975 books match the query 'Case studies' and 45 start with b

cover of Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy

Back of the Yards

The Making of a Local Democracy

Robert A. Slayton

University of Chicago Press, 1986

"Robert A. Slayton's Back of the Yards is one of the finest accounts I have ever read on an urban, working-class neighborhood in twentieth-century America. Its focus on family, politics, and worklife is penetrating and its conclusions reinforce an emerging scholarly picture of ordinary people exercising unique forms of power."—John Bodnar, author of The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
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cover of Bargaining and Learning in Recurring Crises: The Soviet-American, Egyptian-Israeli, and Indo-Pakistani Rivalries

Bargaining and Learning in Recurring Crises

The Soviet-American, Egyptian-Israeli, and Indo-Pakistani Rivalries

Russell J. Leng

University of Michigan Press, 2000

The rivalries between the Soviet Union and the United States, Egypt and Israel, and India and Pakistan produced twelve major crises and seven wars during the quarter-century following World War II. A disproportionate share of international crises and wars occur between long-term rivals. Why could not the leaders of these states learn to manage their disputes without severe crises or war? Russell J. Leng finds that the lessons leaders of those states drew from their experiences most often led to bargaining tactics that only increased the level of hostility and the likelihood of war in subsequent disputes.
The author uses theoretical work on learning and the role of belief systems on foreign policy-making as the basis to explore the history of each rivalry. Detailed narrative accounts of each of the crises are augmented by tables and figures describing the escalation of each crisis and the behavior of participant states. The approach allows for comparisons of behavior and learning across the three rivalries, as well as a consideration of the influence that the Soviet-American rivalry exerted on the Middle East and South Asian rivalries. The concluding chapter illustrates how the influence of realpolitik beliefs on learning across the three rivalries predisposed policymakers to draw lessons from their crisis experience that weakened conflict management in subsequent crises. The author also shows how superpower mediation in Middle East and South Asian crises and wars had the perverse effect of encouraging greater risk-taking by the participant states in subsequent crises.
The book will be of particular interest to political scientists and historians who study international relations, as well as those interested in decision-making and learning by policymakers.
Russell J. Leng is Professor of Political Science, Middlebury College, and the author of Interstate Crisis Behavior 1816-1980: Realism versus Reciprocity and numerous articles.
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cover of Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century

Barrios Norteños

St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century

By Dionicio Nodín Valdés

University of Texas Press, 2000

Mexican communities in the Midwestern United States have a history that extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, when a demand for workers in several mass industries brought Mexican agricultural laborers to jobs and homes in the cities. This book offers a comprehensive social, labor, and cultural history of these workers and their descendants, using the Mexican barrio of "San Pablo" (St. Paul) Minnesota as a window on the region.

Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews, Dennis Valdés explores how Mexicans created ethnic spaces in Midwestern cities and how their lives and communities have changed over the course of the twentieth century. He examines the process of community building before World War II, the assimilation of Mexicans into the industrial working class after the war, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent changes resulting from industrial restructuring and unprecedented migration and population growth. Throughout, Valdés pays particular attention to Midwestern Mexicans' experiences of inequality and struggles against domination and compares them to Mexicans' experiences in other regions of the U.S.

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cover of Beautiful Struggle: How One American High School Took on Systemic Racism

Beautiful Struggle

How One American High School Took on Systemic Racism

Sharon M. Chubbuck and Cynthia M. Ellwood

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An in-depth look at how one high school addressed racial inequality head-on.

The new superintendent stood before the faculty of “Oakmont High,” a large, diverse public school, and spoke a cold truth about American education. He described seeing the vibrant mix of students in the school’s hallways disperse into racially segregated classrooms when the bell rang. The fact was that students were sorted into tracks—supposedly race-neutral, “ability-based” pathways—that led to sharply unequal experiences and opportunities throughout high school and often their whole lives. “Why is it fair for white kids to have a better education than Black kids?” the superintendent asked his faculty. “It’s racism pure and simple, and it’s going to stop!” 

Racial inequality persists because racism is systemic, baked into countless interlacing beliefs, practices, and structures that make up the way we do school. Tracking is one of many such practices. In Beautiful Struggle, Sharon M. Chubbuck and Cynthia M. Ellwood examine eleven years of transformation by administrators, teachers, students, and others as they tackled systemic racism head-on, starting with tracking. The people of OHS encountered intense resistance and made extraordinary inroads. They fought inequality with hard conversations and concrete steps. They dramatically increased Black and brown students’ access to rich, rigorous learning from the moment students entered as freshmen. They questioned and restructured the interconnected web of policy and practices in every aspect of the school. Students themselves propelled major changes in academic opportunity and the very culture of the school.

Chubbuck and Ellwood argue that taking on racial inequality requires an unrelenting focus on racial justice, challenging systems on every front, broad collective leadership across race and role, and the will to navigate difference and conflict. The story within Beautiful Struggle offers a hopeful though sobering path forward.

