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Becoming Transnational Youth Workers contests mainstream notions of adolescence with its study of a previously under-documented cross-section of Mexican immigrant youth. Preceding the latest wave of Central American children and teenagers now fleeing violence in their homelands, Isabel Martinez examines a group of unaccompanied Mexican teenage minors who emigrated to New York City in the early 2000s. As one of the consequences of intractable poverty in their homeland, these emigrant youth exhibit levels of agency and competence not usually assigned to children and teenage minors, and disrupt mainstream notions of what practices are appropriate at their ages. Leaving school and family in Mexico and financially supporting not only themselves through their work in New York City, but also their families back home, these youths are independent teenage migrants who, upon migration, wish to assume or resume autonomy and agency rather than dependence. This book also explores community and family understandings about survival and social mobility in an era of extreme global economic inequality.

The evolution of a university-based public service model that integrates leadership, applied research, and regional engagement in Appalachian Ohio

Becoming the Voinovich School chronicles the evolution of Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service, a pioneering institution that blends academic rigor with hands-on public engagement. Founded on the vision of political scientist Mark Weinberg and inspired by the leadership philosophy of former US senator and Ohio governor George V. Voinovich, the school has become a national model for university-based public service.

From its modest beginnings in 1976—when Weinberg was hired to build a public administration program from scratch—the school has grown into a dynamic “do tank” serving the Appalachian Ohio region and beyond. Early initiatives like the Institute for Local Government Administration and Rural Development laid the groundwork for a new kind of academic center: one that connects faculty expertise with real-world problem-solving. Through applied research, GIS analysis, leadership training, and program evaluation, the school has become a trusted convener and catalyst for change.

The Voinovich School’s mission spans five key sectors: economic development, community development, education and child wellness, environmental restoration, and health and well-being. Its work is rooted in a commitment to empowering communities, especially those facing the economic and health challenges of postindustrial Appalachia. By pairing grant-funded projects with experiential education, the school has created opportunities for students to engage directly with pressing public issues while building leadership capacity across the region.

In 2007, the center was formally renamed the Voinovich School, reflecting its expanded scope and growing impact. Over the next decade, it launched new graduate programs, raised its national ranking, and became the educational partner for the Ohio Economic Development Institute. Today, the school continues to leverage state and federal funding, private-sector partnerships, and alumni networks to address complex challenges with innovative, community-driven solutions.

This book offers a compelling account of how one university unit transformed public service education—and how its legacy continues to shape leadership and policy in and beyond Ohio.

Understanding an infamous political movement's grounding in festivity and defiance

Beer and Revolution examines the rollicking life and times of German immigrant anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914. Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held.

Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists' message and the majority of American workers.

Details the ferment in civil rights that took place across the South before the momentous Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954

This collection refutes the notion that the movement began with the Supreme Court decision, and suggests, rather, that the movement originated in the 1930s and earlier, spurred by the Great Depression and, later, World War II—events that would radically shape the course of politics in the South and the nation into the next century.

This work explores the growth of the movement through its various manifestations—the activities of politicians, civil rights leaders, religious figures, labor unionists, and grass-roots activists—throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses the critical leadership roles played by women and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the NAACP and the Communist Party.

Before Brown shows clearly that, as the drive toward racial equality advanced and national political attitudes shifted, the validity of white supremacy came increasingly into question. Institutionalized racism in the South had always offered white citizens material advantages by preserving their economic superiority and making them feel part of a privileged class. When these rewards were threatened by the civil rights movement, a white backlash occurred.

The potato famines of the nineteenth century were long attributed to Irish indolence. The Stalinist system was blamed on a Russian proclivity for autocracy. Muslim men have been accused of an inclination to terrorism. Is political behavior really the result of cultural upbringing, or does the vast range of human political action stem more from institutional and structural constraints?

This important new book carefully examines the role of institutions and civic culture in the establishment of political norms. Jackman and Miller methodically refute the Weberian cultural theory of politics and build in its place a persuasive case for the ways in which institutions shape the political behavior of ordinary citizens. Their rigorous examination of grassroots electoral participation reveals no evidence for even a residual effect of cultural values on political behavior, but instead provides consistent support for the institutional view. Before Norms speaks to urgent debates among political scientists and sociologists over the origins of individual political behavior.

Robert W. Jackman is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. Ross A. Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science at Santa Clara University.

