8818 books match the query 'Political Science' and 626 start with a

cover of A Nation at Work: The Heldrich Guide to the American Workforce

A Nation at Work

The Heldrich Guide to the American Workforce

Van Horn, Carl E

Rutgers University Press, 2003

In the United States work underlies our very concept of who we are. Changes in society and technology have influenced how and where we work, and transformations within the workplace in turn have altered our society.

A Nation at Work addresses the fundamental economic, demographic, policy, and business facts about how the workforce and workplace are changing in the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with over thirty-five graphs, Part I covers essential topics about the American workforce and workers. Part II gathers essays and speeches from the nation's outstanding journalists and workplace analysts. The book incorporates facts and data, including invaluable tables and listings for useful Internet sites, books, and organizations.

Comprehensive in scope, A Nation at Work will help readers reach a better understanding about their own work and the world of work around them.
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cover of A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered

US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965

Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Hsu, Maria Garcia

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Scholars, journalists, and policymakers have long argued that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically reshaped the demographic composition of the United States. In A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered, leading scholars of immigration explore how the political and ideological struggles of the "age of restriction"--from 1924 to 1965--paved the way for the changes to come. The essays examine how geopolitics, civil rights, perceptions of America's role as a humanitarian sanctuary, and economic priorities led government officials to facilitate the entrance of specific immigrant groups, thereby establishing the legal precedents for future policies. Eye-opening articles discuss Japanese war brides and changing views of miscegenation, the recruitment of former Nazi scientists, a temporary workers program with Japanese immigrants, the emotional separation of Mexican immigrant families, Puerto Rican youth’s efforts to claim an American identity, and the restaurant raids of conscripted Chinese sailors during World War II.

Contributors: Eiichiro Azuma, David Cook-Martín, David FitzGerald, Monique Laney, Heather Lee, Kathleen López, Laura Madokoro, Ronald L. Mize, Arissa H. Oh, Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Lorrin Thomas, Ruth Ellen Wasem, and Elliott Young

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cover of A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

A Nation of Politicians

Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Padhraig Higgins

University of Wisconsin Press, 2009

Between the years 1778 and 1784, groups that had previously been excluded from the Irish political sphere—women, Catholics, lower-class Protestants, farmers, shopkeepers, and other members of the laboring and agrarian classes—began to imagine themselves as civil subjects with a stake in matters of the state. This politicization of non-elites was largely driven by the Volunteers, a local militia force that emerged in Ireland as British troops were called away to the American War of Independence. With remarkable speed, the Volunteers challenged central features of British imperial rule over Ireland and helped citizens express a new Irish national identity.
    In A Nation of Politicians, Padhraig Higgins argues that the development of Volunteer-initiated activities—associating, petitioning, subscribing, shopping, and attending celebrations—expanded the scope of political participation. Using a wide range of literary, archival, and visual sources, Higgins examines how ubiquitous forms of communication—sermons, songs and ballads, handbills, toasts, graffiti, theater, rumors, and gossip—encouraged ordinary Irish citizens to engage in the politics of a more inclusive society and consider the broader questions of civil liberties and the British Empire. A Nation of Politicians presents a fascinating tale of the beginnings of Ireland’s richly vocal political tradition at this important intersection of cultural, intellectual, social, and public history.
 
 
Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book, American Conference for Irish Studies
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cover of A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic

A Nation of Takers

America’s Entitlement Epidemic

Nicholas Eberstadt

Templeton Press, 2012

In A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic, one of our country’s foremost demographers, Nicholas Eberstadt, details the exponential growth in entitlement spending over the past fifty years. As he notes, in 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government’s total outlays. Today, entitlement spending accounts for a full two-thirds of the federal budget. Drawing on an impressive array of data and employing a range of easy- to- read, four color charts, Eberstadt shows the unchecked spiral of spending on a range of entitlements, everything from medicare to disability payments.  But Eberstadt does not just chart the astonishing growth of entitlement spending, he also details the enormous economic and cultural costs of this epidemic.   He powerfully argues that while this spending certainly drains our federal coffers, it also has a very real,long-lasting, negative impact on the character of our citizens. 
Also included in the book is a response from one of our leading political theorists, William Galston. In his incisive response, he questions Eberstadt’s conclusions about the corrosive effect of entitlements on character and offers his own analysis of the impact of American entitlement growth.  
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cover of A Natural History of Peace

A Natural History of Peace

Thomas A. Gregor

Vanderbilt University Press, 1996

We know a great deal about aggression, conflict, and war, but relatively little about peace, partially because it has been such a scarce phenomenon throughout history and in our own times. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace requires special relationships, structures, and attitudes to promote and protect it.

A Natural History of Peace provides the first broadly interdisciplinary examination of peace as viewed from the perspectives of social anthropology, primatology, archaeology, psychology, political science, and economics. Among other notable features, this volume offers:

  • a major theory concerning the evolution of peace and violence through human history; 
  • an in-depth comparative study of peaceful cultures with the goal of discovering what it is that makes them peaceful; 
  • one of the earliest reports of a new theory of the organization and collapse of ancient Maya civilization; 
  • a comparative examination of peace from the perspective of change, including the transition of one of the world's most violent societies to a relatively
  • peaceful culture, and the decision-making process of terrorists who abandon violence; 
  • and a theory of political change that sees the conclusion of wars as uniquely creative periods in the evolution of peace among modern nations.
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cover of A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society

A New Constitutionalism

Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society

Edited by Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In The New Constitutionalism, seven distinguished scholars develop an innovative perspective on the power of institutions to shape politics and political life.

Believing that constitutionalism needs to go beyond the classical goal of limiting the arbitrary exercise of political power, the contributors argue that it should—and can—be designed to achieve economic efficiency, informed democratic control, and other valued political ends. More broadly, they believe that political and social theory needs to turn away from the negativism of critical theory to consider how a good society should be "constituted" and to direct the work of designing institutions that can constitute a "good polity," in both the economic and civic senses.

Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan begin with an overview of constitutionalist theory and a discussion of the new constitutionalism within the broader intellectual and historical context of political and social thought. Charles Anderson, James Ceaser, and the editors then offer different interpretations of the central issues regarding institutional design in a constitutionalist social science, consider various ways of performing the task, and discuss the inadequacy of recent political science to the job it ought to be doing. The book concludes with essays by Ted Lowi, Cass Sunstein and Edwin Haefele which apply these themes to the American regime.
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cover of A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today

A New Criminal Type in Jakarta

Counter-Revolution Today

James T. Siegel

Duke University Press, 1998

In A New Criminal Type in Jakarta, James T. Siegel studies the dependence of Indonesia’s post-1965 government on the ubiquitous presence of what he calls criminality, an ensemble of imagined forces within its society that is poised to tear it apart. Siegel, a foremost authority on Indonesia, interprets Suharto’s New Order—in powerful contrast to Sukarno’s Old Order—and shows a cultural and political life in Jakarta controlled by a repressive regime that has created new ideas among its population about crime, ghosts, fear, and national identity.
Examining the links between the concept of criminality and scandal, rumor, fear, and the state, Siegel analyzes daily life in Jakarta through the seemingly disparate but strongly connected elements of family life, gossip, and sensationalist journalism. He offers close analysis of the preoccupation with crime in Pos Kota (a newspaper directed toward the lower classes) and the middle-class magazine Tempo. Because criminal activity has been a sensationalized preoccupation in Jakarta’s news venues and among its people, criminality, according to Siegel, has pervaded the identities of its ordinary citizens. Siegel examines how and why the government, fearing revolution and in an attempt to assert power, has made criminality itself a disturbing rationalization for the spectacular massacre of the people it calls criminals—many of whom were never accused of particular crimes. A New Criminal Type in Jakarta reveals that Indonesians—once united by Sukarno’s revolutionary proclamations in the name of “the people”—are now, lacking any other unifying element, united through their identification with the criminal and through a “nationalization of death” that has emerged with Suharto’s strong counter-revolutionary measures.
A provocative introduction to contemporary Indonesia, this book will engage those interested in Southeast Asian studies, anthropology, history, political science, postcolonial studies, public culture, and cultural studies generally.


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cover of A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

A New Deal for the Humanities

Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

Hutner, Gordon

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Many in higher education fear that the humanities are facing a crisis. But even if the rhetoric about “crisis” is overblown, humanities departments do face increasing pressure from administrators, politicians, parents, and students. In A New Deal for the Humanities, Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed bring together twelve prominent scholars who address the history, the present state, and the future direction of the humanities. These scholars keep the focus on public higher education, for it is in our state schools that the liberal arts are taught to the greatest numbers and where their neglect would be most damaging for the nation.
 
The contributors offer spirited and thought-provoking debates on a diverse range of topics. For instance, they deplore the push by administrations to narrow learning into quantifiable outcomes as well as the demands of state governments for more practical, usable training. Indeed, for those who suggest that a college education should be “practical”—that it should lean toward the sciences and engineering, where the high-paying jobs are—this book points out that while a few nations produce as many technicians as the United States does, America is still renowned worldwide for its innovation and creativity, skills taught most effectively in the humanities. Most importantly, the essays in this collection examine ways to make the humanities even more effective, such as offering a broader array of options than the traditional major/minor scheme, options that combine a student’s professional and intellectual interests, like the new medical humanities programs.
 
A democracy can only be as energetic as the minds of its citizens, and the questions fundamental to the humanities are also fundamental to a thoughtful life. A New Deal for the Humanities takes an intrepid step in making the humanities—and our citizens—even stronger in the future.
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cover of A New Generation Draws the Line: 'Humanitarian' Intervention and the Standards of the West

A New Generation Draws the Line

'Humanitarian' Intervention and the Standards of the West

Noam Chomsky

Pluto Press, 2012

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cover of A New Green Order?: The World Bank and the Politics of the Global Environment Facility

A New Green Order?

The World Bank and the Politics of the Global Environment Facility

Zoe Young

Pluto Press, 2002

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is a publicly funded, multi-billion dollar experiment in global resource management. It was set up in 1991 by the World Bank to fund international conventions on climate change and biodiversity.

Investigating the workings of this little known aid fund, Zoe Young takes a critical look at the conflicts involved, focusing on how the GEF's agenda relates to questions of globalisation, knowledge and accountability in the United States and the World Bank.

As our landscapes, fertility, cultures and ecosystems are being destroyed every day, Zoe Young gives a disturbing account of the complex issues that must be addressed before the world's environment can be managed more democratically - and effectively.
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cover of A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

A New Insurgency

The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

Howard Brick and Gregory Parker, eds.

Michigan Publishing Services, 2018

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was just one of several new insurgent movements for democracy and social justice during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it must be understood in the context of other causes and organizations—in the United States and abroad—that inspired its founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. In A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, a diverse group of more than forty scholars and activists take a transnational approach in order to explore the different—though often interconnected—campaigns that mobilized people along varied racial, ethnic, gender, and regional dimensions from the birth of the New Left in the civil rights and pacifist agitation of the 1950s to the Occupy movements of today.
 
This volume features three never-before-published “manifesto drafts” written by Tom Hayden in early 1962 that generated the discussion leading to the Port Huron meeting. Other highlights include recollections from leading women in the Port Huron deliberations who, three years later, protested the subordination of women within the radical movements, thus setting the stage for the rise of women’s liberation. A New Insurgency is based on the University of Michigan’s conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement in 2012.
 
“The fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement has drawn a great number of reflections and commemorations, but this carefully conceived volume offers an account of unrivaled ambition, exceptional breadth, and surprising insight. It both excavates the event itself—vividly, perceptively, exhaustively—and gives it the largest and most illuminating of contexts. A New Insurgency is as close to definitive as any volume of this kind can become.”
—Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan
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cover of A New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society

A New Scotland

Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society

Gregor Gall

Pluto Press, 2022

Inequality and unfairness still stalk Scotland after more than twenty years of devolution. Having done little to shield against austerity, Brexit and an increasingly right-wing Westminster agenda, calls for further constitutional reform to solve pressing political, economic and social problems grow ever louder. The debate over further devolution or independence continues to split the population.

In A New Scotland, leading activists and academics lay out the blueprints for radical reform, showing how society can be transformed by embedding values of democracy, social justice and environmental sustainability into a coherent set of policy ideas.

Structured in two parts, the book takes to task the challenges to affect radical change, before exploring new approaches to key questions such as healthcare, education, public ownership, race, gender and human rights.
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cover of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America

A Noble Fight

African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America

Corey D. B. Walker

University of Illinois Press, 2008

A Noble Fight examines the metaphors and meanings behind the African American appropriation of the culture, ritual, and institution of freemasonry in navigating the contested terrain of American democracy. Combining cultural and political theory with extensive archival research--including the discovery of a rare collection of nineteenth-century records of an African American Freemason Lodge--Corey D. B. Walker provides an innovative perspective on American politics and society during the long transition from slavery to freedom.