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cover of Becoming Alcoholic: Alcoholics Anonymous and the Reality of Alcoholism

Becoming Alcoholic

Alcoholics Anonymous and the Reality of Alcoholism

David R. Rudy. Foreword by Norman K. Denzin

Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

Affiliation with Alcoholics Anonymous parallels religious conversion, according to David R. Rudy in this timely study of the most famous self-help organization in the world.

Drinkers who commit themselves to Alcoholics Anonymous embrace the radically different life-style, the altered world of the convert.

To understand this conversion and, more important, to get a grip on the even deeper mystery of alcoholism itself, Rudy sought to answer these three questions: What processes are involved in becoming alcoholic? How does the alcoholic affiliate with, and become committed to, A. A.’s belief system? What is the relation­ship between the world of A. A. members and that constructed by alcohologists?

Rudy establishes the history and structure of A. A. and examines the organization’s relationship to dominant sociological models, theories, and definitions of alcoholism.

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cover of Becoming an Embedded Librarian: Making Connections in the Classroom

Becoming an Embedded Librarian

Making Connections in the Classroom

Michelle Reale

American Library Association, 2015

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cover of Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960

Before Shaughnessy

Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960

Kelly Ritter

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960, Kelly Ritter uses materials from the archives at Harvard and Yale and contemporary theories of writing instruction to reconsider the definition of basic writing and basic writers within a socio-historical context. Ritter challenges the association of basic writing with only poorly funded institutions and poorly prepared students.

Using Yale and Harvard as two sample case studies, Ritter shows that basic writing courses were alive and well, even in the Ivy League, in the early twentieth century.  She argues not only that basic writers exist across institutional types and diverse student populations, but that the prevalence of these writers has existed far more historically than we generally acknowledge.

Uncovering this forgotten history of basic writing at elite institutions, Ritter contends that the politics and problems of the identification and the definition of basic writers and basic writing began long before the work of Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and the rise of open admissions. Indeed, she illustrates how the problems and politics have been with us since the advent of English A at Harvard and the heightened consumer-based policies that resulted in the new admissions criteria of the early twentieth-century American university. In order to recognize this long-standing reality of basic writing, we must now reconsider whether the nearly standardized, nationalized definition of “basic” is any longer a beneficial one for the positive growth and democratic development of our first-year writing programs and students.

 

 

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cover of Beggars and Thieves: Lives of Urban Street Criminals

Beggars and Thieves

Lives of Urban Street Criminals

Mark S. Fleisher

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

As the incidence of violent crime rises in the United States, so does the public demand for a solution. But what will work?
    Mark S. Fleisher has spent years among inmates in jails and prisons and on the streets with thieves, gang members, addicts, and life-long criminals in Seattle and other cities across the country. In Beggars and Thieves, he writes about how and why they become and remain offenders, and about the actual role of jails and prisons in efforts to deter crime and rehabilitate criminals. Fleisher shows, with wrenching firsthand accounts, that parents who are addicts, abusers, and criminals beget irreversibly damaged children who become addicts, abusers, and criminals. Further, Fleisher contends that many well-intentioned educational and vocational training programs are wasted because they are offered too late to help. And, he provides sobering evidence that many youthful and adult offenders find themselves better off in prison—with work to do, medical care, a clean place to sleep, regular meals, and stable social ties—than they are in America’s cities.
    Fleisher calls for anti-crime policies that are bold, practical, and absolutely imperative. He prescribes life terms for violent offenders, but in prisons structured as work communities, where privileges are earned through work in expanded, productive industries that reduce the financial burden of incarceration on the public. But most important, he argues that the only way to prevent street crime, cut prison growth, and reduce the waste of money and human lives is to permanently remove brutalized children from criminal, addicted, and violent parents.

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cover of Bernie Sanders and the Boundaries of Reform: Socialism in Burlington

Bernie Sanders and the Boundaries of Reform

Socialism in Burlington

W. J. Conroy

Temple University Press, 2016

Today, Bernie Sanders is a household name, a wildly popular presidential candidate and an icon for progressive Democrats in the United States. But back in the 1980s, this “democratic socialist”—though some folks would prefer the term “social democrat”—was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where his administration attempted radical reforms. Some efforts were successful, but when a waterfront deal failed, it was not due to Sanders' efforts; he would rather compromise and have a net gain than be an ideological purist.
 
In his preface to this reissue of the 1990 book, Challenging the Boundaries of Reform, W. J. Conroy reflects on the recent legacy of Sanders, his Agenda for America, and his appeal to young voters. His book then looks back to identify Sanders’ experience in Burlington by examining several case studies that unfolded amidst a conservative trend nationally, an unsympathetic state government, and a hostile city council.
 
Ultimately, Conroy asks what lessons can be drawn from the case of Burlington that would aid the American left in its struggle to capture both government and civil society? 
 