Few issues in contemporary U.S> politics have remained on the public agenda so long and so divisively as abortion policy. The landmark Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Waade, which held that laws prohibiting first trimester abortions were illegal because they violated a woman's right to privacy, still generates heated controversy today, a quarter of a century after it was made. The seeds of that controversy were sown in the seven years immediately preceding Roe, when state legislatures tried to reconcile religious opposition to abortion and individuals' civil liberties.

In this groundbreaking book, Rosemary Nossiff examines the force that shaped abortion policy during those years, and the ways in which states responded to them. To provide in-depth analysis while still looking broadly at the picture, she studies New York, which passed the  most permissive abortion bill in the country, and Pennsylvania, which passed one of the most restrictive. That these two states, which share similar demographic, political, and  economic characteristics, should reach two such different outcomes provides a perfect case study for observing political dynamics at the state level.

Nossiff examines the medical, religious, and legal discourses employed on both sides of the debate, as well as the role played by feminist discourse. She looks at the role of the political parties in the campaigns, as well as such interest groups as the National Council of Catholic Bishops, the Clergy Consultation Service, the National Organization for Women, and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. In addition, she analyzes the strategies used by both sides, as well as partisan and institutionalized developments that facilitated success or failure. Finally, in the Epilogue, she assesses the Roe decision and its aftermath, including an analysis of the pro-life movement in Pennsylvania.

As the author remarks, "Without question people's positions on abortion are shaped by a myriad of social, moral, and economic factors. But ultimately abortion policy is shaped in the political arena. This book examines how one of the most intimate decisions a woman makes, whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy, has become one of the most politicized issues in contemporary American politics.

Campaigns to win the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations are longer, more complex, and more confusing to the observer than the general election itself. The maze of delegate-selection procedures includes state primaries and caucuses as well as the traditional "smoke-filled room." Complicated federal election laws govern campaign financing. Sometimes many candidates enter and drop out of the race, while sometimes a stable two-way contest occurs: the 1976 nomination campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford exemplified each extreme. Is it possible to propose general principles to explain the apparent chaos of our presidential nomination system? Can those principles account for two such starkly different campaigns as occurred in 1976? In Before the Convention, political scientist John H. Aldrich presents a systematic analysis of presidential nomination politics, based on application of rational-choice models to candidate behavior. Aldrich views the candidates as decision makers with limited resources in a highly competitive environment. From this perspective, he seeks to determine why and how candidates choose to run, why some succeed and others fail, and what consequences the nomination process has for the general election and, later, for the President in office.

Aldrich begins with a brief history of the presidential selection process, focusing on the continuing shift of power from political elites to the mass electorate. He then turns to a detailed analysis of the 1976 nomination campaigns. Using data from a variety of sources, Aldrich demonstrates that the very different patterns in these races both conform to the rational-choice model. The analysis includes consideration of numerous questions of strategy. Is there a "momentum" to campaigns? How does a candidate identify and exploit this intangible quality? How do candidates decide where to contend and where not to contend? What is the nature of policy competition among candidates? When does a candidate prefer a "fuzzy" position to a clearly stated one? Other topics include reforms in campaign financing and the expanded and changed role of news coverage.

Before the Convention fills a significant gap in the literature on presidential politics, and therefore should be of particular importance to specialists in this area. It will be ofinterest also to everyone who is concerned with understanding the "rules of the game" for a complicated but vitally important exercise of American democracy.

Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination ofthe late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity.

Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Behavioral economics questions the basic underpinnings of economic theory, showing that people often do not act consistently in their own self-interest when making economic decisions. While these findings have important theoretical implications, they also provide a new lens for examining public policies, such as taxation, public spending, and the provision of adequate pensions. How can people be encouraged to save adequately for retirement when evidence shows that they tend to spend their money as soon as they can? Would closer monitoring of income tax returns lead to more honest taxpayers or a more distrustful, uncooperative citizenry? Behavioral Public Finance, edited by Edward McCaffery and Joel Slemrod, applies the principles of behavioral economics to government's role in constructing economic and social policies of these kinds and suggests that programs crafted with rational participants in mind may require redesign. Behavioral Public Finance looks at several facets of economic life and asks how behavioral research can increase public welfare. Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Jeff Strnad note that public support for a tax often depends not only on who bears its burdens, but also on how the tax is framed. For example, people tend to prefer corporate taxes over sales taxes, even though the cost of both is eventually extracted from the consumer. James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, and Andrew Metrick assess the impact of several different features of 401(k) plans on employee savings behavior. They find that when employees are automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan, they overwhelmingly accept the status quo and continue participating, while employees without automatic enrollment typically take over a year to join the saving plan. Behavioral Public Finance also looks at taxpayer compliance. While the classic economic model suggests that the low rate of IRS audits means far fewer people should voluntarily pay their taxes than actually do, John Cullis, Philip Jones, and Alan Lewis present new research showing that many people do not underreport their incomes even when the probability of getting caught is a mere one percent. Human beings are not always rational, utility-maximizing economic agents. Behavioral economics has shown how human behavior departs from the assumptions made by generations of economists. Now, Behavioral Public Finance brings the insights of behavioral economics to analysis of policies that affect us all.

Presents papers which were discussed at the Arden House Conference—a conference held to establish a working relationship between sociologists at the Russell Sage Foundation and journalists of the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University. Both behavioral science and journalism have for a long time been concerned with some of the same major national social problems—juvenile delinquency, urban problems, race and minority group relations, international tensions, and labor relations. These papers touch on some of the barriers to communication and point to possible ways of breaking through those barriers.

What was it like to be colonized by foreigners? Highlighting a region in central Congo, in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, Being Colonized places Africans at the heart of the story. In a richly textured history that will appeal to general readers and students as well as to scholars, the distinguished historian Jan Vansina offers not just accounts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, but the varied voices of a colonized people. Vansina uncovers the history revealed in local news, customs, gossip, and even dreams, as related by African villagers through archival documents, material culture, and oral interviews.
    Vansina’s case study of the colonial experience is the realm of Kuba, a kingdom in Congo about the size of New Jersey—and two-thirds the size of its colonial master, Belgium. The experience of its inhabitants is the story of colonialism, from its earliest manifestations to its tumultuous end. What happened in Kuba happened to varying degrees throughout Africa and other colonized regions: racism, economic exploitation, indirect rule, Christian conversion, modernization, disease and healing, and transformations in gender relations. The Kuba, like others, took their own active part in history, responding to the changes and calamities that colonization set in motion. Vansina follows the region’s inhabitants from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, when a new elite emerged on the eve of Congo’s dramatic passage to independence.

This book examines the changing role of the governor in our federal system, giving particular attention to recent developments. The expansion of gubernatorial responsibilities into managerial, executive, and intergovernmental positions has taken place at the same time that the governor's role as leader of his political party has declined. In discussing the contemporary role of governors, the editors provide a view of how the office functions on a day-to-day basis.

The editors base their data on personal experience; interviews with governors, former governors, and staff; on -site visits; and responses to a series of nineteen surveys of governors and their staff conducted between 1976 and 1981. The research was undertaken by the Center for Policy Research of the National Governors' Association.

The Iraqi Baʿth state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation—testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on. 

 

Being Together in Place explores the landscapes that convene Native and non-Native people into sustained and difficult negotiations over their radically different interests and concerns. Grounded in three sites—the Cheslatta-Carrier traditional territory in British Columbia; the Wakarusa Wetlands in northeastern Kansas; and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds in Aotearoa/New Zealand—this book highlights the challenging, tentative, and provisional work of coexistence around such contested spaces as wetlands, treaty grounds, fishing spots, recreation areas, cemeteries, heritage trails, and traditional village sites. At these sites, activists learn how to articulate and defend their intrinsic and life-supportive ways of being, particularly to those who are intent on damaging or destroying these places. 

Using ethnographic research and a geographic perspective, Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson show how the communities in these regions challenge the power relations that structure the ongoing (post)colonial encounter in liberal democratic settler-states. Emerging from their conversations with activists was a distinctive sense that the places for which they cared had agency, a “call” that pulled them into dialogue, relationships, and action with human and nonhuman others. This being-together-in-place, they find, speaks in a powerful way to the vitalities of coexistence: where humans and nonhumans are working to decolonize their relationships; where reciprocal guardianship is being stitched back together in new and unanticipated ways; and where a new kind of “place thinking” is emerging on the borders of colonial power.

