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On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

A revealing legal journey through Alabama’s civil rights battles, exposing systemic discrimination and the enduring fight for justice via landmark Supreme Court cases

State of Segregation: America’s Freedom Rights Struggles, as Told by Alabama by Mark J. Tenhundfeld offers a compelling exploration of Alabama’s civil rights and civil liberties history through the lens of thirty-two pivotal US Supreme Court cases. Each case, rooted in Alabama’s social and legal conflicts, reveals the persistent struggle to fulfill the Constitution’s promises of equal protection and due process. From early twentieth-century challenges to the Alabama Constitution of 1901 to contemporary battles over gerrymandering, Tenhundfeld traces how discrimination was embedded in the state’s institutions—and how it was contested.

State of Segregation uniquely blends legal analysis, historical narrative, and social commentary to expose the deep-rooted systems of racial, gender, and class-based discrimination in Alabama. Tenhundfeld argues that while discrimination is the most defining feature of Alabama’s past, it remains the most difficult to confront. By illuminating the legal strategies used to uphold and dismantle injustice, State of Segregation contributes to the broader understanding of how historical inequities continue to shape modern society.

Accessible to general readers and scholars alike, this work stands apart by combining Alabama history, civil rights struggles, and Supreme Court jurisprudence into a single, powerful narrative. It offers both cautionary tales about the fragility of freedom and enduring lessons for today’s social justice advocates.

A pathbreaking new genealogy of statelessness

Just as the modern state and the citizenship associated with it are commonly thought of as a European invention, so too is citizenship’s negation in the form of twentieth-century diaspora and statelessness. Statelessness sets forth a new genealogy, suggesting that Europe first encountered mass statelessness neither inside its own borders nor during the twentieth century, as Hannah Arendt so influentially claimed, but outside of itself—in the New World, several hundred years earlier.

Through close readings of political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau to Kant, Tony C. Brown argues that statelessness became a central problem for political thought early on, with far-reaching implications for thinking both on the state and on being human. What Europeans thought they saw among the “savages” of the Americas was life without political order, life less than human. Lacking almost everything those deemed clearly human had achieved, the stateless existed in a radically precarious, almost inhuman privation.

And yet this existence also raised the unsettling possibility that state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal.  This possibility, as Brown shows, prompts the response—as defensive as it was aggressive—that we call Enlightenment political philosophy, which arguably still orders much thinking on being stateless today, including our discourses concerning migrants and Indigenous peoples.

The cultural reverberations of Central America’s failed revolutions on US intellectual thought

The thwarted Central American revolutions during the latter half of the twentieth century marked a watershed in what had become a global anti-imperialist movement striving for a more egalitarian future. Examining a range of documentary, literary, and artistic works, States of Defeat looks at how left-wing intellectuals in the United States reckoned with the fallout from these defeats through wide-ranging creative expressions of indignation, cynicism, and grief.

As he argues for the historical significance of Central America in the transition out of the Cold War, Eric A. Vázquez shows how the unfulfilled revolutionary ambitions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala prompted intellectuals in the United States to reexamine their desires for radical transformation. Analyzing novels, memoirs, anthropological writings, documentary film, and archival materials from the 1980s and 1990s, he demonstrates how these texts prefigured later anxieties about secrecy and securitization, the rise of nongovernmental organizational forms, and state failure.

Examining the legacies of unfulfilled anti-imperialist political ideals and their implications for the global left in the twenty-first century, States of Defeat offers a renewed perspective on the function of Central America in the US imagination. Amid a resurgence of crackdowns on public protest and a rise in virulent anti-immigrant campaigns throughout the United States and globally, Vázquez presents urgent and valuable insights into the viability of political solidarity and state power.

A long-overdue guide on how to use statistics to bring clarity, not confusion, to policy work.

Statistics are an essential tool for making, evaluating, and improving public policy. Statistics for Public Policy is a crash course in wielding these unruly tools to bring maximum clarity to policy work. Former White House economist Jeremy G. Weber offers an accessible voice of experience for the challenges of this work, focusing on seven core practices: 

• Thinking big-picture about the role of data in decisions
• Critically engaging with data by focusing on its origins, purpose, and generalizability
• Understanding the strengths and limits of the simple statistics that dominate most policy discussions
• Developing reasons for considering a number to be practically small or large  
• Distinguishing correlation from causation and minor causes from major causes
• Communicating statistics so that they are seen, understood, and believed
• Maintaining credibility by being right (or at least respectably wrong) in every setting

The U.S. Supreme Court increasingly matters in American political life when those across the political spectrum look at the Court for relief from policies they oppose and as another venue for advancing their own policy agendas. However, the evidence is mounting, to include this book in a big way, that courts are more of a sideshow to the culture war. While court decisions, especially Supreme Court decisions, do have importance, the decisions emanating from the Court reflect social, cultural, and political change that occurred long prior to their decision ever being made.