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cover of Between Belonging and Exclusion: The Intersections of Integration and Anti-Discrimination Politics

Between Belonging and Exclusion

The Intersections of Integration and Anti-Discrimination Politics

Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi

Temple University Press, 2026

Integration and discrimination are two of the most salient yet contradictory forces shaping contemporary European politics. In Between Belonging and Exclusion Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi asserts that this tension exists because integration politics do not facilitate non-discrimination, nor do they address experiences of discrimination. She draws on interviews with refugees and other key actors in integration politics to examine the barriers hindering refugee women’s labor market participation in Germany.

Golesorkhi introduces four explanatory tropes that reveal how and why integration efforts have often fallen short. She examines the power relations and limitations in migration governance as well as the identity narratives of Germanness/Europeanness, and the gendered and racialized mechanisms of “othering” that contribute to discrimination.

Between Belonging and Exclusion delineates what Germany and the EU “get wrong” about integration and anti-discrimination as it outlines conceptual and practical suggestions for expanding the terms of inclusion.

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cover of Between City and Country: Brookline, Massachusetts, and the Origins of Suburbia

Between City and Country

Brookline, Massachusetts, and the Origins of Suburbia

Ronald Dale Karr

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

Since 1945, American popular culture has portrayed suburbia as a place with a culture, politics, and economy distinct from cities, towns, and rural areas. In Between City and Country, Ronald Dale Karr examines the evolution of Brookline, Boston's most renowned nineteenth-century suburb, arguing that a distinctively suburban way of life appeared here long before World War II.

Already a fashionable retreat for wealthy Bostonians, Brookline began to suburbanize in the 1840s with the arrival of hundreds of commuter families—and significant numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants drawn by opportunities to work as laborers and servants. In Brookline the poor were segregated but not excluded altogether, as they would be from twentieth-century elite suburbs. A half century later, a distinct suburban way of life developed that combined rural activities with urban pastimes, and a political consensus emerged that sought efficient government and large expenditures on education and public works. Brookline had created the template for the concept of suburbia, not just in wealthy communities but in the less affluent communities of postwar America.
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cover of Beyond Adversary Democracy

Beyond Adversary Democracy

Jane J. Mansbridge

University of Chicago Press, 1983

"Beyond Adversary Democracy should be read by everyone concerned with democratic theory and practice."—Carol Pateman, Politics

"Sociologists recurrently complain about how seldom it is that we produce books that combine serious theorizing about important issues of public policy with original and sensitive field research. Several rounds of enthusiastic applause, then, are due Jane Mansbridge . . . for having produced a dense and well written book whose subject is nothing less ambitious than the theory of democracy and its problems of equality, solidarity, and consensus. Beyond Adversary Democracy, however, is not simply a work of political theory; Mansbridge explores her abstract subject matter by close studies (using ethnographic, documentary, and questionnaire methods) of two small actual democracies operating at their most elemental American levels (1) a New England town meeting ("Selby," Vermont) and (2) an urban crisis center ("Helpline"), whose 41 employees shared a New Left-Counterculture belief in participatory democracy and consensual decision-making. [Mansbridge] is a force to contend with. It is in our common interest that she be widely read."—Bennett M. Berger, Contemporary Sociology
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cover of Beyond Banned Books: Defending Intellectual Freedom throughout Your Library

Beyond Banned Books

Defending Intellectual Freedom throughout Your Library

Kristin Pekoll

American Library Association, 2019

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cover of Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process

Beyond the Archives

Research as a Lived Process

Edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan Foreword by Lucille M. Schultz

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

This collection of highly readable essays reveals that research is not restricted to library archives. When researchers pursue information and perspectives from sources beyond the archives—from existing people and places— they are often rewarded with unexpected discoveries that enrich their research and their lives.

Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process presents narratives that demystify and illuminate the research process by showing how personal experiences, family history, and scholarly research intersect. Editors Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan emphasize how important it is for researchers to tap into their passions, pursuing research subjects that attract their attention with creativity and intuition without limiting themselves to traditional archival sources and research methods.

Eighteen contributors from a number of disciplines detail inspiring research opportunities that led to recently published works, while offering insights on such topics as starting and finishing research projects, using a wide range of types of sources and methods, and taking advantage of unexpected leads, chance encounters and simple clues. In addition, the narratives trace the importance of place in archival research, the parallels between the lives of research subjects and researchers, and explore archives as sites that resurrect personal, cultural, and historical memory.

Beyond the Archives sheds light on the creative, joyful, and serendipitous nature of research, addressing what attracts researchers to their subjects, as well as what inspires them to produce the most thorough, complete, and engaged scholarly work. This timely and essential volume supplements traditional-method textbooks and effectively models concrete practices of retrieving and synthesizing information by professional researchers.

