2916 books match the query 'Politics and government' and 650 start with t

cover of The Disappearing South?: Studies in Regional Change and Continuity

The Disappearing South?

Studies in Regional Change and Continuity

Robert P. Steed

University of Alabama Press, 1990

There is widespread agreement that the South has changed dramatically since the end of World War II—the essays in The Disappearing South address the ongoing debate

There is widespread agreement that the South has changed dramatically since the end of World War II. Social, demographic, economic, and political changes have altered significantly the region long considered the nation’s most distinctive. There is less agreement, however, about the extent to which the forces of nationalization have eroded the major elements of Southern distinctiveness. Although this volume does not purport to settle the debate on Southern political change, it does present a variety of recent evidence that helps put this important debate into perspective. In the process it helps clarify the contemporary politics of the South for readers ranging from the scholar to the more casual observer.

The essays in The Disappearing South address the ongoing debate. Contributors, in addition to the editors, include E. Lee Bernick, Earl Black, Merle Black, Lewis Bowman, Edward G. Carmines, Patrick Cotter, Thomas Eamon, Douglas G. Feig, John C. Green, James L. Guth, William E. Hulbary, Anne E. Kelley, Lyman A. Kellstedt, David M. Olson, John Shelton Reed, Harold Stanley, James G. Stovall, John Theilmann, Stephen H. Wainscott, and Allen Wilhite.

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cover of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe

The Disciplinary Revolution

Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe

Philip S. Gorski

University of Chicago Press, 2003

What explains the rapid growth of state power in early modern Europe? While most scholars have pointed to the impact of military or capitalist revolutions, Philip S. Gorski argues instead for the importance of a disciplinary revolution unleashed by the Reformation. By refining and diffusing a variety of disciplinary techniques and strategies, such as communal surveillance, control through incarceration, and bureaucratic office-holding, Calvin and his followers created an infrastructure of religious governance and social control that served as a model for the rest of Europe—and the world.
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cover of The Division of Europe after World War II: 1946

The Division of Europe after World War II

1946

By W. W. Rostow

University of Texas Press, 1981

Should the negotiation of the post–World War II peace treaties in Europe have been pursued separately or should they have been approached within the framework of a general European settlement? The debate on this fundamental foreign policy issue, which has left only faint tracks in the documentary record, is fully explored here for the first time.

W. W. Rostow, in his second book in the Ideas and Action Series, describes a meeting that took place on the eve of the departure of Secretary of State James Byrnes for Paris to participate in treaty negotiations. The meeting was probably the only occasion during 1946 when the peace treaty issue as a whole was explicitly addressed at a high level with lucid alternatives on the table. The plan laid before Secretary of State Byrnes by his senior subordinates, Under Secretary Dean Acheson and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton, aimed to halt the movement toward the split of Europe and the emergence of hostile blocs. It outlined an all-European settlement, including economic and security institutions linked to the United Nations. Only one part of the proposal gained Byrnes's support and came to life: the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. But the Acheson-Clayton proposal foreshadowed the Marshall Plan.

The book's larger theme is the process by which the Cold War came about. Rostow's interpretation differs from either conventional or revisionist views, emphasizing as it does the process of incremental deterioration that occurred in 1946 and the role of uncertainty and weakness in American policy.

This second volume in the Ideas and Action Series will interest general readers as well as those with a particular interest in World War II. It should be of special value to political scientists, economists, military historians, and policy makers, and may serve as a case study in a variety of courses.

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cover of The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity

The Dream of Absolutism

Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity

Hall Bjørnstad

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The Dream of Absolutism examines the political aesthetics of power under Louis XIV.

What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do?
 
In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV’s reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjørnstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun’s famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king’s secret Mémoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjørnstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.
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cover of The Dynamics of European Integration: Causes and Consequences of Institutional Choices

The Dynamics of European Integration

Causes and Consequences of Institutional Choices

Thomas König

University of Michigan Press, 2024

In Europe’s recent history, there have been several challenges to the strength of the European Union—Brexit, COVID, financial crises, and global tensions—bringing an increased need to understand the ways that the European Union (EU) could successfully stay together or fall apart. In examining how the European Union has changed since 1993, important puzzles have emerged, including how national government functions are transferred to the EU without reforming the EU, how increased transparency is announced while decisions are approved in informal meetings, and how the effects of the polarizing rise of Euroscepticism can be managed to still promote the formation of solidarity and trust among Europeans. To understand these puzzles, Thomas König introduces a new theory of (supra)national partyism to help explain the causes and consequences of choices made by political leaders for Europe. He uses a game-theoretical perspective to look at how conditions for leaders change through accessions of new members, shocks, and crises, and separates institutional choices into two different games played by office- and policy-seeking political leaders—the interstate summit game and the national game of party competition. The Dynamics of European Integration reveals how the reorganization of electoral systems can harness dissensus and polarization among diverse national constituencies to enable the promotion of solidarity and trust in the EU.
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cover of The Eagle Has Eyes: The FBI Surveillance of César Estrada Chávez of the United Farm Workers Union of America, 1965–1975

The Eagle Has Eyes

The FBI Surveillance of César Estrada Chávez of the United Farm Workers Union of America, 1965–1975

José Angel Gutiérrez

Michigan State University Press, 2019

This book is the first of its kind to bring transparency to the FBI’s attempts to destroy the incipient Chicano Movement of the 1960s. While the activities of the deep state are current research topics, this has not always been the case. The role of the U.S. government in suppressing marginalized racial and ethnic minorities began to be documented with the advent of the Freedom of Information Act and most recently by disclosures of whistle blowers. This book utilizes declassified files from the FBI to investigate the agency’s role in thwarting Cesar E. Chavez’s efforts to build a labor union for farm workers and documents the roles of the FBI, California state police, and local police in assisting those who opposed Chavez. Ultimately, The Eagle Has Eyes is a must-read for academics and activists alike.
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cover of The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination

The East Is Black

Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination

Robeson Taj Frazier

Duke University Press, 2015

During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.
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cover of The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo

The Edge of the Law

Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo

Jacinto Cuvi

University of Chicago Press, 2025

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.
 
