18284 books match the query 'United States' and 783 start with f

cover of Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas

Freedom Is Not Enough

The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas

By William S. Clayson

University of Texas Press, 2010

Led by the Office of Economic Opportunity, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty reflected the president's belief that, just as the civil rights movement and federal law tore down legalized segregation, progressive government and grassroots activism could eradicate poverty in the United States. Yet few have attempted to evaluate the relationship between the OEO and the freedom struggles of the 1960s. Focusing on the unique situation presented by Texas, Freedom Is Not Enough examines how the War on Poverty manifested itself in a state marked by racial division and diversity—and by endemic poverty.

Though the War on Poverty did not eradicate destitution in the United States, the history of the effort provides a unique window to examine the politics of race and social justice in the 1960s. William S. Clayson traces the rise and fall of postwar liberalism in the Lone Star State against a backdrop of dissent among Chicano militants and black nationalists who rejected Johnson's brand of liberalism. The conservative backlash that followed is another result of the dramatic political shifts revealed in the history of the OEO, completing this study of a unique facet in Texas's historical identity.

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cover of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy

Kenneth T. Andrews

University of Chicago Press, 2004

No part of the United States was more resistant to the civil rights movement and its pursuit of racial equality than Mississippi. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle explores the civil rights movement in that state to consider its emergence before the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its impact long after. Did the civil rights movement have a lasting impact, and, if so, how did it bring about change? Kenneth T. Andrews is the first scholar to examine not only the history of the movement but its social and political legacy as well. His study demonstrates how during the 1970s and '80s, local movements worked to shape electoral politics, increase access to better public schools, and secure the administration of social welfare to needy African Americans.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is also the first book of its kind to detail the activities of white supremacists in Mississippi, revealing how white repression and intimidation sparked black activism and simultaneously undermined the movement's ability to achieve far-reaching goals. Andrews shows that the federal government's role was important but reactive as federal actors responded to the sustained struggles between local movements and their opponents. He tracks the mobilization of black activists by the NAACP, the creation of Freedom Summer, efforts to galvanize black voters, the momentous desegregation of public schools and the rise of all-white private academies, and struggles over the economic development of black communities. From this complex history, Andrews shows how the civil rights movement built innovative organizations and campaigns that empowered local leadership and had a lasting legacy in Mississippi and beyond.

Based on an original and creative research design that combines extensive archival research, interviews with activists, and quantitative historical data, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle provides many new insights into the civil rights struggle, and it presents a much broader theory to explain whether and how movements have enduring impacts on politics and society. What results is a work that will be invaluable to students of social movements, democratic politics, and the struggle for racial freedom in the U.S.
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cover of Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements

Freedom Is an Endless Meeting

Democracy in American Social Movements

Francesca Polletta

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of American experiments in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on meticulous research and more than one hundred interviews with activists, Francesca Polletta challenges the conventional wisdom that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice. Instead, she shows that social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change.

Polletta traces the history of democracy in early labor struggles and pre-World War II pacifism, in the civil rights, new left, and women's liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, and in today's faith-based organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. In the process, she uncovers neglected sources of democratic inspiration—Depression-era labor educators and Mississippi voting registration workers, among them—as well as practical strategies of social protest. But Freedom Is an Endless Meeting also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after familiar nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship. Doing so has brought into their deliberations the trust, respect, and caring typical of those relationships. But it has also fostered values that run counter to democracy, such as exclusivity and an aversion to rules, and these have been the fault lines around which participatory democracies have often splintered. Indeed, Polletta attributes the fragility of the form less to its basic inefficiency or inequity than to the gaps between activists' democratic commitments and the cultural models on which they have depended to enact those commitments. The challenge, she concludes, is to forge new kinds of democratic relationships, ones that balance trust with accountability, respect with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness.

For anyone concerned about the prospects for democracy in America, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting will offer abundant historical, theoretical, and practical insights.

"This is an excellent study of activist politics in the United States over the past century. . . . Assiduously researched, impressively informed by a great number of thoughtful interviews with key members of American social movements, and deeply engaged with its subject matter, the book is likely to become a key text in the study of grass-roots democracy in America."—Kate Fullbrook, Times Literary Supplement

"Polletta's portrayal challenges the common assumption that morality and strategy are incompatible, that those who aim at winning must compromise principle while those who insist on morality are destined to be ineffective. . . . Rather than dwell on trying to explain the decline of 60s movements, Polletta shows how participatory democracy has become the guiding framework for many of today's activists."—Richard Flacks, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta has produced a remarkable work of historical sociology. . . . She provides the fullest theoretical work of historical sociology. . . . She provides the fullest theoretical picture of participatory democracy, rich with nuance, ambiguity, and irony, that this reviewer has yet seen. . . . This wise book should be studied closely by both academics and by social change activists."—Stewart Burns, Journal of American History

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cover of Freedom Train North: Stories of the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin

Freedom Train North

Stories of the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin

Julia Pferdehirt

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011

People running from slavery made many hard journeys to find freedom—on steamboats and in carriages, across rivers and in hay-covered wagons. Some were shot at. Many were chased by slave catchers. Others hid in tunnels and secret rooms. But these troubles were worth it for the men, women, and children who eventually reached freedom. Freedom Train North tells the stories of fugitive slaves who found help in Wisconsin. Young readers (ages 7 to 12) will meet people like Joshua Glover, who was broken out of jail by a mob of freedom workers in Milwaukee, and Jacob Green, who escaped five times before he finally made it to freedom.

This compelling book also introduces stories of the strangers who hid fugitive slaves and helped them on their way, brave men and women who broke the law to do what was right. As both a historian and a storyteller, author Julia Pferdehirt shares these exciting and important stories of a dangerous time in Wisconsin’s past. Using manuscripts, letters, and artifacts from the period, as well as stories passed down from one generation to another, Pferdehirt takes us deep into our state’s past, challenging and inspiring us with accounts of courage and survival.

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cover of Freedom and Tenure in the Academy

Freedom and Tenure in the Academy

William W. Van Alstyne, ed.

