8812 books match the query 'Political Science' and 138 start with u

cover of UndocuAsians: Lived Experiences and Social Movement Activism Across the Diaspora

UndocuAsians

Lived Experiences and Social Movement Activism Across the Diaspora

Kevin Escudero

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Asian immigrants comprise over 10% of the national undocumented immigrant population and Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the United States today. Asian undocumented communities, alongside their Latinx and Black undocumented counterparts, have also emphasized the importance of their racial/ethnic identities alongside their immigrant legal status in their organizing. UndocuAsians tells the story of the contemporary US immigrant rights movement with a focus on Asian undocumented immigrant narratives drawing on personal reflections and research studies by self-identified undocuAsian organizers and scholars from Asian immigrant backgrounds. Topics discussed in the volume include activists’ navigation of racialized “illegality,” the importance of chosen and biological family, pathways in the pursuit of higher education, the role of faith communities in the lives of Asian undocumented immigrants, and healing. Combined, these essays provide a diverse portrait of the vibrant, powerful community of Asian undocumented immigrants today.
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cover of Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania

Undocumented Fears

Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania

Jamie Longazel

Temple University Press, 2016

The Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), passed in the small Rustbelt city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 2006, was a local ordinance that laid out penalties for renting to or hiring undocumented immigrants and declared English the city’s official language. The notorious IIRA gained national prominence and kicked off a parade of local and state-level legislative initiatives designed to crack down on undocumented immigrants. 

In his cogent and timely book, UndocumentedFears, Jamie Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton’s controversial ordinance as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide and conquer politics. He shows how neoliberal ideology, misconceptions about Latina/o immigrants, and nostalgic imagery of “Small Town, America” led to a racialized account of an undocumented immigrant “invasion,” masking the real story of a city beset by large-scale loss of manufacturing jobs.

Offering an up-close look at how the local debate unfolded in the city that set off this broader trend, Undocumented Fears makes an important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.

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cover of Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice

Undocumented

Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice

Ronald Riekki

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Focusing on contemporary issues, this text showcases a large collection of regional poets laureate writing on subjects critical to understanding social justice as it relates to the Great Lakes region. Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice includes writing by seventy-eight poets who truly represent the diversity of the Great Lakes region, including Rita Dove, Marvin Bell, Crystal Valentine, Kimberly Blaeser, Mary Weems, Karen Kovacik, Wendy Vardaman, Zora Howard, Carla Christopher, Meredith Holmes, Karla Huston, Joyce Sutphen, and Laren McClung, among others. City, state, and national poets laureate with ties to Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin appear in these pages, organized around themes from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide,” calling on readers to act on behalf of victims of social injustice.
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cover of Undoing the Revolution: Comparing Elite Subversion of Peasant Rebellions

Undoing the Revolution

Comparing Elite Subversion of Peasant Rebellions

Vasabjit Banerjee

Temple University Press, 2019

Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments—only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants.  

Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants’ and elites’ own economic grievances. 

Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.

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cover of Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

Unequal Higher Education

Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity

Barrett J. Taylor

Rutgers University Press, 2019

American higher education is often understood as a vehicle for social advancement. However, the institutions at which students enroll differ widely from one another. Some enjoy tremendous endowment savings and/or collect resources via research, which then offsets the funds that students contribute. Other institutions rely heavily on student tuition payments. These schools may struggle to remain solvent, and their students often bear the lion’s share of educational costs. Unequal Higher Education identifies and explains the sources of stratification that differentiate colleges and universities in the United States. Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell use quantitative analysis to map the contours of this system. They then explain the mechanisms that sustain it and illustrate the ways in which rising institutional inequality has limited individual opportunity, especially for students of color and low-income individuals. 
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cover of Unequal Thailand: Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power

Unequal Thailand

Aspects of Income, Wealth and Power

Edited by Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker

National University of Singapore Press, 2015

Extreme inequalities in income,wealth and power lie behind Thailand’s political turmoil. What are the sources of this inequality?  Why does it persist, or even increase when the economy grows? How can it be addressed?


         The contributors to this important study—Thai scholars, reformers and civil servants—shed light on the many dimensions of inequality in Thailand, looking beyond simple income measures to consider land ownership, education, finance, business structures and politics. The contributors propose a series of reforms in taxation, spending and institutional reform that can address growing inequality.


        Inequality is among the biggest threats to social stability in Southeast Asia, and this close study of a key Southeast Asian country will be relevant to regional policy-makers, economists and business decision-makers, as well as students of oligarchy and inequality more generally.  
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cover of Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs

Unequal under Law

Race in the War on Drugs

Doris Marie Provine

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts.

Doris Marie Provine’s engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism—a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.
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cover of Uneven Tides: Rising Inequality in America

Uneven Tides

Rising Inequality in America

Sheldon H. Danziger

Russell Sage Foundation, 1993

Inequality has been on the rise in America for more than two decades. This socially divisive trend began in the economic doldrums of the 1970s and continued through the booming 1980s, when surging economic tides clearly failed to lift all ships. Instead, escalating inequality in both individual earnings and family income widened the gulf between rich and poor and led to the much-publicized decline of the middle class. Uneven Tides brings together a distinguished group of economists to confront the crucial questions about this unprecedented rise in inequality. Just how large and pervasive was it? What were its principal causes? And why did it continue in the 1980s, when previous periods of national economic growth have generally reduced inequality? Reviewing the best current evidence, the essays in Uneven Tides show that rising inequality is a complex phenomenon, the result of a web of circumstances inherent in the nation's current industrial, social, and political situation. Once attributed to the rising supply of inexperienced workers—as baby boomers, new immigrants, and women entered the labor market—the growing inequality in individual earnings is revealed in Uneven Tides to be the direct result of the economy's increasing demand for skilled workers. The authors explore many of the possible causes of this trend, including the employment shift from manufacturing to the service sector, the heightened importance of technology in the workplace, the decline of unionization, and the intensified efforts to compete in a global marketplace. Uneven Tides also examines the equally dramatic growth in the inequality of family income, and reviews the effects of family size, the age and education of household heads, and the transition to both two-earner and single-parent families. Although these demographic shifts played a role, what emerges most clearly is an understanding of the powerful influence of public policy, as increasingly regressive taxes, declining welfare benefits, and a stagnant minimum wage continue to amplify the effects of market forces on income. With the rise in inequality now much in the headlines, it is clear that our nation's ability to reverse these shifting currents requires deeper understanding of their causes and consequences. Uneven Tides is the first book to get beyond the news stories to a clear analysis of the changing fortunes of America's families. It should be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the economic underpinnings of the country's social problems.
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cover of Unfinished Socialism: Pictures from the Kádár Era

Unfinished Socialism

Pictures from the Kádár Era

András Gero

Central European University Press, 1999

This extraordinary book provides a snapshot of socialism throughout the Kádár regime in Hungary (1956-1989) and captures the essence of the world behind the ‘iron curtain’ in a stunning, and often stark, collection of photographs.

