2916 books match the query 'Politics and government' and 160 start with r

cover of Red Against Blue: The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863 - 1899

Red Against Blue

The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863 - 1899

Helen Delpar

University of Alabama Press, 1981

A landmark study of Liberalism, political conflict, and nation-building in Colombia.

Red Against Blue: The Liberal Party in Colombian Politics, 1863–1899 is a seminal study of the political forces that shaped modern Colombia during the nineteenth century. In this carefully researched work, historian Helen Delpar traces the rise, dominance, decline, and transformation of the Colombian Liberal Party, offering readers a deeper understanding of one of Latin America's most influential political movements. Through extensive use of political writings, personal papers, electoral records, and contemporary sources, Delpar reconstructs the complex world of Colombian politics during an era marked by ideological conflict, regional division, constitutional experimentation, and recurring civil unrest.

The book examines the period from the adoption of the federal Constitution of 1863 through the end of the nineteenth century, when Liberal leaders sought to shape Colombia's political future while confronting growing opposition from Conservative rivals. Delpar explores the origins of Colombian Liberalism, the development of party ideology, the regional bases of political support, and the personalities who guided the party through both triumph and defeat. Her analysis reveals a political movement that was far more diverse and dynamic than conventional interpretations have suggested.

As Liberal influence declined in the 1880s and Conservatives consolidated power under the Regeneration movement, political tensions intensified. Delpar shows how these struggles helped lay the groundwork for the devastating War of the Thousand Days at the century's close, one of the most significant conflicts in Colombian history.

Combining narrative history with insightful political analysis, Red Against Blue remains an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Latin American history, political development, democracy, and nation-building. It offers a compelling portrait of a society grappling with questions of power, ideology, regional identity, and the meaning of political participation in a rapidly changing world.

[more]
cover of Red Chamber, World Dream: Actors, Audience, and Agendas in Chinese Foreign Policy and Beyond

Red Chamber, World Dream

Actors, Audience, and Agendas in Chinese Foreign Policy and Beyond

Jing Sun

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Chinese president Xi Jinping is most famously associated with his “Chinese Dream” campaign, envisioning a great rejuvenation of the nation. Many observers, though, view China’s pursuit of this dream as alarming. They see a global power ready to abandon its low-profile diplomacy and eager to throw its weight around.
 
Red Chamber, World Dream represents an interdisciplinary effort of deciphering the Chinese Dream and its global impact. Jing Sun employs methods from political science and journalism and concepts from literature, sociology, psychology and drama studies, to offer a multilevel analysis of various actors’ roles in Chinese foreign policy making: the leaders, the bureaucrats, and its increasingly diversified public. This book rejects a simple dichotomy of an omnipotent, authoritarian state versus a suppressed society. Instead, it examines how Chinese foreign policy is constantly being forged and contested by interactions among its leaders, bureaucrats, and people. The competition for shaping China’s foreign policy also happens on multiple arenas: intraparty fighting, inter-ministerial feuding, social media, TV dramas and movies, among others. This book presents vast amounts of historical detail, many unearthed the first time in the English language. Meanwhile, it also examines China’s diplomatic responses to ongoing issues like the Covid-19 crisis. The result is a study multidisciplinary in nature, rich in historical nuance, and timely in contemporary significance.

[more]
cover of Red Star Over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict During and After the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946

Red Star Over Malaya

Resistance and Social Conflict During and After the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946

Cheah Boon Kheng

National University of Singapore Press, 2012

Red Star Over Malaya is an account of the inter-racial relations between Malays and Chinese during the final stages of the Japanese occupation. In 1947, none of the three major race of Malaya - Malays, Chinese, and Indians - regarded themselves as pan-ethnic "Malayans" with common duties and problems. With the occupation forcibly cut them off from China, Chinese residents began to look inwards towards Malaya and stake political claims, leading inevitably to a political contest with the Malays. As the country advanced towards nationhood and self-government, there was tension between traditional loyalties to the Malay rulers and the states, or to ancestral homelands elsewhere, and the need to cultivate an enduring loyalty to Malaya on the part of those who would make their home there in future. 
 
 As Japanese forces withdrew from the countryside, the Chinese guerrillas of the communist-led resistance movement, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), emerged from the jungle and took control of some 70 per cent of the country's smaller towns and villages, seriously alarming the Malay population. When the British Military Administration sought to regain control of these liberated areas, the ensuing conflict set the tone for future political conflicts and marked a crucial stage in the history of Malaya. Based on extensive archival research, Red Star Over Malaya provides a riveting account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed Japan's surrender. This book is fundamental to an understanding of social and political developments in Malaysia during the second half of the 20th century.
[more]
cover of Red Star Over the Third World

Red Star Over the Third World

Vijay Prashad

Pluto Press, 2019

“An original and much needed analysis of an important but neglected aspect of the legacy of the Russian Revolution…. Essential reading.”—Mary Davis, Marx Memorial Library
 
From Cuba to Vietnam, China to South Africa, the October Revolution of 1917 inspired millions of people beyond the territory of Russia. It proved that the masses could not only overthrow autocratic governments, but that they could also form an opposing government in their own image.
 
The new idea that the working class and the peasantry could be allied, combined with the clear strength and necessity of a vanguard party, guided multiple revolutions across the globe.  Here is much-needed antidote to all the glum histories written on the demise of the Soviet Union. Vijay Prashad throws a spotlight on the way the Russian Revolution was seen and received in the countries colonized by European empires. With Russia as an inspiration and providing support, suddenly workers and peasants, those left out of capitalist prosperity, organized and attempted to create for themselves real socialist revolution. Prashad’s chapters include:
 
*Eastern Graves
*Red October
*Follow the Path of the Russians
*The Lungs of Russia
*Soviet Asia
*Enemy of Imperialism
*Eastern Marxism
*Colonial Fascism
*Polycentric Communism
*Memories of Communism
 
The author writes in this Preface, “It has been a quarter-century since the demise of the USSR. And yet, the marks of the October Revolution remain—not just in the territories of the USSR but more so in what used to be known as the Third World. From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution remains as an inspiration. After all, that Revolution proved that the working class and the peasantry could not only overthrow an autocratic government but it could form its own government.”
 