Duke University Press, 1993

Questions of academic freedom--from hate speech to the tenure structure—continue to be of great urgency and perennial debate in American higher education. Originally published as a special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems (Summer 1990), this volume draws together leading scholars of law, philosophy, and higher education to offer a fresh assessment of the founding principles of academic freedom and to define this crucial topic for the 1990s.
The original 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which has been influential in determining institutional practices for the last half century, has required continual redefinition since its initial declaration. The volume begins with two overview articles: the most complete examination of the 1940 Statement ever provided (shedding light on some of its most troublesome clauses) and a historical review of the extent to which academic freedom has been accepted into domestic constitutional law. Subsequent articles address a range of issues related to academic freedom: the relationship between tenure and academic freedom; tenure and labor law; ideology and faculty selection; freedom of expression and the arts on campus; the boundaries defining hate speech and offensive expression; the clash between institutional and individual claims of academic freedom; and the practices of religious colleges in the United States.

Contributors. Ralph S. Brown, Matthew W. Finkin, Jordan E. Kurland, Michael W. McConnell, Walter P. Metzger, Robert M. O'Neil, David M. Rabban, Rodney A, Smolla, Janet Sinder, Judith Jarvis Thomson, William W. Van Alstyne

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cover of Freedom of Expression: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property

Freedom of Expression

Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property

Kembrew McLeod

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Freedom of Expression® covers the ways in which intellectual property laws have been used to privatize all forms of expression—from guitar riffs and Donald Trump’s “you’re fired” gesture to human genes and public space—and in the process stifle creative expression. Kembrew McLeod challenges the blind embrace of privatization as it clashes against our right to free speech and shared resources.

Kembrew McLeod is professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, author of Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law, and coproducer of the documentary Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport.

Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford Law School.

This book’s documentary companion will be available through Media Education Foundation.

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cover of Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State

Freedom with Violence

Race, Sexuality, and the US State

Chandan Reddy

Duke University Press, 2011

In Freedom with Violence, Chandan Reddy develops a new paradigm for understanding race, sexuality, and national citizenship. He examines a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational. Reddy argues that the modern liberal state is organized as a “counterviolence” to race even as, and precisely because, race persists as the condition of possibility for the modern subject. Rejecting liberal notions of modernity as freedom from violence or revolutionary ideas of freedom through violence, Reddy contends that liberal modernity is a structure for authorizing state violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies link freedom to the notion of legitimate (state) violence and produce narratives of liberty that tie rights and citizenship to institutionalized violence. To counter these formulations, Reddy proposes an alternative politics of knowledge grounded in queer of color critique and critical ethnic studies. He uses issues that include asylum law and the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to illustrate this major rethinking of the terms of liberal modernity.
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cover of Freedom's Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration

Freedom's Ballot

African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration

Margaret Garb

University of Chicago Press, 2014

In the spring of 1915, Chicagoans elected the city’s first black alderman, Oscar De Priest. In a city where African Americans made up less than five percent of the voting population, and in a nation that dismissed and denied black political participation, De Priest’s victory was astonishing. It did not, however, surprise the unruly group of black activists who had been working for several decades to win representation on the city council.

Freedom’s Ballot is the history of three generations of African American activists—the ministers, professionals, labor leaders, clubwomen, and entrepreneurs—who transformed twentieth-century urban politics. This is a complex and important story of how black political power was institutionalized in Chicago in the half-century following the Civil War. Margaret Garb explores the social and political fabric of Chicago, revealing how the physical makeup of the city was shaped by both political corruption and racial empowerment—in ways that can still be seen and felt today.
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cover of Freedom's Champion: Elijah Lovejoy

Freedom's Champion

Elijah Lovejoy

Elijah Lovejoy. Revised by Paul Simon. Foreword by Clarence Page

Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

In this revised edition of his earlier biography, Paul Simon provides an inspiring account of the life and work of Elijah Lovejoy, an avid abolitionist in the 1830s and the first martyr to freedom of the press in the United States.

Lovejoy was a native New Englander, the son of a Congregational minister. He came to the Midwest in 1827 in pursuit of a teaching career and succeeded in running his own school for two years in St. Louis. Teaching failed to challenge Lovejoy, however, so he bought a half interest in the St. Louis Times and became its editor. In 1832, after experiencing a religious conversion, he returned east to study for the ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. After his graduation, Lovejoy was called back to St. Louis by a group of Christian businessmen to serve as the editor of a new religious newspaper, the Observer, promoting religion, morality, and education. It was through this forum that Lovejoy took an ever stronger stance against slavery.

In the slave state of Missouri, such a view was not onlyunpopular, but in the eyes of many, criminal. As a result, Lovejoy and his family suffered repeated persecution and acts of violence from angry mobs. In July 1836, in hopes of finding a more tolerant community in a "free" state, he moved both his printing press and his family across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois.

The move to Alton was a fateful one. Lovejoy’s press was dismantled and thrown into the river by a mob on the night of its arrival. Lovejoy ordered a new printing press, and it, too, was destroyed eleven months later. A determined and dedicated man, Lovejoy ordered a third press, and city officials took special precautions to ensure its safety after delivery. Nevertheless, an organized and angry mob rolled this third press, still in its crate, into the river exactly one month after Lovejoy’s second press had been destroyed. A fourth press, housed in a large stone warehouse and guarded by Lovejoy and his supporters, met the same fate but only after a drunken mob had killed Lovejoy himself. He was buried two days later, 9 November 1837, on his thirty-fifth birthday. No one was ever convicted of his murder.

Rather than suppressing the abolitionist movement, Lovejoy’s death caused an eruption of antislavery activity throughout the nation. At a protest meeting in Ohio, John Brown dedicated his life to fighting slavery, and Wendell Phillips emerged from a Lovejoy protest meeting in Boston to become a leader in the antislavery fight.

Simon defines Lovejoy’s fight as a struggle for human dignity and the oppressed. He distinguishes Lovejoy as a courageous and admirable individual and his story as an important and enduring one for both the cause of freedom for the slaves and the cause of freedom of the press.

