18284 books match the query 'United States' and 1181 start with s

cover of Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections

Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections

Jennifer A. Steen

University of Michigan Press, 2006

Are our elections for sale? Americans have long asked this question in the face of skyrocketing campaign spending by candidates and parties. Then, in the 1990s, came a wave of wealthy individuals whose deep pockets seemed to be buying political offices across the country. Our worst suspicions were confirmed. Or were they? What effect do self-financers really have on electoral outcomes? Jennifer Steen's authoritative empirical study of self-financed candidates is a landmark in American politics. Steen thoroughly dispels the notion that self-funded candidates can buy legislative seats, proving that the vast majority of self-financers do not win their elections. Her book gives us a truer understanding of self-financers' actual influence on campaign competition and rhetoric.

Jennifer A. Steen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College and a former political consultant. She is one of the nation's leading authorities on self-financed candidates.

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cover of Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them

Self-Help Books

Why Americans Keep Reading Them

Sandra K. Dolby

University of Illinois Press, 2004

Understanding instead of lamenting the popularity of self-help books

Based on a reading of more than three hundred self-help books, Sandra K. Dolby examines this remarkably popular genre to define "self-help" in a way that's compelling to academics and lay readers alike. Self-Help Books also offers an interpretation of why these books are so popular, arguing that they continue the well-established American penchant for self-education, they articulate problems of daily life and their supposed solutions, and that they present their content in a form and style that is accessible rather than arcane.

Using tools associated with folklore studies, Dolby then examines how the genre makes use of stories, aphorisms, and a worldview that is at once traditional and contemporary. The overarching premise of the study is that self-help books, much like fairy tales, take traditional materials, especially stories and ideas, and recast them into extended essays that people happily read, think about, try to apply, and then set aside when a new embodiment of the genre comes along. 

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cover of Self-Made Woman: A Memoir

Self-Made Woman

A Memoir

Denise Chanterelle DuBois

University of Wisconsin Press, 2017

Denise Chanterelle DuBois's transformation into a woman wasn't easy. Born as a boy into a working-class Polish American Milwaukee family, she faced daunting hurdles: a domineering father, a gritty 1960s neighborhood with no understanding of gender nonconformity, trouble in school, and a childhood so haunted by deprivation that neckbone soup was a staple. Terrified of revealing her inner self, DuBois lurched through alcoholism, drug dealing and addiction, car crashes, dangerous sex, and prison time. Dennis barreled from Wisconsin to California, Oregon, Canada, Costa Rica, New York, Bangkok, and Hawaii on a joyless ride.

Defying all expectations, DuBois didn't crash and burn. Embracing her identity as a woman, she remade herself. Writing with resolute honesty and humor, she confronts both her past and her present to tell an American story of self-discovery.
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cover of Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy

Self-Rule

A Cultural History of American Democracy

Robert H. Wiebe

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Something profoundly important occurred in early 19th century America that came to be called democracy. Since then hundreds of millions of people worldwide have operated on the assumption that democracy exists. Yet definitions of democracy are surprisingly vague and remarkably few reckon with its history. In Self-Rule, Robert Wiebe suggests that only in appreciating that history can we recognize how breathtaking democracy's arrival was, how extraordinary its spread has been, and how uncertain its prospects are.

American democracy arrived abruptly in the 19th century; it changed just as dramatically early in the 20th. Hence, Self-Rule divides the history of American democracy into two halves: a 19th century half covering the 1820s to the present, and a 20th century half, with a major transition from the 1890s to the 1920s between them. As Wiebe explains why the original democracy of the early 19th century represented a sharp break from the past, he recreates in vivid detail the way European visitors contrasted the radical character of American democracy with their own societies. He then discusses the operation of various 19th century democratic publics, including a nationwide public, the People. Finally, he places democracy's white fraternal world of equals in a larger environment where other Americans who differed by class, race, and gender, developed their own relations to democracy.

Wiebe then picks up the history of democracy in the 1920s and carries it to the present. Individualism, once integrated with collective self-governance in the 19th century, becomes the driving force behind 20th century democracy. During those same years, other ways of defining good government and sound public policy shunt majoritarian practices to one side. Late in the 20th century, these two great themes in the history of American democracy—individualism and majoritarianism—turn on one another in modern democracy's war on itself.

Finally, Self-Rule assesses the polarized state of contemporary American democracy. Putting the judgments of sixty-odd commentators from Kevin Phillips and E.J. Dionne to Robert Bellah and Benjamin Barber to the test of history, Wiebe offers his own suggestions on the meaning and direction of today's democracy. This sweeping work explains how the history of American democracy has brought us here and how that same history invites us to create a different future.
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cover of Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson: A Diary, 1930-1933

Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson

A Diary, 1930-1933

Lorenzo J. Greene, Edited & Intro by Arvarh E. Strickland

University of Missouri Press, 1996

In the summer of 1930, Lorenzo Johnston Greene, a graduate of Howard University and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, became a book agent for the man with the undisputed title of "Father of Negro History," Carter G. Woodson. With little more than determination, Greene, along with four Howard University students, traveled throughout the South and Southeast selling books published by Woodson's Associated Publishers. Their dual purpose was to provide needed funds for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and to promote the study of African American history. Greene returned east by way of Chicago, and, for a time, he settled in Philadelphia, selling books there and in the nearby cities of Delaware and New Jersey. He left Philadelphia in 1931 to conduct a survey in Washington, D.C., of firms employing and not employing black workers.

From 1930 until 1933, when Greene began teaching at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson provides a unique firsthand account of conditions in African American communities during the Great Depression. Greene describes in the diary, often in lyrical terms, the places and people he visited. He provides poignant descriptions of what was happening to black professional and business people, plus working-class people, along with details of high school facilities, churches, black business enterprises, housing, and general conditions in communities. Greene also gives revealing accounts of how the black colleges were faring in 1930.

Selling Black History for Carter G. Woodson offers important glimpses into the private thoughts of a young man of the 1930s, a developing intellectual and scholar. Greene's diary also provides invaluable insights into the personality of Carter Woodson that are not otherwise available. This fascinating and comprehensive view of black America during the early thirties will be a welcome addition to African American studies.

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cover of Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion

Selling Fear

Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion

Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, Robert Y. Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 2011

While we’ve long known that the strategies of terrorism rely heavily on media coverage of attacks, Selling Fear is the first detailed look at the role played by media in counterterrorism—and the ways that, in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration manipulated coverage to maintain a climate of fear.

            
Drawing on in-depth analysis of counterterrorism in the years after 9/11—including the issuance of terror alerts and the decision to invade Iraq—the authors present a compelling case that the Bush administration hyped fear, while obscuring civil liberties abuses and concrete issues of preparedness. The media, meanwhile, largely abdicated its watchdog role, choosing to amplify the administration’s message while downplaying issues that might have called the administration’s statements and strategies into question. The book extends through Hurricane Katrina, and the more skeptical coverage that followed, then the first year of the Obama administration, when an increasingly partisan political environment presented the media, and the public, with new problems of reporting and interpretation.