This book explains the power of the October Revolution in the Global South. From Ho Chí Minh to Fidel Castro, reflections on polycentric communism, and collective memories of communism, it shows how, for a brief moment, another world was possible.   
[more]
cover of Red State: An Insider's Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics

Red State

An Insider's Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics

By Wayne Thorburn

University of Texas Press, 2014

In November 1960, the Democratic party dominated Texas. The newly elected vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was a Texan. Democrats held all thirty statewide elective positions. The state legislature had 181 Democrats and no Republicans or anyone else. Then fast forward fifty years to November 2010. Texas has not voted for a Democratic president since 1976. Every statewide elective office is held by Republicans. Representing Texas in Washington is a congressional delegation of twenty-five Republicans and nine Democrats. Republicans control the Texas Senate by a margin of nineteen to twelve and the Texas House of Representatives by 101 to 49.

Red State explores why this transformation of Texas politics took place and what these changes imply for the future. As both a political scientist and a Republican party insider, Wayne Thorburn is especially qualified to explain how a solidly one-party Democratic state has become a Republican stronghold. He analyzes a wealth of data to show how changes in the state’s demographics—including an influx of new residents, the shift from rural to urban, and the growth of the Mexican American population—have moved Texas through three stages of party competition, from two-tiered politics, to two-party competition between Democrats and Republicans, and then to the return to one-party dominance, this time by Republicans. His findings reveal that the shift from Democratic to Republican governance has been driven not by any change in Texans’ ideological perspective or public policy orientation—even when Texans were voting Democrat, conservatives outnumbered liberals or moderates—but by the Republican party’s increasing identification with conservatism since 1960.

[more]
cover of Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare

Red War on the Family

Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare

Erica J Ryan

Temple University Press, 2016

In the 1920s, cultural and political reactions to the Red Scare in America contributed to a marked shift in the way Americans thought about sexuality, womanhood, manhood, and family life. The Russian Revolution prompted anxious Americans sensing a threat to social order to position heterosexuality, monogamy, and the family as a bulwark against radicalism.
 
In her probing and engaging book, Red War on the Family, Erica Ryan traces the roots of sexual modernism and the history of antiradicalism and antifeminism. She illuminates how Americans responded to foreign and domestic threats and expressed nationalism by strengthening traditional gender and family roles-especially by imposing them on immigrant groups, workers, women, and young people.
 
Ryan argues that the environment of political conformity in the 1920s was maintained in part through the quest for cultural and social conformity, exemplified by white, middle-class family life. Red War on the Family charts the ways Americanism both reinforced and was reinforced by these sexual and gender norms in the decades after World War I. 
[more]
cover of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy

Reel Power

Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy

Matthew Alford

Pluto Press, 2010

Hollywood is often characterised as a stronghold of left-liberal ideals. In Reel Power, Matthew Alford shows that it is in fact deeply complicit in serving the interests of the most regressive US corporate and political forces.

Films like Transformers, Terminator: Salvation and Black Hawk Down are constructed with Defence Department assistance as explicit cheerleaders for the US military, but Matthew Alford also emphasises how so-called 'radical' films like Three Kings, Hotel Rwanda and Avatar present watered-down alternative visions of American politics that serve a similar function.

Reel Power is the first book to examine the internal workings of contemporary Hollywood as a politicised industry as well as scores of films across all genres. No matter what the progressive impulses of some celebrities and artists, Alford shows how they are part of a system that is hard-wired to encourage American global supremacy and frequently the use of state violence.

[more]
cover of Reflections: Conversations, Essays, and Other Writings

Reflections

Conversations, Essays, and Other Writings

Thomas Hauser

University of Arkansas Press, 2014

Thomas Hauser is well known to readers as Muhammad Ali's biographer and for his recording of the contemporary boxing scene. But Hauser began his writing career in the political arena as the author of Missing, a novel later made into an AcademyAward-winning film starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. He has written books on subjects as diverse as public education, moral values, and Chernobyl, and his articles have appeared in publications ranging from the New Yorker to Penthouse. Reflections brings together all of Hauser's articles on subjects other than sports. The book begins with a never-published essay on the Beatles. It then takes readers on a remarkable journey that moves from an exploration of racism, religion, and other hot-button political issues to personal memories and reflections on the origins of Santa Claus and the Tiffany box. Combining personal memories with issue-oriented commentary, Reflections creates a portrait of some of the most remarkable people and most compelling issues of our time.
[more]
cover of Reform and Revolt in the City of Dreaming Spires: Radical, Socialist and Communist Politics in the City of Oxford 1830–1980

Reform and Revolt in the City of Dreaming Spires

Radical, Socialist and Communist Politics in the City of Oxford 1830–1980

Duncan Bowie

University of Westminster Press, 2018

Books about Oxford have generally focused on the University rather than the city. This original book on the local politics of Oxford City from 1830 to 1980 is based on a comprehensive analysis of primary sources and tells the story of the city’s progressive politics. The book traces this history from Chartism and electoral reform in the mid-nineteenth century, through the early years of socialism to the impact of communism in the interwar period, the struggle between nuclear disarmers and Gaitskellites in the 1960s and the impact of the new revolutionary left in the late 1970s. Throughout the narrative, the book contrasts the two approaches of those engaged in progressive politics, those who focused on the politics of reform and improved government and those who preferred the politics of revolt, protest and revolutionary rhetoric. The author argues that a central feature of this history has been the co-existence and interaction of working- and middle- class elements. It rediscovers a rich heritage, a fascinating story and offers a rare wide-ranging chronological narrative of local UK city politics. Through its extensive quotes from primary sources, the book presents a vivid picture of local politics over 150 years.
[more]
cover of Reforming Legislatures: American Voters and State Ballot Measures, 1792-2020

Reforming Legislatures

American Voters and State Ballot Measures, 1792-2020

Peverill Squire

University of Missouri Press, 2024

Winner of the 2025 Virginia Gray Book Award, APSA Section 22: State Politics and Policy

Legislatures are ubiquitous in the American political experience. First created in Virginia in 1619, they have existed continuously ever since. Indeed, they were established in even the most unlikely of places, notably in sparsely populated frontier settlements, and functioned as the focal point of every governing system devised.
 
Despite the ubiquity of state legislatures, we know remarkably little about how Americans have viewed them as organizations, in terms of their structures, rules, and procedures. But with the rise of modern public opinion surveys in the twentieth century, we now have extensive data on how Americans have gauged legislative performance throughout the many years. That said, the responses to the questions pollsters typically pose reflect partisanship, policy, and personality. Generally, respondents respond favorably to legislatures controlled by their own political party and those in power during good economic times. Incumbent lawmakers get ratings boosts from having personalities, “home styles” that mesh with those of their constituents. These relationships are important indicators of people’s thoughts regarding the current performance of their legislatures and legislators, but they tell us nothing about attitudes toward the institution and its organizational characteristics.
 