With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.
 
In The Edge of the Law, sociologist Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.
 
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cover of The Education of Ernie Dumas: Chronicles of the Arkansas Political Mind

The Education of Ernie Dumas

Chronicles of the Arkansas Political Mind

Ernest Dumas

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2019

Like The Education of Henry Adams, the early twentieth-century classic from which this book derives its name, Adams described the ascent, or descent, of a postwar social and political order into something that a few people called modernity. But Dumas follows this evolution, not in the United States as Adams did, but in insular Arkansas.

Beginning with the defeat of Governor Francis Cherry by the son of a hillbilly socialist at the end of the Joe McCarthy era, Dumas traces the development of a modernist political cast that eventually produced Arkansas’s first president of the United States. It follows the seed from 1978 that would germinate into the second impeachment of an American president.

Dumas has written for newspapers and about politics for sixty-three years, since 1954, the year that the stolid Cherry fell to Orval Eugene Faubus. The book is a political memoir that describes not only his education in the ways of politicians but the politicians’ own education and miseducation in how you win voters and then how you get things done.

It is mostly a collection of untold stories, often deeply personal, that reveal the inner struggles and sometimes the tribulations of the state’s leaders—Cherry, Faubus, Winthrop Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, John McClellan, J. William Fulbright, Bill Clinton, Jim Guy Tucker, and others.
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cover of The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom

The Emancipation Circuit

Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom

Thulani Davis

Duke University Press, 2022

In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.
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cover of The Emergence of a New Turkey: Islam, Democracy, and the AK Parti

The Emergence of a New Turkey

Islam, Democracy, and the AK Parti

Yavuz, M. Hakan

University of Utah Press, 2006

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

The start of accession talks between Turkey and the European Union presents an important challenge for Europe and the Muslim world. Although Turkey has often been cited as a model for the accommodation of Islam and secularism, Islam is still a profound factor in Turkish politics.

This book explores the conditions under which an Islamic movement or party ceases to be Islamic. The Emergence of a New Turkey explains the social, economic, and historical origins of the ruling Justice and Development Party, which evolved from Turkey's half-century-old Islamic National Outlook movement. It focuses on the interplay between internal and external forces in the transformation of political Islam into a conservative democratic party. The book also discusses the effect of neoliberal economic policies in Turkey, offering keen insight into one of the most successful transformations of an Islamic movement in the Muslim world.

In addition to satisfying Turkish studies specialists, this lucidly written book is also suited for use in courses on comparative politics, social movements, and Middle East history and politics.

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cover of The Emperor's Clothes: A Personal Viewpoint of Politics and Administration in the Imperial Ethiopian Government, 1941-1974

The Emperor's Clothes

A Personal Viewpoint of Politics and Administration in the Imperial Ethiopian Government, 1941-1974

Gaitachew Bekele

Michigan State University Press, 1993

. . . An engaging personal account of a public service career n the period leading to the 1974 revolution. It ...persuades and provides real insight into the genuine noblesse oblige of the first generation of technocrats drawn from the social elite of the post- war period.
-James McCann, Boston University

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cover of The End of Czechoslovakia

The End of Czechoslovakia

Jirí Musil

Central European University Press, 1995

Scholars and practitioners from both sides of the divide, Czech and Slovak, as well as international experts, take an in-depth look at the causes of Czechoslovakia's break-up, and explain why a seemingly successful country should disintegrate so quickly after the collapse of the communist regime. Besides exploring the political processes leading to the split, the authors analyse the underlying social, economic and cultural differences between the two nations and examine the historical roots of the problems. Particular attention is paid to changing Czech and Slovak attitudes towards the common state and towards each other, from the heyday of the First Republic to the disillusionment of the post-1989 period.

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cover of The End of Nomadism?: Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia

The End of Nomadism?

Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia

Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath

Duke University Press, 1999

Those who herd in the vast grassland region of Inner Asia face a precarious situation as they struggle to respond to the momentous political and economic changes of recent years. In The End of Nomadism? Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath confront the romantic, ahistorical myth of the wandering nomad by revealing the complex lives and the significant impact on Asian culture of these modern “mobile pastoralists.” In their examination of the present and future of pastoralism, the authors recount the extensive and quite sudden social, political, environmental, and economic changes of recent years that have forced these peoples to respond and evolve in order to maintain their centuries-old way of life.
Using extensive and detailed case studies comparing pastoralism in Siberian Russia, Mongolia, and Northwest China, Humphrey and Sneath explore the different paths taken by nomads in these countries in reaction to a changing world. In examining how each culture is facing not only different prospects for sustainability but also different environmental problems, the authors come to the surprising conclusion that mobility can, in fact, be compatible with a modern and urbanized world. While placing emphasis on the social and cultural traditions of Inner Asia and their fate in the post-Socialist economies of the present, The End of Nomadism? investigates the changing nature of pastoralism by focusing on key areas under environmental threat and relating the ongoing problems to distinctive socioeconomic policies and practices in Russia and China. It also provides lively contemporary commentary on current economic dilemmas by revealing in telling detail, for instance, the struggle of one extended family to make a living.
This book will interest Central Asian, Russian, and Chinese specialists, as well as those studying the environment, anthropology, sociology, peasant studies, and ecology.