            
Selling Fear is a hard-hitting analysis of the intertwined failures of government and media—and their costs to our nation.

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cover of Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60

Selling Free Enterprise

The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60

Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf

University of Illinois Press, 1994

The post-World War II years in the United States were marked by the business community's efforts to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty. 

Based on research in a wide variety of business and labor sources, this detailed account shows how business permeated every aspect of American life, including factories, schools, churches, and community institutions.

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cover of Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961-1963

Selling Outer Space

Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961-1963

James Kauffman

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Examines how the Kennedy administration and the media constructed the space program in ways designed to win congressional and public approval

Examines the Kennedy administration’s rhetorical campaign to persuade Congress and the public to adopt a manned flight to the moon. In so doing, the study addresses three key themes.

First, it illuminates the contrasting nature of technical and narrative arguments and explores how those arguments play different roles in public discussion of social policy. Second, the book examines how both the executive branch and the news media function to help set the agenda in American politics. Offering a case study of the increasingly complex relationship between the government and the media.

Finally, Selling Outer Space explores the power of technology to shape and direct human action.
 
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cover of Selling Power: Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940

Selling Power

Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940

John L. Neufeld

University of Chicago Press, 2016

We remember Thomas Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, but he deserves credit for something much larger, an even more singular invention that profoundly changed the way the world works: the modern electric utility industry. Edison’s light bulb was the first to work within a system where a utility generated electricity and distributed it to customers for lighting. The story of how electric utilities went within one generation from prototype to an indispensable part of most Americans’ lives is a story about the relationships between political and technological change.
           
John L. Neufeld offers a comprehensive historical treatment of the economics that shaped electric utilities. Compared with most industries, the organization of the electric utility industry is not—and cannot be—economically efficient. Most industries are kept by law in a state of fair competition, but the capital necessary to start an electric company—generators, transmission and distribution systems, and land and buildings—is so substantial that few companies can enter the market and compete. Therefore, the natural state of the electric utility industry since its inception has been a monopoly subject to government oversight. These characteristics of electric utilities—and electricity’s importance—have created over time sharp political controversies, and changing public policies have dramatically changed the industry’s structure to an extent matched by few other industries. Neufeld outlines the struggles that shaped the industry’s development, and shows how the experience of electric utilities provides insight into the design of economic institutions, including today’s new large-scale markets.
 
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cover of Selling Science: Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin

Selling Science

Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin

Mawdsley, Stephen E

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Today, when many parents seem reluctant to have their children vaccinated, even with long proven medications, the Salk vaccine trial, which enrolled millions of healthy children to test an unproven medical intervention, seems nothing short of astonishing. In Selling Science, medical historian Stephen E. Mawdsley recounts the untold story of the first large clinical trial to control polio using healthy children—55,000 healthy children—revealing how this long-forgotten incident cleared the path for Salk’s later trial.
 
Mawdsley describes how, in the early 1950s, Dr. William Hammon and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis launched a pioneering medical experiment on a previously untried scale. Conducted on over 55,000 healthy children in Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Nebraska, this landmark study assessed the safety and effectiveness of a blood component, gamma globulin, to prevent paralytic polio. The value of the proposed experiment was questioned by many prominent health professionals as it harbored potential health risks, but as Mawdsley points out, compromise and coercion moved it forward. And though the trial returned dubious results, it was presented to the public as a triumph and used to justify a federally sanctioned mass immunization study on thousands of families between 1953 and 1954. Indeed, the concept, conduct, and outcome of the GG study were sold to health professionals, medical researchers, and the public at each stage. At a time when most Americans trusted scientists, their mutual encounter under the auspices of conquering disease was shaped by politics, marketing, and at times, deception.

Drawing on oral history interviews, medical journals, newspapers, meeting minutes, and private institutional records, Selling Science sheds light on the ethics of scientific conduct, and on the power of marketing to shape public opinion about medical experimentation.
 
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cover of Selling The Dream: The Gulf American Corporation and the Building of Cape Coral, Florida

Selling The Dream

The Gulf American Corporation and the Building of Cape Coral, Florida

David Dodrill

University of Alabama Press, 1993

Examining real estate ambition and urban growth in Cape Coral’s creation.

The Gulf American Corporation played a significant role in the development and urbanization of the state of Florida, especially southwest Florida, during the late 1950s and 1960s. The Miami-based company promoted living in Florida to people residing throughout North America and in several foreign countries. It also enabled people of average incomes to purchase home sites in Florida on an installment basis. As a result, Gulf American had a heavy influence on the migration of people to Florida as early as 1957.

Leonard and Julius J. Rosen of Baltimore, Maryland, founded and controlled the corporation during its 12-year existence from 1957 to 1969. The sale and promotion of Florida real estate was an extension of their marketing style developed in previous years when they sold mail-order cosmetics and other products. Their innovative sales strategies ultimately resulted in conflicts with state and federal regulatory agencies in the mid 1960s over the firm’s aggressive sales methods. The struggle with the state of Florida over regulation, which degenerated into a personal conflict between Governor Claude Kirk and the Rosens, resulted in the Rosens’ selling the business to GAC Corporation of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1969. After a series of business setbacks and continuing accusations of misrepresentations by salespeople, GAC declared bankruptcy in 1975 and was eventually resurrected as Avatar Holding, Inc., in 1980.

Gulf American left a mixed legacy to the state of Florida by building several growing cities like Cape Coral and Golden Gate, while at the same time selling worthless underwater swampland near the Everglades. The building of their first development was planned by the company. In that sense, Cape Coral was designed to be the Rosens’ most elaborate sales tool.

Based on 31 personal interviews with former Gulf American Corporation, GAC/Avatar Holding company officials and supplemented by articles from 25 different newspapers, this book provides a comprehensive and fascinating look at the Gulf American Corporation—the largest land sales firm in the United States in the 1960s. In many ways the story of Gulf American is a rags-to-riches tale of Leonard and Julius (Jack) Rosen, complete with intrigue and the fluctuations of fortune that matched the rising tides that covered much of the land they sold.
 
 

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cover of Selling Women's History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture

Selling Women's History

Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture

Westkaemper, Emily

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Only in recent decades has the American academic profession taken women’s history seriously. But the very concept of women’s history has a much longer past, one that’s intimately entwined with the development of American advertising and consumer culture. 
 
Selling Women’s History reveals how, from the 1900s to the 1970s, popular culture helped teach Americans about the accomplishments of their foremothers, promoting an awareness of women’s wide-ranging capabilities. On one hand, Emily Westkaemper examines how this was a marketing ploy, as Madison Avenue co-opted women’s history to sell everything from Betsy Ross Red lipstick to Virginia Slims cigarettes. But she also shows how pioneering adwomen and female historians used consumer culture to publicize histories that were ignored elsewhere. Their feminist work challenged sexist assumptions about women’s subordinate roles. 
 