Unfinished Socialism is a visually stunning anthropological study containing 450 photographs, many previously unpublished, which portray life in Hungary from every angle: from the May Day March to pop music and from the homeless to sport.

With an introduction that will help the reader understand and appreciate the true meaning of the photographs, this political, social and cultural study of the Kádár years transports the reader back to a time of great significance in Hungary’s long and turbulent history.

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cover of Unfree Masters: Popular Music and the Politics of Work

Unfree Masters

Popular Music and the Politics of Work

Matt Stahl

Duke University Press, 2012

The widespread perception of singers and musicians as free individuals doing enjoyable and fulfilling work obscures the realities of their occupation. In Unfree Masters Matt Stahl examines recording artists' labor in the music industry as a form of creative work. He begins by considering the television show American Idol and the 2004 rockumentary Dig!, tracing the ways that popular music making is narrativized in contemporary America and showing how such narratives highlight musicians' negotiations of the limits of freedom and autonomy in creative cultural-industrial work. Turning to struggles between recording artists and record companies over laws that govern their working and contractual relationships, he reveals further tensions and contradictions in this form of work. Stahl argues that media narratives of music making, as well as contract and copyright disputes between musicians and music industry executives, contribute to American socioeconomic discourse and expose a foundational tension between democratic principles of individual autonomy and responsibility and the power of employers to control labor and appropriate its products. Stahl asserts that the labor issues that he discloses in music can stimulate insights about the political-economic and imaginative challenges currently facing working people of all kinds.
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cover of Unfree in Palestine: Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction

Unfree in Palestine

Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction

Adah Kay and Nadia Abu-Zahra

Pluto Press, 2012

Based on first-hand accounts and extensive fieldwork, Unfree in Palestine reveals the role played by identity documents in Israel’s apartheid policies towards the Palestinians, from the red passes of the 1950s to the orange, green and blue passes of today.

The authors chronicle how millions of Palestinians have been denationalised through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration, blacklisting and a discriminatory legal framework. They show how identity documents are used by Israel as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment. Movement restrictions tied to IDs and population registers threaten Palestinian livelihoods, freedom of movement and access to basic services such as health and education.

Unfree in Palestine is a masterful expose of the web of bureaucracy used by Israel to deprive the Palestinians of basic rights and freedoms, and calls for international justice and inclusive security in place of discrimination and division.
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cover of Unguarded Border: American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War

Unguarded Border

American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War

Donald W. Maxwell

Rutgers University Press, 2023

The United States is accustomed to accepting waves of migrants who are fleeing oppressive conditions and political persecution in their home countries. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of migration reversed as over fifty thousand Americans fled across the border to Canada to resist military service during the Vietnam War or to escape their homeland’s hawkish society. 
 
Unguarded Border tells their stories and, in the process, describes a migrant experience that does not fit the usual paradigms. Rather than treating these American refugees as unwelcome foreigners, Canada embraced them, refusing to extradite draft resisters or military deserters and not even requiring passports for the border crossing. And instead of forming close-knit migrant communities, most of these émigrés sought to integrate themselves within Canadian society. 
 
Historian Donald W. Maxwell explores how these Americans in exile forged cosmopolitan identities, coming to regard themselves as global citizens, a status complicated by the Canadian government’s attempts to claim them and the U.S. government’s eventual efforts to reclaim them. Unguarded Border offers a new perspective on a movement that permanently changed perceptions of compulsory military service, migration, and national identity. 
 
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cover of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism

Unholy Wars

Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism

John Cooley

Pluto Press, 2002

This book examines the events of September 11th 2001, Osama bin Laden's role and the complex working of the Al Qa'ida terror network. This is the classic book on the history of the USA's involvement with Afghanistan that explains the devastating consequences of the alliance between the US government and radical Islam. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the current international crisis.

Cooley marshals a wealth of evidence - from the assassination of Sadat, the destabilisation of Algeria and Chechnya and the emergence of the Taliban, to the bombings of the World Trade Center and the US embassies in Africa. He examines the crucial role of Pakistan’s military intelligence organisation; uncovers China’s involvement and its aftermath; the extent of Saudi financial support; the role of 'America's most wanted man' Osama bin Laden; the BCCI connection; the CIA's cynical promotion of drug traffic in the Golden Crescent; the events in Pakistan since the military coup of October 1999; and, finally, the events of September 11th 2001 and their continuing impact on world affairs.
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cover of Uniform Feelings: Scenes from the Psychic Life of Policing

Uniform Feelings

Scenes from the Psychic Life of Policing

Jessi Lee Jackson

University of Michigan Press, 2022

In Uniform Feelings, American studies scholar and abolitionist psychotherapist Jessi Lee Jackson reads policing as a set of emotional and relational practices in order to shed light on the persistence of police violence.  Jackson argues that psychological investments in U.S. police power emerge at various sites: her counseling room, manuals for addressing bias, museum displays, mortality statistics, and memorial walls honoring fallen officers.  Drawing on queer, feminist, anticolonial, and Black engagements with psychoanalysis to think through U.S. policing—and bringing together a mix of clinical case studies, autotheory, and ethnographic research—the book moves from the individual to the institutional. Jackson begins with her work as a psychotherapist working across the spectrum of relationships to policing, and then turns to interrogate carceral psychology—the involvement of her profession in ongoing state violence.  Jackson orbits around two key questions: how are our relationships shaped by proximity to state violence, and how can our social worlds be transformed to challenge state-sanctioned violence?
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cover of Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference

Unifying Political Methodology

The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference

Gary King

University of Michigan Press, 1998

One of the hallmarks of the development of political science as a discipline has been the creation of new methodologies by scholars within the discipline--methodologies that are well-suited to the analysis of political data. Gary King has been a leader in the development of these new approaches to the analysis of political data. In his book, Unifying Political Methodology, King shows how the likelihood theory of inference offers a unified approach to statistical modeling for political research and thus enables us to better analyze the enormous amount of data political scientists have collected over the years. Newly reissued, this book is a landmark in the development of political methodology and continues to challenge scholars and spark controversy.
"Gary King's Unifying Political Methodology is at once an introduction to the likelihood theory of statistical inference and an evangelist's call for us to change our ways of doing political methodology. One need not accept the altar call to benefit enormously from the book, but the intellectual debate over the call for reformation is likely to be the enduring contribution of the work."
--Charles Franklin, American Political Science Review
"King's book is one of the only existing books which deal with political methodology in a clear and consistent framework. The material in it is now and will continue to be essential reading for all serious students and researchers in political methodology." --R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Tech-nology
Gary King is Professor of Government, Harvard University. One of the leading thinkers in political methodology, he is the author of A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data and other books and articles.
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cover of Union Divided: Black Musicians' Fight for Labor Equality

Union Divided

Black Musicians' Fight for Labor Equality

Leta E. Miller

University of Illinois Press, 2024

An in-depth account of the Black locals within the American Federation of Musicians

In the 1910s and 1920s, Black musicians organized more than fifty independent locals within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in an attempt to control audition criteria, set competitive wages, and secure a voice in national decision-making. Leta Miller follows the AFM’s history of Black locals, which competed directly with white locals in the same territories, from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era crises to the fraught process of dismantling segregated AFM organizations in the 1960s and 70s. Like any union, Black AFM locals sought to ensure employment and competitive wages for members with always-evolving solutions to problems. Miller’s account of these efforts includes the voices of the musicians themselves and interviews with former union members who took part in the difficult integration of Black and white locals. She also analyzes the fundamental question of how musicians benefitted from membership in a labor organization.

Broad in scope and rich in detail, Union Divided illuminates the complex working world of unionized Black musicians and the AFM’s journey to racial inclusion.

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cover of Union Jack: JFK's Special Relationship with Great Britain

Union Jack

JFK's Special Relationship with Great Britain

Christopher Sandford

University Press of New England, 2017

John F. Kennedy carried on a lifelong love affair with England and the English. From his speaking style to his tastes in art, architecture, theater, music, and clothes, his personality reflected his deep affinity for a certain kind of idealized Englishness. In Union Jack, noted biographer Christopher Sandford tracks Kennedy’s exploits in Great Britain between 1935 and 1963, and looks in-depth at the unique way Britain shaped JFK throughout his adult life and how JFK charmed British society. This mutual affinity took place against a backdrop of some of the twentieth century’s most profound events: The Great Depression, Britain’s appeasement of Hitler, the Second World War, the reconstruction of Western Europe, the development and rapid proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the ideological schism between East and West. Based on extensive archival work as well as firsthand accounts from former British acquaintances, including old girlfriends, Union Jack charts two paths in the life of JFK. The first is his deliberate, long-term struggle to escape the shadow of his father, Joseph Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain. The second is the emergence of a peculiarly American personality whose consistently pro-British, rallying rhetoric was rivaled only by Winston Churchill. By explaining JFK’s special relationship with Great Britain, Union Jack offers a unique and enduring portrait of another side of this historic figure in the centennial year of his birth.
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cover of Union Renegades: Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age

Union Renegades

Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age

Dana M. Caldemeyer

University of Illinois Press, 2021

In the late nineteenth century, Midwestern miners often had to decide if joining a union was in their interest. Arguing that these workers were neither pro-union nor anti-union, Dana M. Caldemeyer shows that they acted according to what they believed would benefit them and their families. As corporations moved to control coal markets and unions sought to centralize their organizations to check corporate control, workers were often caught between these institutions and sided with whichever one offered the best advantage in the moment. Workers chased profits while paying union dues, rejected national unions while forming local orders, and broke strikes while claiming to be union members. This pragmatic form of unionism differed from what union leaders expected of rank-and-file members, but for many workers the choice to follow or reject union orders was a path to better pay, stability, and independence in an otherwise unstable age.

Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

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cover of Union Representation Elections: Law and Reality

Union Representation Elections

Law and Reality

Julius Getman

Russell Sage Foundation, 1976

Provides the first major effort to test the rules and regulations that underlie current practices in union elections and, at the same time, explores the role played by the National Labor Relations Board in regulating these elections. The book reports the findings of an empirical field study of thirty-one union representation elections involving over 1,000 employees to determine their pre-campaign attitudes, voting intent, actual vote, and the effect of the campaign on voting. It focuses on campaign issues, unlawful campaigning, working conditions, demographic factors, job-related variables, and other topics.
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cover of Union Women: Forging Feminism In The United Steelworkers Of America

Union Women

Forging Feminism In The United Steelworkers Of America

Mary Margaret Fonow

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

How a feminist agenda took hold in a male-dominated union.

For more than a quarter century, steel mills in the United States and Canada have produced more than metal: they have produced a new kind of worker and union activist-"Women of Steel." In an era labeled postfeminist and postindustrial, women have created spaces in this quintessentially male-dominated workforce from which to mobilize for their rights as women and workers. In Union Women, Mary Margaret Fonow captures the stories of the women of the United Steelworkers. She focuses on a tenacious group who used their developing power in the union to challenge sex discrimination and to advocate for women’s rights, and applied their transnational resources to construct a feminist response to globalization and economic restructuring. In the process, they have transformed the organizations, resources, and networks of both the labor and women’s movements, and have in turn transformed themselves into feminists.