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cover of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain

The End of Tolerance

Racism in 21st Century Britain

Arun Kundnani

Pluto Press, 2007

Is Britain becoming a more racist society? Arun Kundnani looks behind the media hysteria to show how multicultural Britain is under attack by government policies and vitriolic press campaigns that play upon fear and encourage racism.

Exacerbated by the attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, Kundnani argues that a new form of racism is emerging that is based on a systematic failure to understand the causes of forced migration, global terrorism and social segregation. The result is a climate of hatred, especially against Muslims and asylum seekers, and the erosion of the human rights of those whose cultures and values are perceived as 'alien'. 

Communities are more divided than ever. Yet the government presses ahead with flawed immigration and 'integration' policies and anti-terrorist legislation that creates further resentment, alienation and criminalisation. Behind it all lies a refusal to grasp the ways in which the world has been changed by neoliberal globalisation.

What can be done? This timely and precise analysis is a useful account of why racism is now thriving -- and what can be done to stop it. It will be of interest to anyone who is appalled by the current state of race relations in Britain and it should be required reading for all policy-makers.
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cover of The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line

The End of White World Supremacy

Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line

Roderick Bush

Temple University Press, 2009

The End of White World Supremacy explores a complex issue— integration of Blacks into White America—from multiple perspectives: within the United States, globally, and in the context of movements for social justice. Roderick Bush locates himself within a tradition of African American activism that goes back at least to W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, he communicates between two literatures—worldsystems analysis and radical Black social movement history—and sustains the dialogue throughout the book.

Bush explains how racial troubles in the U.S. are symptomatic of the troubled relationship between the white and dark worlds globally. Beginning with an account of white European dominance leading to capitalist dominance by White America, The End of White World Supremacy ultimately wonders whether, as Myrdal argued in the 1940s, the American creed can provide a pathway to break this historical conundrum and give birth to international social justice.

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cover of The End of the Cold War: European Unity, Socialism, and the Shift in Global Power

The End of the Cold War

European Unity, Socialism, and the Shift in Global Power

Bogdan Denitch

University of Minnesota Press, 1990

The End of the Cold War was first published in 1990. 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.

Against the backdrop of unprecedented change in the world political and social order, Bogdan Denitch charts the unique opportunities and potential pitfalls that accompany the increased economic and political integration of the European Community. Historically, any move toward unification has had broad ramifications. This, coming as it does in the wake of recent democratic upheavals in Europe, will bring to a close an entire era -- an era of a world dominated by superpowers and the cold war that defined there confrontations.

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cover of The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

The End of the Future

Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

Bartholomew Dean

Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

In The End of the Future, author Bartholomew Dean broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memory's role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of violent attempts by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA) to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin.

To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, this book relies on the written works and testimony of Sístero García Torres, an MRTA rebel commander; the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; MRTA propaganda; media accounts; and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, Indigenous notions of "justice" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal well-being, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.
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cover of The Era of Education: The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001

The Era of Education

The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001

Lawrence J. McAndrews

University of Illinois Press, 2005

This study of educational policy from Lyndon Johnson through Bill Clinton focuses on three specific issues--public school aid, non-public (especially Catholic) school aid, and school desegregation--that speak to the proper role of the federal government in education as well as to how education issues embody larger questions of opportunity, exclusion, and equality in American society. Lawrence J. McAndrews traces the evolution of policy as each president developed (or avoided developing) a stance toward these issues and discusses the repercussions and implications of policy decisions for the educational community over nearly four decades.
 
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cover of The Essential Paul Simon: Timeless Lessons for Today's Politics

The Essential Paul Simon

Timeless Lessons for Today's Politics

Edited by John S. Jackson. Foreword by David Yepsen

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

One of the most admired public figures in Illinois’s history, journalist and politician Paul Simon dedicated his life to public service for more than four decades. During his lengthy and productive career, he often used his prolific writings as tools to establish a straightforward dialogue with his constituents. In The Essential Paul Simon: Timeless Lessons for Today’s Politics, editor John S. Jackson carefully selects the best of Simon’s decades of writings, which include newspaper columns, editorials, book chapters, and newsletters—works that, while written to address the challenges of Simon’s own era, still resonate with practical wisdom today. Jackson provides an introduction to each chapter, setting Senator Simon’s work into the context of its time and emphasizing the connection to today’s continuing political questions and conflicts.  He also contributes an annotated bibliography covering all of Paul Simon’s twenty-two books which will prove to be a handy guide to Simon’s publications.

While Simon covered a broad spectrum of topics in his written works, his mission throughout the years remained the same: to urge his constituents to study and understand issues that affected their daily lives and to make the complexities of politics accessible to the average citizen. An indispensable volume for voters and politicians alike, The Essential Paul Simon compiles some of the most thought-provoking writings from one of the keenest political minds in our nation’s history. Years after their publication, Simon’s eloquent and energetic conversations continue to provide witty, informative guidance through the maze of American politics and inspire the development of spirited public discussion and debate.

Certificate of Excellence from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2013
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cover of The European Radical Left: Movements and Parties since the 1960s

The European Radical Left

Movements and Parties since the 1960s

Giorgos Charalambous

Pluto Press, 2021

Is today’s left really new? How has the European radical left evolved?

Giorgos Charalambous answers these questions by looking at three moments of rapid political change - the late 1960s to late 1970s; the turn of the millennium; and post-2008. He challenges the conventional understanding of a ‘new left’, drawing out continuities with earlier movements and parties.