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cover of Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Freedom's Witness

The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Jean Lee Cole

West Virginia University Press, 2013

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army’s first black chaplains.
 
In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged “grape” and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman’s army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either.
 
Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner’s youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society.
 
Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

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cover of Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Freedom's Witness

The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Jean Lee Cole

University of Delaware Press, 0

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper the Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, DC, and later, as one of the Union army’s first Black chaplains.

In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and Black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged “grape” and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman’s army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by Bck soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either.

Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of Blacks with whites and insists on civil rights for all Black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the Black community and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner’s youthful exuberance and optimism and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society.

Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

[more]
cover of Freedom, Inc. and Black Political Empowerment

Freedom, Inc. and Black Political Empowerment

Micah W. Kubic

University of Missouri Press, 2016

Much has been written about black urban empowerment and about the candidates—particularly the winning candidates—who are the public face of such shifts in power. Authors invariably mention the important role played by black political organizations in electing black officials or organizing communities, but Micah W. Kubic goes further, making, for the first time, one such organization the focus of a book-length study. Kubic tells the story of black political empowerment in Kansas City through the prism of Freedom, Inc., the nation’s oldest existing black political organization.

Using interviews and observation of participants as well as archival research, Kubic offers historical and political analysis of Freedom, Inc. from its founding in 1962 through its role in municipal elections of 2007. Kubic asserts that strong local organizations are living, dynamic organisms and that they, rather than charismatic candidates or interracial alliances, are the crucial players in both determining political outcomes and advancing black interests in urban areas.

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cover of Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860

Freedom’s Ferment

Phases of American Social History to 1860

Alice Felt Tyler

University of Minnesota Press, 1944

Freedom's Ferment was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this historical synthesis of men and movements, Alice Felt Tyler shows in action the democratic faith of the young American republic. She tells the stories of the reform movements and social and religious experiments characteristic of the early half of the nineteenth century.

The early efforts toward social and economic equality — later engulfed in the urgent issues of the Civil War—are here depicted and interpreted in their relation to the history of American thought and action.

Freedom's Ferment divides the movements of the early 1800's into two groups: the cults and utopias of varied origins and the humanitarian crusades. A wave of revivalistic religions swept the country. Here is the story of the Millerites, who believed the end of the world would come on October 22, 1844, of the Spiritualists, Rappites, the Mormons, the Shakers.

Many experiments in communal living were instituted by religious groups, but others were entirely social in concept. Life at Brook Farm, in Robert Owen's colony, in the Oneida Community, and a score of others, is interestingly reconstructed.

Humanitarian reforms and crusades represent the other phase of the movements. Tyler, "exasperated by all the silly twaddle being written about the eccentricities" of the early American republic, shows these movements and the leaders—event the crackpots—as manifestations of the American creed of perfectibility.

Prison and educational reforms, work for delinquents and unfortunates, crusades for world peace, temperance, and women's rights flourished. All to be overshadowed by the antislavery movement and submerged temporarily by the Civil War.

Freedom's Ferment pictures the days when the pattern for the American way of life and the fundamentals of the American faith were being set by crusaders who fought for righteousness. The changes in out social picture have altered the form of the humanitarian movements but not the purpose.

Interpretative and critical, the book show the ferment of the period and the urge to reform, found in every phase of life, to be the result of the fusion of religious freedom and political democracy.

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cover of Freedom’s Ring: Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave

Freedom’s Ring

Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave

Jacqueline Foertsch

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Freedom’s Ring begins with the question of how the American ideal of freedom, which so effectively defends a conservative agenda today, from globally exploitative free trade to anti-French “freedom fries” during the War in Iraq, once bolstered the progressive causes of Freedom Summer, the Free Speech Movement, and more militant Black Power and Women’s Liberation movements with equal efficacy. Focused as it is on the faring of freedom throughout the liberation era, this book also explores attempts made by rights movements to achieve the often competitive or cross-canceling American ideal of equality–economic, professional, and otherwise. Although many struggled and died for it in the civil rights era, freedoms such as the vote, integrated bus rides, and sex without consequences via the Pill, are ultimately free–costing officialdom little if anything to fully implement—while equality with respect to jobs, salaries, education, housing, and health care, will forever be the much more expensive nut to crack. Freedom’s Ring regards the politics of freedom, and politics in general, as a low-cost substitute for and engrossing distraction from substantive economic problem-solving from the liberation era to the present day.
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cover of Freeing Black Girls: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering

Freeing Black Girls

A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering

Tamura Lomax

Duke University Press, 2025

In Freeing Black Girls, Tamura Lomax offers an insurgent feminist love letter to Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers. Exploring what it means to mother Black children in the twenty-first century, Lomax shares her journey from her traditionalist Black girlhood to finding the path to revolutionary Black motherhood. Along the way, she shows how all Black people are endangered by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal dominance and emphasizes the power of looking and talking back. Lomax insists on Black feminist ways of living that value and nourish whole persons, sketching a radical dream that will allow Black women and girls to survive America while being able to love themselves, others, and collective Black freedom. Ultimately, Lomax declares that Black women and girls are emphatically not defective, second-class, or immanent nurturers; they are sacred and revolutionary beings who deserve to live a life free of predation, patriarchy, misrecognition, misogynoir, and violence.
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cover of Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War

Freeing Charles

The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War

Scott Christianson

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Freeing Charles recounts the life and epic rescue of captured fugitive slave Charles Nalle of Culpeper, Virginia, who was forcibly liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, New York, on April 27, 1860. Scott Christianson follows Nalle from his enslavement by the Hansborough family in Virginia through his escape by the Underground Railroad and his experiences in the North on the eve of the Civil War. This engaging narrative represents the first in-depth historical study of this crucial incident, one of the fiercest anti-slavery riots after Harpers Ferry. Christianson also presents a richly detailed look at slavery culture in antebellum Virginia and probes the deepest political and psychological aspects of this epic tale. His account underscores fundamental questions about racial inequality, the rule of law, civil disobedience, and violent resistance to slavery in the antebellum North and South.
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cover of Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

Freeman's Challenge

The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

Robin Bernstein

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Honored by the 2025 Massachusetts Book Awards in Nonfiction

An award-winning historian tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit.


