Based on first-hand interviews, this is an in-depth look at the people under 35 years old who run for office in the US. Award-winning journalist John Celock interviewed over ninety young leaders across America serving in various capacities, from Vice President and Governor to Senator and County Legislator, to provide an in-depth look at the challenges of political participation for young elected officials. The interviews are complemented by extensive research to answer such questions as why do young people run for office? What personal obstacles do they face as they seek office? Does age affect policymaking? A lively work that connects academic research with practical politics, "The Next Generation" includes a range of stories, from Steven Fulop who left Goldman Sachs following 9/11 to become a Marine to Jane Swift, the first governor to give birth while in office. The thematically organized chapters offer a thorough look at the political process across the United States, providing key information for anyone interested in state and local politics, political participation, and American government.

The surprising story of the movement to create a truly democratic foreign policy by engaging ordinary Americans in world affairs. No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. But not all Americans set out to build a cloistered foreign policy "establishment." For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty. The first comprehensive history of the movement for "citizen education in world affairs," Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy. Taking the lead alongside the State Department were philanthropic institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the Foreign Policy Association, a nonprofit founded in 1918. One of the first international relations think tanks, the association backed local World Affairs Councils, which organized popular discussion groups under the slogan "World Affairs Are Your Affairs." In cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in homes and libraries to learn and talk about pressing global issues. But by the 1960s, officials were convinced that strategy in a nuclear world was beyond ordinary people, and foundation support for outreach withered. The local councils increasingly focused on those who were already engaged in political debate and otherwise decried supposed public apathy, becoming a force for the very elitism they set out to combat. The result, David Allen argues, was a chasm between policymakers and the public that has persisted since the Vietnam War, insulating a critical area of decisionmaking from the will of the people.

Asian Indians figure prominently among the educated, middle class subset of contemporary immigrants. They move quickly into residences, jobs, and lifestyles that provide little opportunity with fellow migrants, yet they continue to see themselves as a distinctive community within contemporary American society. In Life Lines Bacon chronicles the creation of a community--Indian-born parents and their children living in the Chicago metropolitan area--bound by neither geographic proximity, nor institutional ties, and explores the processes through which ethnic identity is transmitted to the next generation.
Bacon's study centers upon the engrossing portraits of five immigrant families, each one a complex tapestry woven from the distinctive voices of its family members. Both extensive field work among community organizations and analyses of ethnic media help Bacon expose the complicated interplay between the private social interactions of family life and the stylized rhetoric of "Indianness" that permeates public life.
This inventive analysis suggests that the process of assimilation which these families undergo parallels the assimilation process experienced by anyone who conceives of him or herself as a member of a distinctive community in search of a place in American society.

For those who care about justice, and especially those who want to do something about injustice, Paul Ciolino's In the Company of Giants is a must-read.--Rob Warden, Executive Director, Innocence Project, Northwestern University School of Law Paul Ciolino is old school. Right is right and wrong is wrong. With street smarts and a sixth sense for where to look, Ciolino won't let go until he's found what he's looking for, which is quite simply justice. And now he's written a highly readable, straight-ahead, tell-it-like-it-is guide to let us in on what he knows.--Alex Kotlowitz, Author of There Are No Children Here, Never a City So Real, and The Other Side of the River Herein lies the root of the issue. Justice, morality, and freedom. This is what our fight is about. This is what it boils down to for me and I hope for you as well. Money is nice. Professional recognition by our peers is great. Warm and fuzzy media stories about our quest for justice are ego enriching. But, at the end of the day, it is about our most basic and dearest God inspired constitutional rights as Americans. ourselves doing this work.

On the basis of a national research project undertaken in England, this volume explores how and why young people's engagement is so important globally in education and society, and looks at what teachers and students think about citizenship and community. The authors make recommendations to enhance understanding and the potential for engagement.

From 1876 to 1924--a period of free immigration--the mission of the American public library in its work with immigrants was to Americanize the immigrants by teaching them English and preparing them for citizenship. From 1924 to 1948--a period of restricted immigration--the mission of the American public library in its work with immigrants was to educate the adult immigrant and to internationalize the American community. Together, the public library and the immigrant community have shaped and perpetuated the national understanding of the value of ethnicity and internationalism to American society. The American public librarians took on the roles of advocates for immigrant rights, social workers, propagandists for the American way, and educators.

