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In this electrifying novel, New York Times bestselling author and "an important voice in American literature" (Jada Pinkett Smith) Sister Souljah returns to the story of her beloved character, Midnight. Handsome, young, Muslim, and married to two women living in one house along with his mother, Umma, and sister, Naja: can Midnight manage all that he has on his plate? He is surrounded by Americans who don't share or understand his faith or culture, and adults who are offended by his maturity, intelligence, and his natural ability to make his hard work turn into real money. He is calm, confident, and cool, Ninja-trained and powerful, but one moment of rage throws this Brooklyn youth into a dark world of dirty police, gangs, guns, drugs, prisons, and dangerous inmates. Everything he ever believed, every dollar he ever earned, and all of the women he ever loved--including his mother--are at risk. Will his manhood be taken, broken, or altered? Can he maintain his faith? Outnumbered, overruled, and deeply envied--how can he possibly survive? Will the streets convert him? What can he keep? What must he lose?
One of . . . Electric Literature's "Most Anticipated Debuts of Early 2020" * O, The Oprah Magazine's "31 LGBTQ Books That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020" * Publishers Weekly's "Spring 2020 Literary Fiction Announcements" * BuzzFeed's "Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2020" * The Millions's "Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2020 Book Preview" * The Rumpus's "What to Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner" * LGBTQ Reads's "2020 LGBTQAP Adult Fiction Preview: January-June" * Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated Books of 2020" * BookRiot's "Must-Read Debut Novels of 2020" * Bitch's "27 Novels Feminists Should Read in 2020" * Harper's Bazaar's "14 LGBTQ+ Books to Look For in 2020" * NewNowNext's "11 Queer Books We Can't Wait to Read This Spring" * Cosmopolitan's "12 Books You'll Be Dying to Read This Summer" * Salon's "The Best and Boldest New Must-Read Books for May" * Lambda Literary's "Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of May 2020" * The Rumpus's "What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Mothers" "A queer tour-de-force . . . Compelling and astonishing."-Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause--despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss--until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie's mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she's never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris--who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality--Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris's second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents' perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall? Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, All My Mother's Lovers is the exciting debut novel from fiction writer and book critic Ilana Masad. A unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, All My Mother's Lovers challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.
Available in hardcover for the first time, a collection of cult sensation Jeremy Robert Johnson's best and most bizarre short fiction, including a brand-new, never-before-published novella. For more than a decade, Jeremy Robert Johnson has been bubbling under the surface of both literary and genre fiction. His short stories present a brilliantly dark and audaciously weird realm where cosmic nightmares collide with all-too-human characters and apocalypses of all shapes and sizes loom ominously. In "Persistence Hunting," a lonely distance runner is seduced into a brutal life of crime with an ever-narrowing path for escape. In "When Susurrus Stirs," an unlucky pacifist must stop a horrifying parasite from turning his body into a sentient hive. Running through all of Johnson's work is a hallucinatory vision and deeply-felt empathy, earning the author a reputation as one of today's most daring and thrilling writers. Featuring the best of his independently-published short fiction, as well as an exclusive, never-before-published novella "The Sleep of Judges"--where a father's fight against the denizens of a drug den becomes a mind-bending suburban nightmare--Entropy in Bloom is a perfect compendium for avid fans and an ideal entry point for adventurous readers seeking the humor, heartbreak, and terror of JRJ's strange new worlds. Table of Contents: An Introduction by Brian Evenson The League of Zeroes Persistence Hunting The Oarsman The Gravity of Benham Falls Dissociative Skills Snowfall When Susurrus Stirs Luminary Trigger Variation Cathedral Mother Swimming in the House of the Sea Saturn's Game The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line A Flood of Harriers States of Glass The Sleep of Judges
National Book Award Finalist! Instant New York Times Bestseller! The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meets Jane the Virgin in this poignant but often laugh-out-loud funny contemporary YA about losing a sister and finding yourself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican-American home. Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it's not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister's story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal? "Alive and crackling--a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner. "--The New York Times "Unique and fresh." --Entertainment Weekly "A standout." --NPR
Two lost sisters find family, and themselves, among the voices of an Ojibwe reservation When Loretta surrenders her young girls to the county and then disappears, she becomes one more missing Native woman in Indian Country's long devastating history of loss. But she is also a daughter of the Mozhay Point Reservation in northern Minnesota and the mother of Azure and Rain, ages 3 and 4, and her absence haunts all the lives she has touched--and all the stories they tell in this novel. In the Night of Memory returns to the fictional reservation of Linda LeGarde Grover's previous award-winning books, introducing readers to a new generation of the Gallette family as Azure and Rain make their way home. After a string of foster placements, from cold to kind to cruel, the girls find their way back to their extended Mozhay family, and a new set of challenges, and stories, unfolds. Deftly, Grover conjures a chorus of women's voices (sensible, sensitive Azure's first among them) to fill in the sorrows and joys, the loves and the losses that have brought the girls and their people to this moment. Though reconciliation is possible, some ruptures simply cannot be repaired; they can only be lived through, or lived with. In the Night of Memory creates a nuanced, moving, often humorous picture of two Ojibwe girls becoming women in light of this lesson learned in the long, sharply etched shadow of Native American history.
Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
A tale of violence, lofty ideals, and moral ambiguity, Fontaine's best-selling novel is now available in a superb English translation Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Vida Doble is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is impossible. Captured by agents of the Chilean repression, withstanding brutal torture to save her comrades, she must now either forsake the allegiances of motherhood or betray the political ideals to which she is deeply committed. Arturo Fontaine's Lorena is a study in contradictions--mother and combatant, intellectual and lover, idealist and traitor--and he places her within a historical context that confounds her dilemmas. Though she has few viable options, she is no mere victim, and Fontaine disallows any comfortable high moral ground. His novel is among the most subtle explorations of human violence ever written. Ranking with Roberto Bolaño and Mario Vargas Llosa on Latin America's roster of most accomplished authors, Fontaine is a fearless explorer of the most sordid and controversial aspects of Chile's history and culture. He addresses a set of moral questions specific to Pinochet's murderous reign but invites us, four decades later, to consider global conflicts today and question how far we've come.