In Union Women Fonow uses statistical, archival, and ethnographic research methods to provide a broad historical account of women in the steel industry. Fonow’s sweeping approach allows her to examine several key issues in social movement, feminist, and political theory, and to show that insights from these fields shape each other. She explores how social movements are gendered, how working-class women develop a feminist consciousness, and how this process is informed by intersecting demands of race, class, and gender. As a comparative, cross-national study, Union Women also demonstrates how different political and social cultures affect women’s organizing and strategic decisions. Finally, Fonow emphasizes that economic restructuring and globalization pose immediate challenges for women as laborers and activists, and that, in order to survive, all unions must develop organizing and mobilization strategies informed by feminism and other social movements.
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cover of Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture

Union-Free America

Workers and Antiunion Culture

Lawrence Richards

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture confronts one of the most vexing questions with which labor activists and labor academics struggle: why is there so much opposition to organized labor in the United States? Scholars often point to powerful obstacles from employers or governmental policies, but Lawrence Richards offers a more complete picture of the causes for union decline in the postwar period by examining the attitudes of the workers themselves. Large numbers of American workers in the 1970s and 1980s told pollsters that they would vote against a union if an election were held at their place of employment, and Richards provides a provocative explanation for this hostility: a pervasive strain of antiunionism in American culture that has made many workers distrustful of organized labor.

Weighing the arguments of previous historians and sociologists, Richards posits that this underlying antiunion culture in America has been remarkably consistent over the course of half a century. Assessing organizing efforts among blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar workers, Richards examines the tactics and countertactics of company and union representatives who sought to either exploit or neutralize workers' popular negative stereotypes of organized labor's insidious control over workers' autonomy. The book considers a number of case studies of organizing drives throughout recent history, from the failed attempt by District 65 to organize clerical workers at New York University in 1970, to a similarly fruitless drive by the Textile Workers Union in 1980 at a textile factory in Charlottesville, Virginia. In both of these particular cases and in many more, antiunion culture has operated to hinder unions' efforts to organize the unorganized. By examining the manifestations and motivations of antiunion culture in the United States, Richards helps explain why so many American workers seem to vote against their own self-interest and declare themselves "Union Free and Proud."

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cover of United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel

United States of Banana

A Graphic Novel

Giannina Braschi and Joakim LindengrenEdited and with an introduction by Amanda M. Smith and Amy Sheeran

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

“I was a monument to immigration—now I’m a border control cop.” So admits the Statue of Liberty in Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana, a rollicking and nakedly political allegory of US imperialism and Puerto Rican independence. Illustrated by Swedish comic book artist Joakim Lindengren and based on Braschi’s epic manifesto by the same title, the story takes us along on the madcap adventures of Zarathustra, Hamlet, and Giannina herself as they rescue the Puerto Rican prisoner Segismundo from under the skirt of the Statue of Liberty. Throughout their quest, the characters debate far-ranging political and philosophical subjects, spanning terrorism, global warming, mass incarceration, revolution, and love. The Marx Brothers, Pablo Neruda, Barack Obama, Disney characters and more make appearances in this stirring call to overthrow empire, liberate the imprisoned masses, and build a new country rooted in friendship, art, poetry, and laughter.
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cover of United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850: The Formative Generations

United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850

The Formative Generations

T. Ray Shurbutt

University of Alabama Press, 1991

Relations between the United States and the countries of Latin America have been characterized by misunderstandings based on language and culture, a lack of sustained commitment on the part of the United States, and, in some cases, incompetent diplomats. During the era when many of the Latin American countries discarded the yoke of colonial status, the young United States attempted to define itself culturally, economically, constitutionally, geographically, and diplomatically. As Latin American emerged from the crucible of revolution and international power politics, it was affected by—and in varying degrees affected—the United States and its desired position of leadership in the Western Hemisphere.

To make sense of these relationships, this volume concentrates on Central America, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Describing the particular paths taken by each of the formation of relations with the United States, Shurbutt and his colleagues focus on the American diplomatic community and its effectiveness in tense political situations.

 Contributors in addition to the editor include Lawrence A. Clayton, Paul B. Goodwin, Eugene R. Huck, Phil Brian Johnson, Edward H. Moseley, Wesley P. Newton, Charles S. Stansifer, and Robert Kim Stevens.

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cover of United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903: Establishing a Relationship

United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903

Establishing a Relationship

Edited by Thomas M. Leonard

University of Alabama Press, 1999

United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903 is a collection of essays that provide an in-depth analysis of the developing relationship between the Americas during the critical period from the Mexican War to the Panama Canal treaty of 1903.

During the second half of the 19th century several forces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe converged to set the stage for the establishment of a more permanent relationship between the United States and Latin America. The key factors--security, economics, and modernization--created both commonalities and conflicts between and among regions. In this volume, scholars examine not only the domestic but also the geopolitical forces that encouraged and guided development of diplomatic relations in this rapidly changing period.

As the contributors note, by the end of the century, economic interests dominated the relationship that eventually developed. This period saw the building of a string of U.S. naval bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the rapid industrialization of the United States and the development of a substantial export market, the entrance of many U.S. entrepreneurs into Latin American countries, and the first two inter-American conferences. By the century's end, the United States appeared as the dominant partner in the relationship, a perception that earned it the "imperialist" label.

This volume untangles this complex relationship by examining U.S. relations with Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay from the perspective of both the United States and the individual Latin American countries.

A companion volume to United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850: The Formative Generations, edited by T. Ray Shurbutt, this book establishes a historical perspective crucial to understanding contemporary diplomatic relations.


 

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cover of United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook

United Tastes

The Making of the First American Cookbook

Keith Stavely

University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

Winner of the 2017 Bruce Fraser Award from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History
The Library of Congress has designated American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons one of the eighty-eight “Books That Shaped America.” Its recognition as “the first American cookbook” has attracted an enthusiastic modern audience of historians, food journalists, and general readers, yet until now American Cookery has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's United Tastes fills this gap by providing a detailed examination of the social circumstances and culinary tradition that produced this American classic.