At the end of the twentieth century, as at the beginning, Americans are still debating the place of immigrants in American society. Public librarians are now as they were then, going about their duties and responsibilities of providing advice and materials to help immigrants, legal and illegal, cope with everyday life in America. The American public library has remained a sovereign alchemist, turning the base metal of immigrant potentialities into the gold of American realities.

Bailey examines a little-known but highly significant governmental mechanism in eighteenth-century Virginia: the right of every citizen to petition the Virginia assembly for redress of grievances.

The 1940s were a pivotal decade in the history of the American labor movement. Large migrations significantly changed the composition of the industrial work force while, simultaneously, the organized labor movement sought to consolidate its base. These essays examine topics including aspects of the institutional development of the labor movement at the national level, while west coast case studies explore the conflicts generated at the workplace and in communities by the increased presence of women and minority workers. American labor historians and labor studies specialists will find this collection fills a major void in the research on American labor.

Using the Nation of Islam as a vehicle, but largely through his own dedication, energy, and intelligence, Malcolm X became an indefatigable Black leader during the 1960s. This encyclopedic volume examines one of the most controversial and heroic leaders of the 20th century. Over 500 essays discuss how Malcolm X affected the world in which he lived and how the influence of people, issues, and events shaped his development as an international figure.

With more than 70 contributors from black studies, history, political science, sociology, philosophy, education, journalism, and psychology, the encyclopedia combines the knowledge of a precise group of writers. Addressing a major social, religious, and political figure through their own disciplines, these authors flesh out both the diversity and the complexity of the world that defined Malcolm X.

This book features a military academy as a microcosm of modern American culture. Combining the nuanced perspective of an insider with the critical distance of a historian, Alexander Macaulay examines The Citadel's reactions to major shifts in postwar life, from the rise of the counterculture to the demise of the Cold War. The Citadel is widely considered one of the most traditional institutions in America and a bastion of southern conservatism. In ""Marching in Step"", Macaulay argues that The Citadel has actually experienced many changes since World War II - changes that often tell us as much about the United States as about the American South. Macaulay explores how The Citadel was often an undiluted showcase for national debates over who deserved full recognition as a citizen - most famously first for black men and later for women. As the boundaries regarding race, gender, and citizenship were drawn and redrawn, Macaulay says, attitudes at The Citadel reflected rather than stood apart from those of mainstream America. In this study of an iconic American institution, Macaulay also raises questions over issues of southern distinctiveness and sheds light on the South's real and imagined relationship with the rest of America.

Nothing conjures up images of the American frontier and a pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps view of freedom and independence quite like guns. Gun Crusaders is a fascinating inside look at how the four-million member National Rifle Association and its committed members come to see each and every gun control threat as a step down the path towards gun confiscation, and eventually socialism. Enlivened by a rich analysis of NRA materials, meetings, leader speeches, and unique in-depth interviews with NRA members, Gun Crusaders focuses on how the NRA constructs and perceives threats to gun rights as one more attack in a broad liberal cultural war. Scott Melzer shows that the NRA promotes a nostalgic vision of frontier masculinity, whereby gun rights defenders are seen as patriots and freedom fighters, defending not the freedom of religion, but the religion of individual rights and freedoms.

This engaging narrative chronicles the history of the immigration to America from the 1600s to the present. The author offers an in-depth exploration of the American immigration experience, including why people emigrated, what they left behind, and what they found when they arrived. He also delves into the immigrants' unique contributions to the history and culture of the nation. The book examines the legal and social aspects of immigration, beginning with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 through the 1994 passage of Proposition 187 in California. Also featured are a brief chronology of immigration and the biographies of 45 important figures in American immigration history. The text is enhanced with photos, illustrations, and political cartoons, and a detailed bibliography is also included.

