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"In Before Lawrence, Wesley Phelps recounts the legal challenges to discriminatory Texas sodomy laws before the major breakthrough in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas. While most scholars and activists recognize the Lawrence decision to be the foundation for all subsequent gains for gay and lesbian equality in the twenty-first century, Phelps argues that the earlier legal challenges laid the necessary groundwork for the modern movement for queer civil rights. By probing the fascinating human stories behind these cases, this book offers a rare glimpse into an important component in the movement for gay and lesbian equality and constitutional reform in the United States. The main contribution of the book is to challenge the widely held assumption that the Lawrence v. Texas decision came out of nowhere in 2003. In reality, over several decades grassroots activists had been busy building the organizational groundwork and legal strategies necessary for this final victory over archaic sodomy laws in the United States. In the process, these activists played significant roles in creating and shaping our modern gay and lesbian rights movement"--
Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s and argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy.
The country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life—from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history—ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.
"'Discovering Texas History' is a historiographical reference book that will be invaluable to teachers, students, and researchers of Texas history. Chapter authors are familiar names in Texas history circles--a 'who's who' of high profile historians. Conceived as a follow-up to the award winning (but increasingly dated) 'A Guide the History of Texas' (1988), 'Discovering Texas History' focuses on the major trends in the study of Texas history since 1990. In part one, topical essays address significant historical themes, from race and gender to the arts and urban history. In part two, chronological essays cover the full span of Texas historiography from the Spanish era to the modern day. In each case, the goal is to analyze and summarize the subjects that have captured the attention of professional historians so that 'Discovering Texas History' will take its place as the standard work on the history of Texas history"--
The grassroots queer activism and legal challenges that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in favor of gay and lesbian equality.
This book analyzes the political culture of the American Sunbelt since the end of World War II. It highlights and explains the Sunbelt's emergence during the second half of the twentieth century as the undisputed geographic epicenter for conservative Republican power in the United States. However, the book also investigates the ongoing nature of political contestation within the postwar Sunbelt, often highlighting the underappreciated persistence of liberal and progressive influences across the region. Sean P. Cunningham argues that the conservative Republican ascendancy that so many have identified as almost synonymous with the rise of the postwar American Sunbelt was hardly an easy, unobstructed victory march. Rather, it was consistently challenged and never foreordained. The history of American politics in the postwar Sunbelt resembles a rollercoaster of partisan and ideological adaptation and transformation.
Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of "poverty pimps," and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal. The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural w...
Randolph B. "Mike" Campbell has spent the better part of the last five decades helping Texans rediscover their history, producing a stream of definitive works on the social, political, and economic structures of the Texas past. Through meticulous research and terrific prose, Campbell's collective work has fundamentally remade how historians understand Texan identity and the state's southern heritage, as well as our understanding of such contentious issues as slavery, westward expansion, and Reconstruction. Campbell's pioneering work in local and county records has defined the model for grassroots research and community studies in the field. More than any other scholar, Campbell has shaped ou...
In the middle of the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals and policymakers in the United States came to see poverty as a global problem. Applying Progressive era and Depression insights about the causes of poverty to the post-World War II challenges posed by the Cold War and decolonization, they developed new ideas about why poverty persisted. The problem, they argued, was that the poor at home and abroad were alienated from the enormous opportunities industrial capitalism provided. Left unsolved, that problem, they believed, would threaten world peace. In The Poverty of the World, Sheyda Jahanbani brings together the histories of US foreign relations and domestic politics to explain why...