With great care and detail, Walker argues that African American freemasonry provides a critical theoretical lens for understanding the distinctive ways African Americans have constructed a radically democratic political imaginary through racial solidarity and political nationalism, forcing us to reconsider much more circumspectly the complex relationship between voluntary associations and democratic politics.

Mapping the discursive logics of the language of freemasonry as a metaphoric rendering of American democracy, this study interrogates the concrete forms of an associational culture, revealing how paradoxical aspects of freemasonry such as secrecy and public association inform the production of particular ideas and expressions of democracy in America.

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cover of A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy

A Not So Foreign Affair

Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy

Andrea Slane

Duke University Press, 2001

In A Not So Foreign Affair Andrea Slane investigates the influence of images of Nazism on debates about sexuality that are central to contemporary American political rhetoric. By analyzing an array of films, journalism, scholarly theories, melodrama, video, and propaganda literature, Slane describes a common rhetoric that emerged during the 1930s and 1940s as a means of distinguishing “democratic sexuality” from that ascribed to Nazi Germany.
World War II marked a turning point in the cultural rhetoric of democracy, Slane claims, because it intensified a preoccupation with the political role of private life and pushed sexuality to the center of democratic discourse. Having created tremendous anxiety—and fascination—in American culture, Nazism became associated with promiscuity, sexual perversionand the destruction of the family. Slane reveals how this particular imprint of fascism is used in progressive as well as conservative imagery and language to further their domestic agendas and shows how our cultural engagement with Nazism reflects the inherent tension in democracy between the value of diversity, individual freedoms national identity, and notions of the common good. Finally, she applies her analysis of wartime narratives to contemporary texts, examining anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-federal rhetoric, as well as the psychic life of skinheads, censorship debates, and the contemporary fascination with incest.
An invaluable resource for understanding the language we use—both visual and narrative—to describe and debate democracy in the United States today, A Not So Foreign Affair will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, film and video studies, American studies, twentieth century history, German studies, rhetoric, and sexuality studies.
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cover of A Paler Shade of Red: The 2008 Presidential Election in the South

A Paler Shade of Red

The 2008 Presidential Election in the South

Branwell DuBose Kapeluck

University of Arkansas Press, 2009

The scholars included in A Paler Shade of Red cover the 2008 presidential election with detailed, state-by-state analyses of how the presidential election, from the nomination struggle through the casting of votes in November, played out in the South. The book also includes examinations of important elections other than for president, and in addition to the single-state perspectives, there are three chapters that look at the region as a whole. Contributors are Scott E. Buchanan, John A. Clark, Patrick R. Cotter, Charles Bullock III, Rogert E. Hogan and Eunice H. McCarney, David A. Breaux and Stephen D. Shaffer, Cole Blease Graham, Jay Barth, Janine A. Parry and Todd G. Shields, Jonathan Knuckey, Charles Prysby, Ronald Keith Gaddie, Brian Arbour and Mark McKenzie, and John J. McGlennon, all collected here to provide powerful insight into southern politics today.
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cover of A Passion for Cooperation: Adventures of a Wide-Ranging Scientist

A Passion for Cooperation

Adventures of a Wide-Ranging Scientist

Robert Axelrod

University of Michigan Press, 2023

A Passion for Cooperation is the exciting autobiography of Robert Axelrod, one of the most acclaimed and wide-ranging scientists of the last fifty years. After being recognized by President Kennedy for being a promising young scientist while in high school, Axelrod built a career dedicated to collaborating with business school professors, international relations scholars, political scientists, computer scientists, and even evolutionary biologists and cancer researchers. Fifty years later, he was honored by President Obama with the National Medal of Science for scientific achievement and leadership and his work has been referred to as the gold standard of interdisciplinary research. 

Yet Axelrod’s autobiography is not just an account of his wide-ranging passion for cooperation. It reveals his struggles to overcome failures and experience the joys of gaining new insights into how to achieve cooperation. A Passion for Cooperation recounts Robert Axelrod’s adventures talking with the leader of the organization Hamas, the Prime Minister of Israel, and the Foreign Minister of Syria. Axelrod also shares stories of being hosted in Kazakhstan by senior Soviet retired generals and visiting China with well-connected policy advisors on issues of military aspects of cyber conflict. Through stories of the difficulties and rewards of interdisciplinary collaborations, readers will discover how Axelrod’s academic and practical work have enriched each other and demonstrated that opportunities for cooperation are much greater than generally thought. 
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cover of A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order

A Peaceful Conquest

Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order

Cara Lea Burnidge

University of Chicago Press, 2016

A century after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson remains one of the most compelling and complicated figures ever to occupy the Oval Office. A political outsider, Wilson brought to the presidency a distinctive, strongly held worldview, built on powerful religious traditions that informed his idea of America and its place in the world.

With A Peaceful Conquest, Cara Lea Burnidge presents the most detailed analysis yet of how Wilson’s religious beliefs affected his vision of American foreign policy, with repercussions that lasted into the Cold War and beyond. Framing Wilson’s intellectual development in relationship to the national religious landscape, and paying greater attention to the role of religion than in previous scholarship, Burnidge shows how Wilson’s blend of Southern evangelicalism and social Christianity became a central part of how America saw itself in the world, influencing seemingly secular policy decisions in subtle, lasting ways. Ultimately, Burnidge makes a case for Wilson’s religiosity as one of the key drivers of the emergence of the public conception of America’s unique, indispensable role in international relations.

As the presidential election cycle once again raises questions of America’s place in the world, A Peaceful Conquest offers a fascinating excavation of its little-known roots.
 
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cover of A People's History of the European Court of Human Rights: A People's History of the European Court of Human Rights, First Paperback Edition

A People's History of the European Court of Human Rights

A People's History of the European Court of Human Rights, First Paperback Edition

Goldhaber, Michael

Rutgers University Press, 2007

The exceptionality of America’s Supreme Court has long been conventional wisdom. But the United States Supreme Court is no longer the only one changing the landscape of public rights and values. Over the past thirty years, the European Court of Human Rights has developed an ambitious, American-style body of law. Unheralded by the mass press, this obscure tribunal in Strasbourg, France has become, in many ways, the Supreme Court of Europe.