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cover of Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism

Beyond the Boycott

Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism

Gay W. Seidman

Russell Sage Foundation, 2007

As the world economy becomes increasingly integrated, companies can shift production to wherever wages are lowest and unions weakest. How can workers defend their rights in an era of mobile capital? With national governments forced to compete for foreign investment by rolling back legal protections for workers, fair trade advocates are enlisting consumers to put market pressure on companies to treat their workers fairly. In Beyond the Boycott, sociologist Gay Seidman asks whether this non-governmental approach can reverse the "race to the bottom" in global labor standards. Beyond the Boycott examines three campaigns in which activists successfully used the threat of a consumer boycott to pressure companies to accept voluntary codes of conduct and independent monitoring of  work sites. The voluntary Sullivan Code required American corporations operating in apartheid-era South Africa to improve treatment of their workers;  in India, the Rugmark inspection team provides 'social labels' for  handknotted carpets made without child labor; and in Guatemala,  COVERCO monitors conditions in factories producing clothing under contract for major American brands. Seidman compares these cases to explore the ingredients of successful campaigns, as well as the inherent limitations facing voluntary monitoring schemes. Despite activists' emphasis on educating individual consumers to support ethical companies, Seidman finds that, in practice, they have been most successful when they mobilized institutions—such as universities, churches, and shareholder organizations. Moreover, although activists tend to dismiss states' capabilities, all three cases involved governmental threats of trade sanctions against companies and countries with poor labor records. Finally, Seidman  points to an intractable difficulty of independent workplace monitoring: since consumers rarely distinguish between monitoring schemes and labels, companies can hand pick monitoring organizations, selecting those with the lowest standards for working conditions and the least aggressive inspections. Transnational consumer movements can increase the bargaining power of the global workforce, Seidman argues, but they cannot replace national governments or local campaigns to expand the meaning of citizenship. As trade and capital move across borders in growing volume and with greater speed, civil society and human rights movements are also becoming more global. Highly original and thought-provoking, Beyond the Boycott vividly depicts the contemporary movement to humanize globalization—its present and its possible future. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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cover of Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World

Bible Believers

Fundamentalists in the Modern World

Nancy Tatom Ammerman

Rutgers University Press, 1987

Bible believer (also Bible-believer,Bible-believing Christian,Bible-believing Church) is a self-description by conservative Christians to differentiate their teachings from others who see non- or extrabiblical tradition as higher or equal in authority.

In normal usage, "Bible believer" means an individual or organisation that believes the Christian Bible is true in some significant way. However, this combination of words is given a unique meaning in fundamentalist Protestant circles, where it is equated with the belief that the Christian Bible "contains no theological contradictions, historical discrepancies, or other such 'errors'", otherwise known as biblical inerrancy.

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cover of Bilingual Deaf and Hearing Families: Narrative Interviews

Bilingual Deaf and Hearing Families

Narrative Interviews

Barbara Bodner-Johnson

Gallaudet University Press, 2012

This study emphasizes the importance of family support for deaf members, particularly through the use of both American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken and/or written English. Research has shown how these factors influence such areas as a child’s development, performance in school, and relationships with brothers and sisters. In this volume, authors Barbara Bodner-Johnson and Beth S. Benedict concentrate on the vital, positive effects of bilingualism and how families that share their experiences with other families can enhance all of their children’s achievement and enrichment.

       Bilingual Deaf and Hearing Families: Narrative Interviews describes the experiences of ten families who have at least one deaf family member. In five of the families, the parents are hearing and they have a deaf child; two of the children in these families have cochlear implants. In three families, both the parents and children are deaf. In one family, the parents are deaf and their daughter is hearing; and in one family, the parents and one child are deaf and they all have cochlear implants, and the deaf child’s twin is hearing.

       The interviews were conducted in the families’ homes using set topics and questions. The family discussions cover a wide range of subjects: cochlear implants, where they live, their thoughts about family relationships, how they participate in the Deaf community, how they arrive at certain decisions, their children’s friendships, and the goals and resiliencies they have as a family.

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cover of Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West

Birth Weight and Economic Growth

Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West

W. Peter Ward

University of Chicago Press, 1993

How can the history of birth weight add to our knowledge of women's living conditions in the past? In this study of newborn weight and economic growth in Boston, Dublin, Edinburgh, Montreal, and Vienna between 1850 and 1930, W. Peter Ward explores the relation between infant size, economic development, and living standards of working-class women in the industrializing West.

Drawing on clinical records from urban maternity hospitals and outpatient services, Ward compares birth weight between cities and traces changes in fetal size during a period in which some cities experienced dramatic economic development while others stagnated. Because fetal growth is strongly affected by maternal nutrition, Ward's research sheds new light on the well-being of working-class women whose living conditions have long been obscure and exceedingly difficult to examine.