In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European colonialism. Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century European travelers to the Middle East experienced a sense of belatedness, of having missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing. Behdad argues that this nostalgic desire for the other contains an implicit critique of Western superiority, a split within European discourses of otherness. Working from these insights and using analyses of power derived from Foucault, Behdad engages in a new critique of orientalism. No longer viewed as a coherent and unified phenomenon or a single developmental tradition, it is seen as a complex and shifting field of practices that has relied upon its own ambivalence and moments of discontinuity to ensure and maintain its power as a discourse of dominance.
Through readings of Flaubert, Nerval, Kipling, Blunt, and Eberhardt, and following the transition in travel literature from travelog to tourist guide, Belated Travelers addresses the specific historical conditions of late nineteenth-century orientalism implicated in the discourses of desire and power. Behdad also views a broad range of issues in addition to nostalgia and tourism, including transvestism and melancholia, to specifically demonstrate the ways in which the heterogeneity of orientalism and the plurality of its practice is an enabling force in the production and transformation of colonial power.
An exceptional work that provides an important critique of issues at the forefront of critical practice today, Belated Travelers will be eagerly awaited by specialists in nineteenth-century British and French literatures, and all concerned with colonial and postcolonial discourse.

Detractors have called it "The Mistake on the Lake." It was once America’s "Comeback City." According to author J. Mark Souther, Cleveland has long sought to defeat its perceived civic malaise. Believing in Cleveland chronicles how city leaders used imagery and rhetoric to combat and, at times, accommodate urban and economic decline.

Souther explores Cleveland's downtown revitalization efforts, its neighborhood renewal and restoration projects, and its fight against deindustrialization. He shows how the city reshaped its image when it was bolstered by sports team victories. But Cleveland was not always on the upswing. Souther places the city's history in the postwar context when the city and metropolitan area were divided by uneven growth. In the 1970s, the city-suburb division was wider than ever.

Believing in Cleveland recounts the long, difficult history of a city that entered the postwar period as America's sixth largest, then lost ground during a period of robust national growth. But rather than tell a tale of decline, Souther provides a fascinating story of resilience for what some folks called "The Best Location in the Nation."

A vivid and fast-paced history, Gary May's Bending toward Justice offers a dramatic account of the birth and precarious life of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It is an extraordinary story of the intimidation and murder of courageous activists who struggled to ensure that all Americans would be able to exercise their right to vote. May outlines the divisions within the Civil Rights Movement, describes the relationship between President Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., and captures the congressional politics of the 1960s. Bending toward Justice is especially timely, given that the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 invalidated a key section of the Voting Rights Act. As May shows, the fight for voting rights is by no means over.

Winner of the American Bar Association's 1992 Silver Gavel Award "in recognition of an outstanding contribution to public understanding of the American system of law and justice."

"Mr. Sobol has produced a readable yet fully researched and detailed study of the operation of the bankruptcy and its effects upon all concerned—the women who were injured, the swarms of lawyers who represented parties in the bankruptcy, and the court which oversaw the bankruptcy in Richmond. . . . This book adds greatly to the current debate about how strong a managerial federal judge our system should have."—Paul D. Rheingold, New York Law Journal

"Bending the Law is polemical and relentless. It is also minutely researched, fluidly written, and persuasive."—Paul Reidinger, ABA Journal

"Bending the Law is a must read for bankruptcy practitioners, and for anyone else concerned about the use of bankruptcy law to deal with mass torts. Although its author is a civil rights lawyer, he details the subtle art of practicing bankruptcy law with a discerning eye, and is a gifted storyteller as well."—Joryn Jenkins, Federal Bar News and Journal

"This is an accessible history of the case by a veteran civil-rights lawyer."—Washington Post Book World

Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process.
           
With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.

Henri Bergson is primarily known for his work on time, memory, and creativity. His equally innovative interventions into politics and religion have, however, been neglected or dismissed until now. In the first book in English dedicated to Bergson as a political thinker, leading Bergson scholars illuminate his positions on core concerns within political philosophy: the significance of emotion in moral judgment, the relationship between biology and society, and the entanglement of politics and religion. Ranging across Bergson's writings but drawing mainly on his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, the contributors consider Bergson's relevance to contemporary discussions of human rights, democratic pluralism, and environmental ethics.