Michael Goldhaber introduces American audiences to the judicial arm of the Council of Europe—a group distinct from the European Union, and much larger—whose mission is centered on interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council routinely confronts nations over their most culturally-sensitive, hot-button issues. It has stared down France on the issue of Muslim immigration; Ireland on abortion; Greece on Greek Orthodoxy; Turkey on Kurdish separatism; Austria on Nazism; and Britain on gay rights and corporal punishment. And what is most extraordinary is that nations commonly comply.

In the battle for the world’s conscience, Goldhaber shows how the court in Strasbourg may be pulling ahead.

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cover of A People's History of the Russian Revolution

A People's History of the Russian Revolution

Neil Faulkner

Pluto Press, 2017

The Russian Revolution may be the most misunderstood and misrepresented event in modern history, its history told in a mix of legends and anecdotes. In A People's History of the Russian Revolution, Neil Faulkner sets out to debunk the myths and pry fact from fiction, putting at the heart of the story the Russian people who are the true heroes of this tumultuous tale. In this fast-paced introduction, Faulkner tells the powerful narrative of how millions of people came together in a mass movement, organized democratic assemblies, mobilized for militant action, and overturned a vast regime of landlords, profiteers, and warmongers.
 
Faulkner rejects caricatures of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as authoritarian conspirators or the progenitors of Stalinist dictatorship, and forcefully argues that the Russian Revolution was an explosion of democracy and creativity—and that it was crushed by bloody counter-revolution and replaced with a form of bureaucratic state-capitalism.
 
Grounded by powerful first-hand testimony, this history marks the centenary of the Revolution by restoring the democratic essence of the revolution, offering a perfect primer for the modern reader.
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cover of A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland

A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland

Michael Agnew

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Once dominated by megabreweries like Miller and G. Heilemann, the Midwest has in recent years become home to a dynamic craft beer industry at the core of America's current brewing renaissance. Beer writer and Certified Cicerone® Michael Agnew crisscrossed Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin sampling the astonishing variety of beers on offer at breweries and brewpubs. The result is a region-wide survey of the Midwestern craft beer scene. Packed with details on more than 200 breweries, A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland offers actual and armchair travelers alike a handbook that includes:
  • Agnew's exclusive choices on which beers to try at each location
  • Entries on every brewery's history and philosophy
  • Information on tours, tasting rooms and attached pubs, and dining options and other amenities
  • A survey of each brewery's brands, including its flagship beer plus seasonal brews and special releases
  • Brewery equipment and capacity
  • Nearby attractions

In addition, Agnew sets the stage with a history of Midwestern beer spanning the origins of the immigrant brewers who arrived in the 1800s to the homebrewers-made-good who have built a new kind of brewing culture founded on creativity, dedication to quality, and attention to customer feedback.

Informed and unique, A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland is the essential companion for beer aficionados and curious others determined to drink the best the Midwest has to offer.

Includes more than 150 full color images, including the region's most distinctive beer labels, trademarks, and company logos.

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cover of A Phenomenology of Trumpism: America Talks with the Origins of the West

A Phenomenology of Trumpism

America Talks with the Origins of the West

Michael Arvanitopoulos

Intellect Books, 2026

A call for the revival of American democracy through a return to Greek classical culture and the strengthening of humanistic education in schools.

This book traces our escalating geopolitical chaos to the utter failure of Western education. The purging of the Greeks from our schools with the masquerade that was modernity, combined with the prevalence of Teutonic neo-barbarism in Europe and a constitutional anti-intellectualism in America, has bred compiling generations of citizens bereft of a kind of thought that is essentially human. In the absence of human thought, market ideologies from Karl Marx to Adam Smith have enjoyed a long leash to establish as incontestable the idea that any existential proposition other than their own is nothing but an arrogant desire to redesign life itself. Thus Western “democracies” alternatively keep voting in Satan to fend off Beelzebub, having to choose between either a preanthropic Hobbesian, or a metanthropic Sartrean future, with not much in between. From what universal constancy, and from what kind of “education,” can an anthropic measure show beyond doubt that there is an alternative path? This is the riddle of the Age of Trumpism, the book argues; and forces the Statue of Liberty into a syzetetic discussion with the Greek statue, through a critical phenomenological return to the things themselves that bridges Heidegger’s thought with the metaphysics of Greek tragic art.
 
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cover of A Place for Dialogue: Language, Land Use, and Politics in Southern Arizona

A Place for Dialogue

Language, Land Use, and Politics in Southern Arizona

Sharon McKenzie Stevens

University of Iowa Press, 2007

 In A Place for Dialogue, Sharon McKenzie Stevens views the contradictions and collaborations involved in the management of public land in southern Arizona—and by extension the entire arid West—through the lens of political rhetoric. Revealing the socioecological relationships among cattlemen and environmentalists as well as developers and recreationists, she analyzes the ways that language shapes landscape by shaping decisions about land use.

Stevens focuses on the collaborative Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan initiated by Pima County, Arizona, the ubiquitous use of scientific argument to defend contradictory practices, and the construction and negotiation of rancher/environmentalist identities to illuminate both literally and metaphorically the dynamics of land use politics. Drawing specifically upon extensive interviews with a diverse array of agents on all sides of the debate—ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, land managers, government officials—on historical narratives, and on her own conflicting experiences as someone who grew up with those who work the western lands, she demonstrates that it is possible to use differences to solve, rather than to aggravate, the entrenched problems that bridge land and language.  

By integrating her richly textured case study of a fragile region with rhetorical approaches to narrative, science-based argument, and collective identities, Stevens makes a significant contribution to the fields of rhetoric, land management, and cultural studies. 

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cover of A Police State: Politics and Public Safety in Minneapolis, 1945–2020

A Police State

Politics and Public Safety in Minneapolis, 1945–2020

Michael J. Lansing

University of Chicago Press, 2027

How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States—even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.

In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor’s office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.

A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd’s murder—and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.

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cover of A Political Economy of Justice

A Political Economy of Justice

Edited by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, Leah Downey, Rebecca Henderson, and Josh Simons

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time.
 
If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy.
 