This book will interest social and economic historians, as well as scholars of women's studies and the history of medicine, and its lessons on the distribution of social benefits during economic change have immidiate relevance for today's developing countries.
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cover of Birth of the Other

Birth of the Other

Rosine Lefort, in collaberation with Robert Lefort

University of Illinois Press, 1994

   Originally published as Naissance de l' Autre (1980), Birth
        of the Other offers a rare look at language acquisition from a Lacanian
        perspective. In 1951-52 Rosine Lefort conducted the treatment of two largely
        preverbal children, guiding them through psychoanalysis and meticulously
        documenting their activities. Lefort has applied her subsequent training
        in Lacanian theory to these early case notes, which provide remarkably
        lucid examples of exceedingly difficult concepts.
      This exceptional work thus clarifies many misconceptions about psychoanalytic
        theory, furnishes unique insight into what Lacan calls the "time
        of analysis," and grants a clearer understanding of the relationship
        between language and the unconscious.
      "Anyone interested in
        Lacan's psychoanalytical theories should not fail to read these revealing
        clinical studies by one of Lacan's most authoritative and lucid interpreters."
        -- Herman Rapaport, author of Between the Sign and the Gaze
 
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cover of Black Corporate Executives

Black Corporate Executives

Sharon Collins

Temple University Press, 1996

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cover of Black Entrepreneurs in America: Stories of Struggle and Success

Black Entrepreneurs in America

Stories of Struggle and Success

Michael D Woodard

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Beginning with a summary of 200 years of entrepreneurship among African Americans, then moving to in-depth interviews with contemporary entrepreneurs, Michael Woodard provides a powerful record of entrepreneurial vitality in a market that is often hostile and exclusive. The book covers businesses nationwide, representing diverse industries. Woodard ends on a practical note with resources and advice for anyone contemplating an entrepreneurial future.
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cover of Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas

Black Victory

The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas

Darlene Clark Hine & Essays by Darlene Clark Hine, Steven F. Lawson, & Merline Pitre

University of Missouri Press, 2003

In Black Victory, Darlene Clark Hine examines a pivotal breakthrough in the struggle for black liberation through the voting process. She details the steps and players in the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright, a precursor to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She discusses the role that NAACP attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall played in helping black Texans regain the right denied them by white Texans in the Democratic Party: the right to vote and to have that vote count. Hine illuminates the mobilization of black Texans. She effectively demonstrates how each part of the African American community—from professionals to laborers—was essential to this struggle and the victory against disfranchisement.
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cover of Black-Brown Relations and Stereotypes

Black-Brown Relations and Stereotypes

By Tatcho Mindiola, Jr., Yolanda Flores Niemann, and Nestor Rodriguez

University of Texas Press, 2002

Race relations in twenty-first-century America will not be just a black-and-white issue. The 2000 census revealed that Hispanics already slightly outnumber African Americans as the largest ethnic group, while together Blacks and Hispanics constitute the majority population in the five largest U.S. cities. Given these facts, black-brown relations could be a more significant racial issue in the decades to come than relations between minority groups and Whites.

Offering some of the first in-depth analyses of how African Americans and Hispanics perceive and interact with each other, this pathfinding study looks at black-brown relations in Houston, Texas, one of the largest U.S. cities with a majority ethnic population and one in which Hispanics outnumber African Americans. Drawing on the results of several sociological studies, the authors focus on four key issues: how each group forms and maintains stereotypes of the other, areas in which the two groups conflict and disagree, the crucial role of women in shaping their communities' racial attitudes, and areas in which Hispanics and African Americans agree and can cooperate to achieve greater political power and social justice.

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cover of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

Blacked Out

Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High

Signithia Fordham

University of Chicago Press, 1996

This innovative portrait of student life in an urban high school focuses on the academic success of African-American students, exploring the symbolic role of academic achievement within the Black community and investigating the price students pay for attaining it. Signithia Fordham's richly detailed ethnography reveals a deeply rooted cultural system that favors egalitarianism and group cohesion over the individualistic, competitive demands of academic success and sheds new light on the sources of academic performance. She also details the ways in which the achievements of sucessful African-Americans are "blacked out" of the public imagination and negative images are reflected onto black adolescents. A self-proclaimed "native" anthropologist, she chronicles the struggle of African-American students to construct an identity suitable to themselves, their peers, and their families within an arena of colliding ideals. This long-overdue contribution is of crucial importance to educators, policymakers, and ethnographers.
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cover of Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago

Blood Runs Green

The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago

Gillian O'Brien

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The dramatic story of a Gilded Age murder that shocked people from Chicago to Ireland

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln’s. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and most curious crimes in civilized history. The dead man, Dr. P. H. Cronin, was a respected Irish physician, but his brutal murder uncovered a web of intrigue, secrecy, and corruption that stretched across the United States and far beyond.

Blood Runs Green tells the story of Cronin’s murder from the police investigation to the trial. It is a story of hotheaded journalists in pursuit of sensational crimes, of a bungling police force riddled with informers and spies, and of a secret revolutionary society determined to free Ireland but succeeding only in tearing itself apart. It is also the story of a booming immigrant population clamoring for power at a time of unprecedented change.

