation to Palestine. What caused a handful of survivors to take their fate into their own hands within days of their liberation, at a time when most survivors were passively awaiting orders from the occupying forces? From what wellsprings did they draw the physical and emotional strength to begin life anew as Zionist pioneers in a world which had turned upside down?
Judith Baumel's moving account of this courageous group is divided into two parts. Part One, entitled "The Dream," examines the kibbutz from its creation in Germany until the departure of the founding group for Palestine in the summer of 1945. Part Two, "The Reality," follows the members of Kibbutz Buchenwald into Palestine, where they eventually established their own independent settlement in 1948. This settlement exists as Kibbutz Netzer Sereni today.
Drawing from the diaries of the kibbutz's founding members, Baumel provides a detailed account of an incredible story and places the central narrative in the larger contexts of communal living, European politics after the war, and the link between European Jewry and Israeli postwar nationhood. An afterword, "Where Are They Now," briefly describes the later life of each of the original kibbutz members.
Today, rarely is a significant land acquisition accomplished without at least one private- and one public-sector participant. This book provides a detailed, inside look at those public- private partnerships.
In 2011, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) turned one hundred years old. But our profession is endlessly beginning, constantly transforming itself and its purpose as new voices and identities claim their rights in our classrooms and in our country. The recognition of such claims, however, does not occur without a struggle, without collective work.
Listening to our Elders attempts to capture the history of those collective moments where teachers across grade levels and institutions of higher education organized to insure that the voices, heritages, and traditions of their students and colleagues were recognized within our professional organizations as a vital part of our classrooms and our discipline. In doing so, Listening to Our Elders demonstrates this recognition was not always easily given. Instead, whether the issue was race, sexuality, class, or disability, committed activist organizations have often had to push against the existing limits of our field and its organizations to insure a broader sense of common responsibility and humanity was recognized.
Listening to Our Elders features interviews with Malea Powell (Native American Caucus), Joyce Rain Anderson (Native American Caucus), Jeffery Paul Chan (Asian/Asian American), James Hill (Black Caucus), James Dolmage (Committee for Disability Issue in College Composition), Geneva Smitherman (Language Policy Commitee), Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer (Latino/a Caucus), Victor Villanueva (Latino/a Caucus), Louise Dunlap (Progressive Caucus), Karen Hollis (Progressive Caucus), Louie Crew (Queer Caucus), William Thelin (Working Class Culture and Pedagogy SIG), Bill Macauley (Working Class Culture and Pedagogy SIG).
The organizations that Springer examines were the first to explicitly use feminist theory to further the work of previous black women’s organizations. As she describes, they emerged in response to marginalization in the civil rights and women’s movements, stereotyping in popular culture, and misrepresentation in public policy. Springer compares the organizations’ ideologies, goals, activities, memberships, leadership styles, finances, and communication strategies. Reflecting on the conflicts, lack of resources, and burnout that led to the demise of these groups, she considers the future of black feminist organizing, particularly at the national level. Living for the Revolution is an essential reference: it provides the history of a movement that influenced black feminist theory and civil rights activism for decades to come.
Hometown associations (HTAs) consist of immigrants from the same town in Mexico and often begin quite informally, as soccer clubs or prayer groups. As Bada’s work shows, however, HTAs have become a powerful force for change, advocating for Mexican immigrants in the United States while also working to improve living conditions in their communities of origin. Focusing on a group of HTAs founded by immigrants from the state of Michoacán, the book shows how their activism has bridged public and private spheres, mobilizing social reforms in both inner-city Chicago and rural Mexico.
Bringing together ethnography, political theory, and archival research, Bada excavates the surprisingly long history of Chicago’s HTAs, dating back to the 1920s, then traces the emergence of new models of community activism in the twenty-first century. Filled with vivid observations and original interviews, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán gives voice to an underrepresented community and sheds light on an underexplored form of global activism.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Orin Starn chronicles the historical conditions that led to the formation of the rondas, the social and geographical expansion of the movement, and its gradual decline in the 1990s. Throughout this anecdotal yet deeply analytical account, the author relies on interviews with ronda participants, villagers, and Peru’s regional and national leaders to explore the role of women, the involvement of nongovernmental organizations, and struggles for leadership within the rondas. Starn moves easily from global to local contexts and from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, presenting this movement in a straightforward manner that makes it accessible to both specialists and nonspecialists.
An engagingly written story of village mobilization, Nightwatch is also a meditation on the nature of fieldwork, the representation of subaltern people, the relationship between resistance and power, and what it means to be politically active at the end of the century. It will appeal widely to scholars and students of anthropology, Latin American studies, cultural studies, history, subaltern studies, and those interested in the politics of social movements.