Situating American Cookery within the post-Revolutionary effort to develop a distinct national identity, Stavely and Fitzgerald demonstrate the book's significance in cultural as well as culinary terms. Ultimately the separation between these categories dissolves as the authors show that the formation of “taste,” in matters of food as well as other material expressions, was essential to building a consensus on what it was to be American. United Tastes explores multiple histories—of food, cookbooks, printing, material and literary culture, and region—to illuminate the meaning and affirm the importance of America's first cookbook.

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cover of Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory

Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction

A Counterhistory

Jaleh Mansoor

Duke University Press, 2025

In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.
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cover of Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production

Unlawful Violence

Mexican Law and Cultural Production

Rebecca Janzen

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Violence has only increased in Mexico since 2000: 23,000 murders were recorded in 2016, and 29,168 in 2017.

The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico's fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple perspectives, often told through shifts in time. The novels, such as Jorge Volpi's Una novela criminal [A Novel Crime] (2018) and Julián Herbert's La casa del dolor ajeno [The House of the Pain of Others] (2015) take multiple perspectives and follow non-linear plotlines; other examples, such as the very short stories in ¡Basta! 100 mujeres contra la violencia de género [Enough! 100 Women against Gender-Based Violence] (2013), present perspectives from multiple authors.

Few scholars compare cultural production and legal texts in situations like Mexico, where extreme violence coexists with a high number of human rights laws. Unlawful Violence measures fictional accounts of human rights against new laws that include constitutional amendments to reform legal proceedings, laws that protect children, laws that condemn violence against women, and laws that protect migrants and Indigenous peoples. It also explores debates about these laws in the Mexican house of representatives and senate, as well as interactions between the law and the Mexican public.
[more]
cover of Unleashing Rights: Law, Meaning, and the Animal Rights Movement

Unleashing Rights

Law, Meaning, and the Animal Rights Movement

Helena Silverstein

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Unleashing Rights is a study of the animal rights movement's efforts to advance social reform through the deployment of legal language and practices. The study looks at how prevailing understandings of rights language have shaped the attempt to put forth the idea that animals have rights, and how this attempt, in turn, offers the opportunity to reconstruct the meaning of rights. The book also examines the way litigation has influenced the movement's activities and opportunities for success.
Presented here is an investigation of the legal system through a decentered, cultural approach. Legal languages and practices are viewed as a part of everyday life--constructed, used, and interpreted not only by those who run official legal institutions but also by everyday people with a legal consciousness. Using this approach, the book questions whether the deployment of rights and litigation by animal rights advocates has challenged prevailing legal meaning.
Looking to both the constitutive and instrumental aspects of law, and to how each informs the other, Unleashing Rights finds that the resort to rights and litigation has advanced movement goals and contributed to alternative constructions of legal meaning. The study concludes that despite their many constraints, both rights talk and litigation are powerful resources for those who seek change, especially when used by strategically minded activists.
Unleashing Rights is a book that illustrates the relationship between law, social movement activism, and social change. The book joins the ongoing debate within public law scholarship that is concerned with the effectiveness of legal strategies and languages. The book also speaks to those interested in the general study of social movements and in the particular study of the animal rights movement. With its cultural approach focused on rights language and the construction of meaning, the work will be of interest to the disciplines of law and political science, as well as those who study sociology, anthropology, and philosophy.
Helena Silverstein is F. M. Kirby Assistant Professor of Government and Law, Lafayette College.
[more]
cover of Unlikely Heroes: The Southern Judges Who Made Brown Work

Unlikely Heroes

The Southern Judges Who Made Brown Work

Jack Bass

University of Alabama Press, 1981

"I think there has been no more heroic episode in American law than the work of southern federal judges in ending racial discrimination in the South. Jack Bass has brought this recent history to life, telling us much that we had not known." —Anthony Lewis, New York Times
 
Unlikely Heroes is a gripping and readable account of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the watershed 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended racially segregated schools. The "unlikely heroes" whose lives and decisions that Jack Bass traces are the federal judges—primarily on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—who vigorously and skillfully implemented the Brown decision in six southern states. These rich profiles show the character of the men who gave up prosperous lives, popularity, and friends to see that the constitutional rights of all U.S. citizens were protected.
[more]
cover of Unlocking V.O. Key Jr.: "Southern Politics" for the Twenty-First Century

Unlocking V.O. Key Jr.

"Southern Politics" for the Twenty-First Century

Angie Maxwell

University of Arkansas Press, 2011

Over sixty years ago, political scientist V.O. Key Jr. published his seminal work, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key's book redefined the field of southern politics and remains one of the most cited and influential works in twentieth-century political science and southern history. In Unlocking V.O. Key Jr., prominent southern scholars in history, political science, and southern and American studies reconsider Key's analysis, debating his omissions as well as highlighting the timeless elements of his work. Charles Reagan Wilson, Kari Frederickson, and Pearl K. Ford argue that Key's exclusion of religion, violence, and African American political participation altered the field of southern politics. Keith Gaddie and Justin Wert draw attention to Key's methodological innovations, while Margaret Reid questions Key's limited and gendered vision of the southern electorate. Harold Stanley discusses the complexity of teaching Key in the twenty-first century. Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston argue for the role that class and the economy played in the realignment of the South with the Republican Party, while Dan T. Carter points to race as the driving factor in this major shift. Susan MacManus tracks immigration trends in the region to explain contemporary southern political behavior. Supported with a foreword by Byron E. Shafer that provides an overview of Key's major contributions as a political scientist, and concluding with Wayne Parent's discussion of Key and the contemporary student, Unlocking V.O. Key Jr. is a must-read companion to the classic Southern Politics in State and Nation.
[more]
cover of Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

Unmaking Botany

Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez

Duke University Press, 2025

In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany’s dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize “sovereign vernaculars,” or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
[more]
cover of Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji

Unmasked

COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji

Emily Mendenhall

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Unmasked is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town.

The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

This book is the recipient of the 2022 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.
[more]
cover of Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji

Unmasked

COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji

Emily Mendenhall

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Unmasked is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town.

