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An insider’s record of the St. Augustine Civil Rights drama.

This memoir recounts the struggle against segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, in the early and mid-1960s. In the summer of 1964 the nation’s oldest city became the center of the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr., encouraged by President Johnson, a southerner, who made the civil rights bill the center piece of his domestic policy, chose this tourism-driven community as an ideal location to demonstrate the injustice of discrimination and the complicity of southern leaders in its enforcement.

St. Augustine was planning an elaborate celebration of its founding, and expected generous federal and state support. But when the kick-off dinner was announced only whites were invited, and local black leaders protested. The affair alerted the national civil rights leadership to the St. Augustine situation as well as fueling local black resentment.

Ferment in the city grew, convincing King to bring his influence to the leadership of the local struggle. As King and his allies fought for the right to demonstrate, a locally powerful Ku Klux Klan counter-demonstrated. Conflict ensued between civil rights activists, local and from out-of-town, and segregationists, also home-grown and imported. The escalating violence of the Klan led Florida’s Governor to appoint State Attorney Dan Warren as his personal representative in St. Augustine. Warren’s crack down on the Klan and his innovative use of the Grand Jury to appoint a bi-racial committee against the intransigence of the Mayor and other officials, is a fascinating story of moral courage. This is an insider view of a sympathetic middleman in the difficult position of attempting to bring reason and dialog into a volatile situation.

Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation. If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress provides an in-depth historical analysis—from the days of the Great Migration to the present—of the people and movements that made the city a center of political activism. The editor and contributors show how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and put presidents in the White House.  

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress emphasizes the strength of political strategies such as the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” movement and the Double V campaign. It demonstrates how Black activism helped shift Philadelphia from the Republican machine to Democratic leaders in the 1950s and highlights the election of politicians like Robert N. C. Nix, Sr., the first African American representative from Philadelphia. In addition, it focuses on grassroots movements and the intersection of race, gender, class, and politics in the 1960s, and shows how African Americans from the 1970s to the present challenged Mayor Frank Rizzo and helped elect Mayors Wilson Goode, John Street, and Michael Nutter. 

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress cogently makes the case that Black activism has long been a powerful force in Philadelphia politics.

Illinois has produced presidents and leading members of Congress. It also has a long history of political corruption, including, in recent years, the federal indictments of two consecutive governors. The population of the state is exceptionally diverse, with a significant number of new immigrants. Its political allegiance, once firmly Republican, has trended ever more Democratic. Illinois can be divided neatly into three distinct regions: Chicago, the suburban collar surrounding the city, and the ninety-five downstate counties.

Based on the research and experience of respected veterans of Illinois politics, this book shows how the government runs, how politics operates, and what obstacles and opportunities exist for change. It explains how power is exercised and how parties compete for it. For engaged citizens, scholars, and students, Illinois Politics: A Citizen's Guide is a timely and much-needed roadmap for positive change.

Shifting demographics. Downstate versus Chicago. Billionaires and bribery. Even veteran observers need a roadmap to track Illinois’ ever-changing political landscape. Melissa Mouritsen, Kent D. Redfield, and James D. Nowlan provide an up-to-date primer on Prairie State politics, government, and policies. Features include:

• Discussions of recent events like the 2015-2017 budget disaster, the response to COVID-19, and the fall of longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan;
• New chapters on corruption, social policies, and the political rules of the game;
• Perspectives on the nuts-and-bolts of campaign funding, the ways political actors acquire power or influence, and many other topics;
• Close examinations of complex issues like the state’s increased polarization and its ongoing fiscal recovery.

Fully revised and expanded, <i>Illinois Politics</i> blends detailed information with expert analysis to offer an essential resource for citizens, students, and public servants alike.

The Balkans offer classic examples of how empires imagine they can transform themselves into national states (Ottomanism) and how nation-states project themselves into future empires (as with the Greek “Great Idea” and the Serbian “Načertaniye”). By examining the interaction between these two aspirations this volume sheds light on the ideological prerequisites for the emergence of Balkan nationalisms.

With a balance between historical and literary contributions, the focus is on the ideological hybridity of the new national identities and on the effects of “imperial nationalisms” on the emerging Balkan nationalisms. The authors of the twelve essays reveal the relation between empire and nation-state, proceeding from the observation that many of the new nation-states acquired some imperial features and behaved as empires. This original and stimulating approach reveals the imperialistic nature of so-called ethnic or cultural nationalism.

At the heart of Herbert J. Gans's utopian narrative is the vision of progress with fairness on which the best of American idealism has been built. Part utopia, part realism, Imagining America in 2033 is also a liberal's dream of life after Bush and a set of progressive yet practical guidelines for restoring sanity and intelligence to nearly every aspect of public and political life post-Bush.

Herbert J. Gans, one of the most influential and prolific sociologists and social commentators of our time, achieves a realistic utopia set mostly in the second and third decades of the century. In Gans's imagined future, elected officials, policymakers, activists, and citizens have transformed America into a much more humane and effective democracy. The book features three Democratic presidents; the major new domestic, foreign, and social policies their administrations pursue; and the political battles they fight.

Gans provides chapters on an exhaustive list of social, political, and economic policy issues: jobs; war; tax reform; global warming; economic, racial, gender, and religious equality; family policies; the creation of affordable housing and energy saving communities; education reform; and more. While hopeful and idealistic, many of Gans's proposals---such as the concept of the nurse-doctor, in which nurses increasingly take on tasks previously handled only by medical doctors within a framework of national health care---are ideas innovative enough that they should be taken seriously by actual policymakers.

Imagining America in 2033 is lively and accessible, with an appeal for general readers, policy hounds, and the politically savvy alike.

Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic.

Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

Nearly half the 2.3 million residents of Queens, New York are foreign-born. Immigrants in Queens hail from more than 120 countries and speak more than 135 languages. As an epicenter of immigrant diversity, Queens is an urban gateway that exemplifies opportunities and challenges in shaping a multi-racial democracy. 

The editors and contributors to Immigrant Crossroads examine the social, spatial, economic, and political dynamics that stem from this fast-growing urbanization. The interdisciplinary chapters examine residential patterns and neighborhood identities, immigrant incorporation and mobilizations, and community building and activism.

Essays combine qualitative and quantitative research methods to address globalization and the unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity as a result of international migration. Chapters on incorporation focus on immigrant participation and representation in electoral politics, and advocacy for immigrant inclusion in urban governance and service provision. A section of Immigrant Crossroads concerns placemaking, focusing on the production of neighborhood spaces and identities as well as immigrant activism and community development and control.

Based on engaged and robust analysis, Immigrant Crossroads highlights the dynamics of this urban gateway.

Investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics

In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.

For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.