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Warfare in Europe contributed to the development of the modern state. In response to external conflict, state leaders raised armies and defended borders. The centralization of power, the development of bureaucracies, and the integration of economies all maximized revenue to support war. But how does a persistent external threat affect the development of a strong state? The “Garrison State” hypothesis argues that states that face a severe security threat will become autocracies. Conversely, the “Extraction School,” argues that warfare indirectly promotes the development of democratic institutions.

Execution of large-scale war requires the mobilization of resource and usually reluctant populations. In most cases, leaders must extend economic or political rights in exchange for resolving the crisis. Large-scale warfare thus expands political participation in the long run. The authors use empirical statistical modeling to show that war decreases rights in the short term, but the longer and bigger a war gets, the rights of the citizenry expand with the conflict. The authors test this argument through historical case studies—Imperial Russia, Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, African Americans in World War I and II, and the Tirailleurs Senegalese in World War I—through the use of large-N statistical studies—Europe 1900–50 and Global 1893–2011—and survey data. The results identify when, where, and how war can lead to the expansion of political rights.

Private Danny Chen was only nineteen years old when he was found dead on a U.S. Army base in Afghanistan. His non-combat death took place under “suspicious circumstances inside the wire.” The court martials revealed that Chen faced weeks of unrelenting hazing and racial harassment by his superiors. We Are Danny is both Elizabeth OuYang’s troubling and critical account of what transpired and her memoir of Chen’s death and life, starting with his funeral.

OuYang, who led the fight for justice, narrates Chen’s story in a personal style that speaks directly to him. We Are Danny chronicles the community-based efforts to stand up to injustice where young enlistees like Chen, who fight for their country, are met with bigotry. OuYang details organizing local and national campaigns to petition the Army for a timely and thorough investigation of Chen’s death. She describes an unprecedented group meeting with high-ranking officials from the Pentagon, and recounts candlelight vigils, community protests, and the naming of Pvt. Danny Chen Way in Manhattan’s Chinatown to honor him.  

There are, sadly, many Private Danny Chens. We Are Danny offers a valuable lesson on how community advocacy and demanding accountability can focus attention on needed military reforms.

In this memoir, Melendez describes with the unsparing eye of an insider the idealism, anger, and vitality of the Lords as they rose to become the most respected and powerful voice of Puerto Rican empowerment in the country. He also traces the internal ideological disputes that led the group, but not the mission, to fracture in 1972. Written with passion and compelling detail, We Took the Streets tells the story of how one group took on the establishment—and won.

In 1968 Miguel “Mickey” Melendez was a college student, developing pride in his Cuban and Puerto Rican cultural identity and becoming increasingly aware of the effects of social inequality on Latino Americans. Joining with other like-minded student activists, Melendez helped form the central committee of the New York branch of the Young Lords, one of the most provocative and misunderstood radical groups to emerge during the 1960s. Incorporating techniques of direct action and community empowerment, the Young Lords became a prominent force in the urban northeast. From their storefront offices in East Harlem, they defiantly took back the streets of El Barrio. In addition to running clothing drives, day-care centers, and food and health programs, they became known for their media-savvy tactics and bold actions, like the takeovers of the First People’s Church and Lincoln Hospital.

“Nothing about us without us” has been a core principle of American disability rights activists for more than half a century. It represents a response by people with disabilities to being treated with scorn and abuse or as objects of pity, and to having the most fundamental decisions relating to their lives—where they would live; if and how they would be educated; if they would be allowed to marry or have families; indeed, if they would be permitted to live at all—made by those who were, in the parlance of the movement, “temporarily able-bodied.”

In What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement, Fred Pelka takes that slogan at face value. He presents the voices of disability rights activists who, in the period from 1950 to 1990, transformed how society views people with disabilities, and recounts how the various streams of the movement came together to push through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Beginning with the stories of those who grew up with disabilities in the 1940s and '50s, the book traces how disability came to be seen as a political issue, and how people with disabilities—often isolated, institutionalized, and marginalized—forged a movement analogous to the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements, and fought for full and equal participation in American society.

When Freedom Speaks chronicles the stories behind our First Amendment right to speak our minds. Lynn Levine Greenky’s background as a lawyer, rhetorician, and teacher gives her a unique perspective on the protection we have from laws that abridge our right to the freedom of speech. Rhetoricians focus on language and how it influences perception and moves people to action. Powerfully employing that rhetorical approach, this book explores concepts related to free speech as moral narratives that proscribe the boundaries of our constitutionally protected right. Using the characters and drama embedded in legal cases that elucidate First Amendment principles, When Freedom Speaks makes the concepts easier to understand and clearly applicable to our lives. With a wide range of examples and accessible language, this book is the perfect overview of the First Amendment.

Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 recalls that triumph, but also looks beyond Randolph and the MOWM's national leadership to focus on the organization's evolution and actions at the local level. Using the personal papers of previously unheralded MOWM members such as T.D. McNeal, internal government documents from the Roosevelt administration, and other primary sources, David Lucander highlights how local affiliates fighting for a double victory against fascism and racism helped the national MOWM accrue the political capital it needed to effect change.

Lucander details the efforts of grassroots organizers to implement MOWM's program of empowering African Americans via meetings and marches at defense plants and government buildings and, in particular, focuses on the contributions of women activists like Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Throughout he shows how local activities often diverged from policies laid out at MOWM's national office, and how grassroots participants on both sides ignored the rivalry between Randolph and the leadership of the NAACP to align with one another on the ground.

World War II marked a turning point for Mexican Americans that fundamentally changed their expectations about how they should be treated by the greater U.S. society. The experiences of fighting alongside white Americans in the military, as well as of working in factory jobs for wages equal to those of Anglo workers, made Mexican Americans less willing to tolerate the second-class citizenship that had been their lot before the war. Having proven their loyalty and "Americanness" during World War II, Mexican Americans in the postwar years wanted to have the civil rights they knew they had earned.

In this book, Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard Steele investigate how the World War II experiences of Mexican Americans galvanized their struggle for civil rights and how the U.S. government responded to the needs and aspirations of Mexican Americans. The authors demonstrate, for example, that the U.S. government "discovered" Mexican Americans during World War II and set about addressing some of their problems as a way of forestalling a sense of grievance and disaffection that might have made the Mexican American community unwilling to support the war effort. The authors also show that, as much or more than governmental programs, the personal wartime experiences of Mexican Americans formed their civil rights consciousness. The book concludes with a selection of key essays and historical documents from the World War II period that collectively gives a first-person understanding of the civil rights struggles of Mexican Americans.