This study offers a unique perspective on what American voters have historically thought about legislatures as organizations and legislators as representatives. Rather than focusing on responses to surveys that ask respondents how they rate the current performance of lawmakers and legislatures, this study leverages the most significant difference between national and state politics: the existence of ballot propositions in the latter. At the national level Americans have never had any say over Congress’s structure, rules, or procedures. In contrast, at the state level they have had ample opportunities over the course of more than two centuries to shape their state legislatures. The data examined here look at how people have voted on more than 1,500 state ballot propositions targeting a wide array of legislative organizational and parliamentary features. By linking the votes on these measures with the public debates preceding them, this study documents not only how American viewed various aspects of their legislatures, but also whether their opinions held constant or shifted over time. The findings reported paint a more nuanced picture of Americans’ attitudes toward legislatures than the prevailing one derived from survey research. When presented with legislative reform measures on which concrete choices were offered and decisions on them had to be made, the analyses presented here reveal that, counter to the conventional wisdom that people loved their representatives but hated the legislature, voters usually took charitable positions toward the institution while harboring skeptical attitudes about lawmakers’ motives and behaviors.
 
[more]
cover of Reforming Philadelphia, 1682–2022

Reforming Philadelphia, 1682–2022

Richardson Dilworth

Temple University Press, 2023

Reforming Philadelphia examines the cyclical efforts of insurgents to change the city’s government over nearly 350 years. Political scientist Richardson Dilworth tracks reformers as they create a new purpose for the city or reshape the government to reflect emerging ideas. Some wish to thwart the “corrupt machine,” while others seek to gain control of the government via elections. These actors formed coalitions and organizations that disrupted the status quo in the hope of transforming the city (and perhaps also enriching themselves).

Dilworth addresses Philadelphia’s early development through the present day, including momentous changes from its new city charter in 1885 and the Republican machine that emerged around the same time to its transformation to a Democratic stronghold in the 1950s, when the city also experienced a racial transition. Focusing primarily on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Dilworth evaluates the terms of Mayors Frank Rizzo, Wilson Goode, and Ed Rendell, as well as John Street, Michael Nutter, and Jim Kenney to illustrate how power and resistance function, and how Philadelphia’s political history and reform cycles offer a conceptual model that can easily be applied to other cities.

Reforming Philadelphia provides a new framework for understanding the evolving relationship between national politics and local, city politics.

[more]
cover of Refuge in the Lord

Refuge in the Lord

Lawrence J. McAndrews

Catholic University of America Press, 2015

Rather than helping to overcome the growing political divide over immigration in the country and the church, Catholics on the outer edges of the issue contributed to it. By eschewing compromise in favor of confrontation, Catholic legislators from both parties too often helped prevent Congress from giving the presidents, and the public, most of what they wanted on immigration reform. By forsaking political reality in the name of religious purity, Catholic immigration advocates frequently antagonized the presidents whose goals they largely shared, and ultimately disappointed the immigrants they so badly wanted to help.
[more]
cover of Regimes of Contention: Resistance and the Governmentality of Resources in Indigenous Philippines

Regimes of Contention

Resistance and the Governmentality of Resources in Indigenous Philippines

Macario Lacbawan

Campus Verlag, 2021

An anthropological reflection on the shifting governmentality of Indigenous resources in the Philippines.

The notion of indigeneity in the Philippines is politically fraught. Most who live on the archipelago are descendants of aboriginal peoples, whether they claim tribal affiliation or not, and those who do enact traditional identities share little else in common. As a result, the term “indigenous” remains unstable and malleable seventy-five years after independence. Connecting insights from Tillian and Foucauldian social theory, Regimes illuminates how the ever-changing Philippine state, from the 1970s through today, constructs artificial subjectivities that Indigenous peoples must embody to access ancestral resources held by the federal government. What emerges is a lucid illustration of how governmentality is entangled with indigeneity in the Philippines.
[more]
cover of Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area

Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area

Paul G. Lewis and Nicholas J. Marantz

Temple University Press, 2023

The San Francisco Bay Area is generally considered the most expensive regional housing market in the country. Because the region added jobs and residents at a faster rate than housing, rents and home prices escalated. Moreover, small municipalities, common in the most job-rich parts of the Bay Area, have strong political incentives to resist development of new multifamily housing. Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area explains how a decentralized, localistic structure of government shapes land-use politics in ways that exacerbate housing shortages and inequalities. 
 
The authors evaluate six potential reforms, arguing that targeted changes to local and regional institutions could generate durable improvements to the region’s housing opportunities. The main lesson from the case of the San Francisco Bay Area is the need to focus on governance when addressing the housing challenge. As the authors effectively illustrate, leaving a solution up to individual cities is unlikely to lead to increased housing supply.  
 
[more]
cover of Regulation in the White House: The Johnson Presidency

Regulation in the White House

The Johnson Presidency

By David M. Welborn

University of Texas Press, 1993

Regulation in the White House is an examination of regulatory policy and its development in the Johnson administration and the first comprehensive study of any presidency and regulation. Based upon a thorough analysis of presidential papers in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the book investigates the working relationships linking the presidency, regulatory commissions, and executive agencies with regulatory responsibilities in both the economic and social spheres.

David Welborn finds that the president's business included regulation as a major component. Johnson's concerns in regulation were varied and complex. He and his aides worked assiduously and successfully to establish effective, cooperative relationships with regulators and to avoid the exercise of undue influence on particular regulatory determinations. In Welborn's view, Johnson traversed the treacherous ground of regulatory politics with adeptness and achieved his major purposes in regulation.

[more]
cover of Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu

Reigning the River

Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu

Anne M. Rademacher

Duke University Press, 2011

A major contribution to the nascent anthropology of urban environments, Reigning the River illuminates the complexities of river restoration in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital and one of the fastest-growing cities in South Asia. In this rich ethnography, Anne M. Rademacher explores the ways that urban riverscape improvement involved multiple actors, each constructing ideals of restoration through contested histories and ideologies of belonging. She examines competing understandings of river restoration, particularly among bureaucrats in state and conservation-development agencies, cultural heritage activists, and advocates for the security of tens of thousands of rural-to-urban migrants settled along the exposed riverbed.

Rademacher conducted research during a volatile period in Nepal’s political history. As clashes between Maoist revolutionaries and the government intensified, the riverscape became a site of competing claims to a capital city that increasingly functioned as a last refuge from war-related violence. In this time of intense flux, efforts to ensure, create, or imagine ecological stability intersected with aspirations for political stability. Throughout her analysis, Rademacher emphasizes ecology as an important site of dislocation, entitlement, and cultural meaning.