This volume focuses on the ways in which mothers aremarginalized based on intersecting identities, such as immigration status,race, class, disability, sexuality, and how these women mother from the margins.Divided into three sections, this collection brings forth the voices andexperiences of mothers and highlights the institutions and laws thatmarginalize them. In the first section, mothersface barriers such as institutional constraints that block them from neededresources and the ability to mother as they see fit. In section two, contributors examine theborders of marginalized mothering - boundaries reflected through citizenship,walls, geography, dealings with intimate partners and welfare offices, or prisonbars. Readings in this section highlight mothers' efforts to transcend, resist,or even just survive experiences with borders. The final section centers on mothers that explicitly adopt motheringstrategies of resistance or explicitly use their status as mothers in theiractivism. Topics range from mothers who engage in milk sharing to mothers ofcolor whom organize against police brutality. Throughout the volume, contributors demonstrate the striking resilienceof these mothers, and their resistance in challenging the ideologies andinstitutions that marginalize them.
Provides a model for queering motherhood that resists racist, neoliberal, and hetero- or homonormative ideals of "good" mothering. Bridging the gap between feminist studies of motherhood and queer theory, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood articulates a provocative philosophy of queer kinship that need not be rooted in lesbian or gay sexual identities. Working from an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates feminist philosophy and queer, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Shelley M. Park offers a powerful critique of an ideology she terms monomaternalism. Despite widespread cultural insistence that every child should have one--and only one--"real" mother, many contemporary family constellations do not fit this mandate. Park highlights the negative consequences of this ideology and demonstrates how families created through open adoption, same-sex parenting, divorce, and plural marriage can be sites of resistance. Drawing from personal experiences as both an adoptive and a biological mother and juxtaposing these autobiographical reflections with critical readings of cultural texts representing multi-mother families, Park advocates a new understanding of postmodern families as potentially queer coalitional assemblages held together by a mixture of affection and critical reflection premised on difference. Shelley M. Park is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Central Florida.
Children's rights, lone motherhood and the breakdown of families are all issues at the forefront of current social debate in the West, with little agreement on what constitutes good parenting, or how the needs of both mother and child are best met. The feminist contribution to this debate is particularly important in keeping in view the diverse identities of all those who provide mothering. The psychoanalytic contribution is often undervalued and misunderstood. Mothering and Ambivalence brings together authors from therapeutic, academic and social work backgrounds to discuss dependency, anxiety and gender relations within families. Drawing on extensive professional experience the contributors combine a psychoanalytic and feminist approach to mothering which transcends the polarized and simplistic political debate about women's and children's needs. They also show how such an approach can inform and improve professional practice.
In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think a good mother should be, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college, and whether to stay in college or not. The first book length study to focus on the lives and experiences of single mothers who are college students, Mothering by Degrees points out how these women are influenced by dominant American ideologies of motherhood, and the institutional parameters of the schools they attend, and argues for increased attention to the specific ways in which the choices, challenges, and opportunities available to mothers are shaped within their specific environments, as well as the ways in which mothers help shape those environments.
The rise of the novel and of the ideal nuclear family was no mere coincidence, argues Susan C. Greenfield in this fascinating look at the construction of modern maternity. Many historians maintain that the eighteenth century witnessed the idealization of the caring, loving mother. Here Greenfield charts how the newly emerging novels of the period, in their increasing feminization, responded to and helped shape that image, often infusing it with more nuance and flexibility. By the end of the eighteenth century, she notes, novels by women about missing mothers and their suffering daughters abounded. Even as the political implications of the novels vary, the books uniformly insist on the tenacity of the mother-daughter bond despite the mother's absence. Exploring the historically contingent assumptions about maternal care that informed writers during this period, Greenfield argues that women's novels helped construct the story of mother love and loss that psychoanalysis would soon inherit.
Research into children and domestic violence in recent years has emphasized the importance of giving positive support to a non-abusive parent for effective child protection. But what exactly does positive support involve? Based on findings from six primary research studies carried out by the authors themselves, as well as other published research, this book reveals how undermining mothering - specifically, family courts and social work agencies blaming mothers for their own victimization - plays a key role in locking women into abusive relationships and exacerbating the damage done by domestic violence. It explores the principle message drawn from the research: that the needs of individual victims should inform risk assessment and safety planning by welfare practitioners. Case studies are used to explore key issues that should be considered during assessment and planning, such as the psychological impact on children of living in an abusive household; mother and child protection from an abusive partner during court proceedings; and child contact with an abusive parent. Mothering Through Domestic Violence is essential reading for practitioners working in the fields of family and child welfare, family courts and policy makers.
A 2012 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book This gorgeous picture book by Newbery Honor winner Patricia C. McKissack and two-time Caldecott Medal-winning husband-and-wife team Leo and Diane Dillon is sure to become a treasured keepsake for African American families. Set in West Africa, this a lyrical story-in-verse is about a young black boy who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and his father who is left behind to mourn the loss of his son. Here's a beautiful, powerful, truly unforgettable story about family, memory, and freedom. "Forceful and iconic," raves Publishers Weekly in a starred review.
In Rome one January afternoon in 1943, a young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. The war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return.Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman,winner of the prestigious Georg Büchner prize, is a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost--even at the risk of excluding reality. More than just the story of this single woman, it is a compelling and credible description of a typical young German woman during the Nazi era.
Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers-- immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs--Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work.
"The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly." --The New York Times Book Review Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop. Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It's there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity. This searing and heart-wrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society's ideas of race and class is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice.
A powerful and groundbreaking revelation of the secret history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered children for adoption in the several decades before Roe v. Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Awaytells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roedecision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Awayis their story.
This widely acclaimed bestseller spans two countries and two generations, following a group of Chinese women who meet to play mah jong, invest money and tell the secret stories of their lives. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club.
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself. Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.
The acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries now gives us an electrifying stand-alone thriller that takes off into a sweeping international drama. January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjovallen, nineteen people have been massacred. The only clue is a red ribbon found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: her grandparents, the Andrens, are among the victims. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed the murders. But when Birgitta discovers the diary of another Andren--a gang master on the American transcontinental railway in the nineteenth century--that describes the cruel treatment of Chinese slave-workers, she is determined to uncover what she suspects is a more complicated truth. The investigation leads to modern-day Beijing and its highest echelons of power, to Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But the narrative also takes us back 150 years, into a history that will ensnare Birgitta as she draws ever closer to solving the Hesjovallen murders. This is Henning Mankell at the height of his powers.