Charalambous examines the ‘Long ‘68’, symbolised by the May uprisings in France, which saw the rise of new left forces and the widespread criticism by younger radical activists of traditional communist and socialist parties. He puts this side by side with the turn of the millennium when the Global Justice Movement rose to prominence and changed the face of the international left, and also the period after the financial crash of 2008 and the rise of anti-austerity politics which initiated the most recent wave of new left parties such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. 

With a unique ‘two-level’ perspective, Charalambous approaches the left through both social movements and party politics, looking at identities, rhetoric and organization, and bringing a fresh new approach to radical history, as well as assessing challenges for both activists and scholars.

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cover of The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files

The FBI in Latin America

The Ecuador Files

Marc Becker

Duke University Press, 2017

During the Second World War, the FDR administration placed the FBI in charge of political surveillance in Latin America. Through a program called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 700 agents were assigned to combat Nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The SIS’s mission, however, extended beyond countries with significant German populations or Nazi spy rings. As evidence of the SIS’s overreach, forty-five agents were dispatched to Ecuador, a country without any German espionage networks. Furthermore, by 1943, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover shifted the SIS’s focus from Nazism to communism. Marc Becker interrogates a trove of FBI documents from its Ecuador mission to uncover the history and purpose of the SIS’s intervention in Latin America and for the light they shed on leftist organizing efforts in Latin America. Ultimately, the FBI’s activities reveal the sustained nature of US imperial ambitions in the Americas.
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cover of The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru

The Fabric of Resistance

Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru

Di Hu

University of Alabama Press, 2022

Textiles as sites of power, production, and rebellion in the early modern Andes.

The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.

Hu’s case study is Pomacocha, the site of an important Spanish colonial hacienda (agricultural estate) and obraje (textile workshop). At its height, the latter had more than one hundred working families and sold textiles all over the Andes. Through analysis of this site, Hu explores three main long-term causes of rebellions against Spanish oppression. First, the Spanish colonial economy provided motivation and the social spaces for intercaste (indigenous, African, and mestizo) mixing at textile workshops. Second, new hybrid cultural practices and political solidarity arose there that facilitated the creation of new rebellious identities. Third, the maturation in the eighteenth century of popular folklore that reflected the harsh nature of Spanish labor institutions helped workers from diverse backgrounds gain a systemic understanding of exploitation.

This study provides a fresh archaeological and historical perspectives on the largest and most cosmopolitan indigenous-led rebellions of the Americas. Hu interweaves analyses of society at multiple scales including fine-grained perspectives of social networks, demography, and intimate details of material life in the textile workshop. She examines a wide range of data sources including artifacts, food remains, architectural plans, account books, censuses, court documents, contracts, maps, and land title disputes.
 

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cover of The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia

The Face of Peace

Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia

Gwen Burnyeat

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A multi-scale ethnography of government pedagogy in Colombia and its impact on peace. 

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.
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cover of The Family Firm: monarchy, mass media and the British public, 1932-53

The Family Firm

monarchy, mass media and the British public, 1932-53

Edward Owens

University of London Press, 2019

The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household’s public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V’s first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s approach to publicity. This book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty’s new media image. It argues that the monarchy’s deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War. Crucially, The Family Firm also contends that the royal household’s media strategy after 1936 helped to restore public confidence in a Crown that was severely shaken by the abdication of King Edward VIII.
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cover of The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State

The Fatal Embrace

Jews and the State

Benjamin Ginsberg

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this provocative book, Benjamin Ginsberg examines the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack throughout the history of the Diaspora, with a concentrated focus on the "special case" of America. For Ginsberg, the essential issue is not anti-Jewish feeling, but the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be used in the political arena. The Fatal Embrace identifies the political dynamics that, historically, have set the stage for the persecution of Jews.
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cover of The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial

The Fear Within

Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial

Martelle, Scott

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Sixty years ago political divisions in the United States ran even deeper than today's name-calling showdowns between the left and right. Back then, to call someone a communist was to threaten that person's career, family, freedom, and, sometimes, life itself. Hysteria about the "red menace" mushroomed as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong rose to power in China, and the atomic arms race accelerated. Spy scandals fanned the flames, and headlines warned of sleeper cells in the nation's midst--just as it does today with the "War on Terror."

In his new book, The Fear Within, Scott Martelle takes dramatic aim at one pivotal moment of that era. On the afternoon of July 20, 1948, FBI agents began rounding up twelve men in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit whom the U.S. government believed posed a grave threat to the nation--the leadership of the Communist Party-USA. After a series of delays, eleven of the twelve "top Reds" went on trial in Manhattan's Foley Square in January 1949.

The proceedings captivated the nation, but the trial quickly dissolved into farce. The eleven defendants were charged under the 1940 Smith Act with conspiring to teach the necessity of overthrowing the U.S. government based on their roles as party leaders and their distribution of books and pamphlets. In essence, they were on trial for their libraries and political beliefs, not for overt acts threatening national security. Despite the clear conflict with the First Amendment, the men were convicted and their appeals denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that gave the green light to federal persecution of Communist Party leaders--a decision the court effectively reversed six years later. But by then, the damage was done. So rancorous was the trial the presiding judge sentenced the defense attorneys to prison terms, too, chilling future defendants' access to qualified counsel.

Martelle's story is a compelling look at how American society, both general and political, reacts to stress and, incongruously, clamps down in times of crisis on the very beliefs it holds dear: the freedoms of speech and political belief. At different points in our history, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have subtly or more drastically eroded a pillar of American society for the politics of the moment. It is not surprising, then, that The Fear Within takes on added resonance in today's environment of suspicion and the decline of civil rights under the U.S. Patriot Act.