Assessing a dazzling array of media, including soap operas, advertisements, films, magazines, calendars, and greeting cards, Selling Women’s History offers a new perspective on how early- and mid-twentieth-century women saw themselves. Rather than presuming a drought of female agency between the first and second waves of American feminism, it reveals the subtle messages about women’s empowerment that flooded the marketplace. 
 
 
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cover of Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States

Selling the Air

A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States

Thomas Streeter

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In this interdisciplinary study of the laws and policies associated with commercial radio and television, Thomas Streeter reverses the usual take on broadcasting and markets by showing that government regulation creates rather than intervenes in the market. Analyzing the processes by which commercial media are organized, Streeter asks how it is possible to take the practice of broadcasting—the reproduction of disembodied sounds and pictures for dissemination to vast unseen audiences—and constitute it as something that can be bought, owned, and sold.

With an impressive command of broadcast history, as well as critical and cultural studies of the media, Streeter shows that liberal marketplace principles—ideas of individuality, property, public interest, and markets—have come into contradiction with themselves. Commercial broadcasting is dependent on government privileges, and Streeter provides a searching critique of the political choices of corporate liberalism that shape our landscape of cultural property and electronic intangibles.
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cover of Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures

Selling the Indian

Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures

Carter Jones Meyer

University of Arizona Press, 2001

For more than a hundred years, outsiders enamored of the perceived strengths of American Indian cultures have appropriated and distorted elements of them for their own purposes—more often than not ignoring the impact of the process on the Indians themselves. This book contains eight original contributions that consider the selling of American Indian culture and how it affects the Native community. It goes beyond studies of “white shamanism” to focus on commercial ventures, challenging readers to reconsider how Indian cultures have been commercialized in the twentieth century.

Some selections examine how Indians have been displayed to the public, beginning with a “living exhibit” of Cocopa Indians at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and extending to contemporary stagings of Indian culture for tourists at Tillicum Village near Seattle. Other chapters range from the Cherokees to Puebloan peoples to Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, in an examination of the roles of both Indians and non-Indian reformers in marketing Native arts and crafts.

These articles show that the commercialization and appropriation of American Indian cultures have been persistent practices of American society over the last century and constitute a form of cultural imperialism that could contribute to the destruction of American Indian culture and identity. They offer a means toward understanding this complex process and provide a new window on Indian-white interactions.

CONTENTS

Part I: Staging the Indian
1. The “Shy” Cocopa Go to the Fair, Nancy J. Parezo and John W. Troutman
2. Command Performances: Staging Native Americans at Tillicum Village, Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner
3. Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media, S. Elizabeth Bird
4. “Beyond Feathers and Beads”: Interlocking Narratives in the Music and Dance of Tokeya Inajin (Kevin Locke), Pauline Tuttle

Part II: Marketing the Indian
5. “The Idea of Help”: White Women Reformers and the Commercialization of Native American Women’s Arts, Erik Trump
6. Saving the Pueblos: Commercialism and Indian Reform in the 1920s, Carter Jones Meyer
7. Marketing Traditions: Cherokee Basketry and Tourist Economies, Sarah H. Hill
8. Crafts, Tourism, and Traditional Life in Chiapas, Mexico: A Tale Related by a Pillowcase, Chris Goertzen

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cover of Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955

Selling the Race

Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955

Adam Green

University of Chicago Press, 2006

In Selling the Race, Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and ’50s, a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

By presenting African Americans as agents, rather than casualties, of modernity, Green ultimately reenvisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race, culture, or the life of cities.

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cover of Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials: The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions

Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials

The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions

James P. Turner

University of Michigan Press, 2018

In 1965 the drive for black voting rights in the south culminated in the epic Selma to Montgomery Freedom March. After brutal state police beatings stunned the nation on “Bloody Sunday,” troops under federal court order lined the route as the march finally made its way to the State Capitol and a triumphant address by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But within hours klan terror struck, claiming the life of one of the marchers, Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother of five. Turner offers an insider’s view of the three trials that took place over the following nine months—which finally resulted in the conviction of the killers. Despite eyewitness testimony by an FBI informant who was riding in the car with the killers, two all-white state juries refused to convict. It took a team of Civil Rights Division lawyers, led by the legendary John Doar, to produce the landmark jury verdict that klansmen were no longer above the law. This is must reading today, as the voting rights won in Selma come under renewed attack.
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cover of Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days

Selma, Lord, Selma

Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days

Sheyann Webb

University of Alabama Press, 1997

Witness the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of two children.

Sheyann Webb was eight years old and Rachel West was nine when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965. He came to organize non-violent demonstrations against discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events from that turbulent winter of 1965--events that changed not only the lives of these two little girls but the lives of all Alabamians and all Americans. From 1975 to 1979, award-winning journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with Webb and West, weaving their recollections into this luminous story of fear and courage, struggle and redemption that readers will discover is Selma, Lord, Selma.

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cover of Selma: A Bicentennial History

Selma

A Bicentennial History

Alston Fitts III

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Exploring the people, politics, and events that shaped Selma from 1815 through the twentieth century.

In 1989, Alston Fitts published a brief history of the city of Selma, Alabama, from its founding through the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Selma: A Bicentennial History is a greatly revised and expanded version of Fitts’s history of the city, replete with a wealth of new, never-before-published illustrations, which further develops a number of significant events, corrects critical errors, and, most importantly, incorporates many new stories and materials that document Selma’s establishment, growth, and development.

Comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and nonpartisan, Fitts’s pleasantly accessible history addresses every major issue, movement, and trend from the city’s settlement in 1815 to the end of the twentieth century. Its commerce, institutions, governance, as well as its evolving racial, religious, and class composition are all treated with candor and depth. Selma’s transformative role within the state and the nation is fully explored, and most notable is a nuanced and complex discussion of race relations from the rise of the civil rights era to modern times.

Historians, scholars, and Alabamians will find great use for this updated and fully developed exploration of Selma’s rich, complex, and significant history.

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cover of Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle

Senator Dennis DeConcini

From the Center of the Aisle

Dennis DeConcini and Jack L. August, Jr.

University of Arizona Press, 2006

Dennis DeConcini, a contemporary of Arizona greats like Sandra Day O’Connor, Barry Goldwater, and Rose Mofford, is an Arizona icon in his own right. Starting his public career as the Pima County Attorney, DeConcini orchestrated an unprecedented rise to a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he held for eighteen years. His political memoir, co-authored with historian Jack L. August Jr., reaches beyond typical reflections to provide the reader with penetrating and revealing insights into the inner workings and colorful characters of Arizona politics and the United States Senate.