Single or married, working mothers are, if not the norm, no longer exceptional. These days, women who stay at home to raise their children seem to be making a radical lifestyle choice. Indeed, the women at the center of The Paradox of Natural Mothering have renounced consumerism and careerism in order to reclaim home and family. These natural mothers favor parenting practices that set them apart from the mainstream: home birth, extended breast feeding, home schooling and natural health care. Regarding themselves as part of a movement, natural mothers believe they are changing society one child, one family at a time. Author Chris Bobel profiles some thirty natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women's traditional role. Bobel's subjects say that they have chosen to follow their nature rather than social imperatives. Embracing such lifestyle alternatives as voluntary simplicity and attachment parenting, they place family above status and personal achievement. Bobel illuminates the paradoxes of natural mothering, the ways in which these women resist the trappings of upward mobility but acquiesce to a kind of biological determinism and conventional gender scripts.
In 1939, on the eve of Hitler''s invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England. The two were given shelter by a jovial, upper-class British foster family with whom they lived for the next seven years. Edith chronicles these transformative experiences of exile and good fortune in "The Tiger in the Attic," a touching memoir of growing up as an outsider in a strange land. In this illuminating chronicle, Edith describes how she struggled to fit in and to conquer self-doubts about her German identity. Her realistic portrayal of the seemingly mundane yet historically momentous details of daily life during World War II slowly reveals istelf as a hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers. She paints an account rich with colorful characters and intense relationships, uncanny close calls and unnerving bouts of luck that led to survival. Edith''s journey between cultures continues with her final passage to AmericaOCoyet another chapter in her life that required adjustment to a new worldOCoallowing her, as she narrates it here, to visit her past as an exile all over again. "The Tiger in the Attic "is a literary gem from a skilled fiction writer, the story of a thoughtful and observant child growing up against the backdrop of the most dangerous and decisive moment in modern European history. Offering a unique perspective on Holocaust studies, this book is both an exceptional and universal story of a young German-Jewish girl caught between worlds. OC Adjectives like OCyaudaciousOCO and OCyeloquent, OCO OCyenchantingOCO and OCyexceptionalOCO require rationing. . . . But what if the book demands these terms and more? Such is the case with "The Tiger in the Attic," Edith MiltonOCOs marvelous memoir of her childhood.OCOOCoKerry Fried, "Newsday" OC Milton is brilliant at the small stroke . . . as well as broader ones.OCOOCoAlana Newhouse, "New York"" Times Book Review ""
The first book on foster care written from foster mothers' perspectives, They're All My Children voices the often painful experiences of contemporary U.S. foster mothers as they struggle to mother and care-work in the face of exploitative social relations with the state. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wozniak, herself a former foster mother and an anthropologist, presents and analyzes women's personal stories about fostering to reflect on the larger socio-cultural context of American family lifenamely, how we think about kinship, identity, and work. Foster mothers construct enduring kinship relationships with children, and often with the children's biological families. These relationships enhance children's chances to growth and thrive and in turn extend women's kin relationships into often distant and disparate communities. Wozniak also highlights the economic side of fostering to show how foster mothers are both mothers and workers; foster children are both providers and provided for, adored sentimental children and economic figures. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Wozniak argues that we have not gone far enough in understanding the experiences of these women whose life work lies outside the usual boundaries. Nor have child welfare gone far enough in revising the theories upon which child welfare policies are based. Foster mothers and their experiences challenge the patriarchal, nuclear family ideals upon which foster care programs are based, a challenge that They're All My Children takes forward.
Test A remarkable new novel, luminous with passion and mystery, from the incredible bestselling author of Seventh Heaven. Hoffman, one of the finest writers of her generation (Newsweek), transports readers to Florida--a place where anything can happen during the month of May. A transplanted New Yorker and her son have no idea what Verity holds in store for them.
These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure.
Resources and Readings
edited by Sue Doe and Lisa Langstraat
Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student.
edited by Tracy Crow
A collection of 32 essays written by both veterans and family members describing their experiences from conflicts spanning World War II to Afghanistan.
edited by David C. DiRamio
With the passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2008, more than 1.4 million service members and their families became eligible for higher education benefits, and veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan enrolled in colleges and universities in record numbers. The first wave of research about these new student veterans focused mostly on describing their characteristics and the transition from military service to civilian life and the college campus. This new edited collection presents findings from the second wave of research about student veterans, with a focus on data-driven evidence of academic success factors, including persistence, retention, degree completion, and employment after college.
by
This powerful collection juxtaposes 48 self-posed photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of women at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women from all five branches of the military share their stories here - stories that are by turns moving, comic, thought-provoking, and profound. Seeing their faces in stunning color photographic portraits and reading what they have to say about loss, comradeship, conflict, and hard choices will change the ways we think about women and war.
by Suzanne Gordon
In The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare, award-winning author Suzanne Gordon takes us to the front lines of federal policymaking and healthcare delivery, as it affects eight million Americans whose military service makes them eligible for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) coverage. Gordon's collected dispatches provide insight and information too often missing from mainstream media reporting on the VHA and from Capitol Hill debates about its future. Drawing on interviews with veterans and their families, VHA staff and administrators, health care policy experts and Congressional decision makers, Gordon describes a federal agency under siege that nevertheless accomplishes its difficult mission of serving men and women injured, in myriad ways, while on active duty. The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare is an essential primer on VHA care and a call to action by veterans, their advocacy organizations, and political allies. Without lobbying efforts and broader public understanding of what's at stake, a system now functioning far better than most private hospital systems may end up looking more like them, to the detriment of patients and providers alike.
by Jeremy M. Teigen
The assumptions that military service helps candidates attract votes - while lacking it harms a candidate's chances - has been an article of faith since the electoral coronation of George Washington in 1789. Perhaps the most compelling fact driving the perception that military service helps win votes is the large number of veterans who have held public office. Some candidates even exaggerate their military service to persuade voters. However, sufficient counter-examples undermine the idea that military veterans enjoy an advantage when seeking political office. In Why Veterans Run, Jeremy Teigen explains the tendency of parties to elevate those with armed forces experience to run for high office. He describes the veteran candidate phenomenon by examining the related factors and patterns, showing why different eras have more former generals running and why the number of veterans in election cycles varies. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Why Veterans Run investigates each postwar era in U.S. electoral history and elaborates why so many veterans run for office. Teigen also reveals how election outcomes with veteran candidates illuminate the relationship between the military and civilian spheres as well as the preferences of the American electorate.