[more]
cover of Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context

Reimagining National Belonging

Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context

Robin Maria DeLugan

University of Arizona Press, 2012

Reimagining National Belonging is the first sustained critical examination of post–civil war El Salvador. It describes how one nation, after an extended and divisive conflict, took up the challenge of generating social unity and shared meanings around ideas of the nation. In tracing state-led efforts to promote the concepts of national culture, history, and identity, Robin DeLugan highlights the sites and practices—as well as the complexities—of nation-building in the twenty-first century.

Examining events that unfolded between 1992 and 2011, DeLugan both illustrates the idiosyncrasies of state and society in El Salvador and opens a larger portal into conditions of constructing a state in the present day around the globe—particularly the process of democratization in an age of neoliberalism. She demonstrates how academics, culture experts, popular media, and the United Nations and other international agencies have all helped shape ideas about national belonging in El Salvador. She also reveals the efforts that have been made to include populations that might have been overlooked, including indigenous people and faraway citizens not living inside the country’s borders. And she describes how history and memory projects have begun to recall the nation’s violent past with the goal of creating a more just and equitable nation.

This illuminating case study fills a gap in the scholarship about culture and society in contemporary El Salvador, while offering an “ethnography of the state” that situates El Salvador in a global context.
[more]
cover of Reimagining the Nation-State: The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building

Reimagining the Nation-State

The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building

Jim MacLaughlin

Pluto Press, 2001

This book assesses competing modes of nation-building and nationalism through a critical reappraisal of the works of key theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. Exploring the processes of nation building from a variety of ethnic and social class contexts, it focuses on the contested terrains within which nationalist ideologies are often rooted.

Mac Laughlin offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of nation building, taking as a case study the historical connections between Ireland and Great Britain in the clash between 'big nation' historic British nationalism on the one hand, and minority Irish nationalism on the other. Locating the origins of the historic nation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mac Laughlin emphasises the difficulties, and specifities, of minority nationalisms in the nineteenth century. In so doing he calls for a place-centred approach which recognises the symbolic and socio-economic significance of territory to the different scales of nation-building. Exploring the evolution of Irish Nationalism, Reimaging the Nation State also shows how minority nations can challenge the hegemony of dominant states and threaten the territorial integrity of historic nations.
[more]
cover of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

Reinventing Chinese Tradition

The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

Ka-ming Wu

University of Illinois Press, 2015

The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions.

Ka-ming Wu's ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices--paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults--within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change.

Alive with details, Reinventing Chinese Tradition is an in-depth, eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China.

[more]
cover of Reinventing Citizenship: Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation

Reinventing Citizenship

Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation

Kazuyo Tsuchiya

University of Minnesota Press, 2014


In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. Reinventing Citizenship offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities.

Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya’s work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles.

Reinventing Citizenship reveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.

[more]
cover of Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran

Reinventing Khomeini

The Struggle for Reform in Iran

Daniel Brumberg

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Reinventing Khomeini offers a new interpretation of the political battles that paved the way for reform in Iran. Brumberg argues that these conflicts did not result from a sudden ideological shift; nor did the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 really defy the core principles of the Islamic Revolution. To the contrary, the struggle for a more democratic Iran can be traced to the revolution itself, and to the contradictory agendas of the revolution's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A complex figure, Khomeini was a fervent champion of Islam, but while he sought a Shi'ite vision of clerical rule under one Supreme Leader, he also strove to mesh that vision with an implicitly Western view of mass participatory politics. The intense magnetism and charisma of the ayatollah obscured this paradox. But reformers in Iran today, while rejecting his autocratic vision, are reviving the constitutional notions of government that he considered, and even casting themselves as the bearers of his legacy. In Reinventing Khomeini, Brumberg proves that the ayatollah is as much the author of modern Iran as he is the symbol of its fundamentalist past.
[more]
cover of Reinventing Texas Government

Reinventing Texas Government

By Michael Lauderdale

University of Texas Press, 1999

The Survey of Organizational Excellence is revolutionizing the operation of Texas state agencies and other governmental and private organizations. Developed and refined over the last twenty years by a team of researchers led by Michael Lauderdale, the survey is a proven tool for improving the effectiveness of state government services through surveys of employee attitudes toward their organizations.

In this book, Lauderdale gives a history of the survey and its use under four governors, including George W. Bush. He explains what the survey is, how to use it, and how to apply its results to organizational change and improvement. Step-by-step instructions for planning, implementing, and evaluating the survey are enhanced with real-life case studies from the 140,000 surveys that have been distributed and used by more than 75 different organizations. Lauderdale also sets the survey in a broader perspective by identifying some of the forces currently impelling change in organizations throughout our society and exploring where this push for change is taking us.

[more]
cover of Reinventing the Austin City Council

Reinventing the Austin City Council

Ann O'M. Bowman

Temple University Press, 2020

Until recently, Austin, the progressive, politically liberal capital of Texas, elected its city council using a not-so-progressive system. Candidates competed citywide for seats, and voters could cast ballots for as many candidates as there were seats up for election. However, this approach disadvantages the representation of geographically-concentrated minority groups, thereby—among other things—preventing the benefits of growth from reaching all of the city’s communities. 

Reinventing the Austin City Council explores the puzzle that was Austin’s reluctance to alter its at-large system and establish a geographically-based, single-member district system. Ann Bowman chronicles the repeated attempts to change the system, the eventual decision to do so, and the consequences of that change. In the process, she explores the many twists and turns that occurred in Austin as it struggled to design a fair system of representation. Reinventing the Austin City Council assesses the impact of the new district system since its inception in 2014. 