A vigilant centrist, who got results by building coalitions on both sides of the aisle, Senator DeConcini’s approach was not bound to strict party alliances but was deeply rooted in the independent political environment of Arizona. During his career, he sponsored legislation limiting the sale of assault weapons, which provoked the National Rifle Association. He confounded Democratic Party regulars by supporting Clarence Thomas during the controversial confirmation hearings and again split with his party in his support for William Rehnquist’s nomination to Chief Justice. In 1980 he voted for Ronald Reagan, but in 1993 he cast the swing vote for President Bill Clinton’s tax bill, which was strongly opposed by Republicans in Arizona.

This political memoir will be of interest to anyone concerned with the inner workings of the U.S. Senate or Arizona politics and offers relevant insights into today’s political climate.
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cover of Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada: A Biography

Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada

A Biography

Michael Vernetti

University of Nevada Press, 2015

Howard Cannon (1912 - 2002) represented Nevada in the U.S. Senate from 1958 until 1982 and acquired a reputation as one of its most productive and influential members. Because he was a modest man more comfortable with hard work than self-aggrandizement, he was also one of its most under-appreciated. Nonetheless, Cannon influenced many major changes in American politics and policies during his time in office.

Born to a devout Mormon family in a small farming community in southwest Utah, Cannon served in the Army Air Force during World War II and emerged from the war as a hero. Soon he was part of the postwar migration of ambitious, adventurous Americans to the booming desert city of Las Vegas, where he practiced law and entered local politics. In 1958 he was elected to the U.S. Senate and joined a group of influential young Democratic senators who were to play a major role in shaping the country’s future. His service on the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and the Armed Services Committee led to major changes in the air travel industry, including deregulation, and to increased support for national military preparedness.
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cover of Senator Leahy: A Life in Scenes

Senator Leahy

A Life in Scenes

Philip Baruth

University Press of New England, 2017

Having vaulted to a position in the United States Senate at the tender age of thirty-four, Patrick Leahy now claims the longest tenure of any member of that institution still serving—and he was third in line for the presidency when the Democrats held control. Few recent American lawmakers have watched history unfold so at such close range; fewer still have influenced it so powerfully. Philip Baruth brings a thriller-like intensity to the most spectacular of those scenes: the 9/11 attack on the US capital, the contentious drafting of the Patriot Act, the ensuing anthrax attacks, and the dramatic 2014 opening of diplomatic ties with Cuba. Throughout, the biography focuses in on Leahy’s meticulous image making, his cultivation of a “Top Cop” persona both in the media and at the ballot box. It is an approach that culminates in simultaneous roles for the lawmaker as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and as the tough-talking “distinguished gentleman” in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films. Leahy’s improbable success, Philip Baruth argues, in the end lies in his ability both to be and to play the top cop not only in post-Watergate Vermont, but in a post-9/11 America viciously divided between the red states and the blue.
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cover of Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana: Law and Public Affairs, from TR to FDR

Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana

Law and Public Affairs, from TR to FDR

J. Leonard Bates

University of Illinois Press, 1999

This is the first comprehensive biography of Thomas J. Walsh, the Democratic senator from Montana from 1913 to 1933 who was best known for his role in uncovering the Teapot Dome scandal. J. Leonard Bates places Walsh in his colorful and tumultuous times, illuminating Montana history and politics as well as national movements including Progressivism, internationalism, Prohibition, war, and so-called normalcy.
 
Walsh fought throughout his long career against corruption and monopoly power. During his early years as a lawyer-politician in Helena, he was often in conflict with the "Copper Kings" and other powerful figures. As a senator, he became an internationalist, working throughout the 1920s for naval disarmament, the World Court, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact for the "outlawry" of war.
 
In his most celebrated coup, breaking open the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923-24, Walsh revealed that the secretary of the interior had accepted "loans" from oil men in return for leases of U.S. naval oil reserves. Working through the Public Lands Committee of the Senate, Walsh enjoyed support for his investigation from members of both parties, and the Supreme Court endorsed his interpretation of the scandal in 1927. Shortly before his death, he presided over the Democratic National Convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt and served for a brief time as a key figure in the new leader's circle.
 
Drawing on archival sources of unprecedented depth, including personal letters between Walsh and his first wife, Elinor McClements Walsh, Bates's expansive study paints a richly detailed portrait of an influential and principled figure whose political career spanned world war, depression, and the administrations of six presidents.
 
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cover of Send the Alabamians: World War I Fighters in the Rainbow Division

Send the Alabamians

World War I Fighters in the Rainbow Division

Nimrod T. Frazer

University of Alabama Press, 2014

The Remarkable Story of Alabama's Soldiers in America's Great War.

Send the Alabamians recounts the story of the 167th Infantry Regiment of the WWI Rainbow Division from their recruitment to their valiant service on the bloody fields of eastern France in the climactic final months of World War I.

To mark the centenary of World War I, Send the Alabamians tells the remarkable story of a division of Alabama recruits whose service Douglas MacArthur observed had not “been surpassed in military history.” The book borrows its title from a quip by American General Edward H. Plummer who commanded the young men during the inauspicious early days of their service. Impressed with their ferocity and esprit de corps but exasperated by their rambunctiousness, Plummer reportedly exclaimed: In time of war, send me all the Alabamians you can get, but in
time of peace, for Lord’s sake, send them to somebody else!

The ferocity of the Alabamians, so apt to get them in trouble at home, proved invaluable in the field. At the climactic Battle of Croix Rouge, the hot-blooded 167th exhibited unflinching valor and, in the face of machine guns, artillery shells, and poison gas, sustained casualty rates over 50 percent to dislodge and repel the deeply entrenched and heavily armed enemy.

Relying on extensive primary sources such as journals, letters, and military reports, Frazer draws a vivid picture of the individual soldiers who served in this division, so often overlooked but critical to the war’s success. After Gettysburg, the Battle of Croix Rouge is the most significant military engagement to involve Alabama soldiers in the state’s history. Families and genealogists will value the full roster of the 167th that accompanies the text.

Richly researched yet grippingly readable, Nimrod T. Frazer’s Send the Alabamians will delight those interested in WWI, the World Wars, Alabama history, or southern military history in general. Historians of the war, regimental historians, military history aficionados, and those interested in previously unexplored facets of Alabama history will prize this unique volume as well.