From backrooms to courtrooms, historian Gillian O’Brien deftly navigates the complexities of Irish Chicago, bringing to life a rich cast of characters and tracing the spectacular rise and fall of the secret Irish American society Clan na Gael. She draws on real-life accounts and sources from the United States, Ireland, and Britain to cast new light on Clan na Gael and reveal how Irish republicanism swept across the United States. Destined to be a true crime classic, Blood Runs Green is an enthralling tale of a murder that captivated the world and reverberated through society long after the coffin closed.
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cover of Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures

Blue Architecture

Water, Design, and Environmental Futures

Brook Muller

University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Finalist, PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning

A guide to water-focused and climate-resilient architectural and urban design.


Le Corbusier famously said, “A house is a machine for living in.” We now confront the litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine: a changing climate, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and resource scarcities. Brook Muller offers an alternative: water-centric urban design that fosters sustainability, equity, and architectural creativity.

Inspired by the vernacular, such as the levadas of Madeira Island and both the arid and drenched places of the American West, Muller articulates a “hydro-logical” philosophy in which architects and planners begin by conceptualizing interactions between existing waterways and the spaces they intend to develop. From these interactions—and the new technologies and approaches enabling them—aesthetic, spatial, and experiential opportunities follow. Not content merely to work around sensitive ecology, Muller argues for genuinely climate-adapted urban landscapes in which buildings act as ecological infrastructure that actually improve watersheds while delivering functionality and beauty for diverse communities. Rich in images and practical examples, Blue Architecture will change the way we think about our designed world.

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cover of Body Factory: Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room

Body Factory

Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room

Kaitlin Pericak

Temple University Press, 2025

A university’s athletic training room is meant to care for and heal college athletes and ensure they are receiving the help they need. Although sports medicine staff members are sincere in their goal of centering athletes and providing the best healthcare possible, organizational constraints affect their approach. Chief among them is the pressure sports medicine staff members feel to keep athletes from profit-generating sports healthy enough to perform.

Body Factory enters an NCAA Division I athletic training room to examine the disconnect between what the NCAA states as its goal of athlete healthcare and what is actually happening. Kaitlin Pericak conducts observations in this space and interviews injured athletes and sports medicine staff members to show how institutional control over “best interests” often ends up exploiting the individual athlete. The influences at work are part of a neoliberal paradigm that explains why interest in an athlete’s care is greatly diminished once they are injured and can no longer play.

Body Factory considers how race, gender, and health before and after injury are deciding factors in these university training centers. The bureaucratic organization has a goal of maintaining power to generate profit, and Pericak shows this is almost always at the expense of the athlete.
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cover of Book Club Reboot: 71 Creative Twists

Book Club Reboot

71 Creative Twists

Sarah Ostman

American Library Association, 2019

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cover of Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life

Book Clubs

Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life

Elizabeth Long

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Book clubs are everywhere these days. And women talk about the clubs they belong to with surprising emotion. But why are the clubs so important to them? And what do the women discuss when they meet? To answer questions like these, Elizabeth Long spent years observing and participating in women's book clubs and interviewing members from different discussion groups. Far from being an isolated activity, she finds reading for club members to be an active and social pursuit, a crucial way for women to reflect creatively on the meaning of their lives and their place in the social order.
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cover of Book Repair: A How-To-Do-It Manual

Book Repair

A How-To-Do-It Manual

American Library Association, 2011

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cover of Book of the Disappeared: The Quest for Transnational Justice

Book of the Disappeared

The Quest for Transnational Justice

Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Book of the Disappeared confronts worldwide human rights violations of enforced disappearance and genocide and explores the global quest for justice with forceful, outstanding contributions by respected scholars, expert practitioners, and provocative contemporary artists. This profoundly humane book spotlights our historic inhumanity while offering insights for survival and transformation.

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cover of Border Junkies: Addiction and Survival on the Streets of Juárez and El Paso

Border Junkies

Addiction and Survival on the Streets of Juárez and El Paso

By Scott Comar

University of Texas Press, 2011

The drug war that has turned Juárez, Mexico, into a killing field that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since 2008 captures headlines almost daily. But few accounts go all the way down to the streets to investigate the lives of individual drug users. One of those users, Scott Comar, survived years of heroin addiction and failed attempts at detox and finally cleaned up in 2003. Now a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso in the history department's borderlands doctoral program, Comar has written Border Junkies, a searingly honest account of his spiraling descent into heroin addiction, surrender, change, and recovery on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Border Junkies is the first book ever written about the lifestyle of active addiction on the streets of Juárez. Comar vividly describes living between the disparate Mexican and American cultures and among the fellow junkies, drug dealers, hookers, coyote smugglers, thieves, and killers who were his friends and neighbors in addiction—and the social workers, missionaries, shelter workers, and doctors who tried to help him escape. With the perspective of his anthropological training, he shows how homelessness, poverty, and addiction all fuel the use of narcotics and the rise in their consumption on the streets of Juárez and contribute to the societal decay of this Mexican urban landscape. Comar also offers significant insights into the U.S.-Mexico borderland's underground and peripheral economy and the ways in which the region's inhabitants adapt to the local economic terrain.