[more]
cover of The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783-1840

The Federalist Frontier

Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783-1840

Kristopher Maulden

University of Missouri Press, 2023

The Federalist Frontier traces the development of Federalist policies and the Federalist Party in the first three states of the Northwest Territory—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—from the nation’s first years until the rise of the Second Party System in the 1820s and 1830s. Relying on government records, private correspondence, and newspapers, Kristopher Maulden argues that Federalists originated many of the policies and institutions that helped the young United States government take a leading role in the American people’s expansion and settlement westward across the Appalachians. It was primarily they who placed the U.S. Army at the fore of the white westward movement, created and executed the institutions to survey and sell public lands, and advocated for transportation projects to aid commerce and further migration into the region. Ultimately, the relationship between government and settlers evolved as citizens raised their expectations of what the federal government should provide, and the region embraced transportation infrastructure and innovation in public education.
 
Historians of early American politics will have a chance to read about Federalists in the Northwest, and they will see the early American state in action in fighting Indians, shaping settler understandings of space and social advancement, and influencing political ideals among the citizens. For historians of the early American West, Maulden’s work demonstrates that the origins of state-led expansion reach much further back in time than generally understood.
[more]
cover of The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter

The Fernando Coronil Reader

The Struggle for Life Is the Matter

Fernando Coronil

Duke University Press, 2019

In The Fernando Coronil Reader Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions. Consisting of work written between 1991 and 2011, this posthumously published collection includes Coronil's landmark essays “Beyond Occidentalism” and “The Future in Question” as well as two chapters from his unfinished book manuscript, "Crude Matters." Taken together, the essays highlight his deep concern with the Global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire, and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach. Presenting a cross section of Coronil's oeuvre, this volume cements his legacy as one of the most innovative critical social thinkers of his generation.
[more]
cover of The Fires of New England: A Story of Protest and Rebellion in Antebellum America

The Fires of New England

A Story of Protest and Rebellion in Antebellum America

Eric J. Morser

University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

In the winter of 1834, twenty men convened in Keene, New Hampshire, and published a fiery address condemning their state's legal system as an abomination that threatened the legacy of the American Revolution. They attacked New Hampshire's constitution as an archaic document that undermined democracy and created a system of conniving attorneys and judges. They argued that the time was right for their neighbors to rise up and return the Granite State to the glorious pathway blazed by the nation's founders.

Few people embraced the manifesto and its radical message. Nonetheless, as Eric J. Morser illustrates in this eloquently written and deeply researched book, the address matters because it reveals how commercial, cultural, political, and social changes were remaking the lives of the men who drafted and shared it in the 1830s. Using an imaginative range of sources, Morser artfully reconstructs their moving personal tales and locates them in a grander historical context. By doing so, he demonstrates that even seemingly small stories from antebellum America can help us understand the rich complexities of the era.
[more]
cover of The First Primary: New Hampshire's Outsize Role in Presidential Nominations

The First Primary

New Hampshire's Outsize Role in Presidential Nominations

David W. Moore

University of New Hampshire Press, 2015

Since 1952, the primary election in a small, not very diverse New England state has had a disproportionate impact on the U.S. presidential nomination process and the ensuing general election. Although just a handful of delegates are at stake, the New Hampshire primary has become a massive media event and a reasonably reliable predictor of a campaign's ultimate success or failure. In The First Primary, Moore and Smith offer a comprehensive history of the state's primary, an analysis of its media coverage and impact, and a description of the New Hampshire electorate, along with a discussion of how that electorate reflects or diverges from national opinions on candidates and issues. A book for political scientists and political junkies, media and policy professionals, and all students of American government, The First Primary ably fills the gaps in our understanding of New Hampshire's outsize role in the nomination process.
[more]
cover of The First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping of the Modern Middle East

The First World War and Its Aftermath

The Shaping of the Modern Middle East

Edited by T.G. Fraser

Gingko, 2024

Gathers together leading scholars in the field to examine the impact of World War I on the Middle East, which is crucial to understanding the region’s current problems and the rise of groups like the Islamic State.

In addition to recounting the crucial international politics that drew fierce lines in the sands of the Middle East—a story of intrigue between the British, Russians, Ottomans, North Africans, Americans, and others—the contributors engage topics ranging from the war’s effects on women, the experience of the Kurds, sectarianism, the evolution of Islamism, and the importance of prominent intellectuals like Ziya Gökalp and Michel ‘Aflaq. They examine the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the exploitation of notions of Islamic unity and pan-Arabism, the influences of Woodrow Wilson and American ideals on Middle East leaders, and likewise the influence of Vladimir Lenin’s vision of a communist utopia. Altogether, they tell a story of promises made and promises broken, of the struggle between self-determination and international recognition, of centuries-old empires laying in ruin, and of the political poker of the twentieth century that carved up the region, separating communities into the artificial states we know today.   
[more]
cover of The Ford Administration and Anglo-American Relations: Re-Valuing an Interim Presidency

The Ford Administration and Anglo-American Relations

Re-Valuing an Interim Presidency

Steve Marsh, Robert M. Hendershot and Tia Culley

University of Michigan Press, 2026

In the shadow of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Gerald Ford’s presidency has long been dismissed as little more than an interim administration. Yet the administration and its British counterparts worked to manage economic crises, Cold War tensions, and international flashpoints, while also harnessing cultural diplomacy to sustain transatlantic partnership. Drawing on newly declassified archival sources and fresh historical analysis, The Ford Administration and Anglo-American Relations shows how Ford’s years in office (1974–77) were pivotal in reshaping the US–UK special relationship at a moment of global turbulence.

Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the authors examine eight dimensions of Anglo-American relations under Ford: the inheritance of transatlantic tensions from the Nixon era; cultural and societal links beyond the state; the significance of Ford’s personal diplomacy; negotiations over defense and security; transformations in international economic relations and the birth of the G6/G7; cooperation through multilateral institutions such as NATO and the UN; joint management of crises in Cyprus and Rhodesia to the sterling currency crisis; and the cultural diplomacy of the 1976 Bicentennial, when Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit symbolized renewed unity between former adversaries. By highlighting both the challenges and the resilience of Anglo-American ties, this book recasts a neglected presidency as a crucial bridge between the crises of the Nixon years and the celebrated Reagan–Thatcher era. Accessible yet deeply researched, it is a work that will appeal to anyone interested in how two nations, facing uncertainty at home and abroad, turned to multilateral cooperation, culture, and public diplomacy to navigate the upheavals of the 1970s.

[more]
cover of The Foreign and Domestic Dimensions of Modern Warfare: Vietnam, Central America, and Nuclear Strategy

The Foreign and Domestic Dimensions of Modern Warfare

Vietnam, Central America, and Nuclear Strategy

Howard Mumford Jones

University of Alabama Press, 1988

An exploration of the nuclear arms race and the dangers arising with the advent of “limited warfare”

After the development of the atomic bomb in 1945, Americans became engaged in a "new kind of war" against totalitarianism. Enemies and objectives slipped out of focus, causing political and military aims to mesh as a struggle to contain communism both at home and abroad encompassed civilians as well as soldiers. In matters relating to Vietnam, Central America, and the nuclear arms race, the domestic and foreign dimensions of each issue became inseparable. Policymakers in Washington had to formulate strategies dictated by "limited war" in their search for peace.

Contributors to this volume demonstrate the multifaceted nature of modern warfare. Robert H. Ferrell establishes the importance of studying military history in understanding the post-World War II era. On Vietnam, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., gives an intriguing argument regarding the U. S. Army; George C. Herring examines how America's decisions in 1954 assured deepened involvement; and Captain Mark Clodfelter uncovers new evidence concerning "Linebacker I." On the home front, Robert F. Burk analyzes the impact of the Cold War on the battle for racial justice; Charles DeBenedetti puts forth a challenging interpretation of the antiwar movement; and James C. Schneider provides perspective on the relationship between the Vietnam War and the Great Society. On Central America, two writers downplay communism in explaining the region's troubles. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., fits the Nicaraguan revolution in the long span of history, and Thomas M. Leonard shows how the Reagan administration forced Costa Rica to side with the United States's anti-Sandinista policy. Finally, on nuclear strategy, Donald M. Snow offers a thought-provoking assessment of the "star wars" program, and Daniel S. Papp recommends measures to promote understanding among the superpowers.

These essays demonstrate that the making of foreign policy is immensely complicated, not subject to easy solution or to simple explanation. Despite these complexities, the central objective of policymakers remained clear: to safeguard what was perceived as the national interest.

[more]
cover of The Franco Regime, 1936–1975

The Franco Regime, 1936–1975

Stanley G. Payne

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The history of modern Spain is dominated by the figure of Francisco Franco, who presided over one of the longest authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Between 1936 and the end of the regime in 1975, Franco’s Spain passed through several distinct phases of political, institutional, and economic development, moving from the original semi-fascist regime of 1936–45 to become the Catholic corporatist “organic democracy” under the monarchy from 1945 to 1957. Distinguished historian Stanley G. Payne offers deep insight into the career of this complex and formidable figure and the enormous changes that shaped Spanish history during his regime.

[more]
cover of The Free Economy and the Strong State

The Free Economy and the Strong State

Andrew Gamble

Duke University Press, 1988

A new politics emerged in the 1970s in response to the world recession, the exhaustion of Fordism (the theory, traced to Henry Ford, that well-paid industrial workers fuel continuous capitalist growth), and the breakdown of American hegemony. Thatcherism, one expression of this new politics, acquired its distinctive characteristics through the exceptional and deep-seated crisis of state authority that developed in Britain in the mid-1970s.

By 1987, the Conservatives under Thatcher's leadership had won their third successive election victory over a divided opposition and enjoyed a degree of political and ideological dominance that led many commentators to speak of the end of the socialist era and the emergence of a new consensus in Britain. A new word—Thatcherism—had entered the political lexicon. It has come to signify a broad-ranging and distinctive program aimed at promoting economic recovery through the privatization of public enterprise and restoring the authority of the state. The Free Economy and the Strong State explores the roots of Thatcherism and its relationship to the Conservative tradition, to the economic liberal ideology of the New Right, and to the "new politics" which emerged from the recession and crisis of the world order in the mid 1970s.

[more]
cover of The French Voter Decides

The French Voter Decides

Daniel Boy and Nonna Mayer, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1993

This volume presents a detailed study of the very latest research on French electoral behavior by leaders in voting scholarship. The careful and large-scale survey research on which it is based makes this study highly unusual and distinct from other, related studies. The approach and scientific standards of the study make it comparable to current efforts in the United States and Britain. The French Voter Decides therefore provides, for political scientists trained in the survey research tradition, a familiar lens through which to view French politics.   While the methodology employed is American in origin, the authors develop a distinctive model of voting adapted to the special characteristics of the French electorate. Each chapter addresses a separate aspect of the general topic, thus ensuring a comprehensive and cohesive view of electoral behavior. In particular, the contributors refute the widely held notion that somehow things have have changed dramatically in France; rather, they demonstrate the underlying stability of the French electorate.   Political scientists specializing in French politics will find much that is valuable and original in this study, while Michael S. Lewis-Beck's introduction – correlating the French approach with more familiar American models – will provide essential background for nonspecialists. Clear and accessibly presented data analyses make this volume ideal for students at the graduate as well as the undergraduate level.
[more]
cover of The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War: EISENHOWER & COLD WAR

The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War

EISENHOWER & COLD WAR

David L. Snead

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

[more]
cover of The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine

The Gambler King of Clark Street

Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine

Richard C. Lindberg with a Foreword by John Miya.