In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.

Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.
 
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cover of Fremont: Explorer For A Restless Nation

Fremont

Explorer For A Restless Nation

Ferol Egan

University of Nevada Press, 1985

Foreword by Richard Dillon. Between 1842 and 1853, John C. Fremont led five expeditions across the trans-Mississippi West. While the success of his early journeys gained him acclaim as a national hero, his later missions ended in tragedy and ultimately a court-martial. Historian Ferol Egan focuses on Fremont’s explorations, providing a vivid portrait of a courageous man in an emerging young nation. 
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cover of French Canadians in Michigan

French Canadians in Michigan

John P. DuLong

Michigan State University Press, 2001

As the first European settlers in Michigan, the French Canadians left an indelible mark on the place names and early settlement patterns of the Great Lakes State. Because of its importance in the fur trade, many French Canadians migrated to Michigan, settling primarily along the Detroit- Illinois trade route, and throughout the fur trade avenues of the Straits of Mackinac. When the British conquered New France in 1763, most Europeans in Michigan were Francophones. John DuLong explores the history and influence of these early French Canadians, and traces, as well, the successive 19th- and 20th-century waves of industrial migration from Quebec, creating new communities outside the old fur trade routes of their ancestors.

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cover of French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory

French DNA

Trouble in Purgatory

Paul Rabinow

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as a commodity unto itself: French DNA.
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cover of French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism

French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism

Rick Fantasia

Temple University Press, 2019

A tectonic shift has occurred in the gastronomic field in France, upsetting the cultural imagination. In a European country captivated by a high-stakes power struggle between chefs and restaurants in the culinary field, the mass marketing of factory-processed industrial cuisine and fast foods has created shock waves in French society, culture, and the economy. 

In this insightful book, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism, Rick Fantasia examines how national identity and the dynamics of cultural meaning-making within gastronomy have changed during a crucial period of transformation, from the 1970s through the 1990s. He illuminates the tensions and surprising points of cooperation between the skill, expertise, tradition, artistry, and authenticity of grand chefs and the industrial practices of food production, preparation, and distribution. 

Fantasia examines the institutions and beliefs that have reinforced notions of French cultural supremacy—such as the rise and reverence of local cuisine—as well as the factors that subvert those notions, such as when famous French chefs lend their names to processed, frozen, and pre-packaged foods available at the supermarket. Ultimately, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism shows what happens to a cultural field, like French gastronomy, when the logic and power of the economic field imposes itself upon it.

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cover of French Lessons: A Memoir

French Lessons

A Memoir

Alice Kaplan

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
[more]
cover of French Lessons: A Memoir

French Lessons

A Memoir

Alice Kaplan

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
[more]
cover of French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times

French Roots in the Illinois Country

The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times

Carl J. Ekberg

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Book Prize for the Best Book on Louisiana History, French Roots in the Illinois Country creates an entirely new picture of the Illinois country as a single ethnic, economic, and cultural entity. Focusing on the French Creole communities along the Mississippi River, Carl J. Ekberg shows how land use practices such as medieval-style open-field agriculture intersected with economic and social issues ranging from the flour trade between Illinois and New Orleans to the significance of the different mentalities of French Creoles and Anglo-Americans.
 
[more]
cover of French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

French Theory

How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

Francois Cusset

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

“A great story, full of twists and turns. . . . Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.” —Stanley Fish, Think Again, New York Times

“In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida

“The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come.” —Sylvere Lotringer

 

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.

Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric.

French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.

François Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University’s Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics and La Décennie.

Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

[more]
cover of French and Indians of Illinois River

French and Indians of Illinois River

Nehemiah Matson. Foreword by Rodney O. Davis

Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Complex and paradoxical, Nehemiah Matson (1816–1873) celebrated the occupation of the Middle West by European pioneers even as he labored to preserve the memory of the natives these pioneers replaced. He perpetuated the memory of the Indians who were driven out of the territory, but he nevertheless accumulated wealth selling their land to the pioneers. Rodney O. Davis notes in his new foreword to this book that Matson combined the attributes of a scholar with those of a salesman and promoter.

Matson settled in Princeton, Illinois, in 1836. He left behind a library partially endowed by him, named for him, and finally completed in 1913. According to Davis, however, Matson’s other legacy, “of equal significance in his own eyes, consisted of the five books he authored on northern Illinois and Illinois River history and cartography, volumes based not only on conscientious scholarship but also on both Indian and white reminiscence and on local folklore.”

Matson’s historical writings are valuable even when he deals with well-known events because his personal perspective makes his observations unique. Without the stories and reminiscences he collected, much valuable information would have been lost, especially since many of his informants, both Indian and European, were illiterate. Because his informants often told conflicting stories, Matson admitted that “harmonizing all conflicting accounts . . . has not been a success.”

Although Matson’s sources may not always have agreed, and sometimes his heart may have overruled his head and colored his accounts, he was a conscientious and committed author. “Obviously,” Davis explains, “this book must be evaluated as what it is, a piece of colorful local history, romantically anchored in legend yet rooted also in invaluable research and produced by a dedicated amateur whose standards were high. . . . French and Indians of Illinois River is a model of its type, indeed a minor classic.”

[more]
cover of French in Michigan

French in Michigan

Russell M. Magnaghi

Michigan State University Press, 2016

Compared to other nationalities, few French have immigrated to the United States, and the state of Michigan is no exception in that regard. Although the French came in small numbers, those who did settle in or pass through Michigan played important roles as either permanent residents or visitors.
The colonial French served as explorers, soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and colonists. Later, French priests and nuns were influential in promoting Catholicism in the state and in developing schools and hospitals. Father Gabriel Richard fled the violence of the French Revolution and became a prominent and influential citizen of the state as a U.S. Congressman and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. French observers of Michigan life included Alexis de Tocqueville. French entrepreneurs opened copper mines and a variety of service-oriented businesses. Louis Fasquelle became the first foreign-language instructor at the University of Michigan, and François A. Artault introduced photography to the Upper Peninsula. As pioneers of the early automobile, the French made a major contribution to the language used in auto manufacturing.
[more]
cover of Frenchman, Chaplain, Rebel: The Civil War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippoltye Gache, 10th Louisiana Infantry

Frenchman, Chaplain, Rebel

The Civil War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippoltye Gache, 10th Louisiana Infantry

Pere Louis-Hippolyte Gache, S.J.