A Political Economy of Justice collects fourteen essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.
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cover of A Political Theology of Negative Sovereignty

A Political Theology of Negative Sovereignty

Claudio Lomnitz

Duke University Press, 2027

Claudio Lomnitz excavates the metaphysical foundations of violence in contemporary Mexico by exploring the theological imaginaries that emerge from the decay of state sovereignty and the rise of criminal syndicates. Accelerated economic and political changes have sparked deep changes in public morality, and Lomnitz identifies and defines “negative sovereignty” as the core phenomenon driving a deeply unsettling moral revolt. Negative sovereignty arises where the state has ceded or forfeited its authority to govern to illegal organizations that thrive on violence and extraction. Lomnitz explores the political theology that has emerged alongside this phenomenon, a moral cosmology in which Death, not God, is the metaphysical sovereign of choice. A Political Theology of Negative Sovereignty dissects the relationship between violence and public morality; in the process, Lomnitz challenges the theoretical assumptions underlying dominant views of contemporary governmentality.
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cover of A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji

A Politics of Virtue

Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji

John D. Kelly

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Kelly opens new questions about dialogue, colonial power, and
changing conditions of political possibility by examining the
connection between politics and sexual morality in the British
colony of Fiji from 1929 to 1932.
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cover of A Postcapitalist Politics

A Postcapitalist Politics

J. K. Gibson-Graham

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies.

A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic “development” pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action. In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action.

J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
[more]
cover of A Pragmatic Alliance: Jewish-Lithuanian political cooperation at the beginning of the 20th century

A Pragmatic Alliance

Jewish-Lithuanian political cooperation at the beginning of the 20th century

Vladas Sirutavicius

Central European University Press, 2011

Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.
[more]
cover of A Pragmatism of Beginnings: Governing Crises in the Anthropocene

A Pragmatism of Beginnings

Governing Crises in the Anthropocene

Pol Bargués

University of Michigan Press, 2027

As climate change, pandemics, disasters, migrations, and conflicts increasingly overlap, crises are becoming more complex and difficult to address. The Anthropocene is an era characterized by uncertainty and contestation, in which traditional approaches to crisis management are no longer working. This book examines the ideas that have emerged to help societies move forward, including resilience, navigation, adaptation, precaution, and slow peacebuilding. While these approaches promise hope and progress, A Pragmatism of Beginnings critically highlights their limitations, showing how they often focus on coping with crises in ways that merely preserve and reproduce a decaying status quo.

Drawing on philosophical pragmatism, the book places these imaginaries that drive crisis management today in dialogue with the work of the classical pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, as well as contemporary philosophers Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Elizabeth Grosz, to assess both their promises and their limitations. Across a series of case studies covering disaster response, peacebuilding, global health, climate governance, migration management, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda, the book shows how contemporary crisis governance often seeks to preserve the status quo by managing risks and avoiding breakdown rather than pursue transformative change. A Pragmatism of Beginnings argues that responding to today’s crises requires more; it also demands the courage and imagination to seize new beginnings.

[more]
cover of A Preface to Democratic Theory

A Preface to Democratic Theory

Robert A. Dahl

University of Chicago Press, 1963

A Preface to Democratic Theory explores some problems left unsolved by traditional democratic theory, Professor Dahl examines two influential "model" theories—the Madisonian, representing the prevailing American doctrine, and its recurring challenger, the populistic theory—and argues that they no longer explain how modern democracies operate. He then constructs a model more consistent with modern political science, and, in doing so, develops some unique views of popular sovereignty and the American constitutional system.

"A Preface to Democratic Theory is well worth the devoted attention of anyone who cares about democracy. For it will have an important influence on both theory about democracy and on actual practice in democracies round the world."—Bernard Barber, Political Science Quarterly

"The book is a must for democratic theorists."—J. Roland Pennock, Journal of Politics
[more]
cover of A Preface to Democratic Theory, Expanded Edition

A Preface to Democratic Theory, Expanded Edition

Robert A. Dahl

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Robert Dahl’s Preface helped launch democratic theory fifty years ago as a new area of study in political science, and it remains the standard introduction to the field. Exploring problems that had been left unsolved by traditional thought on democracy, Dahl here examines two influential models—the Madisonian, which represents prevailing American doctrine, and its recurring challenger, populist theory—arguing that they do not accurately portray how modern democracies operate. He then constructs a model more consistent with how contemporary democracies actually function, and, in doing so, develops some original views of popular sovereignty and the American constitutional system. 

For this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Dahl has written an extensive new afterword that reevaluates Madisonian theory in light of recent research. And in a new foreword, he reflects back on his influential volume and the ways his views have evolved since he wrote it. For any student or scholar of political science, this new material is an essential update on a gold standard in the evolving field of democratic theory. 

“A Preface to Democratic Theory is well worth the devoted attention of anyone who cares about democracy.”—Political Science Quarterly

[more]
cover of A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers' Compensation

A Prelude to the Welfare State

The Origins of Workers' Compensation

Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Workers' compensation was arguably the first widespread social insurance program in the United States and the most successful form of labor legislation to emerge from the early Progressive Movement. Adopted in most states between 1910 and 1920, workers' compensation laws have been paving seen as the way for social security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and eventually the broad network of social welfare programs we have today.

In this highly original and persuasive work, Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor challenge widespread historical perceptions, arguing that, rather than being an early progressive victory, workers' compensation succeeded because all relevant parties—labor and management, insurance companies, lawyers, and legislators—benefited from the legislation. Thorough, rigorous, and convincing, A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers' Compensation is a major reappraisal of the causes and consequences of a movement that ultimately transformed the nature of social insurance and the American workplace.
[more]
cover of A Presidential Civil Service: FDR's Liaison Office for Personnel Management

A Presidential Civil Service

FDR's Liaison Office for Personnel Management

Mordecai Lee

University of Alabama Press, 2016

Revealing the overlooked agency that transformed presidential personnel management and modern federal governance.

A Presidential Civil Service offers a comprehensive and definitive study of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM). Established in 1939 following the release of Roosevelt’s Brownlow Committee report, LOPM became a key milestone in the evolution of the contemporary executive-focused civil service.

The Progressive Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised groups across the political spectrum with quite different. All, however, agreed on the need for a politically autonomous and independent federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) to eliminate patronage and political favoritism. In A Presidential Civil Service, public administration scholar Mordecai Lee explores two models open to later reformers: continuing a merit-based system isolated from politics or a management-based system subordinated to the executive and grounded in the growing field of managerial science.

