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How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States—even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.

In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor’s office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.

A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd’s murder—and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.

Contested Terrain explores suburban literature between two moments of domestic crisis: the housing shortage that gave rise to the modern era of suburbanization after World War II, and the mortgage defaults and housing foreclosures that precipitated the Great Recession. Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating, placeless quality of suburbia, Wilhite argues that we should reimagine suburban literature as part of a long literary tradition of U.S. regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and the environmental imperialism of urban sprawl. Wilhite produces new, unexpected readings of works by Sinclair Lewis, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Yates, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Ford, Jung Yun, and Patrick Flanery. Contested Terrain demonstrates how postwar suburban nation-building ushered in an informal geography that recalibrated notions of national identity, democratic citizenship, and domestic security to the scale of the single-family home.
 

This second volume of Music in Black American Life offers research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and Black Music Research Journal, and in two book series published by the University of Illinois Press: Music in American Life, and African American Music in Global Perspective. In this collection, a group of predominately Black scholars explores a variety of topics with works that pioneered new methodologies and modes of inquiry for hearing and studying Black music. These extracts and articles examine the World War II jazz scene; look at female artists like gospel star Shirley Caesar and jazz musician-arranger Melba Liston; illuminate the South Bronx milieu that folded many forms of black expressive culture into rap; and explain Hamilton's massive success as part of the "tanning" of American culture that began when Black music entered the mainstream.

Part sourcebook and part survey of historic music scholarship, Music in Black American Life, 1945–2020 collects groundbreaking work that redefines our view of Black music and its place in American music history.

Contributors: Nelson George, Wayne Everett Goins, Claudrena N. Harold, Eileen M. Hayes, Loren Kajikawa, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy L. Kernodle, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gwendolyn Pough, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mark Tucker, and Sherrie Tucker