University of Alabama Press, 2007

The American Civil War through the eyes of a French Jesuit chaplain.

"This book has a tantalizing quality, and it certainly is fresh literature for those who have watched the story of the Civil War unfold. . . . One cannot help but marvel at the research undertaken by Fr. Buckley. These letters of Fr. Gache cover such subjects as the duties of a chaplain, the lack of stimulating conversation in camp, whiskey as medication for diarrhea, the chaplain’s uniform, the oversupply of Catholic chaplains, descriptions of battles—Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg—chaplains as prisoners of war, the possibility of General Lee being chosen as the second president of the Confederacy, making candles for the alter and bleaching wax, procuring sacramental wine, conflicts with Protestant preachers, and the surrender of Richmond. Such subjects allow the personality and character of Hippolyte to stand out. . . . [The book] is interesting reading for all who love and admire the Jesuits. Its wealth of information makes it a must for others whose concern is the Confederate soldier and his God."

—Journal of Southern History

[more]
cover of Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien: History and Folklore from Wisconsin's Frontier

Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien

History and Folklore from Wisconsin's Frontier

Mary Elise Antoine

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

Albert Coryer, the grandson of a fur trade voyageur-turned-farmer, had a gift for storytelling. Born in 1877, he grew up in Prairie du Chien hearing tales of days gone by from his parents, grandparents, and neighbors who lived in the Frenchtown area. Throughout his life, Albert soaked up the local oral traditions, including narratives about early residents, local landmarks, interesting and funny events, ethnic customs, myths, and folklore.

Late in life, this lively man who had worked as a farm laborer and janitor drew a detailed illustrated map of the Prairie du Chien area and began to write his stories out longhand, in addition to sharing them in an interview with a local historian and folklore scholar. The map, stories, and interview transcript provide a colorful account of Prairie du Chien in the late nineteenth century, when it was undergoing significant demographic, social, and economic change. With sharp historical context provided by editors Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Mary Elise Antoine, Coryer’s tales offer an unparalleled window into the ethnic community comprised of the old fur trade families, Native Americans, French Canadian farmers, and their descendants.

[more]
cover of Fresh Blood: THE NEW AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS

Fresh Blood

THE NEW AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS

Sanford J. Ungar

University of Illinois Press, 1998

      Drawing on hundreds of richly textured interviews conducted from one
        end of the country to the other, veteran journalist Sanford J. Ungar documents
        the real-life struggles and triumphs of America's newest immigrants. He
        finds that the self-chosen who arrive every day, most of them legally,
        still enrich our national character and experience and make invaluable
        political, economic, social, cultural, and even gastronomic contributions.
      "First-class journalism, a book scholars will use decades from now
        to find out what it 'felt like' to be an immigrant in the 90s. I do not
        know of a better description and analysis of contemporary immigration."
        -- Roger Daniels, author of Coming to America: A History of Immigration
        and Ethnicity in American Life
      "An excellent overview of contemporary immigration issues set within
        the context of developments in the past fifty years. Ungar makes a strong
        case for the contributions of recent immigrants and for maintaining a
        relatively open door in the face of sometimes shrill opposition."
        -- Thomas Dublin, editor of Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America
      "Exactly the right book at the right time. [Ungar] looks at the
        national controversy over immigration policy with a clear eye, producing
        a history and a convincing argument why this is no time to reverse a liberal
        welcome to newcomers that has always—in good times and bad—made
        this a better and more prosperous democracy." -- Ben H. Bagdikian,
        author of Double Vision
 
[more]
cover of Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes

Fresh Water

Women Writing on the Great Lakes

Alison Swan

Michigan State University Press, 2006

Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes is a collection of nonfiction works by women writers. These works focus on the Midwest: living with the five interconnected freshwater seas that we know as the Great Lakes. Contributing to this collection are renowned poets, essayists, and fiction writers, all of whom write about their own creative streams of consciousness, the fresh waters of the Great Lakes, and the region's many rivers: Loraine Anderson, Judith Arcana, Rachel Azima, Mary Blocksma, Gayle Boss, Sharon Dilworth, Beth Ann Fennelly, Linda Nemec Foster, Gail Griffin, Rasma Haidri, Aleta Karstad, Laura Kasischke, Janet Kauffman, Jacqueline Kolosov, Susan Laidlaw, Lisa Lenzo, Linda Loomis, Anna Mills, Stephanie Mills, Judith Minty, Anne-Marie Oomen, Rachael Perry, Susan Power, Donna Seaman, Heather Sellers, Gail Louise Siegel, Sue William Silverman,Claudia Skutar, Annick Smith, Leslie Stainton, Kathleen Stocking, Judith Strasser, Alison Swan, Elizabeth A.Trembley, Jane Urquhart, Diane Wakoski, and Leigh Allison Wilson.

[more]
cover of Freshwater Wetlands: A Guide to Common Indicator Plants of the Northeast

Freshwater Wetlands

A Guide to Common Indicator Plants of the Northeast

Dennis W. Magee

University of Massachusetts Press, 1981

Although public interest in wetlands has grown considerably in recent years, the associated issues of legislation and environmental policy are often confused by the need to correctly define a wetland area. Much of the difficulty comes from an inability to identify wetland indicator species and to determine whether a given area contains a significant proportion of such plants. The 182 species treated in this work represent the fast majority of genera commonly encountered in freshwater wetlands throughout the Northeast, consequently, this will prove an invaluable book for those concerned with how a correct definition of wetland areas affects decisions about land use, development, and/or conservation.