Contributors. Keith Ansell-Pearson, G. William Barnard, Claire Colebrook, Hisashi Fujita, Suzanne Guerlac, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Frédéric Keck, Leonard Lawlor, Alexandre Lefebvre, Paola Marrati, John Mullarkey, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Carl Power, Philippe Soulez, Jim Urpeth, Melanie White, Frédéric Worms

The Cold War is back in the news. So is history, in the sense of past geopolitical confrontations that for a span of a few decades were thought to be largely decoupled from present-day political developments. Of course, such reflexive reactions lack nuance and, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tended to refer more to tensions between the United States and China. We should neither see Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine immediately as part of a new cold war—though it could certainly become one of its foundation pieces—nor define history simply in terms of warfare and conflict. Yet such history has great appeal in efforts to understand the dizzying and depressing events of recent years. For example, correspondents and commentators have likened the delivery of weapons systems, protective gear, and humanitarian aid to a beleaguered Ukraine to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49. But relying on history as a guide may mislead as much as enlighten. No city symbolizes the Cold War quite as Berlin does. When we think of the Cold War and of Berlin, we tend to emphasize the crises—the 1948–49 blockade and airlift, perhaps the 1953 East German workers’ uprising, surely the 1958­–61 crisis, during which the Berlin Wall was built—and the climactic ending of the Cold War in Europe when the wall came down. Berlin may conjure up iconic moments and tropes, from a statement attributed to Nikita Khrushchev in 1963 that Berlin was “the testicles of the West,” to John F. Kennedy’s insistence that all free men had to be invested in the defense of Berlin, to Ronald Reagan’s exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” For American presidents (or presidential hopefuls), Berlin and the Brandenburg Gate have remained powerful images, even in the twenty-first century. A presence in Berlin signals strong leadership in the West, even though the proximate reasons why the West, as a political construct, emerged in the first place may be gone. In that sense, Berlin also stands for overcoming the past: first, West Berlin as the counterpoint not only to eastern communism but also to defeated fascism, and second, the new Berlin as the capital of a unified Germany and as a symbol that the West has won.

Berlusconi's Italy provides a fresh, thoroughly-informed account of how Italy's richest man came to be its political leader. Without dismissing the importance of personalities and political parties, it emphasizes the significance of changes in voting behaviors that led to the rise-and eventual fall-of Silvio Berlusconi, the millionaire media baron who became Prime Minister. Armed with new data and new analytic tools, Michael Shin and John Agnew use recently developed methods of spatial analysis, to offer a compelling new argument about contextual re-creation and mutation. They reveal that regional politics and shifting geographical voting patterns were far more important to Berlusconi's successes than the widely-credited role of the mass media, and conclude that Berlusconi's success (and later defeat) can be best understood in geographic terms.

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? 
 

Walter Laqueur has been writing and teaching for over six decades, primarily in the fields of twentieth century history and politics, always as a shrewd and thoughtful generalist in an age of specialization. In this engaging memoir, Laqueur focuses on the political and historical events that shaped his thinking and that have inspired his intellectual work throughout his life. He discusses living and attending school under Nazism; Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the part he played in Cold War politics; and the image his generation had of Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East. Laqueur shares his views on beltway politics and think tanks, and concludes with a look at guerrilla warfare and terrorism, and the future of Europe.

The first major study to consider Black women’s activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists’ quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas’s agrarian history.

The Black women activists highlighted here include home demonstration agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service and Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, all of whom possessed an acute understanding of the difficulties that African Americans faced in rural spaces. Examining these activists through a historical lens, Jones-Branch reveals how educated, middle-class Black women worked with their less-educated rural sisters to create all-female spaces where they confronted economic, educational, public health, political, and theological concerns free from white regulation and interference.

Centered on the period between 1914 and 1965, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps brings long-overdue attention to an important chapter in Arkansas history, spotlighting a group of Black women activists who uplifted their communities while subverting the formidable structures of white supremacy.

"Betting the Earth explores the uneasy parallels between our contemporary environmental challenges and our national fascination with gambling. How much should we bet on preserving biodiversity? Should we bet more on responding to climate change? where should we place each bet: on federal or state laws, on acquiring public or private preserves, on preventing environmental harms or saving places of special environmental significance? Like it or not, we must make such choices every day, and Betting the Earth helps us to understand how we do so."

