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This is the first book-length work to offer a sustained comparison of Roma and African Americans.
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement is a theoretical study of the dynamics of public-spirited collective action as well as a substantial study of the American civil rights movement and the local and national politics that surrounded it. In this major historical application of rational choice theory to a social movement, Dennis Chong reexamines the problem of organizing collective action by focusing on the social, psychological, and moral incentives of political activism that are often neglected by rational choice theorists. Using game theoretic concepts as well as dynamic models, he explores how rational individuals decide to participate in social movements and how these individual decisions translate into collective outcomes. In addition to applying formal modeling to the puzzling and important social phenomenon of collective action, he offers persuasive insights into the political and psychological dynamics that provoke and sustain public activism. This remarkably accessible study demonstrates how the civil rights movement succeeded against difficult odds by mobilizing community resources, resisting powerful opposition, and winning concessions from the government.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year How the fight for civil rights in America became an important front in the Cold War In 1958, an African American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing less than two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Soon after World War II, American racism became a major concern of US allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Racial segregation undermined the American image, harming foreign relations in every administration from Truman to Johnson. Mary Dudziak shows how the Cold War helped to facilitate desegregation and other key social reforms at home as the United States sought to polish its image abroad, yet how a focus on appearances over substance limited the nature and extent of progress. Cold War Civil Rights situates the Cold War in civil rights history while giving an international perspective to the fight for racial justice in America.
This book tells the story of how Americans, from the Civil War through today, have fought over the meaning of civil rights.
Since at least the time of Tocqueville, observers have noted that Americans draw on the language of rights when expressing dissatisfaction with political and social conditions. As the United States confronts a complicated set of twenty-first-century problems, that tradition continues, with Americans invoking symbolic events of the founding era to frame calls for change. Most observers have been critical of such “rights talk.” Scholars on the left worry that it limits the range of political demands to those that can be articulated as legally recognized rights, while conservatives fear that it creates unrealistic expectations of entitlement. Drawing on a remarkable cache of Depression-era ...
"Victoria W. Wolcott argues that utopianism is the little-appreciated base of the visionary worldview that informed the prime movers of the Civil Rights Movement. Idealism and pragmatism, not utopianism, are what tend to come to mind when we think about the motivating philosophies of the movement. It's well-known that many of its iconic moments were carefully executed products of planning, not passion alone. But Wolcott holds that pragmatism and idealism alike were grounded in nothing less than intensely utopian thought. Key figures from Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott to Marjorie Penney and Howard Thurman shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was, Wolcott shows, both specifically utopian and precisely engaged in changing the existing world. Casting mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in the light of utopianism ultimately allows us to see the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today"--
Describes the struggle for civil rights in the United States including the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Grounded in a wide reading of social theory and supported with interview data, The Civil Rights Society reveals an important dimension of the failure of legal action to address many of the most persistent forms of racial and sexual oppression.
Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom is a groundbreaking work, one of the first to show in detail how the civil rights movement crystallized our views of citizenship as a grassroots-level, collective endeavor and of self-respect as a formidable political tool. Drawing on both oral and written sources, Richard H. King shows how rank-and-file movement participants defined and discussed such concepts as rights, equality, justice, and, in particular, freedom, and how such key movement leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael, and James Forman were attuned to this "freedom talk." The book includes chapters on the concept of freedom in its many varieties, both individual a...
The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.