Roosevelt’s 1937 Brownlow Committee, formally known as the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, has been widely studied including its recommendation to disband the CSC and replace it with a presidential personnel director. What has never been documented in detail was Roosevelt’s effort to implement that recommendation over the objections of Congress by establishing the LOPM as a nonstatutory agency.

The role and existence of LOPM from 1939 to 1945 has been largely dismissed in the history of public administration. Lee’s meticulously researched A Presidential Civil Service, however, persuasively shows that LOPM played a critical role in overseeing personnel policy. It was involved in every major HR initiative before and during World War II. Though small, the agency’s deft leadership almost always succeeded at impelling the CSC to follow its lead.

Roosevelt’s actions were in fact an artful and creative victory, a move finally vindicated when, in 1978, Congress abolished the CSC and replaced it with an Office of Personnel Management headed by a presidential appointee. A Presidential Civil Service offers a fascinating account and vital reassessment of the enduring legacy of Roosevelt’s LOPM.

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cover of A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country

A Prison in the Woods

Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country

Clarence Jefferson Hall

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have known the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as a site of industrial production, a place to heal from disease, and a sprawling outdoor playground that must be preserved in its wild state. Less well known, however, has been the area's role in hosting a network of state and federal prisons. A Prison in the Woods traces the planning, construction, and operation of penitentiaries in five Adirondack Park communities from the 1840s through the early 2000s to demonstrate that the histories of mass incarceration and environmental consciousness are interconnected.

Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr. reveals that the introduction of correctional facilities—especially in the last three decades of the twentieth century—unearthed long-standing conflicts over the proper uses of Adirondack nature, particularly since these sites have contributed to deforestation, pollution, and habitat decline, even as they've provided jobs and spurred economic growth. Additionally, prison plans have challenged individuals' commitment to environmental protection, tested the strength of environmental regulations, endangered environmental and public health, and exposed tensions around race, class, place, and belonging in the isolated prison towns of America's largest state park.
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cover of A Program for Land Use in Northern Minnesota: A Type Study in Land Utilization

A Program for Land Use in Northern Minnesota

A Type Study in Land Utilization

Oscar Jesness

University of Minnesota Press, 1935

A Program for Land Use in Northern Minnesota was first published in 1935. 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.With half of its privately owned lands tax delinquent, millions of acres returning to public ownership, a per capita debt twice as large as that for the rest of the state, and large areas in no economic use whatsoever, northeastern Minnesota, like many other cut-over regions of the country, faces a serious situation.These fourteen counties, as the authors show, are suffering from the unwise land policies of the past – policies not peculiar to Minnesota. Is there a solution to the problem, or must Minnesota and other states continue to pay the price for their past mistakes?The authors of this volume believe there is a remedy. From a first-hand investigation and careful analysis of conditions in this area, they have arrived at definite conclusions and a specific program. They describe concretely how desirable shifts in land use and changes in government can be accomplished: what legislation should be enacted; how the cooperation of local officers, the settlers, and the general public can be won, and how in the process of readjustment the farmer can be saved from undue hardship and embarrassment.A volume for the legislator, the public official, the landowner, the agricultural economist, and every taxpayer in the state.
[more]
cover of A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies

A Prosperous Way Down

Principles and Policies

Howard T. Odum

University Press of Colorado, 2008

A Prosperous Way Down (2001), the last book by Howard T. and Elisabeth C. Odum, has shaped politics and planning as nations, states, and localities begin the search for ways to adapt to a future with vastly increased competition for energy.

A Prosperous Way Down considers ways in which a future with less fossil fuel could be peaceful and prosperous. Although history records the collapse of countless civilizations, some societies and ecosystems have managed to descend in orderly stages, reducing demands and selecting and saving what is most important.

The authors make recommendations for a more equitable and cooperative world society, with specific suggestions based on their evaluations of trends in global population, wealth distribution, energy sources, conservation, urban development, capitalism and international trade, information technology, and education.

Available for the first time in paperback, this thoughtful, provocative book forces us to confront assumptions about our world 's future and provides both a steadying hand and a call to action with its pragmatic analysis of a global transition.

[more]
cover of A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968-1976

A Question of Justice

New South Governors and Education, 1968-1976

Gordon E. Harvey

University of Alabama Press, 2005

The governors who used education to transform the modern South.

In southern politics, 1970 marked a watershed. A group of southern governors entered office that year and changed both the way the nation looked at the South and the way the constituents of those states viewed themselves. Reubin Askew in Florida, John West in South Carolina, Jimmy Carter in Georgia, and Albert Brewer in Alabama all represented a new breed of progressive moderate politician that helped demolish Jim Crow segregation and the dual economies, societies, and educational systems notorious to the Sunbelt South. Historian Gordon Harvey explores the political lives and legacies of three of these governors, examining the conditions that led to such a radical change in political leadership, the effects their legislative agendas had on the identity of their states, and the aftermath of their terms in elected office.

A common thread in each governor's agenda was educational reform. Albert Brewer's short term as Alabama governor resulted in a sweeping education package that still stands as the most progressive the state has seen. Reubin Askew, far more outspoken than Brewer, won the Florida gubernatorial election through a campaign that openly promoted desegregation, busing, and tax reform as a means of equal school funding. John West's commitment to a policy of inclusion helped allay fears of both black and white parents and made South Carolina's one of the smoothest transitions to integrated schools.

As members of the first generation of New South governors, Brewer, Askew, and West played the role of trailblazers. Their successful assaults on economic and racial injustice in their states were certainly aided by such landmark events as Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and the expansion of voting rights-all of which sounded the death knell for the traditional one-party segregated South. But in this critical detailing of their work for justice, we learn how these reform-minded men made education central to their gubernatorial terms and, in doing so, helped redefine the very character of the place they called home.