In No Longer Outsiders, Minta provides a comprehensive account of the effectiveness of minority civil rights organizations and their legislative allies. He finds that the organizations’ legislative priorities are consistent with black and Latino preferences for stronger enforcement of civil rights policy and immigration reform. Although these groups focus mainly on civil rights for blacks and immigration issues for Latinos, their policy agendas extend into other significant areas. Minta concludes with an examination of how diversity in Congress helps groups gain greater influence and policy success despite many limits placed upon them.
Women and racial-ethnic minorities have had long histories of mobilizing for equality in U.S. society, but recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the number and visibility of voluntary and activist organizations committed to challenging gender and racial-ethnic discrimination. What conditions have encouraged this growth? Going beyond more familiar accounts of social movement development, Debra Minkoff uses multivariate techniques to demonstrate that there is an ecology of organizational evolution that has shaped the formation and survival of national women's, African-American, Asian American, and Latino social and political organizations. Changes in the environment for action during the 1960s promoted the creation of a niche for women's and minority organizational activity, and this sector continued to expand even as the climate for social action became increasingly conservative during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on recent advances in both social movement and organizational theory and research, Minkoff offers an organizational analysis of the evolution of the women's and racial-ethnic social change sector since the mid-1950s. She provides an original synthesis of social movement and organizational theory, and unique analysis of the development of these women's and minority organizations from the civil rights era to the present.
“The modern European state has lived upon a reservoir of soldiers and electors provided by the peasantry, but the peasants have remained the object of politics and not its master,” states Suzanne Berger. One of the few political scientists and students of the modernization process to look at the peasant-state relationship in the old nations of Europe, Berger explores the impact of mass organization on the politics of the peasants.
“One might have predicted,” she writes, “that as peasants became involved in local cooperative and syndical associations, their participation in the politics of the national community would have increased.” The results of her research show, however, that between 1911 and 1967 peasant participation in a wide range of rural associations did not significantly contribute to their integration into the national political system. Why have changes in rural society had so little impact on the peasant's political role?
In considering this question, the author compares peasant organizations in Finistere and Côtes-du-Nord, two backward agricultural departments in western France. Although the social and economic structures of these areas were essentially the same, different types of organizations mobilized the peasants. In Finistere, corporative associations separated the countryside from the currents of national political life. As a result, party politics in Finistere became stagnant, and peasant electors voted in 1967 as they had in the first quarter of the century. In Côtes-du-Nord, on the other hand, the forces that organized the peasants were political parties, and they involved the countryside in national politics. It is this involvement that, according to the author, has contributed to a politicization of local communities and resulted in radical political change.
Focusing on peasant struggles for market control over coffee exports in Bugisu from colonial times through the reign and overthrow of Idi Amin, Bunker shows that these freeholding peasants acted collectively and used the state's dependence on coffee export revenues to effectively influence and veto government programs inimical to their interests.
Bunker's work vividly portrays the small victories and great trials of ordinary people struggling to control their own economic destiny while resisting the power of the world economy.
Drawing on extensive interviews with creators, directors, and producers, Playing Doctor is a classic in the field of communications studies. This expanded edition includes a new introduction placing the book in the contemporary context of the health care crisis, as well as new chapters covering the intervening twenty years of television programming. Turow uses recent research and interviews with principals in contemporary television doctor shows such as ER, Grey's Anatomy, House, and Scrubs to illuminate the extraordinary ongoing cultural influence of medical shows. Playing Doctor situates the television vision of medicine as a limitless high-tech resource against the realities underlying the health care debate, both yesterday and today.
Cover image: Eric Dane, Kate Walsh, Sara Ramirez, and crew members on the set of Grey's Anatomy © American Broadcasting Company, Inc.
With in-depth research and an expansive scope, Rescued from Oblivion offers a vital account of the formation of historical culture and consciousness in the early United States, re-centering in the record groups long marginalized from the national memory. As Alea Henle demonstrates, these societies laid the groundwork for professional practices that are still embraced today: collection policies, distinctions between preservation of textual and nontextual artifacts, publication programs, historical rituals and commemorations, reconciliation of scholarly and popular approaches, and more. At the same time, officers of these early societies faced challenges to their historical authority from communities interested in preserving a broader range of materials and documenting more inclusive histories, including fellow members, popular historians, white women, and peoples of color.
Mining extensive primary sources, Robert Zecker gives voice to the workers in “A Road to Peace and Freedom.” He describes the group's economic goals, commitment to racial justice, and activism, from lobbying to end segregation and lynching in America to defeating fascism abroad. Zecker also illustrates the panoply of entertainment, sports, and educational activities designed to cultivate the minds and bodies of members.
However, the IWO was led by Communists, and the Order was targeted for red-baiting during the Cold War, subject to government surveillance, and ultimately "liquidated." Zecker explains how the dismantling of the IWO and the general suppression of left-wing dissenting views on economic egalitarianism and racial equality had deleterious effects for the entire country. Moreover, Zecker shows why the sobering lesson of the IWO remains prescient today.