by Joanna Wise
Horticultural Therapy is ideally suited to engage veterans alienated from traditional civilian healthcare routes who present with a range of complex and challenging healthcare needs. It presents, on the surface, as a deceptively simple and accessible activity. Carried out by trained professionals, it is an evidence-based, effective and cost-effective treatment. By targeting specific client-centred goals, it is able to integrate improved individual physical, emotional, cognitive and social outcomes with broader opportunities to transition successfully into civilian society through learning a valuable skill set and a meaningful occupation. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the methods of Horticultural Therapy as applied to this unique client group. It describes the type of combat training and experiences veterans may have had, and sets out the common issues and pitfalls civilian therapists often face when working with the military. Looking to the future, it also identifies promising avenues in terms of how we may improve the treatment we offer to best serve the needs of these ex-service men and women who fight on our behalf.
by
Breaking Ranks brings a new and deeply personal perspective to the war in Iraq by looking into the lives of six veterans who turned against the war they helped to fight. Based on extensive interviews with each of the six, the book relates why they enlisted, their experiences in training and in early missions, their tours of combat, and what has happened to them since returning home. The compelling stories of this diverse cross section of the military recount how each journey to Iraq began with the sincere desire to do good. Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Anne Lutz show how each individual's experiences led to new moral and political understandings and ultimately to opposing the war.
by Erin P. Finley
In this book the author relates the stories of how American veterans and their families navigate the return home. For many of the 1.6 million U.S. service members who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, the trip home is only the beginning of a longer journey. Many undergo an awkward period of readjustment to civilian life after long deployments. Some veterans may find themselves drinking too much, unable to sleep or waking from unspeakable dreams, lashing out at friends and loved ones. Over time, some will struggle so profoundly that they eventually are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD). Following a group of veterans and their personal stories of war, trauma, and recovery, the author illustrates the devastating impact PTSD can have on veterans and their families, their loved ones, and their communities. He explores issues of substance abuse, failed relationships, domestic violence, and even suicide and also challenges popular ideas of PTSD as incurable and permanently debilitating. Drawing on ethnographic material, he examines the cultural, political, and historical influences that shape individual experiences of PTSD and how its sufferers are perceived by the military, medical personnel, and society at large. Despite widespread media coverage and public controversy over the military's response to wounded and traumatized service members, debate continues over how best to provide treatment and compensation for service-related disabilities. Meanwhile, new and highly effective treatments are revolutionizing how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides trauma care, redefining the way PTSD itself is understood in the process. Untangling each of these conflicts, the book reveals the very real implications they have for veterans living with PTSD and offers recommendations to improve how we care for this vulnerable but resilient population.
by Lisa Leitz
Fighting for Peace brings to light an important yet neglected aspect of opposition to the Iraq War-the role of veterans and their families. Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews, Lisa Leitz demonstrates how the harrowing war experiences of veterans and their families motivated a significant number of them to engage in peace activism.
by Christopher S. Parker
Fighting for Democracy shows how the experiences of African American soldiers during World War II and the Korean War influenced many of them to challenge white supremacy in the South when they returned home. Focusing on the motivations of individual black veterans, this groundbreaking book explores the relationship between military service and political activism. Christopher Parker draws on unique sources of evidence, including interviews and survey data, to illustrate how and why black servicemen who fought for their country in wartime returned to America prepared to fight for their own equal.
by Al Carroll
As far back as colonial times, Native individuals and communities have fought alongside European and American soldiers against common enemies. Medicine Bags and Dog Tags is the story of these Native men and women whose military service has defended ancient homelands, perpetuated longstanding warrior traditions, and promoted tribal survival and sovereignty.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
YOU CAN'T ASK THAT asks recent war veterans the awkward, inappropriate or uncomfortable questions you've always wanted to know the answers to, but never had the guts to ask.
by
The study of military veterans and politics has been a growing topic of interest, but to date most research on the topic has remained isolated in specific, unconnected fields of inquiry. Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics is the first multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the American veteran experience. Stephen Ortiz has compiled some of the best work on the formation and impact of veterans' policies, the politics of veterans' issues, and veterans' political engagement over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States.
by David A. Gerber
Disabled Veterans in History explores the long-neglected history of those who have sustained lasting injuries or chronic illnesses while serving in uniform. The contributors to this volume cover an impressive range of countries in Europe and North America as well as a wide sweep of chronology from the Ancient World to the present. The essays address the emergence of "veteran" as a political category with unique privileges and entitlements and of disabled veterans as a special project--and indeed one of the original projects--of the modern welfare state. The introductory essay, "Finding Disabled Veterans in History," offers perhaps the first attempt at synthesizing knowledge about disabled veterans in Western societies. The other essays examine the representation of disabled veterans from Sophocles' Philoctetes to American feature films; the relations of disabled veterans to the state and society in such public policy issues as pensions, medical care, physical rehabilitation, and job retraining; and the disabled veteran's agency and experience in reentering the peacetime world. Other topics include the place of disabled veterans in societies defeated in war; the fate of disabled veterans in societies experiencing frequent changes of political regimes; the emergence of pensions and vocational rehabilitation for disabled veterans; and the abiding problem of alcohol abuse among disabled veterans. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines, including history, physical rehabilitation, Slavic studies, sociology, communication and media, and museum studies. The book will be of interest especially to researchers in the fields of war and society, the welfare state, and disability studies, as well as those in the medical, rehabilitation, and counseling fields. David A. Gerber is Professor of History, State University at Buffalo.
by Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Filipczak
There's a serious new problem in the workplace, and it has nothing to do with downsizing, change, foreign competition, pointy-haired bosses, cubicle envy, or greed. Instead, it's the problem of distinct generations - the Veterans, the Baby Boomers, the GenXers, and (coming soon) the Nexters - crossing paths and sometimes colliding. So how can you manage this motley group with their conflicting work ethics, dissimilar values, and idiosyncratic styles? How do you get them to stop snarling at each other? How do you motivate them to work together? Generations at Work is the first book to clearly outline each group's primary characteristics, and to explain the seminal events and cultural icons that shaped their attitudes and values. But it doesn't just provide an astute sociological portrait. The book also offers practical, sound solutions for avoiding (or remedying) the most common mistakes of managing in today's cross-generational workplace.
by Suzanne Gordon
The book looks at the largest hospital system in the country, the Veterans Healthcare Administration--one that has come under fire from critics in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the nation's media. The author spent five years closely observing the VHA's treatment of patients suffering from service related injuries, physical and mental. This book describes how the VHA, tasked with a challenging patient population, does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life. It explores how the resulting public debate about the future of veterans' health care has pitted VHA patients and their care-givers against politicians and policy-makers who believe that former military personnel would be better served by private health care providers
by Aaron Glantz
The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz, who reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since, levels a devastating indictment against the Bush administration for its bald neglect of soldiers and its disingenuous reneging on their benefits.