[more]
cover of A Question of Voice: Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy

A Question of Voice

Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy

Ron Scapp

University of Michigan Press, 2020

A Question of Voice: Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy offers an explicit and comprehensive consideration of voice as a complex of rethinking aspects of the history of philosophy through issues of power, as well as contemporary issues that include and involve the desire for and the dynamics of legitimacy, for individuals and communities. By identifying voice as a significant theme and means by which and through which we might better engage some important philosophical questions, Ron Scapp hopes to expand traditional philosophical discussion and discourse regarding questions about validity, legitimacy, empathy, and solidarity. He offers an innovative perspective that is informed and guided by multiculturalism, ethnic studies, queer studies, feminism, and thinkers and critics such as bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, among others. A Question of Voice is an American investigation, but also suggests questions that emanate from contemporary continental thought as well as issues that arise from transnational perspectives—an approach that is motived by doing philosophy in an age of multiculturalism.
[more]
cover of A Radical Convergence: Latter-day Saints and Their Utopian Socialist Origins

A Radical Convergence

Latter-day Saints and Their Utopian Socialist Origins

Erik J. Freeman

University of Illinois Press, 2026

During the nineteenth century, socialists and workers from outside the United States converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and flocked to Mormon communities to build a social utopia. By 1890, working-class immigrants or their children comprised two-thirds of the LDS population in Utah.

Erik J. Freeman uses the lives of radical converts to explore the international socialist politics that permeated the early Church. These energetic newcomers fueled LDS expansion even as they laid the foundation for a global religion. At the same time, utopian socialists within the Church helped lay the groundwork for later political and social movements and progressive ideas. The Church in the United States pivoted toward capitalism after the turn of the century, but socialist thought remained—and remain—an important thread throughout LDS communities around the world.

Provocative and sweeping, A Radical Convergence tells the surprising story of utopian socialism's place in Church history.
[more]
cover of A Radical History of the World

A Radical History of the World

Neil Faulkner

Pluto Press, 2018


“Staggeringly ambitious.”―New Internationalist

“One of the finest historians on the left.”—John Newsinger, author, The Blood Never Dried



Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Neil Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives the transformative events of our many histories. This is a history of power, abuse, and greed, but also one of liberation, progress, and solidarity.            
 
From the hunter-gatherers two million years ago to the ancient empires of Persia and China, and from the Russian Revolution to modern imperialism, humans have always struggled to create a better society than what came before. All over the world at numerous points in the past, a different way of life has become an absolute necessity, over and over again. This is a history of the humans in these struggles—the hominid and the hunter, the emperor and the slave, the dictator and the revolutionary.
 
Reading against the grain of mainstream histories, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past has never been predetermined. From antiquity to feudalism, and from fascism to our precarious political present, choices have always been numerous and complex, and the possible outcomes have ranged broadly between liberation and barbarism. His chapters include:
 
*Hunters and Farmers
*The First Class Societies
*Ancient Empires
*The Medieval World
*European Feudalism
*The First Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions
*Absolutist Europe and Capitalist Globalization
*The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
*The Revolutionary Wave
*The Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism
*World War and Cold War
*The New World Disorder
*Capitalism’s Greatest Crisis? The Early Twenty-First Century
 
In our fraught political present—as we face the loss of civil liberties and environmental protections, the rise of ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of nuclear war—we need the perspective of these histories now more than ever. The lesson of A Radical History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.  
[more]
cover of A Radical Spirit: The History and Potential of the Latter Day Saint Tradition

A Radical Spirit

The History and Potential of the Latter Day Saint Tradition

Edited by Andrew Bolton, Taunalyn Ford, and Patrick Q. Mason

University of Illinois Press, 2027

The early Latter Day Saint movement embraced a vision and mission that challenged the political, social, and economic systems of the nineteenth century. Andrew Bolton, Taunalyn Ford, and Patrick Q. Mason edit essays that explore the ideas and transformative energy at the root of the Latter Day Saint tradition that gave rise to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ.

Early followers of Joseph Smith believed their new faith could organize society from the ground up and create a religious community shaped by justice, equality, and spiritual transformation. The essayists look at the movement’s diverse influences—religious, philosophical, and cultural—alongside the economic, gender, and racial issues that informed its radicalism. They also trace the competing pressures inside and outside the movement that helped determine which radical ideas survived and which faded or were later enhanced.

Eye-opening and expansive, A Radical Spirit rediscovers implications of the original heart of the Restoration tradition that thrived among the marginalized poor in the USA, Canada and in Europe—a radical Spirit of Jesus that offers possibilities for our times.

Contributors: Andrew Bolton, Gerard Charmley, Rebekah Clark, Taunalyn Ford, Russell Arben Fox, Erik J. Freeman, David J. Howlett, Brad A. Martell, Lori Martell, Patrick Q. Mason, Michael Ratcliffe, Jennifer Reeder, Joseph M. Spencer, Jordan T. Watkins, Walker Wright
[more]
cover of A Rebellious People: Basques, Protests, And Politics

A Rebellious People

Basques, Protests, And Politics

Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh

University of Nevada Press, 1991

In this scholarly work, Zirakzadeh argues that there is a calculated reasoning behind ETA's political violence that is often overlooked by researchers. His book is a comprehensive account of the Basque region's grassroots politics.

[more]
cover of A Received Grace: Slavery, Heirlooms, and the Feminine Labor of Forgetting

A Received Grace

Slavery, Heirlooms, and the Feminine Labor of Forgetting

Macushla Robinson

Duke University Press, 2027

In A Received Grace, Macushla Robinson examines the afterlives of transatlantic slavery through the intimate terrain of gendered family inheritance, material culture, and memory. Rooted in an investigation into an heirloom passed down through her own family, Robinson asks how everyday objects carry the legacies of colonial violence into the present. She brings together archival research, personal narrative, and cultural analysis to trace the histories embedded within inherited possessions and the social worlds they sustain. Robinson also reveals how whiteness is continually maintained through practices of inheritance, sentimentality, and selective remembrance, as well as the gendered dimensions of how white women in particular become active participants in the reproduction of racial hierarchies, family mythology, and structures of privilege. Moving between memoir, historical inquiry, and critical reflection, A Received Grace is a meditation on the persistence of colonial histories in domestic life and how to reckon with the material traces of slavery that inhabit the present.
[more]
cover of A Reckoning: Philippine Trials of Japanese War Criminals

A Reckoning

Philippine Trials of Japanese War Criminals

Sharon W. Chamberlain

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

After World War II, thousands of Japanese throughout Asia were put on trial for war crimes. Examination of postwar trials is now a thriving area of research, but Sharon W. Chamberlain is the first to offer an authoritative assessment of the legal proceedings convened in the Philippines. These were trials conducted by Asians, not Western powers, and centered on the abuses suffered by local inhabitants rather than by prisoners of war. Her impressively researched work reveals the challenges faced by the Philippines, as a newly independent nation, in navigating issues of justice amid domestic and international pressures.