Austin’s experience ultimately offers a political lesson for creating institutional change.
[more]
cover of Reinventing the Lacandón: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas

Reinventing the Lacandón

Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas

Brian Gollnick

University of Arizona Press, 2008

Before massive deforestation began in the 1960s, the Lacandón jungle, which lies on the border of Mexico and Guatemala, was part of the largest tropical rain forest north of the Amazon. The destruction of the Lacandón occurred with little attention from the international press—until January 1, 1994, when a group of armed Maya rebels led by a charismatic spokesperson who called himself Subcomandante Marcos emerged from jungle communities and briefly occupied several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas. These rebels, known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, became front-page news around the globe, and they used their notoriety to issue rhetorically powerful communiqués that denounced political corruption, the Mexican government’s treatment of indigenous peoples, and the negative impact of globalization. As Brian Gollnick reveals, the Zapatista communiqués had deeper roots in the Mayan rain forest than Westerners realized—and he points out that the very idea of the jungle is also deeply rooted, though in different ways, in the Western imagination. Gollnick draws on theoretical innovations offered by subaltern studies to discover “oral traces” left by indigenous inhabitants in dominant cultural productions. He explores both how the jungle region and its inhabitants have been represented in literary writings from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present and how the indigenous people have represented themselves in such works, including post-colonial and anti-colonial narratives, poetry, video, and photography. His goal is to show how popular and elite cultures have interacted in creating depictions of life in the rain forest and to offer new critical vocabularies for analyzing forms of cross-cultural expression.
[more]
cover of Reinventing the State: Economic Strategy and Institutional Change in Peru

Reinventing the State

Economic Strategy and Institutional Change in Peru

Carol Wise

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The political economic history of Latin America in the post-World War II era has largely been one of underachievement and opportunities lost. This all changed with the wave of market reforms that were implemented in the 1990s. However, the precise role of these reforms as an agent of change is still hotly debated. This in-depth analysis of the Peruvian case argues for an explanation that treats institutional innovation and state reconstruction as necessary conditions for the apparent success of the market in Latin America.
Exploring how state intervention has been both the cause of Latin America's economic downfall in the 1980s and the solution to its recovery, Reinventing the State analyzes three main phases of state intervention: the developmentalism that lasted until 1982, the state in retreat of the 1980s, and the streamlined state of the 1990s. Through a comprehensive examination of the Peruvian experience, the book explains the country's impressive turnaround from the standpoint of institutional modernization and internal state reform.
Written for a broad academic audience, the public-policy community, and the private sector, this book is also meant as a quick primer for any journalist, consultant, or private-sector analyst in need of an overview of the region's market-reform effort and how it has played out in Peru.
Carol Wise is Associate Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California.
[more]
cover of Rekindling the Sacred Fire: Métis Ancestry and Anishinaabe Spirituality

Rekindling the Sacred Fire

Métis Ancestry and Anishinaabe Spirituality

Chantal Fiola

University of Manitoba Press, 2015

The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois or Six Nations, have been one of the most widely written about Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada. But seldom have the voices emerging from this community been drawn on in order to understand its enduring intellectual traditions. Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters offers the first comprehensive portrait of how the Haudenosaunee of the Grand River region have expressed their long struggle for sovereignty in Canada. Through careful readings of more than two centuries of letters, speeches, ethnography, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film, Monture argues Haudenosaunee core beliefs have remained remarkably consistent and continue to inspire ways to address current social and political realities.
[more]
cover of Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics

Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics

Pedro Ramet, ed.

Duke University Press, 1988

Religious organizations in many countries of the communist world have served as agents for the preservation, defense, and reinforcement of nationalist feelings, and in playing this role have frequently been a source of frustration to the Communist Party elites. Although the relationship between governments and religious groups varies according to the particular country and group in question, the mosaic of these relationships constitutes a revealing picture of the political reform shaping the lives of Soviet and East European citizens.
[more]
cover of Religion and Politics in East Africa: The Period since Independence

Religion and Politics in East Africa

The Period since Independence

Hölger Bernt Hansen

Ohio University Press, 1994

Religious activities have been of continuing importance in the rise of protest against postcolonial governments in Eastern Africa. Governments have attempted to “manage“ religious affairs in both Muslim and Christian areas. Religious denominations have acted as advocates of human rights and in opposition to one-party-state regimes. Islamic fundamentalism changed with the ending of the Cold War.

The book is divided into four parts: The Challenge of Islam; Christianity, Sectarianism, and Politics in Uganda; Christians and Muslim in Kenyan Politics; and Cross-cultural Complications. An introductory essay by Michael Twaddle provides and overview of the changing character of politico-religious conflict in Eastern Africa. Holger Bernt Hansen summarizes the presentation with a discussion of dilemmas and challenges in the study of religion and politics.

[more]
cover of Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States

Religion and Radical Politics

An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States

Robert Craig

Temple University Press, 1995

"This meticulously researched study....discusses a varied array of movements, organizations, and activists, many largely unstudied, who sought to aid the poor and oppressed through Christian social action....[This] thoughtful, lucid book will engage not only historians but also theologians, ethicists, political scientists, sociologists, indeed anyone interested in the convergence of religion and politics in the United States." --Journal of American History Robert Craig explores the history of American left-wing Christians who discovered the convergence between radical politics and Christian faith. He examines the life histories of individuals, movements, and organizations that encompass more than a century of American history and discusses the role of religious activism in movements of social transformation. Craig describes the activists who participated in this (largely ignored) alternative tradition of social action on behalf of the poor. Among those included are Jesse H. Jones, Edward H. Rogers, the Christian Labor Union, and the Knights of labor, which represented workers; Frances Willard and Mother Jones, who worked to improve the status of women and working-class people; Reverdy Ransom, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, and George Washington Woodbey, who wrestled with the relationship between race and class; Southern radicals, such as Howard Kester, Claude Williams, and the southern Tenant Farmers' Union, which struggled for radical equality; and those involved in the politics of nonviolence, such as Dorothy Day and A.J.. Muste. "Religion and Radical Politics is a helpful analysis of several chapters in American a religious history....built around a series of biographical sketches that explore the lives of people such as Terence Powederly, Frances Willard, Mother Jones, George Washington Woodbey, Claude Williams, Howard Kester, Harry F. Ward, A.J. Juste, and Dorothy Day. ...[It] is a remarkably strong book." --Journal of Church and State "A major contribution to American history and to Christian ethics. It will be controversial in the best way, raising questions which are the right questions, at least right for those who care for a democracy of human rights, universal participation, and social justice." --David J. O'Brien, College of the Holy Cross
[more]
cover of Religion and the Politics of Time

Religion and the Politics of Time

Noah Shusterman

Catholic University of America Press, 2010

Religion and the Politics of Time is an extensive study of the changes in religious holidays in Old Regime and Revolutionary France.
[more]
cover of Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State: Mis Af#66

Religious Pluralism and the Nigerian State

Mis Af#66

Simeon O. Ilesanmi

Ohio University Press, 1996

In the case of Nigeria, scholarship on religious politics has not adequately taken into account the pluralistic context and the idealistic pretensions of the state that inhibit the possibility of forging an enduring civic amity among Nigeria’s diverse groups. Ilesanmi proposes a new philosophy or model of religio-political interaction, which he calls dialogic politics. Dialogic politics celebrates pluralism and suggests that religious institutions he construed as mediating structures functioning as buffers between individual citizens in search of existential meaning and cultural identity and the impersonal state, which tends to gravitate toward instrumental objectives. Ilesanmi’s study offers a fresh perspective on the complex relations between political attitudes and religious convictions.
[more]
cover of Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal

Reluctant Landscapes

Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal

Francois G. Richard

University of Chicago Press, 2018

West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not only colors the range of political discourse about Africa but also occludes many lesser-known—but equally important—experiences of those living in the region.
 