Following a brief introduction that discusses the functional values of wetlands and describes their various types, the manual is organized into two major components, the first consisting of keys that are based on life form and arrangement of plant parts, the second consisting of a description of each species. Such factors as range, habitat, general characteristics, stem, leaves, inflorescence, fruit, and similar species are covered in the descriptions.
[more]
cover of Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture

Freud Upside Down

African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture

Badia Sahar Ahad

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.
[more]
cover of Friar Bringas Reports to the King: Methods of Indoctrination on the Frontier of New Spain, 1796–97

Friar Bringas Reports to the King

Methods of Indoctrination on the Frontier of New Spain, 1796–97

Translated and Edited by Daniel S. Matson and Bernard L. Fontana

University of Arizona Press, 1977

A significant contribution to a deeper understanding of the Spanish period in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, this translation of Father Diego Miguel Bringas' 1796–97 report on missionary activities presents a rare first-hand account of Spanish attempts to direct cultural change among the Pima Indians.
[more]
cover of Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers: Hispanic Arizona and the Sonora Mission Frontier, 1767–1856

Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers

Hispanic Arizona and the Sonora Mission Frontier, 1767–1856

John L. Kessell

University of Arizona Press, 1976

The Franciscan mission San José de Tumacácori and the perennially undermanned presidio Tubac become John L. Kessell's windows on the Arizona–Sonora frontier in this colorful documentary history. His fascinating view extends from the Jesuit expulsion to the coming of the U.S. Army.

Kessell provides exciting accounts of the explorations of Francisco Garcés, de Anza's expeditions, and the Yuma massacre. Drawing from widely scattered archival materials, he vividly describes the epic struggle between Bishop Reyes and Father President Barbastro, the missionary scandals of 1815–18, and the bloody victory of Mexican civilian volunteers over Apaches in Arivaipa Canyon in 1832. Numerous missionaries, presidials, and bureaucrats—nameless in histories until now—emerge as living, swearing, praying, individuals.

This authoritative chronicle offers an engrossing picture of the continually threatened mission frontier. Reformers championing civil rights for mission Indians time and again challenged the friars' "tight-fisted paternalistic control" over their wards. Expansionists repeatedly saw their plans dashed by Indian raids, uncooperative military officials, or lack of financial support.

Frairs, Soldiers, and Reformers brings into sharp focus the long, blurry period between Jesuit Sonora and Territorial Arizona.
[more]
cover of Friday Night Fighter: Gaspar "Indio" Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing

Friday Night Fighter

Gaspar "Indio" Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing

Troy Rondinone

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Friday Night Fighter relives a lost moment in American postwar history, when boxing ruled as one of the nation's most widely televised sports. During the 1950s and 1960s, viewers tuned in weekly, sometimes even daily, to watch widely recognized fighters engage in primordial battle; the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports Friday Night Fights was the most popular fight show. Troy Rondinone follows the dual narratives of the Friday Night Fights show and the individual story of Gaspar "Indio" Ortega, a boxer who appeared on prime-time network television more than almost any other boxer in history. From humble beginnings growing up poor in Tijuana, Mexico, Ortega personified the phenomenon of postwar boxing at its greatest, appearing before audiences of millions to battle the biggest names of the time, such as Carmen Basilio, Tony DeMarco, Chico Vejar, Benny "Kid" Paret, Emile Griffith, Kid Gavilan, Florentino Fernández, and Luis Manuel Rodriguez.

Rondinone explores the factors contributing to the success of televised boxing, including the rise of television entertainment, the role of a "reality" blood sport, Cold War masculinity, changing attitudes toward race in America, and the influence of organized crime. At times evoking the drama and spectacle of the Friday Night Fights themselves, this volume is a lively examination of a time in history when Americans crowded around their sets to watch the main event.

[more]
cover of Friendly Fallout 1953

Friendly Fallout 1953

Ann Ronald

University of Nevada Press, 2011

Friendly Fallout 1953 is a hybrid work of literature that combines the actual history of aboveground atomic testing in the Nevada desert in 1953 with fictional vignettes that explore the impact of the tests on the people who participated in them and on civilian "downwinders." The book brings to life a turbulent era when Cold War fears, patriotic enthusiasm, scientific progress, and unacknowledged political agendas often collided with the welfare of ordinary citizens and the environment.

[more]
cover of Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston

Friends Disappear

The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston

Mary Barr

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Mary Barr thinks a lot about the old photograph hanging on her refrigerator door.  In it, she and a dozen or so of her friends from the Chicago suburb of Evanston sit on a porch. It's 1974, the summer after they graduated from Nichols Middle School, and what strikes her immediately—aside from the Soul Train–era clothes—is the diversity of the group: boys and girls, black and white, in the variety of poses you'd expect from a bunch of friends on the verge of high school. But the photo also speaks to the history of Evanston, to integration, and to the ways that those in the picture experienced and remembered growing up in a place that many at that time considered to be a racial utopia.

In Friends Disappear Barr goes back to her old neighborhood and pieces together a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its work life. She finds that there is a detrimental myth of integration surrounding Evanston despite bountiful evidence of actual segregation, both in the archives and from the life stories of her subjects. Curiously, the city’s own desegregation plan is partly to blame. The initiative called for the redistribution of students from an all-black elementary school to institutions situated in white neighborhoods.  That, however, required busing, and between the tensions it generated and obvious markers of class difference, the racial divide, far from being closed, was widened.  Friends Disappear highlights how racial divides limited the life chances of blacks while providing opportunities for whites, and offers an insider’s perspective on the social practices that doled out benefits and penalties based on race—despite attempts to integrate.
[more]
cover of Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815-1860

Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon

Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815-1860

Stewart Davenport

University of Chicago Press, 2008

What did Protestants in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about? The Bible told antebellum Christians that they could not serve both God and mammon, but in the midst of the market revolution most of them simultaneously held on to their faith while working furiously to make a place for themselves in a changing economic landscape. In Friends of the Unrighteous Mammom, Stewart Davenport explores this paradoxical partnership of transcendent religious values and earthly, pragmatic objectives, ultimately concluding that religious and ethical commitments, rather than political or social forces, shaped responses to market capitalism in the northern states in the antebellum period.