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cover of Senda Berenson: The Unlikely Founder of Women's Basketball

Senda Berenson

The Unlikely Founder of Women's Basketball

Ralph Melnick

University of Massachusetts Press, 2007

In the winter of 1892 the new instructor of physical training at Smith College, a diminutive young woman with a heavy accent, introduced her students to an adaptation of James Naismith's new game of Basket Ball. An immediate if unexpected success, the game spread to other women's schools across the country, and soon its founder, Senda Berenson (1868–1954), was called upon to codify its distinctive set of gender-specific rules. Emphasizing team passing and position over individual play, the version she instituted defined women's basketball for seventy years and eventually earned her the honor of being the first female elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Yet as Ralph Melnick points out, Berenson's pioneering role in the history of women's athletics was more a matter of accident than destiny. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, prone to ill health throughout her childhood, she enrolled in the Boston Normal School for Gymnastics in the fall of 1890 with the hope of strengthening herself so that she could pursue a career as a pianist, dancer, or painter. Instead she soon became both a practitioner and a proponent of a new approach to women's physical education, one aimed at providing a “natural outlet of the play instinct,” developing “endurance and physical courage” as well as “quickness of thought and action,” and promoting through teamwork the “power of organization” women needed to achieve full social equality. 

Extending her work into the factories and blighted urban tenements of America, Berenson later won the recognition of Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and other progressive reformers. Believing that “Americans have forgotten how to play,” she wanted to teach others to live “joyfully—beautifully.” For Berenson, the physical culture of exercise and games, played not for competition but for personal and social development as well as sheer enjoyment, was but another form of art. 

This convergence of athletics and aesthetics was hardly surprising, Melnick explains, because the single most important influence on Senda Berenson's life was her brother, the renowned art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson. The two siblings wrote frequently to each other over the course of their lives, and the author draws heavily on their correspondence throughout the book to create an intimate and insightful portrait of a remarkable American woman.

[more]
cover of Senior Power or Senior Peril: Aged Communities and American Society in the Twenty-First Century

Senior Power or Senior Peril

Aged Communities and American Society in the Twenty-First Century

Brittany H Bramlett

Temple University Press, 2015

As the Baby Boomer generation ages, the number of senior citizens as a proportion of the overall electorate is going to reach record numbers. This fact prompted Brittany Bramlett to ask: When senior citizens make up a large proportion of the local population, are they politically more powerful, or are they perhaps more powerless?
 
In Senior Power or Senior Peril, Bramlett examines the assertions that the increasing number of older adult-concentrated communities across the United States form a growing bloc of senior power that will influence the redistribution of particularized welfare benefits to older adults at the expense of younger people. However, others suggest that political influence declines with old age. Bramlett uses interviews and on-site research at various senior communities to explore what qualities make an aged community politically unique, and the impact of the local aged context on residents' political knowledge, safety-net policy attitudes, efficacy, and political activity.
 
This path-breaking book identifies the political behaviors, attitudes, and political consciousness of both older and younger residents as it recounts the perceived and actual political power of seniors.
 
In the series The Social Logic of Politics, edited by Scott McClurg
[more]
cover of Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America

Sensational Devotion

Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America

Jill Stevenson

University of Michigan Press, 2015

Sensational Devotion examines contemporary Passion plays, biblical theme parks, Holy Land recreations, creationist museums, and megachurches in order to understand how they serve their evangelical believer-users while also shaping larger cultural and national dialogues. Jill Stevenson explores how performative media support specific theologies and core beliefs by creating sensual, live experiences for those who use them. The book explores evangelical performance across a range of media and sites, including film, television, theater, tourist attractions, museums, and places of worship. Using historical research coupled with firsthand experiences, it critically examines these spaces and events within their specific religious, cultural, and national contexts, while placing them within a long devotional tradition to suggest how they cultivate religious belief by generating vivid, sensual, affectively oriented, and individualized experiences. Stevenson’s analysis builds upon existing work on performance and cognition, as well as theories of affect, as it contributes to existing scholarship on American evangelicalism and evangelical Christian media. 
[more]
cover of Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life

Sense of History

The Place of the Past in American Life

David Glassberg

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001

As Americans enter the new century, their interest in the past has never been greater. In record numbers they visit museums and historic sites, attend commemorative ceremonies and festivals, watch historically based films, and reconstruct family genealogies. The question is, Why? What are Americans looking for when they engage with the past? And how is it different from what scholars call “history?” 

In this book, David Glassberg surveys the shifting boundaries between the personal, public, and professional uses of the past and explores their place in the broader cultural landscape. Each chapter investigates a specific encounter between Americans and their history: the building of a pacifist war memorial in a rural Massachusetts town; the politics behind the creation of a new historical festival in San Francisco; the letters Ken Burns received in response to his film series on the Civil War; the differing perceptions among black and white residents as to what makes an urban neighborhood historic; and the efforts to identify certain places in California as worthy of commemoration. Along the way, Glassberg reflects not only on how Americans understand and use the past, but on the role of professional historians in that enterprise. Combining the latest research on American memory with insights gained from Glassberg's more than twenty years of personal experience in a variety of public history projects, Sense of History offers stimulating reading for all who care about the future of history in America.

[more]
cover of Sensing Qualia: Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Sensing Qualia

Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Paul G. Skokowski

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A new, naturalistic theory of consciousness and sensory experience.

Philosophers of mind and neuroscientists often debate what they call the hard problem of consciousness, that is, how we might account for qualia—our subjective experiences of phenomena like color, taste, pain, smell, and more. In Sensing Qualia, Paul G. Skokowski surveys the most influential theories of mind since Descartes in order to establish a new theory he calls sensory naturalism, which recognizes the senses as natural detectors of physical properties in the world.

Drawing on neuroscience, physics, and philosophy, Skokowski provides a naturalistic framework for studying qualia in the physical world and explores the limits of qualia in androids and AI. The result is a compelling explanation of qualia for anyone curious about the nature of conscious experience in humans and AI.
[more]
cover of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

Sensory Experiments

Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling

Erica Fretwell

Duke University Press, 2020

In Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell excavates the nineteenth-century science of psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation to examine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of feeling in nineteenth-century America. Fretwell demonstrates how psychophysics—a scientific movement originating in Germany and dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience—shifted the understandings of feeling from the epistemology of sentiment to the phenomenological terrain of lived experience. Through analyses of medical case studies, spirit photographs, perfumes, music theory, recipes, and the work of canonical figures ranging from Kate Chopin and Pauline Hopkins to James Weldon Johnson and Emily Dickinson, Fretwell outlines how the five senses became important elements in the biopolitical work of constructing human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability. In its entanglement with social difference, psychophysics contributed to the racialization of aesthetics while sketching out possibilities for alternate modes of being over and against the figure of the bourgeois liberal individual. Although psychophysics has largely been forgotten, Fretwell demonstrates that its importance to shaping social order through scientific notions of sensation is central to contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, aesthetics, and affect theory.
[more]
cover of Sentencing in Time