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

The Gambler King of Clark Street tells the story of a larger-than-life figure who fused Chicago’s criminal underworld with the city’s political and commercial spheres to create an urban machine built on graft, bribery, and intimidation. Lindberg vividly paints the life of the Democratic kingmaker against the wider backdrop of nineteenth-century Chicago crime and politics.

McDonald has long been cited in the published work of city historians, members of academia, and the press as the principal architect of a unified criminal enterprise that reached into the corridors of power in Chicago, Cook County, the state of Illinois, and ultimately the Oval Office. The Gambler King of Clark Street is both a major addition to Chicago’s historical literature and a revealing biography of a powerful and troubled man.

Illinois State Historical Society Scholarly Award, Certificate of Excellence, 2009
Society of Midland Authors Biography Award, 2009

[more]
cover of The Gay Place

The Gay Place

By Billy Lee Brammer

University of Texas Press, 1995

Set in Texas, The Gay Place consists of three interlocking novels, each with a different protagonist—a member of the state legislature, the state's junior senator, and the governor's press secretary. The governor himself, Arthur Fenstemaker, a master politician, infinitely canny and seductive, remains the dominant figure throughout.

Billy Lee Brammer—who served on Lyndon Johnson's staff—gives us here "the excitement of a political carnival: the sideshows, the freaks, and the ghoulish comedy atmosphere" (Saturday Review).

Originally published in 1961, The Gay Place is at once a cult classic and a major American novel.

[more]
cover of The Genius of American Politics

The Genius of American Politics

Daniel J. Boorstin

University of Chicago Press, 1958

How much of our political tradition can be absorbed and used by other peoples? Daniel Boorstin's answer to this question has been chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for representation in American Panorama as one of the 350 books, old and new, most descriptive of life in the United States. He describes the uniqueness of American thought and explains, after a close look at the American past, why we have not produced and are not likely to produce grand political theories or successful propaganda. He also suggests what our attitudes must be toward ourselves and other countries if we are to preserve our institutions and help others to improve theirs.

". . . a fresh and, on the whole, valid interpretation of American political life."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New Leader
[more]
cover of The Gentleman from Illinois: Stories from Forty Years of Elective Public Service

The Gentleman from Illinois

Stories from Forty Years of Elective Public Service

Alan J. Dixon

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

In 1993, Alan J. Dixon’s political career came to an end with a defeat—the first one in his forty-three years of elected service. Beginning his legislative career in 1950 as a Democrat in the Illinois House of Representatives, Dixon also served in the Illinois State Senate, worked as state treasurer and secretary of state, and concluded his political career as a U.S. senator. The Gentleman from Illinois is an insider’s account of Illinois politics in the second half of the twentieth century, providing readers with fascinating stories about the people he encountered and events he participated in and witnessed during his four decades of service.
 
With a degree of candor often unheard of in political memoirs, The Gentleman from Illinois reveals Dixon’s abilities as a storyteller. At times chatty and self-effacing, Dixon pulls no punches when it comes to detailing the personalities of major political figures—such as Mayor Richard J. Daley, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Simon, and presidents of the United States. Indeed, he uses this same honest approach when examining himself, fully describing the setbacks and embarrassing moments that peppered his own life.
 
As a moderate Democrat who regularly crossed party lines in his voting and his views, Dixon also shares his thoughts on the proper way to run a government, the difficulties of passing legislation, the balancing act required to be a statewide official, and other valuable observations on local, state, and national politics. Full of behind-the-scenes insights presented in 121 short vignettes, The Gentleman from Illinois entertains as much as it informs, making it a necessary book for everyone interested in Illinois politics.
[more]
cover of The Gentleman from Ohio

The Gentleman from Ohio

Louis Stokes with David Chanoff with a foreword by Congressman John Lewis

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

Louis Stokes was a giant in Ohio politics and one of the most significant figures in the U.S. Congress in recent times. When he arrived in the House of Representatives as a freshman in 1969, there were only six African Americans serving. By the time he retired thirty years later, he had chaired the House Special Committee on the Kennedy and King assassinations, the House Ethics Committee during Abscam, and the House Intelligence Committee during Iran-Contra; he was also a senior member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
 
Prior to Louis Stokes’s tenure in Congress he served for many years as a criminal defense lawyer and chairman of the Cleveland NAACP Legal Redress Committee. Among the Supreme Court Cases he argued, the Terry “Stop and Frisk” case is regarded as one of the twenty-five most significant cases in the court’s history. The Gentleman from Ohio chronicles this and other momentous events in the life and legacy of Ohio’s first black representative—a man who, whether in law or politics, continually fought for the principles he believed in and helped lead the way for African Americans in the world of mainstream American politics.
 
