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A story of resistance, power and politics as revealed through New York City’s complex history of police brutality The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was the catalyst for a national conversation about race, policing, and injustice. The subsequent killings of other black (often unarmed) citizens led to a surge of media coverage which in turn led to protests and clashes between the police and local residents that were reminiscent of the unrest of the 1960s. Fight the Power examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community’s long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people ...
Federal Law and Southern Order, first published in 1987, examines the factors behind the federal government's long delay in responding to racial violence during the 1950s and 1960s. The book also reveals that it was apprehension of a militant minority of white racists that ultimately spurred acquiescent state and local officials in the South to protect blacks and others involved in civil rights activities. By tracing patterns of violent racial crimes and probing the federal government's persistent failure to punish those who committed the crimes, Michal R. Belknap tells how and why judges, presidents, members of Congress, and even Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation offici...
White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order—especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.
In Framing a Radical African Atlantic Holger Weiss presents a critical outline and analysis of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) and the attempts by the Communist International (Comintern) to establish an anticolonial political platform in the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa during the interwar period. It is the first presentation about the organization and its activities, investigating the background and objectives, the establishment and expansion of a radical African (black) Atlantic network between 1930 and 1933, the crisis in 1933 when the organization was relocated from Hamburg to Paris, the attempt to reactivate the network in 1934 and 1935 and its final dissolution and liquidation in 1937-38.
How do we reconcile the abstract reverence for the natural world central to American literary history, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature," with over a century and a half of widespread environmental destruction? Environmental Evasion examines the environmental implications of literary and cultural productions by writers from James Femimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. Lloyd Willis provocatively argues that the environmentalist outlooks by Cooper and Longfellow were eclipsed by Ralph Waldo Emerson's abstract, imperialist vision of nature. He demonstrates how many 20th century American writers have taken the Emersonian approach, participating in a silent but extremely powerful form of evasive environmental politics in the ways in which they write about the natural world. Attentive to the inherent political dimensions of all texts, Environmental Evasion insists on the relevance of environmental history and politics to New Americanist approaches to the literary canon.
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This is a sweeping narrative of American domestic public policy—its triumphs, struggles, and failures over the past 120 years. In a larger sense, it is a reflection on how the United States has grown and matured, faced challenges and opportunities, and how its federal leaders and policymakers have responded or failed to confront pressing problems. Moreover, American Public Policy addresses the hurdles and challenges that still lie ahead. Four critical questions are posed and answered. First, what were the most significant adversities endured by the American people? Second, what were the landmark domestic policies crafted by the president, enacted by Congress, or issued in Supreme Court decisions? Third, what did they fail to do? Finally, how well have federal policymakers met the key challenges facing America: income inequality, racism, financial crises, terrorist attacks, climate change, gun violence, and other pressures? And what do we still need to do? This book reaches out to students of public policy, American government, US history, and contemporary affairs, as well as to citizens, journalists, and policy practitioners.
Why did some offenses in the South end in mob lynchings while similar crimes led to legal executions? Why did still other cases have nonlethal outcomes? In this well-researched and timely book, Margaret Vandiver explores the complex relationship between these two forms of lethal punishment, challenging the assumption that executions consistently grew out of-and replaced-lynchings. Vandiver begins by examining the incidence of these practices in three culturally and geographically distinct southern regions. In rural northwest Tennessee, lynchings outnumbered legal executions by eleven to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offenses rather than for actual crimes. In co...
A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government’s anti-communist repression. In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together ...
"Direct and accessible. A tour de force of research that demonstrates seemingly unlikely origins, evolutions, and contradictions of social identities."—George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark and American Studies in a Moment of Danger