Reluctant Landscapes is an exploration of the making and remaking of political experience and physical landscapes among rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal between the late 1500s and the onset of World War II. By recovering the histories of farmers and commoners who made up African states’ demographic core in this period, Richard shows their crucial—but often overlooked—role in the making of Siin history. The book also delves into the fraught relation between the Seereer, a minority ethnic and religious group, and the Senegalese nation-state, with Siin’s perceived “primitive” conservatism standing at odds with the country’s Islamic modernity. Through a deep engagement with oral, documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic archives, Richard’s groundbreaking study revisits the four-hundred-year history of a rural community shunted to the margins of Senegal’s national imagination.
[more]
cover of Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory, 1830s-1907

Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory, 1830s-1907

Wendy St. Jean

University of Alabama Press, 2011

 

In the early 1800s, the U.S. government attempted to rid the Southeast of Indians in order to make way for trading networks, American immigration, optimal land use, economic development opportunities, and, ultimately, territorial expansion westward to the Pacific. The difficult removal of the Chickasaw Nation to Indian Territory—later to become part of the state of Oklahoma— was exacerbated by the U.S. government’s unenlightened decision to place the Chickasaws on lands it had previously provided solely for the Choctaw Nation.

 

This volume deals with the challenges the Chickasaw people had from attacking Texans and Plains Indians, the tribe’s ex-slaves, the influence on the tribe of intermarried white men, and the presence of illegal aliens (U.S. citizens) in their territory. By focusing on the tribal and U.S. government policy conflicts, as well as longstanding attempts of the Chickasaw people to remain culturally unique, St. Jean reveals the successes and failures of the Chickasaw in attaining and maintaining sovereignty as a separate and distinct Chickasaw Nation.

[more]
cover of Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity

Remaking New Orleans

Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity

Thomas J. Adams and Matt Sakakeeny, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

Approached as a wellspring of cultural authenticity and historical exceptionality, New Orleans appears in opposition to a nation perpetually driven by progress. Remaking New Orleans shows how this narrative is rooted in a romantic cultural tradition, continuously repackaged through the twin engines of tourism and economic development, and supported by research that has isolated the city from comparison and left unquestioned its entrenched inequality. Working against this feedback loop, the contributors place New Orleans at the forefront of national patterns of urban planning, place-branding, structural inequality, and racialization. Nontraditional sites like professional wrestling matches, middle-class black suburbs, and Vietnamese gardens take precedence over clichéd renderings of Creole cuisine, voodoo queens, and hot jazz. Covering the city's founding through its present and highlighting changing political and social formations, this volume remakes New Orleans as a rich site for understanding the quintessential concerns of American cities.

Contributors. Thomas Jessen Adams, Vincanne Adams, Vern Baxter, Maria Celeste Casati Allegretti, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Rien Fertel, Megan French-Marcelin, Cedric G. Johnson, Alecia P. Long, Vicki Mayer, Toby Miller, Sue Mobley, Marguerite Nguyen, Aaron Nyerges, Adolph Reed Jr., Helen A. Regis, Matt Sakakeeny, Heidi Schmalbach, Felipe Smith, Bryan Wagner
[more]
cover of Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization And The Politics Of Urban Community

Remaking New York

Primitive Globalization And The Politics Of Urban Community

William Sites

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Uses New York City to discuss the ways that policy has mismanaged the effects of globalization

Inequality increases, instability grows, communities fragment: this is the fate of a city in the wake of globalization—but is globalization really the cause? Proposing a new perspective on politics, globalization, and the city, this provocative book argues that such urban problems result in part from U.S. policies that can be changed.

William Sites develops the concept of primitive globalization, identifying a pattern of reactive politics—ad hoc measures to subsidize business, displace the urban poor, and dismantle the welfare state—that uproots social actors (corporations, citizens, urban residents) and facilitates a damaging, short-term-oriented type of international integration. In light of this theory, Sites examines the transformation of New York City since the 1970s, focusing on the logic of political action at national, local, and neighborhood levels. In the process, the story of late twentieth-century New York and its Lower East Side community emerges as something different: not a tale of globalist transformation or of local resurgence but a distinctly American case, one in which urban politics and the state, in their own right, exacerbate inequality and community fragmentation within the city.
[more]
cover of Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

Remaking Rwanda

State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

Scott Straus

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

In the mid-1990s, civil war and genocide ravaged Rwanda. Since then, the country’s new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda’s politics, economy, and society, and the country’s accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. Remaking Rwanda is the first book to examine Rwanda’s remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country’s reconstruction.
            Edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda brings together experienced scholars and human rights professionals to offer a nuanced, historically informed picture of post-genocide Rwanda—one that reveals powerful continuities with the nation’s past and raises profound questions about its future.
 
 
Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
 
Best Special Interest Books, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
[more]
cover of Remaking the Citizen for New Times: History, Pedagogy and the Amar Chitra Katha

Remaking the Citizen for New Times

History, Pedagogy and the Amar Chitra Katha

Deepa Sreenivas

Seagull Books, 2024

An accessible cultural and literary critique of the right wing in India.
 
How does orthodoxy maintain its power over culture? In Remaking the Citizen for New Times, Deepa Sreenivas explores how the Amar Chitra Katha, a widely read comic series started in 1967 in India, influenced the historical and national consciousness of young readers in a conservative direction. Tacitly blaming Nehruvian welfarism of the time for the moral decline of the nation, the Amar Chitra Katha emerged as a literary articulation of the Indian right’s Hindu-nationalist ideology in a modern, bourgeois guise. To renew Hindutva hegemony, the comic series gave orthodox ideas a new sheen, both in its form and content, merging Western comic styles with Indian visual storytelling traditions on the one hand, and combining mythological characters with political figureheads into harmonious narratives on the other—making it difficult to sift history from myths and legends. Sreenivas deftly argues that these mythological-political tales emphasized the instructive rather than the informative potential of history, encouraging neoliberal values such as merit and hard work while ignoring caste or class as systemic issues.
 