Drawing on diverse primary sources, Davenport identifies three distinct Christian responses to market capitalism: assurance from clerical economists who believed in the righteousness of economic development; opposition from contrarians who resisted the changes around them; and adaptation by the pastoral moralists who modified their faith to meet the ethical challenges of the changing economy. Delving into the minds of antebellum Christians as they considered themselves, their God, and their developing American economy, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon is an ambitious intellectual history of an important development in American religious and economic life.
[more]
cover of Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor

Fringe Banking

Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor

John P. Caskey

Russell Sage Foundation, 1994

"Cogently argued, fills an important gap in the literature, and is accessible to undergraduates." —Choice "Dismantles the mythology surrounding pawnshops and check-cashing outlets, and demonstrates that they are no longer on the fringe of our financial system but integral to it."—San Francisco Bay Guardian In today's world of electronic cash transfers, automated teller machines, and credit cards, the image of the musty, junk-laden pawnshop seems a relic of the past. But it is not. The 1980s witnessed a tremendous boom in pawnbroking. There are now more pawnshops thanever before in U.S. history, and they are found not only in large cities but in towns and suburbs throughout the nation. As John Caskey demonstrates in Fringe Banking, the increased public patronage of both pawnshops and commercial check-cashing outlets signals the growing number of American households now living on a cash-only basis, with no connection to any mainstream credit facilities or banking services. Fringe Banking is the first comprehensive study of pawnshops and check-cashing outlets, profiling their operations, customers, and recent growth from family-owned shops to such successful outlet chains as Cash American and ACE America's Cash Express. It explains why, despite interest rates and fees substantially higher than those of banks, their use has so dramatically increased. According to Caskey, declining family earnings, changing family structures, a growing immigrant population, and lack of household budgeting skills has greatly reduced the demand for bank deposit services among millions of Americans. In addition, banks responded to 1980s regulatory changes by increasing fees on deposit accounts with small balances and closing branches in many poor urban areas. These factors combined to leave many low- and moderate-income families without access to checking privileges, credit services, and bank loans. Pawnshops and check-cashing outlets provide such families with essential financial services thay cannot obtain elsewhere. Caskey notes that fringe banks, particularly check-cashing outlets, are also utilized by families who could participate in the formal banking system, but are willing to pay more for convenience and quick access to cash. Caskey argues that, contrary to their historical reputation as predators milking the poor and desperate, pawnshops and check-cashing outlets play a key financial role for disadvantaged groups. Citing the inconsistent and often unenforced state laws currently governing the industry, Fringe Banking challenges policy makers to design regulations that will allow fringe banks to remain profitable without exploiting the customers who depend on them.
[more]
cover of Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

Fritz Lang

The Nature of the Beast

Patrick McGilligan

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

The name of Fritz Lang—the visionary director of Metropolis, M, Fury, The Big Heat, and thirty other unforgettable films—is hallowed the world over. But what lurks behind his greatest legends and his genius as a filmmaker? Patrick McGilligan, placed among “the front rank of film biographers” by the Washington Post, spent four years in Europe and America interviewing Lang’s dying contemporaries, researching government and film archives, and investigating the intriguing life story of Fritz Lang. This critically acclaimed biography—lauded as one of the year’s best nonfiction books by Publishers Weekly—reconstructs the compelling, flawed human being behind the monster with the monocle.

[more]
cover of Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet

Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet

Kenneth Morgan

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is the first solid appraisal of the legendary career of the eminent Hungarian-born conductor Fritz Reiner (1888-1963). Personally enigmatic and often described as difficult to work with, he was nevertheless renowned for the dynamic galvanization of the orchestras he led, a nearly unrivaled technical ability, and high professional standards. Reiner's influence in the United States began in the early 1920s and lasted until his death. Reiner was also deeply committed to serious music in American life, especially through the promotion of new scores. In Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet, Kenneth Morgan paints a very real portrait of a man who was both his own worst enemy and one of the true titans of his profession.

[more]
cover of Fritz Reiner: A Biography

Fritz Reiner

A Biography

Philip Hart

Northwestern University Press, 1996

Thirty years after his death, Fritz Reiner's contribution--as a conductor, as a teacher (of Leonard Bernstein, among others), and as a musician--continues to be reassessed. Music scholar and long-time friend Philip Hart has written the definitive biography of this influential figure.
[more]
cover of From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library

From A to Zine

Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library

Julie Bartel

American Library Association, 2004

[more]
cover of From Androboros to the First Amendment: A History of America's First Play

From Androboros to the First Amendment

A History of America's First Play

Peter A. Davis

University of Iowa Press, 2015

The story of America’s earliest extant play begins with a petty crime—a crime that would have passed largely unnoticed had it not been for one fact: it prompted a beleaguered royal governor of one of Britain’s colonies to lash out at his enemies by writing a biting satire. Androboros, A Bographical [sic] Farce in Three Acts (1715), is universally acknowledged as the first play both written and printed in America. Its significance stems not simply from its publication but from its eventual impact. The play inadvertently laid the foundation for one of the defining rights of the nation that would eventually emerge some seventy-five years later—the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, guaranteeing a free press and freedom of expression.

Androboros was not just the first of its kind, it was also ahead of its time in many ways, preceding the harsh political satires and farces of the later eighteenth century by some fifty years. Such plays served a small but essential role in promoting political thought among the colonists. Written by anonymous authors and passed from hand to hand, these short, crude, and often bawdy plays and dialogues were rarely acted due to their inflammatory lampoonery. Nevertheless, they provided an opportunity for disgruntled colonists to vent their grievances and promote their ideas to fellow citizens. The farces of the late eighteenth century drove home the meaning and message of the American Revolution.