The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

This book is the recipient of the 2022 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.
[more]
cover of Unraveling of Civil Society: Peacebuilding, Health Crises, and Aid in Twenty-First-Century Guinea and Sierra Leone

Unraveling of Civil Society

Peacebuilding, Health Crises, and Aid in Twenty-First-Century Guinea and Sierra Leone

Michelle Reddy

Ohio University Press, 2026

In recent years, the capacity of civil society to respond to crises has been increasingly constrained by rising authoritarianism. Yet in West Africa, where civil society has historically played a pivotal role in democratization, this trend reveals deeper structural challenges. Unraveling of Civil Society examines how international aid strategies emphasizing technical capacity and professionalization have inadvertently contributed to the politicization and fragmentation of civil society in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork—including interviews with representatives of more than a hundred locally led organizations, analysis of 260 strategic plans, and collection of cross-national survey data—this book offers a rare longitudinal and comparative study of civil society in the region. It traces how donor-driven models have led organizations to become sector specific, mimic donor institutions, or align with political interests—ultimately reducing organizational diversity and weakening the social infrastructure necessary for collective action and crisis resilience.

The book situates these findings within broader debates on democratic backsliding, noting that three of the nine countries that transitioned to autocracy between 2021 and 2023—Guinea, Chad, and Mali—are in West Africa. Despite significant international investment, “coup culture” and unconstitutional power shifts have resurged, raising urgent questions about the effectiveness of aid and the role of civil society in sustaining democratic norms.

Combining comparative historical analysis with a mixed-methods approach, Unraveling of Civil Society challenges prevailing assumptions about capacity building and offers practical recommendations for democratizing local organizations from within. It advocates for participatory governance and funding mechanisms and engages with ongoing conversations around the localization and decolonization of aid in a shifting geopolitical landscape.

This book is essential reading for scholars of African studies, political science, development studies, and global civil society as well as for practitioners in crisis management and political reform.
[more]
cover of Unreasonable Doubt: Circumstantial Evidence and an Ordinary Murder in New Haven

Unreasonable Doubt

Circumstantial Evidence and an Ordinary Murder in New Haven

Norma Thompson

University of Missouri Press, 2006

It was to all appearances an ordinary murder—many might have said that it was an open-and-shut case. But some jurors were not convinced, and the taint of reasonable doubt led one of them to question the very future of our legal system.
            For many Americans, the civic responsibility of jury duty might seem an inconvenience; for Norma Thompson, it was a unique opportunity to bring her expertise to bear on the state of trial procedures in America today. With a background in political science, literature, and the classics, Thompson served as jury foreman in a trial of an “ordinary” murder in New Haven, Connecticut. Deliberations were buffeted by crosswinds of common sense and strong emotion. The trial ended in a hung jury because of what Thompson calls the “unreasonable doubts” of two fellow jurors concerning circumstantial evidence in an age when DNA testing holds out the promise of irrefutable proof.
In a compelling tale of contrasting rhetoric, Thompson takes readers into the courtroom to hear a streetwise convict verbally sparring with the D.A., then brings us into the confines of the jury room to have us witness nervous chatter over the meaning of evidence. She also contrasts this ordinary murder with the concurrent brutal stabbing of a Yale student, a case that attracted considerably more police and media attention.
            Thompson argues that the indeterminate results of the trial are symptomatic of larger problems in the justice system and society and that the reluctance of most people today to be judgmental is damaging the criminal justice system. As an antidote, she suggests that great literary and historical texts can help us develop the capacity for prudential judgment. Gleaning insights from an imaginary jury of Tocqueville and Plato, Jane Austen and William Faulkner, among other writers and thinkers, Thompson shows how confrontation with the works of such authors can help model more proper habits of deliberation.
            Blending personal memoir, social analysis, and literary criticism, Unreasonable Doubt is a challenging book that deals squarely with the evasion of judgment in contemporary political, social, and legal affairs. Brimming with brilliant insights, it suggests that the foundations for thought and action in our time have been neglected as a result of the wall erected between the social sciences and the humanities and invites readers to consider jury duty in a new light. Through real-world drama and literary reflection, it shows us that there is more to politics than power—and more of value to be found in the humanities than we may have supposed.
[more]
cover of Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa

Unreasonable Histories

Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa

Christopher J. Lee

Duke University Press, 2015

In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the parameters and content of African studies as currently understood. At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in British Central Africa—contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of evidence—including organizational documents, court records, personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals, photographs, and oral testimony—Lee traces the emergence of Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and often impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a genealogical imagination that reconfigured kinship and racial descent to make political claims and generate affective meaning. But these critical histories equally confront a postcolonial reason that has occluded these experiences, highlighting uneven imperial legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries, Unreasonable Histories ultimately revisits foundational questions in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present—and for the future.
[more]
cover of Unrecognized: A Palestinian Bedouin Feminist in Israel

Unrecognized

A Palestinian Bedouin Feminist in Israel

Lihi Ben Shitrit

Rutgers University Press, 2027

In 1998, when Mona Al-Habanin was twenty-eight years old and pregnant with her sixth child, she stood before a council of al-Naqab Bedouin shaykhs and faced the most difficult decision of her life: give up her children or be responsible for more killings in her tribe.

This book tells the extraordinary story of Mona Al-Habanin (b. 1970), the first Bedouin woman to run for elected office in Israel's Negev Desert. Through Mona's life, it illuminates Indigenous Bedouin women's traumas and resilience while documenting a genealogy of contemporary Palestinian Bedouin feminism. It traces her journey from desert tent dwelling through forced dislocation, her community's struggles with violence against women, and her battle for her children—against state-sanctioned tribal justice rooted in British colonial paradigms and Zionist settler-native relations—and to her turn to fierce and irreverent activism, taboo-breaking, and political trailblazing. This book tells the story of an unrecognized community under siege and of a new form of Indigenous feminism that bravely defies the violence of silencing. 