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cover of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino: Lessons for Governing Post-Industrial Cities

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino

Lessons for Governing Post-Industrial Cities

Wilbur C. Rich

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Hailed as one of Boston’s most beloved mayors and its longest serving, Thomas Menino (1942–2014) deftly managed the city’s finances and transformed Boston into the hub of innovation that it is today. During his time in office, Boston embraced modern industrial growth and moved forward with noteworthy developments that altered neighborhoods, while also facing ongoing racial strife, challenges of unaffordable housing, and significant public union negotiations.

Mayors in modern American cities occupy unique positions as government leaders who need to remain active parts of their communities in addition to being tasked with fixing neighborhood issues, managing crises, and keeping schools and public infrastructure on course. Situating news coverage alongside interviews with the mayor and his administration, political scientist Wilbur C. Rich chronicles Menino’s time in office while also considering his personal and professional background, his larger-than-life personality, and his ambitions. Menino’s approach to these challenges and opportunities offers enduring lessons to anyone interested in urban government and political leadership.

[more]
cover of Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner

Boys and Girls

Superheroes in the Doll Corner

Vivian Gussin Paley

University of Chicago Press, 1984

"Paley has a sharp ear for the rhythm and inflections of childhood. Her vignettes give us a revealing glimpse into children's inner lives, and her discussion of her own discomfort with boy's play and approval of that of girls raises and important issue."—Carole Wade, Psychology Today

"I will admit my biases up front: having a three-year old daughter of my own made it impossible for this book to be anything but fun to read. I dare anyone who enjoys children not to enjoy this story about stories, this narrative about narratives."—Jerry Powell, Winterthur Portfolio
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cover of Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner

Boys and Girls

Superheroes in the Doll Corner

Vivian Gussin Paley

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The classic work that revealed the complicated world of children's play, and what we can learn from it for education

For more than forty years, Boys and Girls has a classic account of the little-known world that young children create together when they play. Vivian Gussin Paley takes readers inside a kindergarten classroom to show them in detail how boys and girls play—and how, by playing and fantasizing in different ways, they work through complicated notions of gender roles and identity. The children’s own conversations, stories, playacting, and scuffles are interwoven with Paley’s observations and accounts of her vain attempts to alter their stereotyped play. In the decades since the book's original publication, play in kindergarten and early years of school has lost ground to structured teaching and even testing, which makes Paley's book, updated for a new era, more important than ever. To teach kids successfully, we must make space for play.
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cover of Brazilians Working With Americans/Brasileiros que trabalham com americanos: Cultural Case Studies/Estudos de casos culturais

Brazilians Working With Americans/Brasileiros que trabalham com americanos

Cultural Case Studies/Estudos de casos culturais

By Orlando R. Kelm and Mary E. Risner

University of Texas Press, 2006

Doing business internationally requires understanding not only other languages, but even more so the business practices and cultures of other countries. In the case of Brazilians working with Americans, a fundamental difference for all parties to understand is that Brazilian business culture is based on developing personal relationships between business partners, while American businesspeople often prefer to get down to hard "facts and figures" quickly, with fewer personal preliminaries. Negotiating such differences is crucial to creating successful business relationships between the two countries, and this book is designed to help businesspeople do just that.

Brazilians Working With Americans presents ten short case studies that effectively illustrate many of the cultural factors that come into play when North American business professionals work in Brazil. The authors summarize each case and the aspects of culture it involves, and American and Brazilian executives comment on the cultural differences highlighted by that case. A list of topics and questions for discussion also help draw out the lessons of each business situation. To make the book equally useful to Brazilians and Americans (whether businesspeople or language students), the entire text is presented in both English and Portuguese. In addition, Apple QuickTime movies of the executives' comments, which allow viewers to see and hear native speakers of both languages, are available on the Internet at www.laits.utexas.edu/orkelm/casos/intro.html.

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cover of Bridging State and Civil Society: Informal Organizations in Tajik/Afghan Badakhshan

Bridging State and Civil Society

Informal Organizations in Tajik/Afghan Badakhshan

Suzanne Levi-Sanchez

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Bridging State and Civil Society provides an in-depth study of parts of Central Asia and Afghanistan that remain marginalized from the larger region. As such, the people have developed distinct ways of governing and surviving, sometimes in spite of the state and in part because of informal organizations. Suzanne Levi-Sanchez provides eight case studies, each an independent look at a particular informal organization, but each also part of a larger picture that helps the reader understand the importance and key role that informal organizations play for civil society and the state. Each case explores how informal organizations operate and investigates their structures and interactions with official state institutions, civil society, familial networks, and development organizations. As such, each chapter explores the concepts through a different lens while asking a deceptively simple question: What is the relationship between informal organizations and the state?