This book tests how much political and social change has been made primarily through Gerald Rosenberg’s framework from his seminal work, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change, but it also utilizes Daniel Elazar’s Political Culture Theory to explain state level variations in political and social change. The findings indicate that while courts are not powerless institutions, reformers will not have success unless supported by the public and the elected branches, and most specifically, that preexisting state culture is a determining factor in the amount of change courts make. In short, federalism still matters.

With the dual and often conflicting responsibilities of deterring illegal immigration and providing services to legal immigrants, the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is a bureaucracy beset with contradictions. Critics fault the agency for failing to stop the entry of undocumented workers from Mexico. Agency staff complain that harsh enforcement policies discourage legal immigrants from seeking INS aid, while ever-changing policy mandates from Congress and a lack of funding hinder both enforcement and service activities.

In this book, Lisa Magaña convincingly argues that a profound disconnection between national-level policymaking and local-level policy implementation prevents the INS from effectively fulfilling either its enforcement or its service mission. She begins with a history and analysis of the making of immigration policy which reveals that federal and state lawmakers respond more to the concerns, fears, and prejudices of the public than to the realities of immigration or the needs of the INS. She then illustrates the effects of shifting and conflicting mandates through case studies of INS implementation of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Proposition 187, and the 1996 Welfare Reform and Responsibility Act and their impact on Mexican immigrants. Magaña concludes with fact-based recommendations to improve the agency's performance.

How did the US become a world power? How did it become involved in the Middle East? What is the history and nature of its 'special relationship' with Israel?

Given the increase in tensions in the Middle East, and the United States' involvement in them, news coverage is in abundance. Yet, the reportage and discussion of American foreign policy is often narrow in scope, offering little background or context. The subject is routinely treated with the vocabulary provided by government officials, presenting best intentions while conceding occasional mistakes and unfortunate incidents. As Gregory Harms demonstrates in Straight Power Concepts, the historical record bears out a different vocabulary and tells a story that sharply contrasts with the common assumptions.

In this brief and accessible account, the reader is guided through the panoramic sweep of world and American history, reviewing how the US became a world power, how the Middle East became 'modern' and how Israel became an American 'strategic asset.' In so doing, the book provides a broad frame of reference, illustrating that recent developments are closer to business-as-usual and nothing resembling the rhetoric commonly used by heads of state, press secretaries, news media, and commentators.

As in his highly successful book The Palestine-Israel Conflict, Harms makes complex subjects accessible to everyone, without sacrificing analytical rigour. This book should be the first port of call for students and anyone seeking clarity and a historical elucidation of current events involving the United States, Israel, and the Middle East.

Street Fight is muscularly reported journalism trained on the people and events that shaped Sesame Street from the 1990s to the present. Expanding from Street Gang, Michael Davis’s acclaimed origin story of the series, this revelatory new book probes deeply into the decisions made by Sesame Workshop, the New York-based corporate non-profit that has weathered political and financial storms, all while upholding aspirational values instilled in the late-1960s. 

Hundreds of eyewitnesses provide on-the-record recollections of the show’s evolution in the narrative and a series of chapter-ending oral histories.

Interwoven are passages of time-tested alliances, courtships and marriages, the back stories of the artists who provided the show’s melodies and lyrics. That, plus plenty of dish about the performers behind Muppets of Sesame Street, and how Jim Henson, decades after his shocking passing in 1990, is a spectral figure quite powerful in spirit.

Laughter and tears – in equal measure – await readers.
 

Faced with intolerable congestion and noxious pollution, cities around the world are rethinking their reliance on automobiles. In the United States a loosely organized livability movement seeks to reduce car use by reconfiguring urban space into denser, transit-oriented, walkable forms, a development pattern also associated with smart growth and new urbanism. Through a detailed case study of San Francisco, Jason Henderson examines how this is not just a struggle over what type of transportation is best for the city, but a series of ideologically charged political fights over issues of street space, public policy, and social justice. 

Historically San Francisco has hosted many activist demonstrations over its streets, from the freeway revolts of the 1960s to the first Critical Mass bicycle rides decades later. Today the city's planning and advocacy establishment is changing zoning laws to limit the number of parking spaces, encouraging new car-free housing near transit stations, and applying “transit first” policies, such as restricted bus lanes. Yet Henderson warns that the city's accomplishments should not be romanticized. Despite significant gains by livability advocates, automobiles continue to dominate the streets, and the city's financially strained bus system is slow and often unreliable. 

Both optimistic and cautionary, Henderson argues that ideology must be understood as part of the struggle for sustainable cities and that three competing points of view—progressive, neoliberal, and conservative—have come to dominate the contemporary discourse about urban mobility. Consistent with its iconic role as an incubator of environmental, labor, civil rights, and peace movements, San Francisco offers a compelling example of how the debate over sustainable urban transportation may unfold both in the United States and globally.