[more]
cover of Unreported Opinions of the Supreme Court of Michigan 1836-1843

Unreported Opinions of the Supreme Court of Michigan 1836-1843

Edited by William Wirt Blume

University of Michigan Press, 1945

Those who are interested in the judicial history of Michigan prior to 1863 are fortunate in having access to much of such history contained in the six volumes entitled Transactions of the Supreme Court of Michigan, edited by William Wirt Blume of the Michigan Law School faculty. In Unreported Opinions of the Supreme Court of Michigan 1836–1843, Blume brings to light and for the first time makes accessible the Michigan Supreme Court decisions that were rendered during the seven years from 1836 to 1843. The volume includes seventy of the opinions of the Michigan Territorial Court during this time period, along with other interesting material.
[more]
cover of Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru

Unruly Domestication

Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru

Kristin Skrabut

University of Texas Press, 2024

2024 Flora Tristán Book Award, Sección Perú, Latin American Studies Association

How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru.

Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru’s ongoing, internationally endorsed "war on poverty" shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima’s largest and most recently founded “extreme poverty zone,” Kristin Skrabut demonstrates how Peru’s efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians’ faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut reveals myriad entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians’ everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery.

The only full-length ethnography written about Lima’s iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, Unruly Domestication provides valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South, elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.

[more]
cover of Unsafe Haven: The United States, the IRA and Political Prisoners

Unsafe Haven

The United States, the IRA and Political Prisoners

Karen McElrath

Pluto Press, 2000

For almost two hundred years the United States has been a safe haven for Irish political prisoners seeking refuge. More recently however the US government has sought deportation, extradition and prosecution to exclude Irish republicans from the country. In the first book to focus on the relationship between these tools of exclusion and US foreign policy, Karen McElrath examines why this change has come about and the extent to which the granting of political asylum in the US is influenced by relations with Britain and other countries.

Karen McElrath questions US government attempts to portray an impartial role in the Irish conflict, arguing that historical and contemporary evidence reveals otherwise. She shows that, far from being a neutral process, the success of bids for political asylum often depends on the relationship between the US and the government of the applicant’s country of origin. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Irish Republicans who have faced deportation or extradition from the United States, or who have been prosecuted in the US for politically-motivated offences, McElrath explores the links between deportation and extradition outcomes and foreign policy issues. The tools of exclusion are defined in their historical context, and the history of US extradition law is described, with particular focus on the treaties with Britain. McElrath also examines the offences for which Irish and Irish-American Republicans have been charged, discusses the various levels of support for Irish political prisoners in the US, and summarises the findings by international human rights organisations.
[more]
cover of Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent

Unsafe for Democracy

World War I and the U.S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent

William H. Thomas Jr.

University of Wisconsin Press, 2009

During the First World War it was the task of the U.S. Department of Justice, using the newly passed Espionage Act and its later Sedition Act amendment, to prosecute and convict those who opposed America’s entry into the conflict. In Unsafe for Democracy, historian William H. Thomas Jr. shows that the Justice Department did not stop at this official charge but went much further—paying cautionary visits to suspected dissenters, pressuring them to express support of the war effort, or intimidating them into silence. At times going undercover, investigators tried to elicit the unguarded comments of individuals believed to be a threat to the prevailing social order.
In this massive yet largely secret campaign, agents cast their net wide, targeting isolationists, pacifists, immigrants, socialists, labor organizers, African Americans, and clergymen. The unemployed, the mentally ill, college students, schoolteachers, even schoolchildren, all might come under scrutiny, often in the context of the most trivial and benign activities of daily life.
            Delving into numerous reports by Justice Department detectives, Thomas documents how, in case after case, they used threats and warnings to frighten war critics and silence dissent. This early government crusade for wartime ideological conformity, Thomas argues, marks one of the more dubious achievements of the Progressive Era—and a development that resonates in the present day.

Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

“Recommended for all libraries.”—Frederic Krome, Library Journal
[more]
cover of Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel

Unsettled Labors

Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel

Rachel H. Brown

Duke University Press, 2024

In Unsettled Labors, Rachel H. Brown explores the overlooked labor of migrant workers in Israel’s eldercare industry. Brown argues that live-in eldercare in Palestine/Israel, which is primarily done by migrant workers, is an often invisible area where settler colonialism is reproduced culturally, economically, and biologically. Situating Israeli labor markets within a longer history of imperialism and dispossession of Palestinian land, Brown positions migrant eldercare within the resulting tangle of Israeli laws, policies, and social discourses. She draws from interviews with caretakers, public statements, court documents, and first-hand fieldwork to uncover the inherently contradictory nature of elder care work: the intimate presence of South and Southeast Asian workers in the home unsettles the idea of the Israeli home as an exclusively Jewish space. By paying close attention to the comparative racialization of migrant workers, Palestinians, asylum seekers, and Mizrahi and Ashkenazi settlers, Brown raises important questions of labor, social reproduction, displacement, and citizenship told through the stories of collective care provided by migrant workers in a settler colonial state.
[more]
cover of Unsettling 'Sensation': Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy

Unsettling 'Sensation'

Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy

Rothfield, Lawrence

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In September 1999, Sensation, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, opened its doors, igniting a controversy that would rage for many months in the world's art capital. This collection of cutting-edge art from the Saatchi collection in England, and the museum's arrangements with Charles Saatchi to finance the show, so offended New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he attempted to shut the museum down by withholding city funds that are crucially needed by that institution. Only a legal ruling prevented him from doing so. Like the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition before it,Sensation once again raises questions about public spending for "controversial" art, but with the added dimension of religious conflict, animal rights, and charges of commercialization.
[more]
cover of Unsettling 'Sensation': Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy

Unsettling 'Sensation'

Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy

Rothfield, Lawrence

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In September 1999, Sensation, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, opened its doors, igniting a controversy still burning in the art world. This collection of cutting-edge art from the Saatchi collection in England, and the museum’s arrangements with Charles Saatchi to finance the show, so offended New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he attempted to shut the museum down by withholding city funds that are crucially needed by that institution. Only a legal ruling prevented him from doing so. Like the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition before it, Sensation once again raises questions about public spending for “controversial” art, but with the added dimension of religious conflict and charges of commercialization.

The contributors to this volume use the Sensation exhibition as a stepping-stone to analyze larger questions such as the authority the government has to withhold funds, various interpretations of the First Amendment, how to respect divergent cultural and religious values; and the economic stake of museums and dealers in art. In their articles—written expressly for this volume, and spanning the disciplines of law, cultural studies, public policy, and art—the contributors consider issues at the center of arts policy. They propose various legal strategies, curatorial practices, and standards of doing business intended to serve the public interest in the arts. 