Sentencing in Time

Linda Ross Meyer

Amherst College Press, 2017

Exactly how is it we think the ends of justice are accomplished by sentencing someone to a term in prison? How do we relate a quantitative measure of time—months and years—to the objectives of deterring crime, punishing wrongdoers, and accomplishing justice for those touched by a criminal act? Linda Ross Meyer investigates these questions, examining the disconnect between our two basic modes of thinking about time—chronologically (seconds, minutes, hours), or phenomenologically (observing, taking note of, or being aware of the passing of time). In Sentencing in Time, Meyer asks whether—in overlooking the irreconcilability of these two modes of thinking about time—we are failing to accomplish the ends we believe the criminal justice system is designed to serve. Drawing on work in philosophy, legal theory, jurisprudence, and the history of penology, Meyer explores how, rather than condemning prisoners to an experience of time bereft of meaning, we might instead make the experience of incarceration constructively meaningful—and thus better aligned with social objectives of deterring crime, reforming offenders, and restoring justice.
[more]
cover of Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America

Sentimental Collaborations

Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America

Mary Louise Kete

Duke University Press, 2000

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University’s commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a revelation concerning the compassion of others, Gore effectively reconstructed himself as a typical, middle-class American for whom sympathy can lead to salvation. This contemporary reiteration of mid-nineteenth-century American sentimental discourse proves to be a fruitful point of departure for Mary Louise Kete’s argument that sentimentality has been an important and recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class American life.
Many scholars have written about the sentimental novel as a primarily female genre and have stressed its negative ideological aspects. Kete finds that in fact many men—from writers to politicians—participated in nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Importantly, she also recovers the utopian dimension of the phenomenon, arguing that literary sentimentality, specifically in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls “sentimental collaboration”—an exchange of sympathy in the form of gifts that establishes common cultural or intellectual ground. Kete reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of sentimentality for the creation of Americanism, as well as for political and abolitionist ends. Finally, she locates the origins of sentimental collaboration in the activities of ordinary people who participated in mourning rituals—writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs—to ease their personal grief.
Sentimental Collaborations significantly advances prevailing scholarship on Romanticism, antebellum culture, and the formation of the American middle class. It will be of interest to scholars of American studies, American literature, cultural studies, and women’s studies.
[more]
cover of Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Sentimental Materialism

Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Lori Merish

Duke University Press, 2000

In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artifacts—from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars—Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman’s wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity—the feminine consumer—was remarkably influential, helping to shape American capitalism, culture, and nation building.

The phenomenon of female consumption was capitalism’s complement to male production: It created what Merish calls the “Other Protestant Ethic,”a feminine and sentimental counterpart to Max Weber’s ethic of hard work, economic rationality, and self-control. In addition, driven by the culture’s effort to civilize the “cannibalistic” practices of ethnic, class, and national otherness, appropriate female consumerism, marked by taste and refinement, identified certain women and their families as proper citizens of the United States. The public nature of consumption, however, had curiously conflicting effects: While the achievement of cultured material circumstances facilitated women’s civic agency, it also reinforced stereotypes of domestic womanhood.

Sentimental Materialism’s inquiry into middle-class consumption and accompanying ideals of womanhood will appeal to readers in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and cultural history.

[more]
cover of Separate Destinations: Migration, Immigration, and the Politics of Places

Separate Destinations

Migration, Immigration, and the Politics of Places

James G. Gimpel

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Natives who change residence do not settle in the same places as immigrants. Separate Destinations argues that these distinct mobility patterns, coupled with record levels of immigration from impoverished third world nations, are balkanizing the American electorate. James G. Gimpel examines the consequences of different patterns of movement and settlement on the politics of the communities in which these different groups settle.
Newer immigrants are con-strained by a lack of education, money, English literacy, and information--and frequently by discrimination--to live in areas of coethnic settlement. Domestic, native-born migrants--predominantly Caucasian--free of discrimination and possessing more money and information, move where they wish, often to communities where immigrants are not welcome or cannot afford to live. Strong evidence suggests that spatially isolated immigrants are slower to naturalize and get involved in politics than domestic migrants.
Gimpel looks closely at states with very different patterns of migration and immigration: California, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York. In these states, Gimpel shows the impact of population mobility on party registration, party votes, and voter turnout and asks whether population changes have changed the dominant party in a state or produced a political reaction from natives.
Separate Destinations contains a number of thematic maps detailing the settlement patterns of internal migrants and immigrants for both counties and census tracts. Blending insights from a number of social science disciplines, including economics, demography, sociology, political science, and anthropology, this book will be of interest to a wide and diverse readership of scholars, students, and policymakers.
James G. Gimpel is Associate Professor of Government, University of Maryland.
[more]
cover of Separate Games: African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation

Separate Games

African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation

David K. Wiggins

University of Arkansas Press, 2017

Winner of the 2017 NASSH Book Award for best edited collection.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the twentieth century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the twelve essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.

The significance of this sporting culture is vividly showcased in the stories of the Cuban Giants baseball team, basketball’s New York Renaissance Five, the Tennessee State Tigerbelles track-and-field team, black college football’s Turkey Bowl Classic, car racing’s Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, Negro League Baseball’s East-West All-Star game, and many more. These teams, organizations, and events made up a vibrant national sporting complex that remained in existence until the integration of sports beginning in the late 1940s. Separate Games explores the fascinating ways sports helped bind the black community and illuminate race pride, business acumen, and organizational abilities.

[more]
cover of Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey

Separate Paths

Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey

Jean R. Soderlund

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Winner of the 2023 McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance

Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.
[more]
cover of Separate Societies

Separate Societies

William Goldsmith

Temple University Press, 1992

Paul Davidoff Award, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, 1993 "A passionately argued, provocative book that takes us back to the long neglected emphasis on the cities that was so distinctive a part of the original War On Poverty. But now, at issue is the city of the 21st century." --Eugene Smolensky "Economic and political forces no longer combat poverty--they generate poverty!" exclaim William Goldsmith and Edward Blakely in their report on the plight of American's urban poor. Focusing on the reality of separation--social segmentation, economic inequality, and geographic isolation--the authors examine the presence and persistence of urban poverty, the transformation of national industry into a global economy, and the dilemmas of local reform. Goldsmith and Blakely document the appalling conditions of poor and minority people in central cities, examining those conditions in relation to inequalities in the national distributions of income and wealth. They analyze the connections between the structure and movement of the new global economy and the problems of the poorest Americans. They demonstrate how globalized markets and production arrangements have worsened the opportunities facing most American cities and workers. Noting that neither economic growth nor public subsidy has solved the problems of the poor, Goldsmith and Blakely propose that the very separation that exacerbates poverty be used to motive restructure. The authors maintain that when those in power locally respond to the pressure exerted by those suffering from inequality and isolation, community-level institutions will be restructured. These multi-local coalitions of small businesses and neighborhood organizations need to press for reallocation of federal resources in favor of domestic needs and redirection of the national economic favor of workers and common citizens. "This is a major work that will influence debate on the issue of American urban poverty into the next century. The authors argue that the recent upsurge in urban poverty has been generated by a particular set of American political responses to changes in the international and national economies, exacerbated by a long process of federally subsidized suburbanization and by racial discrimination. The difference [from Wilson's the Truly Disadvantaged] is that Goldsmith and Blakely's policy recommendations are more comprehensive and have a greater focus on strategies 'from the bottom up.'" --Joe T. Darden, Dean of Urban Affairs Programs, Michigan State University "Goldsmith and Blakely present a vivid, factually accurate account of the post-1970s rise in inequality, underemployment, poverty, and collapsing societal infrastructures. Having outlined the dimensions of national disaster, they do not give up hope. Rather, they advocate the improved industrial policy, expanded opportunity for education, and increased family support.... Their provocative optimism, although guarded, is a refreshing challenge, much needed in this period of pessimism and cynicism." --Robin M. Williams, Jr., Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science, Emeritus, Cornell University
[more]
cover of Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities

Separate Societies

Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities

Authored by William W. Goldsmith and Edward J. Blakely with a foreword by President Bill Clinton

Temple University Press, 2010

“Economic and political forces no longer combat poverty—they generate poverty!" exclaim William Goldsmith and Edward Blakely in their report on the plight of American's urban poor. In this revised and updated edition of their 1992 book Separate Societies,the authors present a compelling examination of the damaging divisions that isolate poor city minority residents from the middle-class suburban majority. They pay special attention to how the needs of the permanently poor have been unmet through the alternating years of promises and neglect, and propose a progressive turn away from 30 years of conservative policies.

Separate Societies vividly documents how the urban working class has been pushed out of industrial jobs through global economic restructuring, and how the Wall Street meltdown has aggravated underemployment, depleted public services, and sharpened racial and class inequalities.

The authors insist that the current U.S. approach puts Americans out of work and lowers the standard of living for all. As such, Goldsmith and Blakely urge the Obama administration to create better urban policy and foster better metropolitan management to effectively and efficiently promote equality.

[more]
cover of Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930

Separate Spheres No More

Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930

Monika Elbert

University of Alabama Press, 2000

Examines the intersection of male and female spheres in American literature

Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.

While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.

Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.

 

[more]
cover of Separating Church and State: ROGER WILLIAMS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Separating Church and State

ROGER WILLIAMS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Timothy L. Hall

University of Illinois Press, 1998

      Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island, is famous as an
        apostle of religious tolerance and a foe of religious establishments.
      In Separating Church and State, Timothy Hall combines impressive
        historical and legal scholarship to explore Williams's theory of religious
        liberty and relate it to current debate. Williams's fierce religious dogmaticism,
        Hall argues, is precisely what led to his religious tolerance, making
        him one of the most articulate champions of the argument for the necessary
        separation of church and state.
      "Both timely and provocative. . . . Offers Williams's largely overlooked
        but deeply important perspective on the peaceful coexistence of committed
        believers of diverse faiths. The book also brings into question crucial
        tenets of the United States Supreme Court's First Amendment religion clause
        jurisprudence at a time when many are raising questions about it."
        -- Marci A. Hamilton, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York City
      "Hall has the entire Williams corpus under his command, and he plays
        the relevant texts like a master organist. He also has the legal corpus
        equally at his fingertips. One of the great strengths of his book is that
        it bridges the too often separate fields of history and jurisprudence."
        -- Edwin Gaustad, author of Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in
        America
 
 
[more]
cover of Separation of Church and State in the United States

Separation of Church and State in the United States

Alvin W. Johnson and Frank H. Yost

University of Minnesota Press, 1948

Separation of Church and State in the United States was first published in 1948. 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.

This book is more than a revised and enlarged edition of Dr. Johnson's Legal Status of Church-State Relationships in the United States. Besides rewriting and bringing up to date much of the original material, the authors have added a number of chapters dealing with subjects that have gained prominence in recent years: citizenship and the bearing of arms, saluting the flag, distribution of religious literature, and freedom of speech for Communists. Such recent cases as the Supreme Court decision in McCollum v. Board of Education—better known as the Champaign, Illinois, case—are discussed in some detail.

School administrators will find the book of great practical value, for it deals predominantly with church-state relationships in the public schools, one of the chief areas of conflict. These conflicts include such questions as Bible readings and religious instruction in the public schools, dismissed and released time for religious education, the allowing of credit for religious instruction, public aid to sectarian schools, the wearing of religious garb, furnishing free textbooks and transportation for students in parochial schools.

[more]
cover of September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment?

September 11 in History

A Watershed Moment?

Mary L. Dudziak, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

Hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the idea that the September 11 attacks had “changed everything” permeated American popular and political discussion. In the period since then, the events of September 11 have been used to justify profound changes in U.S. public policy and foreign relations. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, literature, and Islam, September 11 in History asks whether the attacks and their aftermath truly marked a transition in U.S. and world history or whether they are best understood in the context of pre-existing historical trajectories.

From a variety of perspectives, the contributors to this collection scrutinize claims about September 11, in terms of both their historical validity and their consequences. Essays range from an analysis of terms like “ground zero,” “homeland,” and “the axis of evil” to an argument that the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay has become a site for acting out a repressed imperial history. Examining the effect of the attacks on Islamic self-identity, one contributor argues that Osama bin Laden enacted an interpretation of Islam on September 11 and asserts that progressive Muslims must respond to it. Other essays focus on the deployment of Orientalist tropes in categorizations of those who “look Middle Eastern,” the blurring of domestic and international law evident in a number of legal developments including the use of military tribunals to prosecute suspected terrorists, and the justifications for and consequences of American unilateralism. This collectionultimately reveals that everything did not change on September 11, 2001, but that some foundations of democratic legitimacy have been significantly eroded by claims that it did.

Contributors. Khaled Abou el Fadl, Mary L. Dudziak, Christopher L. Eisgruber, Laurence R. Helfer, Sherman A. Jackson, Amy B. Kaplan, Elaine Tyler May, Lawrence G. Sager, Ruti G. Teitel, Leti Volpp, Marilyn B. Young

[more]
cover of Serbians in Michigan

Serbians in Michigan

Paul Lubotina

Michigan State University Press, 2014

Fighting, nationalism, and religion influenced Serbian migration to America in three distinct waves during the twentieth century, first following the Balkan Wars, again after the Second World War, and most recently, following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Serbians in Michigan examines the lives of Serbian immigrants from lowland areas of the Balkans and the distinct highland culture of Montenegro. The work provides cultural background to Serbian society that serves as a benchmark to compare the changes that occurred among the population after arriving in Michigan. The book also functions as an informational how-to guide for individuals of Serbian descent who are interested in learning more about their ancestors. Lubotina provides key words, phrases, and recipes that allow readers to sample aspects of Serbian culture from the comfort of their homes. Additionally, the book explores the nature of a split between conservative and liberal factions in Serbian-American communities. However, a key theme in the book is how the Serbian Orthodox Church has maintained Serbian heritage and nationalism through several generations in America.
[more]
cover of Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History

Service Denied

Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History

Edited by John M. Kinder and Jason A. Higgins

University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans—women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, “bad paper” discharges, or criminal records—have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits.

Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service. Together, the chapters in this collection recast veterans beyond the archetype, inspiring an innovative model for veterans studies that encourages an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis of veterans history. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Barbara Gannon, Robert Jefferson, Evan P. Sullivan, Steven Rosales, Heather Marie Stur, Juan Coronado, Kara Dixon Vuic, John Worsencroft, and David Kieran.

[more]
cover of Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea

Service Economies

Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea

Jin-kyung Lee

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Service Economies presents an alternative narrative of South Korean modernity by examining how working-class labor occupies a central space in linking the United States and Asia to South Korea's changing global position from a U.S. neocolony to a subempire.

Making surprising and revelatory connections, Jin-kyung Lee analyzes South Korean military labor in the Vietnam War, domestic female sex workers, South Korean prostitution for U.S. troops, and immigrant/migrant labor from Asia in contemporary South Korea. Foregrounding gender, sexuality, and race, Lee reimagines the South Korean economic "miracle" as a global and regional articulation of industrial, military, and sexual proletarianization.

Lee not only addresses these under-studied labors individually but also integrates and unites them to reveal an alternative narrative of a changing South Korean working class whose heterogeneity is manifested in its objectification. Delving into literary and popular cultural sources as well as sociological work, Lee locates South Korean development in its military and economic interactions with the United States and other Asian nation-states, offering a unique perspective on how these practices have shaped and impacted U.S.-South Korea relations.
[more]
cover of Service as Mandate: How American Land-Grant Universities Shaped the Modern World, 1920–2015

Service as Mandate

How American Land-Grant Universities Shaped the Modern World, 1920–2015

Edited by Alan I Marcus

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Established by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, America’s land-grant universities have had far-reaching influences on the United States and the world. Service as Mandate, Alan I Marcus’s second edited collection of insightful essays about land-grant universities, explores how these universities have adapted to meet the challenges of the past sixty-five years and how, having done so, they have helped to create the modern world.
 
From their founding, land-grant schools have provided educational opportunities to millions, producing many of the nation’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders and spawning countless technological and agricultural innovations. Nevertheless, their history has not always been smooth or without controversy or setbacks. These vital centers of learning and research have in fact been redefined and reconceptualized many times and today bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations.
 
The thirteen essays in this collection explore such themes as the emphasis on food science and home economics, the country life movement, the evolution of a public research system, the rise of aerospace engineering, the effects of the GI Bill, the teaching of military science, the sustainable agriculture movement, and the development of golf-turf science. Woven together, these expertly curated scenes, vignettes, and episodes powerfully illustrate these institutions’ ability to flex and adapt to serve the educational needs of an ever-changing American citizenry.
 
By dint of their mission to remedy social, economic, and technical problems; to improve standards of living; and to enhance the quality of life, land-grant universities are destined and intended to be agents of change—a role that finds them at times both celebrated and hotly contested, even vilified. A readable and fascinating exploration of land-grant universities, Service as Mandate offers a vital exploration of these dynamic institutions to educators, policy makers, students, and the wider communities that land-grant universities serve.
[more]
cover of Service in a Time of Suspicion: Experiences of Muslims Serving in the U.S. Military Post-9/11

Service in a Time of Suspicion

Experiences of Muslims Serving in the U.S. Military Post-9/11

Michelle Sandhoff

University of Iowa Press, 2017

On September 11, 2001, nineteen members of the Islamist extremist organization al-Qaeda launched four coordinated attacks on the United States, killing 2,977 people. These events and the government’s subsequent “War on Terror” refueled long-standing negative stereotypes about Muslims and Islam among many Americans. And yet thousands of practicing Muslims continued to serve or chose to enlist in the U.S. military during these years.

In Service in a Time of Suspicion, fifteen such service members talk about what it means to be Muslim, American, and a uniformed member of the armed services in the twenty-first century. These honest accounts remind us of our shared humanity. 
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cover of Serving At-Risk Teens: Proven Strategies and Programs for Bridging the Gap

Serving At-Risk Teens

Proven Strategies and Programs for Bridging the Gap

Angela Craig

American Library Association, 2013

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cover of Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II

Serving Our Country

Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II

Moore, Brenda L

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war on Japan, the U.S. War Department allowed up to five hundred second-generation, or "Nisei," Japanese American women to enlist in the Women's Army Corps and, in smaller numbers, in the Army Medical Corps.

Through in-depth interviews with surviving Nisei women who served, Brenda L. Moore provides fascinating firsthand accounts of their experiences. Interested primarily in shedding light on the experiences of Nisei women during the war, the author argues for the relevance of these experiences to larger questions of American race relations and views on gender and their intersections, particularly in the country's highly charged wartime atmosphere. Uncovering a page in American history that has been obscured, Moore adds nuance to our understanding of the situation of Japanese Americans during the war.

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cover of Serving Patrons with Disabilities: Perspectives and Insights from People with Disabilities

Serving Patrons with Disabilities

Perspectives and Insights from People with Disabilities

Edited by Kodi Laskin

American Library Association, 2023

Ensuring accessibility is more important than ever; however, answering questions of what needs to be done and why to make a library accessible can be an uncomfortable and daunting hurdle to true inclusion. This book is a safe, nonjudgmental tool for overcoming this awkwardness, offering readers practical, to-the-point information and guidance that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Its contributors showcase real-world stories and viewpoints that illustrate ways to provide excellent customer service and a safe environment to all patrons regardless of ability. Readers will learn about
  • bridging the gap between people with disabilities and those without, through empathy, patience, and understanding;
  • techniques for training staff and overcoming discomfort;
  • making your library accessible for people with mobility issues;
  • how to interact with and assist a person with limited sight or hearing;
  • guidance for interacting with a service animal handler;
  • advice on library programming for people with learning differences; and
  • best practices for effective service to patrons who use a speech assistance device.
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cover of Sesame Street Revisited

Sesame Street Revisited

Thomas D. Cook

Russell Sage Foundation, 1975

In the course of its television lifetime, "Sesame Street" has taught alphabet-related skills to hundreds of thousands of preschool children. But the program may have attracted more of its regular viewers from relatively affluent homes in which the parents were better educated. Analyzing and reevaluating data drawn from several sources, principally the Educational Testing Service's evaluations of "Sesame Street," the authors of this book open fresh lines of inquiry into how much economically disadvantaged children learned from viewing the series for six months and into whether the program is widening the gap that separates the academic achievement of disadvantaged preschoolers from that of their more affluent counterparts.  The authors define as acute dilemma currently facing educational policymakers: what positive results are achieved when a large number of children learn some skills at a younger age if this absolute increase in knowledge is associated with an increase in the difference between social groups?  
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