Nightline, ABC News Productions
Overshadowed by the wars that came before and after it, the Korean War has received little of the attention it rightly deserves, yet its legacy endures: armies still face each other across the demilitarized zone - and nuclear saber-rattling, this time coming from North Korea, is still a factor. In this ABC News program, correspondent Phil Ittner embeds himself with a group of veterans making a pilgrimage to Korea for the first time since they saw action there more than 50 years ago.
by Robert Eno Hunt
Robert Hunt examines how Union veterans of the Army of the Cumberland employed the extinction of slavery in the trans-Appalachian South in their memory of the Civil War. Hunt argues that rather than ignoring or belittling emancipation, it became central to veterans' retrospective understanding of what the war, and their service in it, was all about. The Army of the Cumberland is particularly useful as a subject for this examination because it invaded the South deeply, encountering numerous ex-slaves as fugitives, refugees, laborers on military projects, and new recruits.
by James Alan Marten
After the Civil War, white Confederate and Union army veterans reentered - or struggled to reenter - the lives and communities they had left behind. In Sing Not War, James Marten explores how the nineteenth century's "Greatest Generation" attempted to blend back into society and how their experiences were treated by non-veterans. Many soldiers, Marten reveals, had a much harder time reintegrating into their communities and returning to their civilian lives than has been previously understood.
by Willamette Master Chorus
Recorded First United Methodist Church, Salem, Oregon. 2015 May 30 and June 1
by Matthew H. Bradley
by William C. Meadows
In this book, William C. Meadows presents an in-depth ethnohistorical survey of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche military societies, drawn from extensive interviews with tribal elders and military society members, unpublished archival sources, and linguistic data. He examines their structure, functions, rituals, and martial symbols, showing how they fit within larger tribal organizations. And he explores how military societies, like powwows, have become a distinct public format for cultural and ethnic continuity.
Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because dollars and jobs are at stake: depending on what policy is chosen, some industries, farmers, and workers will prosper, while others will suffer. Douglas A. Irwin's Clashing over Commerce is the most authoritative and comprehensive history of US trade policy to date, offering a clear picture of the various economic and political forces that have shaped it. From the start, trade policy divided the nation--first when Thomas Jefferson declared an embargo on all foreign trade and then when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over excessive taxes on imports. The Civil War saw a shift toward protectionism, which then came under constant political attack. Then, controversy over the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression led to a policy shift toward freer trade, involving trade agreements that eventually produced the World Trade Organization. Irwin makes sense of this turbulent history by showing how different economic interests tend to be grouped geographically, meaning that every proposed policy change found ready champions and opponents in Congress. As the Trump administration considers making major changes to US trade policy, Irwin's sweeping historical perspective helps illuminate the current debate. Deeply researched and rich with insight and detail, Clashing over Commerce provides valuable and enduring insights into US trade policy past and present.
Free Trade and the Environment examines the impact economic integration has on the environment, using Mexico, which transformed itself from one of the most closed economies to one of the world's most open, as a case study. As new nations join the Free Trade Area of the Americas or the World Trade Organization, they are considering the path taken by Mexico nearly 20 years ago. The author investigates two commonly held and opposing beliefs in the policy community about the impact of free trade on the environment. While some believe that free trade will raise incomes in developing countries, thus encouraging governments to protect the environment, others argue that free trade simply provides an incentive for heavily polluting industries to move to developing countries with lax environmental regulations. The author shows that for Mexico in fact neither position is correct, and concludes with suggestions for free trade policies that couple environmental benefits with economic integration.
Jennifer Harbury's investigation into torture began when her husband disappeared in Guatemala in 1992; she told the story of his torture and murder in Searching for Everardo. For over a decade since, Harbury has used her formidable legal, research, and organizing skills to press for the U.S. government's disclosure of America's involvement in harrowing abuses in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. A draft of this book had just been completed when the first photos from Abu Ghraib were published; tragically, many of Harbury's deepest fears about America's own abuses were graphically confirmed by those horrific images. This urgently needed book offers both well-documented evidence of the CIA's continuous involvement in torture tactics since the 1970s and moving personal testimony from many of the victims. Most important, Harbury provides solid, convincing arguments against the use of torture in any circumstances- not only because it is completely inconsistent with all the basic values Americans hold dear, but also because it has repeatedly proved to be ineffective- Again and again,'information' obtained through these gruesome tactics proves unreliable or false. Worse, the use of torture by U.S. client states, allies, and even by our own operatives, endangers our citizens and especially our troops deployed internationally.
'American Protest Literature' presents sources from 11 protest movements - political, social and cultural - from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. Each section reprints documents from the original phase of the movement as well as evidence of its legacy in later times.
How could the United States, a nation founded on the principles of liberty and equality, have produced Abu Ghraib, torture memos, Plamegate, and warrantless wiretaps? Did America set out to become an empire? And if so, how has it reconciled its imperialism--and in some cases, its crimes--with the idea of liberty so forcefully expressed in the Declaration of Independence? Empire for Liberty tells the story of men who used the rhetoric of liberty to further their imperial ambitions, and reveals that the quest for empire has guided the nation's architects from the very beginning--and continues to do so today. Historian Richard Immerman paints nuanced portraits of six exceptional public figures who manifestly influenced the course of American empire: Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Seward, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Foster Dulles, and Paul Wolfowitz. Each played a pivotal role as empire builder and, with the exception of Adams, did so without occupying the presidency. Taking readers from the founding of the republic to the Global War on Terror, Immerman shows how each individual's influence arose from a keen sensitivity to the concerns of his times; how the trajectory of American empire was relentless if not straight; and how these shrewd and powerful individuals shaped their rhetoric about liberty to suit their needs. But as Immerman demonstrates in this timely and provocative book, liberty and empire were on a collision course. And in the Global War on Terror and the occupation of Iraq, they violently collided.