[more]
cover of Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence

Unsettling Accounts

Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence

Leigh A. Payne

Duke University Press, 2008

An Argentine naval officer remorsefully admits that he killed thirty people during Argentina’s Dirty War. A member of General Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence service reveals on a television show that he took sadistic pleasure in the sexual torture of women in clandestine prisons. A Brazilian military officer draws on his own experiences to write a novel describing the military’s involvement in a massacre during the 1970s. The head of a police death squad refuses to become the scapegoat for apartheid-era violence in South Africa; he begins to name names and provide details of past atrocities to the Truth Commission. Focusing on these and other confessions to acts of authoritarian state violence, Leigh A. Payne asks what happens when perpetrators publicly admit or discuss their actions. While mechanisms such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are touted as means of settling accounts with the past, Payne contends that public confessions do not settle the past. They are unsettling by nature. Rather than reconcile past violence, they catalyze contentious debate. She argues that this debate—and the public confessions that trigger it—are healthy for democratic processes of political participation, freedom of expression, and the contestation of political ideas.

Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form—from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what they say and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting, and reception of their confessions; and the different ways that they portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial, or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.

[more]
cover of Unsettling Brazil: Urban Indigenous and Black Peoples' Resistances to Dependent Settler Capitalism

Unsettling Brazil

Urban Indigenous and Black Peoples' Resistances to Dependent Settler Capitalism

Desirée Poets

University of Alabama Press, 0

Analyzes favela, quilombola, and indigenous communities’ responses to settler colonialism in urban Brazil. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte

Unsettling Brazil offers a powerful account of five urban Indigenous and Black communities and movements in Brazil that illuminates their struggle for land, dignity, and their ways of life amid historic and ongoing settler colonialism, marked by militarization and dependent capitalist development. The in-depth case studies are the Indigenous movement Aldeia Maracanã and the quilombola community Sacopã in Rio, the Quilombo dos Luízes in Belo Horizonte, the Indigenous movement behind the Pindorama scholarship program in São Paulo, and the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio. For each, Poets vividly documents the intersectional and transnational structures of power that perpetuate the erasure, dispossession, and exploitation of nonwhite populations and the creative ways that Black and Indigenous communities have mobilized to unsettle these structures.

Drawing on the knowledge produced by Black and Indigenous organizers and thinkers, Poets argues for an interdisciplinary framework that prioritizes the voices and experiences of these communities. Addressing increasingly salient calls for decolonization, Poets ponders the paradoxical role of rights, citizenship, and the state in the fight for freedom and justice. Unsettling Brazil urges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about the nation's history and stands in solidarity with those fighting to reclaim their heritage, identity, and land.

[more]
cover of Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance

Unsilencing Gaza

Reflections on Resistance

Sara Roy

Pluto Press, 2021

'Roy is humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar' - Edward W. Said

Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.

Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society.

Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
[more]
cover of Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance

Unsilencing Gaza

Reflections on Resistance

Sara Roy

Pluto Press, 2021

'Roy is humanely and professionally committed in ways that are unmatched by any other non-Palestinian scholar' - Edward W. Said

Gaza, the centre of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to the occupation, is the linchpin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the key to its resolution. Since 2005, Israel has deepened the isolation of the territory, severing it almost completely from its most vital connections to the West Bank, Israel and beyond, and has deliberately shattered its economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.

Sara Roy unpacks this process, looking at US foreign policy towards the Palestinians, as well as analysing the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza, which became a series of punitive approaches meant not only to contain the Hamas regime but weaken Gazan society.

Roy also reflects on Gaza's ruination from a Jewish perspective and discusses the connections between Gaza's history and her own as a child of Holocaust survivors. This book, a follow up from the renowned Failing Peace, comes from one of the world's most acclaimed writers on the region.
[more]
cover of Untapped: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Craft Beer

Untapped

Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Craft Beer

Nathaniel G. Chapman

West Virginia University Press, 2017

Untapped collects twelve previously unpublished essays that analyze the rise of craft beer from social and cultural perspectives.

In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe there has been exponential growth in the number of small independent breweries over the past thirty years – a reversal of the corporate consolidation and narrowing of consumer choice that characterized much of the twentieth century. While there are legal and policy components involved in this shift, the contributors to Untapped ask broader questions. How does the growth of craft beer connect to trends like the farm-to-table movement, gentrification, the rise of the “creative class,” and changing attitudes toward both cities and farms? How do craft beers conjure history, place, and authenticity? At perhaps the most fundamental level, how does the rise of craft beer call into being new communities that may challenge or reinscribe hierarchies based on gender, class, and race?
[more]
cover of Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case

Until Justice Rolls Down

The Birmingham Church Bombing Case

Frank Sikora

University of Alabama Press, 2005

It was a time when Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders rallied black youth and adults to march for their civil rights, a time when the Ku Klux Klan was active in cities and throughout the countryside of the Deep South, employing 19th-century tactics to intimidate blacks to stay “in their place.” It was also the year that the worst act of terrorism in the entire civil rights movement occurred just as Birmingham, Alabama, was coming under close national scrutiny.

This book tells the story of one grim Sunday in September 1963 when an intentionally planted cache of dynamite ripped through the walls of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and ended the dreams and the lives of four young black girls. Their deaths spurred the Kennedy administration to send an army of FBI agents to Alabama and led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. When the Justice Department was unable to bring anyone to trial for this heinous crime, a young Alabama attorney general named Bill Baxley began his own investigation to find the perpetrators. In 1977, 14 years after the bombing, Baxley brought one Klansman to trial and, in a courtroom only blocks from the bombed church (now a memorial to the victims), persuaded a jury to return a guilty verdict. More than 20 years later two other perpetrators were tried for the bombing, found guilty, and remanded to prison.

Frank Sikora has used the court records, FBI reports, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts to weave a story of spellbinding proportions. A reporter by profession, Sikora tells this story compellingly, explaining why the civil rights movement had to be successful and how Birmingham had to change.
 
[more]