[more]
cover of Remaking the Democratic Party: Lyndon B. Johnson as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate

Remaking the Democratic Party

Lyndon B. Johnson as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate

Hanes Walton Jr., Pearl K. Ford Dowe, and Josephine A. V. Allen

University of Michigan Press, 2016

A continuation of Hanes Walton Jr.’s work on Southern Democratic presidents, Remaking the Democratic Party analyzes the congressional and presidential elections of Lyndon Baines Johnson. This study builds upon the general theory of the native-son phenomenon to demonstrate that a Southern native-son can win the presidency without the localism evident in the elections of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

Although ridiculed by contemporaries for his apparent lack of control over formal party politics and the national committee, Johnson excelled at leading the Democratic Party’s policy agenda. While a senator and as president, Johnson advocated for—and secured—liberal social welfare and civil rights legislation, forcing the party to break with its Southern tradition of elitism, conservatism, and white supremacy. In a way, Johnson set the terms for the continuing partisan battle because, by countering the Democrats’ new ideology, the Republican Party also underwent a transformation.

[more]
cover of Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism & After

Remapping Ethiopia

Socialism & After

Wendy James

Ohio University Press, 2002

Governance everywhere is concerned with spatial relationships. Modern states “map” local communities, making them legible for the purposes of control. Ethiopia has gone through several stages of “mapping” in its imperial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary phases.

In 1986 The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia, a cross-disciplinary collection edited by Don Donham and Wendy James, opened up the study of center/periphery relations in the Ethiopian empire until the fall of the monarchy in 1974. This new volume examines similar themes, taking the story forward through the major changes effected by the socialist regime from the revolution of 1974 to its overthrow in 1991, and then into the current period that has been marked by moves toward local democracy and political devolution.

Topics include the changing fortunes of new and historic towns and cities, the impact of the Mengistu regime’s policies of villagization and resettlement, local aspects of the struggle against Mengistu and its aftermath, and the fate of border regions. Special attention is given to developments since 1991: to new local institutions and forms of autonomy, the links between the international diasporas of Ethiopia and the fortunes of their home areas. The collection draws on the work of established scholars as well as a new generation of Ethiopian and international researchers in the disciplines of anthropology, political science, history, and geography.

[more]
cover of Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest

Remembering 1989

Future Archives of Public Protest

Anke Pinkert

University of Chicago Press, 2024

This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification.

For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.

Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
[more]
cover of Remembering the Cajun Past: Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana

Remembering the Cajun Past

Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana

Marc David

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

Exploring how public history creates collective memory of this white ethnic group through memorials
 
Cajuns arrived in southern Louisiana in the 18th century after the British exiled them from eastern Canada. Also known as Acadians, they retain a unique dialect of French, and their distinctive music, food, and other cultural traits characterized them as an ethnic group. Until the 1960s, authorities viewed them as a serious problem, allegedly blocking the state’s progress as they clung to their antiquated ways. Few Cajun residents in the region remembered the remote past of their ancestors, but by the 1970s, organizations ranging from local non-profits to the National Park Service created sites that commemorated their history, such as the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, allowing Cajuns to connect their lives to their past and claim it as their own.
 
In Remembering the Cajun Past, anthropologist Marc David studies the cultural and political dynamics that reconfigured Cajun memory and identity. Focusing on St. Martinville and the Acadian Memorial, he explores how authorities changed their minds about Cajuns and demonstrates how Cajuns’ historical memories took shape. Part ethnography and part history, David examines the racial aspects of the Memorial’s creation in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the growth of a new Cajun history, one through which individual Cajuns rejected the label’s connotation of “white trash” and embraced belonging within a storied white ethnic group. Based on decades of fieldwork and deep engagement with public history practices, David explores how historical memory and the historic sites that foster it are intertwined with the politics of civic life.

[more]
cover of Remembering the Power of Words: The Life of an Oregon Activist, Legislator, and Community Leader

Remembering the Power of Words

The Life of an Oregon Activist, Legislator, and Community Leader

Avel Louise Gordly

Oregon State University Press, 2011

Remembering the Power of Words recounts the personal and professional journey of Avel Gordly, the first African-American woman elected to the Oregon State Senate.

The book is a brave and honest telling of Gordly’s life. She shares the challenges and struggles she faced growing up black in Portland in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as her determination to attend college, the dedication to activism that took her from Portland to Africa, and her eventual decision to run for a seat in the state legislature.

That words have power is a constant undercurrent in Gordly’s account and a truth she learned early in life. “Growing up, finding my own voice,” she writes, “was tied up with denying my voice or having it forcefully rejected and in all of that the memory of my father is very strong. To this day—and I am today a very experienced public speaker—preparation to speak takes a great deal of energy.” That this memoir has its origins as an oral history is fitting since Gordly has used her voice, out loud, to teach and inspire others for so many years.

Important as a biographical account of one significant Oregonian’s story, the book also contributes “broader narratives touching on Black history (and Oregon’s place within it), and most particularly the politics associated with being an African American woman,” according to series editor Melody Rose.

[more]
cover of Remembrance, History, and Justice: Coming to terms with traumatic pasts in democratic societies

Remembrance, History, and Justice

Coming to terms with traumatic pasts in democratic societies

Bogdan C. Iacob

Central European University Press, 2015

The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, or collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often the premises for and the specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts. The present manuscript is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay between memory, history, and justice generates insight that is multifariously relevant for comprehending the present and future of democracy without becoming limited to a Europe-centric framework of understanding. The manuscript is structured on three complementary and interconnected trajectories: the public use of history, politics of memory, and transitional justice. Key words 1. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 2. Collective memory—Europe,Eastern. 3. Memory—Political aspects—Europe, Eastern. 4. Democratization—Social aspects—Europe, Eastern. 5. Europe, Eastern—Historiography—Socialaspects. 6. Europe, Eastern—Historiography—Political aspects. 7. Social justice—Europe, Eastern. 8. Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. 9. Fascism—Socialaspects—Europe, Eastern. 10. Dictatorship—Social aspects—Europe, Eastern.
[more]
cover of Reminiscences of a Soldier's Wife: An Autobiography

Reminiscences of a Soldier's Wife

An Autobiography

Mrs. John A. Logan. Foreword by John Y. Simon

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

"To tell my own story is to tell that of my famous husband, General John A. Logan," explains Mary S. Logan in the preface to her autobiography.

Married to John A. Logan for thirty-one years, Mary Logan shared in her distinguished husband’s career as a prosecutor in southern Illinois, as a Civil War general, and as a senator from Illinois. She observed firsthand the extraordinary events before, during, and after the Civil War, and she knew personally those world leaders who held the power to shape history. After the death of her husband, she maintained her influence in Washington, D.C. "Under the brightest and darkest skies," she explains, "I have passed than a half-century at the national capital."