A Lab of One's Own describes the experiences of some extraordinary but sadly neglected scientific women who tasted independence, responsibility, and excitement in World War One. Understanding the past is crucial for improving the future, and Patricia Fara examines how inherited prejudicescontinue to limit women's scientific opportunities.Suffragists aligned themselves with scientific and technological progress. Defying arguments about intellectual inferiority and child-bearing responsibilities, during the War they won support by mobilising women to enter conventionally male domains, including science, industry, medicine, and themilitary.A Lab of One's Own reveals these women's stories, celebrating successes and analysing setbacks. In 1919, the suffragist Millicent Fawcett declared triumphantly that "The war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs, and left them free." She was wrong: although women hadhelped the country to victory and won the vote for those over thirty, they had lost the battle for equality. Men returning from the Front reclaimed their jobs, and conventional hierarchies were re-established - although now the nation knew that women were fully capable of performing worktraditionally reserved for men.
Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right over 40 years ago, it bears stigma - a proverbial scarlet A- in the United States. Millions participate in or benefit from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in theUS ends in abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend, or loved one to loved one? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many fromsharing their abortion experiences with friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way. It argues persuasively that America would benefit from working to reverse such stigma, providing readers with tools that may help them model ways of doing so.Our silence around private experience with abortion has distorted our public discourse. Both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on the extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the public discourse polarized and contentious, and keeps the focus on the cases that occur theleast. Katie Watson focuses instead on the remaining 95% of abortion cases. The book gives the reflective reader a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like. It explains why this public/private disjuncture exists, what it costs us, and what can begained by including ordinary abortion in public debate.As Scarlet A explains, abortion has been a constitutional right for nearly 45 years, and it should remain one. What we need now are productive conversations about abortion ethics: how could or should people decide whether to exercise this right? Watson paints a rich, rarely seen picture of howpatients and doctors currently think and act, and ultimately invites readers to draw their own conclusions.
In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African American family. Though the discussion of racial inequality is typically ideologically polarized. Wilson dares to consider both institutional and cultural factors as causes of the persistence of racial inequality. He reaches the controversial conclusion that while structural and cultural forces are inextricably linked, public policy can only change the racial status quo by reforming the institutions that reinforce it.
Master storyteller Joy Hakim has excited millions of young minds with the great drama of American history in her award-winning series A History of US. Hailed by historians, educators, and parents for its exciting, thought-provoking narrative, the books have been recognized as a break-throughtool in teaching history and critical reading skills to young people. And the kids themselves agree: Hakim has piles of fan letters as testimony.Beginning in January, PBS, in association with Thirteen/WNET, General Electric and Kunhardt Productions, will present Freedom: A History of US, an innovative television mini-series based on Joy Hakim's award-winning books. Katie Couric will host the series, George and Laura Bush willintroduce the first episode, and celebrated actors such as Paul Newman, Glenn Close, Robin Williams, Matthew Broderick, Angela Bassett, Jeremy Irons, John Lithgow, and Morgan Freeman will participate as narrators. The program will focus on the history of the United States through the inspiring storyof our fight to uphold the ideal of freedom, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, culminating in the Civil Rights movement, and concluding with the challenges posed by the September 11th attacks. In 8 one-hour episodes appearing nationally on public television, the story ofAmerica will unfold through Joy Hakim's vision: her belief that freedom survives again and again, despite all the mistakes and tragic setbacks, and that in order to succeed in upholding this great ideal we must examine the past.The Freedom: A History of US companion book to the PBS series will capture both the visual energy of the programs and Hakim's rare gift for telling history through the lives of its makers. The book will follow the thread of the programs and also expand on them, providing a more completepicture of the people and events that shaped a defiant band of thirteen colonies into a great nation of 50 states. More than 400 illustrations, sidebars, and historical documents enhance this stunning look at American history for families to share, discuss, and treasure. Freedom: A History of US isan essential book for every household in America, and reminds us that great storytelling and a passion for freedom will always have a place at the table.
Originally published in 1974, just as the Wounded Knee occupation was coming to an end, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties raises disturbing questions about the status of American Indians within the American and international political landscapes. Analyzing the history of Indian treaty relations with the United States, Vine Deloria presents population and land ownership information to support his argument that many Indian tribes have more impressive landholdings than some small members of the United Nations. Yet American Indians are not even accorded status within the UN's trust territories recognition process. A 2000 study published by the Annual Survey of International and Comparative Law recommends that the United Nations offer membership to the Iroquois, Cherokee, Navajo, and other Indian tribes. Ironically, the study also recommends that smaller tribes band together to form a confederation to seek membership--a suggestion nearly identical to the one the United States made to the Delaware Indians in 1778--and that a presidential commission explore ways to move beyond the Doctrine of Discovery, under which European nations justified their confiscation of Indian lands. Many of these ideas appear here in this book, which predates the 2000 study by twenty-six years. Thus, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties anticipates recent events as history comes full circle, making the book imperative reading for anyone wishing to understand the background of the movement of American Indians onto the world political stage. In the quarter century since this book was written, Indian nations have taken great strides in demonstrating their claims to recognized nationhood. Together with Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, by Deloria and David E. Wilkins, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties highlights the historical events that helped bring these changes to fruition. At the conclusion of Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Deloria states: "The recommendations made in the Twenty Points and the justification for such a change as articulated in the book may well come to pass in our lifetime." Now we are seeing his statement come true.
Pauline Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to be -- from the Declaration's birth in the hard and tortuous struggle by which Americans arrived at Independence to the ways in which, in the nineteenth century, the document itself became sanctified. Maier describes the transformation of the Second Continental Congress into a national government, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, and with more authority than the colonists would ever have conceded to the British Parliament; the great difficulty in making the decision for Independence; the influence of Paine's Common Sense, which shifted the terms of debate; and the political maneuvers that allowed Congress to make the momentous decision. In Maier's hands, the Declaration of Independence is brought close to us. She lets us hear the voice of the people as revealed in the other "declarations" of 1776: the local resolutions -- most of which have gone unnoticed over the past two centuries -- that explained, advocated, and justified Independence and undergirded Congress's work. Detective-like, she discloses the origins of key ideas and phrases in the Declaration and unravels the complex story of its drafting and of the group-editing job which angered Thomas Jefferson. Maier also reveals what happened to the Declaration after the signing and celebration: how it was largely forgotten and then revived to buttress political arguments of the nineteenth century; and, most important, how Abraham Lincoln ensured its persistence as a living force in American society. Finally, she shows how by the very act of venerating the Declaration as we do -- by holding it as sacrosanct, akin to holy writ -- we may actually be betraying its purpose and its power.