Equally significant is that Androboros may have influenced a few of the key political discourses published in the 1730s, and these works in turn may well have shaped the future of the American political landscape for the next several decades and even into the modern era. But as a closet drama intended only to be read by close friends and political supporters, this play has languished as a minor footnote in American intellectual history. Scholarly research published to date has been, for the most part, inadequate and occasionally inaccurate. This study remedies that oversight, providing a full analysis as well as an annotated typescript and facsimiles of the original printing.
[more]
cover of From Anzio to the Alps: An American Soldier's Story

From Anzio to the Alps

An American Soldier's Story

Lloyd M. Wells

University of Missouri Press, 2019

This compelling work is Lloyd M. Wells’s firsthand account of World War II based on a journal he kept during the war, letters he sent home, and personal records, as well as recollections of people and events.
In June 1941, the twenty-one-year-old Wells was drafted into the army. He was commissioned second lieutenant after he attended O.C.S. and was later promoted to first lieutenant with the First Armored Division. He saw action in North Africa, Italy, and Germany and was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge, the Purple Heart, and the Bronze Star.
Wells offers the reader information that has never before been provided. He tells exactly what happened to 2/7 Queens on the night of February 21, 1944, when the troops came up to “the caves” at Anzio. He also depicts what happened during the last offensive in Italy and what armored infantry troops experienced on the perimeter of the attack. This book, however, is not just a story of battle actions. It is a personal story about the “old Army” and how young soldiers were transformed by it during one of the greatest upheavals in world history.
Wells’s goal in writing this book was to leave behind “an account of a simpler time and of the funny, sad, terrorizing, and tender moments of a war which, with the death of each man or woman who lived through it, recedes just a little bit further into the nation’s past.” He accomplished that and so much more.
[more]
cover of From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

From Azaleas to Zydeco

My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Mark W. Nichols

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2013

Inspired by a 1937 map and travelogue of a newspaperman’s tour, author Mark W. Nichols embarked on his own long journey into the unique cities of the South. En route he met beekeepers, cheese makers, crawfish “bawlers,” duck callers, and a licensed alligator hunter, as well as entrepreneurs and governors. His keen observations encompass the southern states from Virginia to Arkansas and points south, and he unpacks the unique qualities of every city he visits. “It’s easy to say that getting to meet so many interesting and wonderful people was the best part of the journey--because it’s true,” Nichols writes. “I know there are friendly people everywhere, but southern friendliness is different.” His story embraces a wealth of southern charm from local characters, folklore, and customs to food, music, and dancing. Besides being just plain fun to read, Nichols’s account of his journey gives readers a true taste of the flavor of the evolving modern South.
[more]
cover of From Ballot to Bench: Judicial Elections and the Quest for Accountability

From Ballot to Bench

Judicial Elections and the Quest for Accountability

By Philip L. Dubois

University of Texas Press, 1980

Over several decades, many U.S. states abandoned the practice of selecting their judges by direct popular election and adopted the Missouri Plan of judicial selection. In From Ballot to Bench, Philip L. Dubois subjects the various criticisms raised against judicial elections to a more searching scrutiny than previously has been attempted.

Dubois carefully reviews the three central counts on which judicial elections have been faulted: for lowering the quality of the bench, for impairing judicial independence, and for failing to secure judicial accountability. After concluding that the potential for judicial elections to hold judges popularly accountable is what might commend them over alternative selection methods, Dubois concentrates on the analysis of empirical evidence to evaluate judicial elections as mechanisms of accountability.

The study examines all the statewide partisan and nonpartisan elections for state supreme court justices in non-southern states from 1948 to 1974. Included is a detailed examination of voter participation, electoral competition, the behavior of judicial electorates, and the patterns of gubernatorial vacancy appointments. An analysis of decision making on eight state supreme courts also tests the relationship between different selection systems and judicial behavior.

Dubois finds that partisan elections maximize voter participation, meaningfully structure voter choices, minimize accession to the bench by appointment, and allow popular control over gubernatorial appointments. Additional evidence on the extent of partisan voting by judges selected under different methods leads Dubois to conclude that partisan elections are superior to both nonpartisan elections and nonelective selection methods as instruments of accountability.

The importance of the questions addressed, the breadth of the data collected, and the unorthodox conclusions offered make this a significant book for political scientists, judges, lawyers, and public officials.

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cover of From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture

From Bananas to Buttocks

The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture

Edited by Myra Mendible

University of Texas Press, 2007

From the exuberant excesses of Carmen Miranda in the "tutti frutti hat" to the curvaceous posterior of Jennifer Lopez, the Latina body has long been a signifier of Latina/o identity in U.S. popular culture. But how does this stereotype of the exotic, erotic Latina "bombshell" relate, if at all, to real Latina women who represent a wide spectrum of ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and physical appearances? How are ideas about "Latinidad" imagined, challenged, and inscribed on Latina bodies? What racial, class, and other markers of identity do representations of the Latina body signal or reject?

In this broadly interdisciplinary book, experts from the fields of Latina/o studies, media studies, communication, comparative literature, women's studies, and sociology come together to offer the first wide-ranging look at the construction and representation of Latina identity in U.S. popular culture. The authors consider such popular figures as actresses Lupe Vélez, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Lopez; singers Shakira and Celia Cruz; and even the Hispanic Barbie doll in her many guises. They investigate the media discourses surrounding controversial Latinas such as Lorena Bobbitt and Marisleysis González. And they discuss Latina representations in Lupe Solano's series of mystery books and in the popular TV shows El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. This extensive treatment of Latina representation in popular culture not only sheds new light on how meaning is produced through images of the Latina body, but also on how these representations of Latinas are received, revised, and challenged.

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cover of From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism

From Black Power to Hip Hop

Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism

Patricia Hill Collins

Temple University Press, 2006

Despite legislation designed to eliminate unfair racial practices, the United States continues to struggle with a race problem. Some thinkers label this a "new" racism and call for new political responses to it. Using the experiences of African American women and men as a touchstone for analysis, Patricia Hill Collins examines new forms of racism as well as political responses to it.In this incisive and stimulating book, renowned social theorist Patricia Hill Collins investigates how nationalism has operated and re-emerged in the wake of contemporary globalization and offers an interpretation of how black nationalism works today in the wake of changing black youth identity. Hers is the first study to analyze the interplay of racism, nationalism, and feminism in the context of twenty-first century black America.From Black Power to Hip Hop covers a wide range of topics including the significance of race and ethnicity to the American national identity; how ideas about motherhood affect population policies; African American use of black nationalism ideologies as anti-racist practice; and the relationship between black nationalism, feminism and women in the hip-hop generation.
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