Antebellum secret societies ranged politically from those with progressive or even revolutionary agendas to those that pursued conservative or oppressive goals. This book shows how, in the years leading up to the Civil War, these clandestine organizations exacerbated existing sectional tensions in the United States. Lause's research indicates that the pervasive influence of secret societies may have played a part in key events such as the Freesoil movement, the beginning of the Republican party, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Lincoln's election, and the Southern secession process of 1860-1861.
This exceptional study encompasses both white and African American secret society involvement, revealing the black fraternal experience in antebellum America as well as the clandestine operations that provided assistance to escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad. Unraveling these pervasive and extensive networks of power and influence, A Secret Society History of the Civil War demonstrates that antebellum secret societies played a greater role in affecting Civil War-era politics than has been previously acknowledged.
The WWB received federal money while retaining its status as a private organization that could mount campaigns without government oversight. Historian Thomas Howell argues that this unique position has caused its history to fall between the cracks, since it was not recognized as an official part of the government's war effort. Yet the WWB's work had a huge impact on the nation's wartime culture, and this fascinating history will inform contemporary thinking on propaganda, the media, and American society.
The key to democratization lies within the experience of the popular movements. Those who engaged in the popular struggle in Guatemala have a deep understanding of substantive democratic behavior, and the experience of Guatemala’s civil society should be the cornerstone for building a meaningful formal democracy.
In Terror in the Countryside Rachel May offers an in-depth examination of the relationship between political violence and civil society. Focusing on Guatemala, Professor May develops a theoretical scheme that calls into question the more conventional understandings of both violence and civil society.
By elaborating a cyclical model of violence, and suggesting a typology of rural (campesino) popular organizations, Terror in the Countryside provides both a history and an analysis of late-twentieth-century violence and of the role of campesino organizations during the worst years of conflict in Guatemala.
This history details the way ideologies, organizational structures, and mobilization strategies evolved in response to the climate of terror, emphasizing the courage and sacrifice of those who worked for justice and human rights.
This book argues that the peace accords can be considered only as a first step to eliminate a violence that has become deeply rooted in the political life of the country.
"A welcome contribution to the history of science in the South during the period since the Civil War. . . . By considering the academies in the larger context of scientific professionalism, South and North, Midgette has produced a surprisingly wide-ranging and informative study. This is overall a judicious and carefully researched work. The writing is straightforward and admirably clear, while the topic is effectively organized and presented. The book is a commendably original addition to local and regional history as well as history of American Science."
—Journal of American History
"Midgette’s study is thorough and well organized and should be consulted by anyone interested in American science and American higher education."
—Florida Historical Quarterly
"A very useful survey."
—Choice
In Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish, Howard Lune considers the development and mobilization of different nationalisms over 125 years of Irish diasporic history (1791–1920) and how these campaigns defined the Irish nation and Irish citizenship.
Lune takes a collective approach to exploring identity, concentrating on social identities in which organizations are the primary creative agent to understand who we are and how we come to define ourselves. As exiled Irishmen moved to the United States, they sought to create a new Irish republic following the American model. Lune traces the construction of Irish American identity through the establishment and development of Irish nationalist organizations in the United States. He looks at how networks—such as societies, clubs, and private organizations—can influence and foster diaspora, nationalism, and nationalist movements.
By separating nationalism from the physical nation, Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish uniquely captures the processes and mechanisms by which collective identities are constructed, negotiated, and disseminated. Inevitably, this work tackles the question of what it means to be Irish—to have a nationality, a community, or a shared history.
Das Gupta offers an ethnography of seven South Asian organizations in the northeastern United States, looking at their development and politics as well as the conflicts that have emerged within the groups over questions of sexual, class, and political identities. She examines the ways that women’s organizations have defined and responded to questions of domestic violence as they relate to women’s immigration status; she describes the construction of a transnational South Asian queer identity and culture by people often marginalized by both mainstream South Asian and queer communities in the United States; and she draws attention to the efforts of labor groups who have sought economic justice for taxi drivers and domestic workers by confronting local policies that exploit cheap immigrant labor. Responding to the shortcomings of the state, their communities, and the larger social movements of which they are a part, these groups challenge the assumption that citizenship is the necessary basis of rights claims.
Unlike leftist antiwar movements, the mothers' movement was not pacifist; its members opposed the war on Germany because they regarded Hitler as an ally against the spread of atheistic communism. They also differed from leftist women in their endorsement of patriarchy and nationalism. God, they believed, wanted them to fight the New Deal liberalism that imperiled their values and the internationalists, communists, and Jews, whom they saw as subjugating Christian America.
Jeansonne examines the motivations of these women, the political and social impact of their movement, and their collaborations with men of the far right and also with mainstream isolationists such as Charles Lindbergh. Drawing on files kept by the FBI and other confidential documents, this book sheds light on the history of the war era and on women's place within the far right.
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