In the United States, almost 90 percent of state judges have to run in popular elections to remain on the bench. In the past decade, this peculiarly American institution has produced vicious multi-million-dollar political election campaigns and high-profile allegations of judicial bias and misconduct. The People's Courts traces the history of judicial elections and Americans' quest for an independent judiciary--one that would ensure fairness for all before the law--from the colonial era to the present. In the aftermath of economic disaster, nineteenth-century reformers embraced popular elections as a way to make politically appointed judges less susceptible to partisan patronage and more independent of the legislative and executive branches of government. This effort to reinforce the separation of powers and limit government succeeded in many ways, but it created new threats to judicial independence and provoked further calls for reform. Merit selection emerged as the most promising means of reducing partisan and financial influence from judicial selection. It too, however, proved vulnerable to pressure from party politics and special interest groups. Yet, as Shugerman concludes, it still has more potential for protecting judicial independence than either political appointment or popular election. The People's Courts shows how Americans have been deeply committed to judicial independence, but that commitment has also been manipulated by special interests. By understanding our history of judicial selection, we can better protect and preserve the independence of judges from political and partisan influence.
What can the killing of a transgender teen teach us about the violence of misreading gender identity as sexual identity? The Life and Death of Latisha King examines a single incident, the shooting of 15-year-old Latisha King by 14-year-old Brandon McInerney in their junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The press coverage of the shooting, as well as the criminal trial that followed, referred to Latisha, assigned male at birth, as Larry. Unpacking the consequences of representing the victim as Larry, a gay boy, instead of Latisha, a trans girl, Gayle Salamon draws on the resources of feminist phenomenology to analyze what happened in the school and at the trial that followed. In building on the phenomenological concepts of anonymity and comportment, Salamon considers how gender functions in the social world and the dangers of being denied anonymity as both a particularizing and dehumanizing act. Salamon offers close readings of the court transcript and the bodily gestures of the participants in the courtroom to illuminate the ways gender and race were both evoked in and expunged from the narrative of the killing. Across court documents and media coverage, Salamon sheds light on the relation between the speakable and unspeakable in the workings of the transphobic imaginary. Interdisciplinary in both scope and method, the book considers the violences visited upon gender-nonconforming bodies that are surveilled and othered, and the contemporary resonances of the Latisha King killing. What can the killing of a transgender teen teach us about the violence of misreading gender identity as sexual identity? The Life and Death of Latisha King examines a single incident, the shooting of 15-year-old Latisha King by 14-year-old Brandon McInerney in their junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The press coverage of the shooting, as well as the criminal trial that followed, referred to Latisha, assigned male at birth, as Larry. Unpacking the consequences of representing the victim as Larry, a gay boy, instead of Latisha, a trans girl, Gayle Salamon draws on the resources of feminist phenomenology to analyze what happened in the school and at the trial that followed. In building on the phenomenological concepts of anonymity and comportment, Salamon considers how gender functions in the social world and the dangers of being denied anonymity as both a particularizing and dehumanizing act. Salamon offers close readings of the court transcript and the bodily gestures of the participants in the courtroom to illuminate the ways gender and race were both evoked in and expunged from the narrative of the killing. Across court documents and media coverage, Salamon sheds light on the relation between the speakable and unspeakable in the workings of the transphobic imaginary. Interdisciplinary in both scope and method, the book considers the violences visited upon gender-nonconforming bodies that are surveilled and othered, and the contemporary resonances of the Latisha King killing.
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new. Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.
The passage of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California in 2008 stunned gay rights activists across the country. Although facing a well-funded campaign in support of the ballot measure, LGBT activists had good reasons for optimism, including the size and strength of their campaign. Since 1974, the LGBT movement has fought 146 anti-gay ballot initiatives sponsored by the religious right and has developed innovative strategies to oppose these measures. In Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, Amy L. Stone examines how the tactics of LGBT activists have evolved and unravels the complex relationship between ballot measure campaigns and the broader goals of the LGBT movement. The first comprehensive history of anti-gay ballot measures, both those merely attempted and those successfully put before voters, this book draws on archival research and interviews with more than one hundred LGBT activists to provide a detailed account of the campaigns to stop such ballot measures from passing into law. As Stone shows through in-depth case studies, although LGBT activists lost the vast majority of these fights, they also won significant statewide victories in Oregon in 1992 and Arizona in 2006, and local successes, including ones in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1998 and 2002. Stone analyzes how LGBT activists constantly refined their campaign tactics in response to both victories and defeats. She also stresses that such campaigns have played both a complementary and contradictory role within the LGBT movement. Specific anti-ballot campaigns and the broader movement do often strengthen each other. However, ballot measure campaigns sometimes distract activists from the movement's more general goals, and activists at the movement level can pressure local campaigns to take on more than they can handle. With gay rights coming under increasing assault from the religious right, this book is a vital resource for LGBT activists and others working to block their efforts.
"Everyone of us is under the omniscient magnifying glass of the government and corporate spies. . . . How do we respond to this smog of surveillance? Start by readingSpying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance by Heidi Boghosian"--Bill Moyers "With ex-CIA staffer Edward Snowden's leaks about National Security Agency surveillance in the headlines, Heidi Boghosian'sSpying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance feels especially timely. Boghosian reveals how the government acquires information from telecommunications companies and other organizations to create databases about 'persons of interest.'" --Publishers Weekly "Heidi Boghosian'sSpying on Democracy is the answer to the question, 'if you're not doing anything wrong, why should you care if someone's watching you?'"--Michael German, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU and former FBI agent Until the watershed leak of top-secret documents by Edward Snowden to theGuardian UK and theWashington Post, most Americans did not realize the extent to which our government is actively acquiring personal information from telecommunications companies and other corporations. As made startlingly clear, the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on every phone call Americans have made over the past seven years. In that same time, the NSA and the FBI have gained the ability to access emails, photos, audio and video chats, and additional content from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, Skype, Apple, and others, allegedly in order to track foreign targets. InSpying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild Executive Director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and to the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs. She shows how corporations and government intelligence agencies mine data from sources as diverse as surveillance cameras and unmanned drones to iris scans and medical records, while combing websites, email, phone records and social media for resale to third parties, including U.S. intelligence agencies. The ACLU's Michael German says of the examples shown in Boghosian's book, "this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse." Boghosian adds, "If the trend is permitted to continue, we will soon live in a society where nothing is confidential, no information is really secure, and our civil liberties are under constant surveillance and control."Spying on Democracy is a timely, invaluable, and accessible primer for anyone concerned with protecting privacy, freedom, and the U.S. Constitution. Heidi Boghosian is the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild. She co-hostsLaw and Disorder, broadcast on WBAI-FM in New York and over forty stations nationwide. She is based in New York City.