[more]
cover of The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

The Georgia of the North

Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams

Rutgers University Press, 2024

The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question:  How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle. 
[more]
cover of The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995

The German Problem Transformed

Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995

Thomas Banchoff

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Does the new, more powerful Germany pose a threat to its neighbors? Does the new German Problem resemble the old? The German Problem Transformed addresses these questions fifty years after the founding of the Federal Republic and ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Many observers have underscored the reemergence of Germany as Europe's central power. After four decades of division, they contend, Germany is once again fully sovereign; without the strictures of bipolarity, its leaders are free to define and pursue national interests in East and West. From this perspective, the reunified Germany faces challenges not unlike those of its unified predecessor a century earlier.
The German Problem Transformed rejects this formulation. Thomas Banchoff acknowledges post-reunification challenges, but argues that postwar changes, not prewar analogies, best illuminate them. The book explains the transformation of German foreign policy through a structured analysis of four critical postwar junctures: the cold war of the 1950s, the détente of the 1960s and 1970s, the new cold war of the early 1980s, and the post-cold war 1990s. Each chapter examines the interaction of four factors--international structure and institutions, foreign policy ideas, and domestic politics--in driving the direction of German foreign policy at a key turning point.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of German history, German politics, and European international relations, as well as policymakers and the interested public.
Thomas Banchoff is Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown University.
[more]
cover of The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics

The Ghana Reader

History, Culture, Politics

Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbell, editors

Duke University Press, 2016

Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast's importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana's brief period under British colonial rule, or the emergence of its modern democracy, the volume's eighty selections emphasize Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations. They also demonstrate that the path to fully understanding Ghana requires acknowledging its ethnic and cultural diversity and listening to its population's varied voices. Readers will encounter selections written by everyone from farmers, traders, and the clergy to intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers. With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, The Ghana Reader conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of Ghana's development as a nation, its key contribution to the formation of the African diaspora, and its increasingly important role in the economy and politics of the twenty-first century.
 
 
[more]
cover of The Global Economy and Democracy in South Africa

The Global Economy and Democracy in South Africa

Koelble, Thomas A.

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Democracy differs dramatically in First and Third World countries. Academic debate in the West focuses on democractic institutional arrangements and concepts such as elections, freedom of association, and freedom of speech, and little attention is paid to the content of emancipatory policy. In the Third World and especially in South Africa, emancipation and socio-economic redistribution are more important aspects in the popular perception of what democracy means than considerations of how political institutions function. These variations put regimes such as the ANC-led government on a collision course with the West.
Arguing that a consolidation of democratic institutions depends on a redistribution of resources, Thomas Koelble analyzes two crucial policy arenas-housing and education-to clarify the enormous problems facing the current South African government. For successful consolidation of institutional democracy in South Africa, Western political and financial institutions must provide support for that redistribution. Without their support, the ANC constituency's expectations that democracy will improve the quality of life will go unrealized, and the government may fail.
Koelble also posits that while the new South African constitution encompasses aspects of a consensus oriented system in terms of its federal structures and various rights to minorities, it is a system dominated by one large political party that is not constitutionally required to share power. He suggests that the ANC would have better served the cause of democracy had it included rather than excluded their opposition from political power. This majoritarian rule may deteriorate into another version of "race politics". Such race politics will have deleterious effects on both South Africa's polity and economy.
[more]
cover of The Global Political Economy of Israel

The Global Political Economy of Israel

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler

Pluto Press, 2002

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated "market economy" characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? In order to understand capitalist development, argue Bichler and Nitzan, we need to break the artificial separation between "economics" and "politics", and think of accumulation itself as "capitalisation of power". Applying this concept to Israel, they reveal the big picture that never makes it to the news. Diverse processes – such as regional conflicts and energy crises, ruling class formation and dominant ideology, militarism and dependency, inflation and recession, the politics of high-technology and the transnationalisation of ownership – are all woven into a single story. The result is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

[more]
cover of The Glorious Revolution and the Continuity of Law

The Glorious Revolution and the Continuity of Law

Richard S. Kay

Catholic University of America Press, 2014

The Glorious Revolution and the Continuity of Law explores the relationship between law and revolution. Revolt - armed or not - is often viewed as the overthrow of legitimate rulers. Historical experience, however, shows that revolutions are frequently accompanied by the invocation rather than the repudiation of law. No example is clearer than that of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. At that time the unpopular but lawful Catholic king, James II, lost his throne and was replaced by his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William of Orange and Mary, with James's attempt to recapture the throne thwarted at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. The revolutionaries had to negotiate two contradictory but intensely held convictions. The first was that the essential role of law in defining and regulating the activity of the state must be maintained. The second was that constitutional arrangements to limit the unilateral authority of the monarch and preserve an indispensable role for the houses of parliament in public decision-making had to be established. In the circumstances of 1688-89, the revolutionaries could not be faithful to the second without betraying the first. Their attempts to reconcile these conflicting objectives involved the frequent employment of legal rhetoric to justify their actions. In so doing, they necessarily used the word "law" in different ways. It could denote the specific rules of positive law; it could simply express devotion to the large political and social values that underlay the legal system; or it could do something in between. In 1688-89 it meant all those things to different participants at different times. This study adds a new dimension to the literature of the Glorious Revolution by describing, analyzing and elaborating this central paradox: the revolutionaries tried to break the rules of the constitution and, at the same time, be true to them.
[more]
cover of The Good Neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power

The Good Neighbor

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power

Mary E. Stuckey

Michigan State University Press, 2013

No modern president has had as much influence on American national politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt. During FDR’s administration, power shifted from states and localities to the federal government; within the federal government it shifted from Congress to the president; and internationally, it moved from Europe to the United States. All of these changes required significant effort on the part of the president, who triumphed over fierce opposition and succeeded in remaking the American political system in ways that continue to shape our politics today. Using the metaphor of the good neighbor, Mary E. Stuckey examines the persuasive work that took place to authorize these changes. Through the metaphor, FDR’s administration can be better understood: his emphasis on communal values; the importance of national mobilization in domestic as well as foreign affairs in defense of those values; his use of what he considered a particularly democratic approach to public communication; his treatment of friends and his delineation of enemies; and finally, the ways in which he used this rhetoric to broaden his neighborhood from the limits of the United States to encompass the entire world, laying the groundwork for American ideological dominance in the post–World War II era.

[more]