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cover of Bridging Worlds: Emerging Mode Ls And Practices Of

Bridging Worlds

Emerging Mode Ls And Practices Of

Raymond Pun

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2016

[more]
cover of Bright College Years: Inside the American College Today

Bright College Years

Inside the American College Today

Anne Matthews

University of Chicago Press, 1998

As the price of higher education escalates and the number of Americans seeking a college degree steadily rises, it is now more important then ever to think about higher education in a different way. In Bright College Years, Anne Matthews paints a provocative yet evenhanded portrait of the American campus. With each chapter dedicated to sections of the academic year, Matthews puts students, professors, and administrators under the magnifying glass. She conducts her investigation in four-year universities all across the country, from enormous state schools like the University of Texas to specialized colleges like Cal Tech. Bright College Years is a fascinating look at the changing face of the American university that will be of interest to prospective students, their parents, and anyone interested in higher education.

"Matthews writes with sympathy and substantial understanding of the dilemmas colleges face these days."—Tara Fitzpatrick, Chicago Tribune

"A wide-ranging, well-written and lively account of contemporary academia."—Christian Wiman, Dallas Morning News

"Notable Book of the Year." New York Times

"An eye-opening, startling exposé;. . . . Matthews' energetic and well-written report provides a dismal yet concise insider portrait of college life."—Booklist
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cover of Bringing the Arts into the Library

Bringing the Arts into the Library

Carol Smallwood

American Library Association, 2013

[more]
cover of Broadcasting Birth Control: Mass Media and Family Planning

Broadcasting Birth Control

Mass Media and Family Planning

Parry, Manon

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Recently, historians have begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. Broadcasting Birth Control builds on this new scholarship to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning at home in the United States, and in the expanding international arena of population control.

Mass media, Manon Parry contends, was critical to the birth control movement’s attempts to build support and later to publicize the idea of fertility control and the availability of contraceptive services in the United States and around the world. Though these public efforts in advertising and education were undertaken initially by leading advocates, including Margaret Sanger, increasingly a growing class of public communications experts took on the role, mimicking the efforts of commercial advertisers to promote health and contraception in short plays, cartoons, films, and soap operas. In this way, they made a private subject—fertility control—appropriate for public discussion.

Parry examines these trends to shed light on the contested nature of the motivations of birth control advocates. Acknowledging that supporters of contraception were not always motivated by the best interests of individual women, Parry concludes that family planning advocates were nonetheless convinced of women’s desire for contraception and highly aware of the ethical issues involved in the use of the media to inform and persuade.
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cover of Broker, Mediator, Patron, and Kinsman: An Historical Analysis of Key Leadership Roles in a Rural Malaysian District

Broker, Mediator, Patron, and Kinsman

An Historical Analysis of Key Leadership Roles in a Rural Malaysian District

Conner Bailey

Ohio University Press, 1976

This study attempts to relate questions of rural leadership to the constantly changing social and economic environment of a rural district in Malaysia during the twentieth century. The study itself began as an effort to analyze a single instance of structural change in Malay village leadership which occurred while the author worked in Sik District as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1968–1971). A research proposal was developed positing a traditional pattern of behavior which could be identified as traditional leadership, the better to contrast this with the bureaucratic style of the district’s new penghulus (headmen of a mukim, or subdistrict).

As research progressed, it became obvious that there was in fact no single traditional leadership pattern to be discovered, but rather that over time adaptations were regularly made whenever a significant change in Sik’s social and economic environment occurred. Although the study has retained rural leadership as a primary concern, it has been found necessary to relate it to Sik’s social and economic history.

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cover of Building Little Saigon: Refugee Urbanism in American Cities and Suburbs

Building Little Saigon

Refugee Urbanism in American Cities and Suburbs

Erica Allen-Kim

University of Texas Press, 2024

2026 Spiro Kostof Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians

An in-depth look at the diverging paths of Vietnamese American communities, or “Little Saigons,” in America’s built environment.

In the final days before the fall of Saigon in 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese who were evacuated or who made their own way out of the country resettled in the United States. Finding themselves in unfamiliar places yet still connected in exile, these refugees began building their own communities as memorials to a lost homeland. Known both officially and unofficially as Little Saigons, these built landscapes offer space for everyday activities as well as the staging of cultural heritage and political events.

Building Little Saigon examines nearly fifty years of city building by Vietnamese Americans—who number over 2.2 million today. Author Erica Allen-Kim highlights architecture and planning ideas adapted by the Vietnamese communities who, in turn, have influenced planning policies and mainstream practices. Allen-Kim traveled to ten Little Saigons in the United States to visit archives, buildings, and public art and to converse with developers, community planners, artists, business owners, and Vietnam veterans. By examining everyday buildings—who made them and what they mean for those who know them—Building Little Saigon shows us the complexities of migration unfolding across lifetimes and generations.

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cover of Building a Buzz: Libraries & Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Building a Buzz

Libraries & Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Peggy Barber

American Library Association, 2010

[more]
cover of Bureaucrats, Clients, and Geography: The Bailly Nuclear Power Plant Battle in Northern Indiana

Bureaucrats, Clients, and Geography

The Bailly Nuclear Power Plant Battle in Northern Indiana

Nancy J. Obermeyer

University of Chicago Press, 1989

[more]