Born in 1838, Logan writes of her early days growing up in southern Illinois through 1913, when this book was first published. A skillful observer, she recounts events that are personal, regional, and national in scope. In charming detail, she shares her courtship and subsequent marriage to a young prosecutor from Jackson County and the births of their children. She writes proudly of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 and her husband’s election to the Thirty-seventh Congress that same year. Logan tells of the coming of the Civil War and of her husband—formerly a Democrat and an enemy of Lincoln—casting his fate with the Union and raising a regiment in southern Illinois. She poignantly describes her brother’s defection to the Confederate Army, her life in war-torn Cairo, Illinois, and her horror at her husband’s severe war wounds. She recounts the battles, the political campaigns, and Lincoln’s reelection and subsequent assassination from her point of view—and, as the wife of a politician and general, hers is a decidedly privileged perspective.

In a position to observe and to participate in events ranging from momentous to minute throughout the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she reports the essential episodes of history with the flair of journalism, a career she in fact embraced after the death of her husband. She writes movingly of a wounded captain on the road to recovery who suddenly died when the minié shifted next to his lung, amusingly of the excuses soldiers invented to wrangle a pass to town, and elegantly of her trips to Europe and of the pomp and circumstance of the parties attended by the great men and women of the time. Drawing on events grand and small, she re-creates history as only a skillful writer who was in the right place at the right time could.

[more]
cover of Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa

Remotely Global

Village Modernity in West Africa

Charles Piot

University of Chicago Press, 1999

At first glance, the remote villages of the Kabre people of northern Togo appear to have all the trappings of a classic "out of the way" African culture—subsistence farming, straw-roofed houses, and rituals to the spirits and ancestors. Arguing that village life is in fact an effect of the modern and the global, Charles Piot suggests that Kabre culture is shaped as much by colonial and postcolonial history as by anything "indigenous" or local. Through analyses of everyday and ceremonial social practices, Piot illustrates the intertwining of modernity with tradition and of the local with the national and global. In a striking example of the appropriation of tradition by the state, Togo's Kabre president regularly flies to the region in his helicopter to witness male initiation ceremonies.

Confounding both anthropological theorizations and the State Department's stereotyped images of African village life, Remotely Global aims to rethink Euroamerican theories that fail to come to terms with the fluidity of everyday relations in a society where persons and things are forever in motion.
[more]
cover of Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present, and Future

Reparations and Reparatory Justice

Past, Present, and Future

Edited by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry, and V. P. Franklin

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Changes at the global, federal, state, and municipal level are pushing forward the reparations movement for people of African descent. The distinguished editors of this volume have gathered works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world.

Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent.

Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time.

Contributors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Hilary McDonald Beckles, Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Chuck Collins, Ron Daniels, V. P. Franklin, Danny Glover, Adom Gretachew, Charles Henry, Kamm Howard, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Sr., Brian Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee, James B. Stewart, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

[more]
cover of Reporting the Oregon Story: How Activists and Visionaries Transformed a State

Reporting the Oregon Story

How Activists and Visionaries Transformed a State

Floyd J. McKay

Oregon State University Press, 2016

Oregon entered a new era in 1964 with the election of Tom McCall as Secretary of State and Bob Straub as State Treasurer.  Their political rivalry formed the backdrop for two of Oregon’s most transformative decades, as they successively fought for, lost, and won the governorship. Veteran Oregon journalist Floyd McKay had a front-row seat.
 
As a political reporter for The Oregon Statesman in Salem, and then as news analyst for KGW-TV in Portland, McKay was known for asking tough questions and pulling no punches. His reporting and commentaries ranged from analysis of the “Tom and Bob” rivalry, to the Vietnam War’s impact on Senators Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield and the emergence of a new generation of Portland activists in the 1970s.
 
McKay and his colleagues were on the beaches as Oregon crafted its landmark Beach Bill, ensuring the protection of beaches for public use. They watched as activists turned back efforts to build a highway on the sand at Pacific City. Pitched battles over Oregon’s Bottle Bill, and the panic-inducing excitement of “Vortex”—the nation’s only state-sponsored rock festival—characterized the period. Covering the period from 1964-1986, McKay remembers the action, the players and the consequences, in this compelling and personal account.
 
As major actors fade from the scene and new leaders emerge, McKay casts a backwards glance at enduring Oregon legends. Half a century later, amid today’s cynicism and disillusionment with media, politics, and politicians, Reporting the Oregon Story serves as a timely reminder that charged politics and bitter rivalries can also come hand-in-hand with lasting social progress.
 
Reporting the Oregon Story will be relished by those who lived the history, and it will serve as a worthy introduction to Oregonians young and old who want a first-hand account of Oregon’s mid- twentieth-century political history and legislative legacy.
[more]
cover of Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization

Represented Communities

Fiji and World Decolonization

John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.
[more]
cover of Repression, Exile, and Democracy: Uruguayan Culture

Repression, Exile, and Democracy

Uruguayan Culture

Saul Sosnowski and Louise B. Popkin, eds.

Duke University Press, 1992

Repression, Exile, and Democracy, translated from the Spanish, is the first work to examine the impact of dictatorship on Uruguyan culture. Some of Uruguay's best-known poets, writers of fiction, playwrights, literary critics and social scientists participate in this multidisciplinary study, analyzing how varying cultural expressions have been affected by conditions of censorship, exile and "insilio" (internal exile), torture, and death.
The first section provides a context for the volume, with its analyses of the historical, political, and social aspects of the Uruguayan experience. The following chapters explore various aspects of cultural production, including personal experiences of exile and imprisonment, popular music, censorship, literary criticism, return from exile, and the role that culture plays in redemocratization.
This book's appeal extends well beyond the study of Uruguay to scholars and students of the history and culture of other Latin American nations, as well as to fields of comparative literature and politics in general.

Contributors. Hugo Achugar, Alvarro Barros-Lémez, Lisa Block de Behar, Amanda Berenguer, Hiber Conteris, José Pedro Díaz, Eduardo Galeano, Edy Kaufman, Leo Masliah, Carina Perelli, Teresa Porzecanski, Juan Rial, Mauricio Rosencof, Jorge Ruffinelli, Saúl Sosonowski, Martin Weinstein, Ruben Yáñez

[more]
cover of Republican Portugal: A Political History, 1910–1926

Republican Portugal

A Political History, 1910–1926

Douglas L. Wheeler

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

[more]