A critical survey of nine documentary photographers who were at the cutting edge of this form of journalism during the second half of the 20th century, 'Engaged Observers' shows how since the sixties photographers such as Leonard Freed & Susan Meiselas have challenged the conventional objectivity of the newsroom.
Winner of the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize "An original, wise and courageous work that moves beyond sterile arguments and lifts the discussion of race and justice to a new and more hopeful level."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another. "An admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book."--New York Times Book Review "This book should be a standard for all law students."--Boston Globe
Since 1958, twenty-five men and two women have forced the Supreme Court to consider whether the Constitution's promises of equal protection apply to gay Americans. Here Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price reveal how the nation's highest court has reacted to these cases--from the surprising 1958 victory of a tiny homosexual magazine to the 2000 defeat of a gay Eagle Scout. A triumph of investigative reporting, Courting Justice gives us an inspiring new perspective on the struggle for civil rights in America.
Framing Class explores how the media, including television, film, and news, depict wealth and poverty in the United States. Fully updated and revised throughout, the second edition of this groundbreaking book now includes discussions of new media, updated media sources, and provocative new examples from movies and television, such as The Real Housewives series and media portrayals of the new poor and corporate executives in the recent recession. The book introduces the concepts of class and media framing to students and analyzes how the media portray various social classes, from the elite to the very poor. Its accessible writing and powerful examples make it an ideal text or supplement for courses in sociology, American studies, and communications.
Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a color-blind society. Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of color could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else. Essential reading for anyone disturbed by America's ongoing failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows conclusively that "separate but equal" represented far more than a southern backlash against emancipation-it was a founding principle of our nation.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed to the world what many U.S. politicians and pundits have long been able to ignore. The media images that commanded our attention spoke loudly of the class and racial divisions that still exist in the United States today. Despite the stock market gains of the 1990s, which increased the ranks of millionaires and created greater wealth for those already wealthy, U.S. society has witnessed a dramatic increase in class inequality over that last two decades. A host of newly available research indicates that the United States is afar more classbound society than was previously supposed. The rich are becoming both relatively and absolutely richer while the poor are becoming relatively, if not absolutely, poorer. More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States is a sobering examination of the dynamics of class relations today. John Bellamy Foster, William K. Tabb, David Roediger, Stephanie Luce, and Mark Brenner— among others--contribute essays that challenge many of our assumptions about class and provide a multilayered analysis. Topics include the impact of social and economic policy on class; wealth and prospects for the working poor; undocumented workers and their exploitation in the U.S. informal economy; race and class struggles post-Hurricane Katrina; women and class over the last forty years; and education reform and the devastating effects for public schooling. Editor, Michael D. Yates shares a personal story of his working-class life and values, the shaping of his political consciousness, and the people and ideas that inspired his teaching. For the vast majority of us, a strong work ethic and desire to see the next generation in better circumstances are no longer enough. The barriers separating classes are hardening. Class inequality manifests itself in wealth, income, and occupation, but also in education, consumption, and health. More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States demonstrates that an analysis of society as a whole--its relationships of power, conflict, and potential for social change-- is not possible without a thorough investigation of the role and meaning of class.
How the optimism gap between rich and poor is creating an increasingly divided society The Declaration of Independence states that all people are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and that among these is the pursuit of happiness. But is happiness available equally to everyone in America today? How about elsewhere in the world? Carol Graham draws on cutting-edge research linking income inequality with well-being to show how the widening prosperity gap has led to rising inequality in people's beliefs, hopes, and aspirations. For the United States and other developed countries, the high costs of being poor are most evident not in material deprivation but rather in stress, insecurity, and lack of hope. The result is an optimism gap between rich and poor that, if left unchecked, could lead to an increasingly divided society. Graham reveals how people who do not believe in their own futures are unlikely to invest in them, and how the consequences can range from job instability and poor education to greater mortality rates, failed marriages, and higher rates of incarceration. She describes how the optimism gap is reflected in the very words people use--the wealthy use words that reflect knowledge acquisition and healthy behaviors, while the words of the poor reflect desperation, short-term outlooks, and patchwork solutions. She also explains why the least optimistic people in America are poor whites, not poor blacks or Hispanics. Happiness for All? highlights the importance of well-being measures in identifying and monitoring trends in life satisfaction and optimism--and misery and despair--and demonstrates how hope and happiness can lead to improved economic outcomes.
When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation's triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the nineteenth-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage, and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad. During the antebellum years, they worked energetically to modernize the U.S. military, while steering American diplomacy to protect slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the Republic of Texas. As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their "vast southern empire" was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy--not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.
Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and "progress poems" that address America's destiny in the face of slavery, the Civil War, imperialist expansion, immigration, repeated financial boom and bust, gross social inequality, racial and gendered oppression, and the rise of the present-day corporate oligarchy. Adams elucidates how poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed political crises from a position of patriotic idealism and how military interventions overseas in Cuba and in the Philippines increasingly caused poets to question the actions of those in power. He traces competing loyalties through major works of writers at both extremes of the political spectrum, from the radical Republican versus Confederate voices of the Civil War, through New Deal liberalism versus the lost-cause propaganda of the defeated South and the conservative isolationism of the 1930s, and after the Second World War, the renewed hope of Black leaders and the existential alienation of Allen Ginsberg's counter-culture. Blazing a new path of critical discourse, Adams questions why America, of all nations, has appeared to rule out politics as a subject fit for poetry. His answer draws connections between familiar touchstones of American poetry and significant yet neglected writing by Philip Freneau, Sidney Lanier, Archibald MacLeish, William Vaughn Moody, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Allen Tate, Henry Timrod, Melvin B. Tolson, and others. An illuminating and pioneering work, The Patriot Poets provides a rich understanding of the ambivalent relationship American poets and poems have had with nation, genre, and the public.
"Recounts the significant advances and the ongoing effort to gain a clear and permanent guarantee of privileges for women and all economically disadvantaged groups. From the right to own property, to the formation of labor unions, women's suffrage, consumer rights, equal pay, Title IX and the Disabilities Act. This series includes key historical individuals such as: Susan B. Anthony, Horace Mann, Mary Lyon, Juana Briones, Betty Friedan, Madeleine Albright and more."--Container.