Chamberlain highlights the differing views of Filipinos and Japanese about the trials. The Philippine government aimed to show its commitment to impartial proceedings with just outcomes. In Japan, it appeared that defendants were selected arbitrarily, judges and prosecutors were biased, and lower-ranking soldiers were punished for crimes ordered by their superior officers. She analyzes the broader implications of this divergence as bilateral relations between the two nations evolved and contends that these competing narratives were reimagined in a way that, paradoxically, aided a path toward postwar reconciliation.
[more]
cover of A Red Family: Junius, Gladys, and Barbara Scales

A Red Family

Junius, Gladys, and Barbara Scales

Mickey Friedman. Afterword by Barbara Scales. Historical Essay by Gail O'Brien.

University of Illinois Press, 2008

One of the few publicly known communists in the South, Junius Scales organized textile workers, fought segregation, and was the only American to be imprisoned under the membership clause of the Smith Act during the McCarthy years. This compact collective memoir, built on three interconnected oral histories and including a historical essay by Gail O'Brien, covers Scales's organizing activities and work against racism in the South, his progressive disillusionment with Party bureaucracy and dogmatic rigidity, his persecution and imprisonment, as well as his family's radicalism and response to FBI hounding and blacklisting.
 

Through the distinct perspectives of Junius, his wife Gladys, and his daughter Barbara, this book deepens and personalizes the story of American radicalism. Conversational, intimate, and exceptionally accessible, A Red Family offers a unique look at the American communist experience from the inside out.
 

[more]
cover of A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism

A Renegade Union

Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism

Lisa Phillips

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Dedicated to organizing workers from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, many of whom were considered "unorganizable" by other unions, the progressive New York City-based labor union District 65 counted among its 30,000 members retail clerks, office workers, warehouse workers, and wholesale workers. In this book, Lisa Phillips presents a distinctive study of District 65 and its efforts to secure economic equality for minority workers in sales and processing jobs in small, low-end shops and warehouses throughout the city. Phillips shows how organizers fought tirelessly to achieve better hours and higher wages for "unskilled," unrepresented workers and to destigmatize the kind of work they performed.
 
Closely examining the strategies employed by District 65 from the 1930s through the early Cold War years, Phillips assesses the impact of the McCarthy era on the union's quest for economic equality across divisions of race, ethnicity, and skill. Though their stories have been overshadowed by those of auto, steel, and electrical workers who forced American manufacturing giants to unionize, the District 65 workers believed their union provided them with an opportunity to re-value their work, the result of an economy inclining toward fewer manufacturing jobs and more low-wage service and processing jobs.
 
Phillips recounts how District 65 first broke with the CIO over the latter's hostility to left-oriented politics and organizing agendas, then rejoined to facilitate alliances with the NAACP. In telling the story of District 65 and detailing community organizing efforts during the first part of the Cold War and under the AFL-CIO umbrella, A Renegade Union continues to revise the history of the left-led unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. 

[more]
cover of A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún

A Return to Servitude

Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún

M. Bianet Castellanos

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancún, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved in the production of transnational capital but also forms an integral part of the state's modernization plan for rural, indigenous communities. Indeed, Maya migrants make up over a third of the city's population.

A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatán Peninsula, M. Bianet Castellanos examines how Cancún came to be equated with modernity, how this city has shaped the political economy of the peninsula, and how indigenous communities engage with this vision of contemporary life. More broadly, she demonstrates how indigenous communities experience, resist, and accommodate themselves to transnational capitalism.

Tourism and the social stratification that results from migration have created conflict among the Maya. At the same time, this work asserts, it is through engagement with modernity and its resources that they are able to maintain their sense of indigeneity and community.
[more]
cover of A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

A Rhetorical Crime

Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Weiss-Wendt, Anton

Rutgers University Press, 2018

The Genocide Convention was drafted by the United Nations in the late 1940s, as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. But was the Genocide Convention truly effective at achieving its humanitarian aims, or did it merely exacerbate the divisive rhetoric of Cold War geopolitics?

A Rhetorical Crime shows how genocide morphed from a legal concept into a political discourse used in propaganda battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the course of the Cold War era, nearly eighty countries were accused of genocide, and yet there were few real-time interventions to stop the atrocities committed by genocidal regimes like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. 

Renowned genocide scholar Anton Weiss-Wendt employs a unique comparative approach, analyzing the statements of Soviet and American politicians, historians, and legal scholars in order to deduce why their moral posturing far exceeded their humanitarian action.  
 
[more]
cover of A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World

A Rich and Tantalizing Brew

A History of How Coffee Connected the World

Jeanette M. Fregulia

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

The history of coffee is much more than the tale of one luxury good—it is a lens through which to consider various strands of world history, from food and foodways to religion and economics and sociocultural dynamics.

A Rich and Tantalizing Brew traces the history of coffee from its cultivation and brewing first as a private pleasure in the highlands of Ethiopia and Yemen through its emergence as a sought-after public commodity served in coffeehouses first in the Muslim world, and then traveling across the Mediterranean to Italy, to other parts of Europe, and finally to India and the Americas. At each of these stops the brew gathered ardent aficionados and vocal critics, all the while reshaping patterns of socialization.

Taking its conversational tone from the chats often held over a steaming cup, A Rich and Tantalizing Brew offers a critical and entertaining look at how this bitter beverage, with a little help from the tastes that traveled with it—chocolate, tea, and sugar—has connected people to each other both within and outside of their typical circles, inspiring a new context for sharing news, conducting business affairs, and even plotting revolution.

[more]
cover of A Rift in the Clouds: Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900-1910

A Rift in the Clouds

Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900-1910

Brent J. Aucoin

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

A Rift in the Clouds chronicles the efforts of three white southern federal judges to protect the civil rights of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, when few in the American legal community were willing to do so. Jacob Treiber of Arkansas, Emory Speer of Georgia, and Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama challenged the Supreme Court's reading of the Reconstruction amendments that were passed in an attempt to make disfranchised and exploited African Americans equal citizens of the United States. These unpopular white southerners, two of whom who had served in the Confederate Army and had themselves helped to bring Reconstruction to an end in their states, asserted that the amendments not only established black equality, but authorized the government to protect blacks. Although their rulings won few immediate gains for blacks and were overturned by the Supreme Court, their legal arguments would be resurrected, and meet with greater success, over half a century later during the civil rights movement.
[more]