Professor John Copeland Nagle, John N. Matthews Chair in Law, University of Notre Dame Law School

In the postwar years, Italy underwent a far-reaching process of industrialization that transformed the country into a leading industrial power. Throughout most of this period, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) remained a powerful force in local government and civil society. However, as Stephen Gundle observes, the PCI was increasingly faced with challenges posed by modernization, particularly by mass communication, commercial cultural industries, and consumerism. Between Hollywood and Moscow is an analysis of the PCI’s attempts to cope with these problems in an effort to maintain its organization and subculture.

Gundle focuses on the theme of cultural policy, examining how the PCI’s political strategies incorporated cultural policies and activities that were intended to respond to the Americanization of daily life in Italy. In formulating this policy, Gundle contends, the Italian Communists were torn between loyalty to the alternative values generated by the Communist tradition and adaptation to the dominant influences of Italian modernization. This equilibrium eventually faltered because the attractive aspects of Americanization and pop culture proved more influential than the PCI’s intellectual and political traditions.

The first analysis in English of the cultural policies and activities of the PCI, this book will appeal to readers with an interest in modern Italy, the European left, political science, and media studies.

Between Jesus and the Market looks at the appeal of the Christian right-wing movement in contemporary American politics and culture. In her discussions of books and videotapes that are widely distributed by the Christian right but little known by mainstream Americans, Linda Kintz makes explicit the crucial need to understand the psychological makeup of born-again Christians as well as the sociopolitical dynamics involved in their cause. She focuses on the role of religious women in right-wing Christianity and asks, for example, why so many women are attracted to what is often seen as an antiwoman philosophy. The result, a telling analysis of the complexity and appeal of the "emotions that matter" to many Americans, highlights how these emotions now determine public policy in ways that are increasingly dangerous for those outside familiarity’s circle.
With texts from such organizations as the Christian Coalition, the Heritage Foundation, and Concerned Women for America, and writings by Elizabeth Dole, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh, Kintz traces the usefulness of this activism for the secular claim that conservative political economy is, in fact, simply an expression of the deepest and most admirable elements of human nature itself. The discussion of Limbaugh shows how he draws on the skepticism of contemporary culture to create a sense of absolute truth within his own media performance—its truth guaranteed by the market. Kintz also describes how conservative interpretations of the Holy Scriptures, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence have been used to challenge causes such as feminism, women’s reproductive rights, and gay and lesbian rights. In addition to critiquing the intellectual and political left for underestimating the power of right-wing grassroots organizing, corporate interests, and postmodern media sophistication, Between Jesus and the Market discusses the proliferation of militia groups, Christian entrepreneurship, and the explosive growth and "selling" of the Promise Keepers.

During the Cold War, Chinese Americans struggled to gain political influence in the United States. Considered potentially sympathetic to communism, their communities attracted substantial public and government scrutiny, particularly in San Francisco and New York.

Between Mao and McCarthy looks at the divergent ways that Chinese Americans in these two cities balanced domestic and international pressures during the tense Cold War era. On both coasts, Chinese Americans sought to gain political power and defend their civil rights, yet only the San Franciscans succeeded. Forging multiracial coalitions and encouraging voting and moderate activism, they avoided the deep divisions and factionalism that consumed their counterparts in New York. Drawing on extensive research in both Chinese- and English-language sources, Charlotte Brooks uncovers the complex, diverse, and surprisingly vibrant politics of an ethnic group trying to find its voice and flex its political muscle in Cold War America.

Why do the armed forces sometimes intervene in politics via short-lived coups d’état, at other times establish or support authoritarian regimes, or in some cases come under the democratic control of civilians? To find answers, Yaprak Gürsoy examines four episodes of authoritarianism, six periods of democracy, and ten short-lived coups in Greece and Turkey, and then applies her resultant theory to four more recent military interventions in Thailand and Egypt.

Based on more than 150 interviews with Greek and Turkish elites, Gürsoy offers a detailed analysis of both countries from the interwar period to recent regime crises. She argues that officers, politicians, and businesspeople prefer democracy, authoritarianism, or short-lived coups depending on the degree of threat they perceive to their interests from each other and the lower classes. The power of elites relative to the opposition, determined in part by the coalitions they establish with each other, affects the success of military interventions and the consolidation of regimes.

With historical and theoretical depth, Between Military Rule and Democracy will interest students of regime change and civil-military relations in Greece, Turkey, Thailand, and Egypt, as well as in countries facing similar challenges to democratization.