Taking the Fight South provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if racial justice is to be fully realized. Distinguished historian and civil rights activist Howard Ball has written dozens of books during his career, including the landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall, A Defiant Life, and the critically acclaimed Murder in Mississippi, chronicling the Mississippi Burning killings. In Taking the Fight South, arguably his most personal book, Ball focuses on six years, from 1976 to 1982, when, against the advice of friends and colleagues in New York, he and his Jewish family moved from the Bronx to Starkville, Mississippi, where he received a tenured position in the political science department at Mississippi State University. For Ball, his wife, Carol, and their three young daughters, the move represented a leap of faith, ultimately illustrating their deep commitment toward racial justice. Ball, with breathtaking historical authority, narrates the experience of his family as Jewish outsiders in Mississippi, an unfamiliar and dangerous landscape contending with the aftermath of the civil rights struggle. Signs and natives greeted them with a humiliating and frightening message: "No Jews, Negroes, etc., or dogs welcome." From refereeing football games, coaching soccer, and helping young black girls integrate the segregated Girl Scout troops in Starkville, to life-threatening calls from the KKK in the middle of the night, from his work for the ACLU to his arguments in the press and before a congressional committee for the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Ball takes the reader to a precarious time and place in the history of the South. He was briefly an observer but quickly became an activist, confronting white racists stubbornly holding on to a Jim Crow white supremacist past and fighting to create a more diverse, equitable, and just society. Ball's story is one of an imitable advocate who didn't just observe as a passive spectator but interrupted injustice. Taking the Fight South will join the list of required books to read about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of racism in the United States. The book will also appeal to readers interested in Judaism because of its depiction of anti-Semitism directed toward Starkville's Jewish community, struggling to survive in the heart of the deep and very fundamentalist Protestant South.

Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Cubans, Dominicans, West Indians, and Puerto Ricans, among other groups, have all sought to migrate to areas with more economic activity or less political repression than their native countries. Upon arrival in a new country, they face such problems as impersonal bureaucracies, racial prejudice, and job discrimination. "The Caribbean Exodus" is a welcome study of the historical, cultural, geographic, and economic forces behind these migrations. Examining many regions of the Caribbean, the contributors compare similarities and differences of the migrant experiences, both in their original countries and upon reaching their destinations. This timely book is an essential tool for understanding the complexities of the Caribbean migration and for developing informed and judicious policy.

"Choice" Outstanding Academic Title 2003

.,."A thorough summary of the trajectory of current case law on the legal regulation of U.S. citizens' intimate lives. . . . A valuable introduction to increasingly important and salient legal questions about the constitutional limits on the state's ability to shape intimate lives in the United States."
--" Political Science Quarterly"

.,."A worthy assessment of the law of intimate association and personal decision-making. For those intrigued by the Court's human side, Ball provides a sufficient glimpse without raising the curtain on its realm of privacy that the justices have strived to protect.
-- "Trial"

"Despite the controversial content of many of the cases, Mr. Ball maintains an air of bemused detachment and does not openly take sides. This is not a polemic. With few exceptions, the prevailing tone is light and scholarly. The goal is to illuminate, not to persuade."
--"New York Law Journal"

"In this truly fascinating and spellbinding work, Ball tells many tales."
-- "Choice"

Personal rights, such as the right to procreate--or not--and the right to die generate endless debate. This book maps out the legal, political, and ethical issues swirling around personal rights. Howard Ball shows how the Supreme Court has grappled with the right to reproduce and to abort, and takes on the issue of auto-euthanasia and assisted suicide, from Karen Ann Quinlan through Kevorkian and just recently to the Florida case of the woman who was paralyzed by a gunshot from her mother and who had the plug pulled on herself.

For the last half of the twentieth century, the justices of the Supreme Court have had to wrestle with newand difficult life and death questions for them as well as for doctors and their patients, medical ethicists, sociologists, medical practitioners, clergy, philosophers, law makers, and judges. The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans offers a look at these issues as they emerged and examines the manner in which the men and women of the U.S. Supreme Court addressed them.

Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. In recent decades, however, the nation's religious landscape has undergone several seismic shocks. "American Grace "is an authoritative, fascinating examination of what precipitated these changes and the role that religion plays in contemporary American society.
Although there is growing polarization between religious conservatives and secular liberals today, at the same time personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased, and religious identities have become more fluid. More people than ever are friendly with someone of a different faith or no faith at all. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings greater interfaith tolerance, despite the so-called culture wars.
Based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America (and with a new epilogue based on a third survey), "American Grace "is an indispensable book about American religious life, essential for understanding our nation today.

This book is a comparative study of similar people in different environments at the same point in time. The six chapters discuss why eastern European Jews came to London and New York, the differences and similarities in the settlement process, the schools they found and the use they made of them, and the mobility they achieved. The study concludes that individual and societal conditions made it impossible for more than a small proportion of the generation that grew to maturity before the first world war to use schooling as a road to the middle class. In general, the Russian and Polish Jews who came to New York reached the middle class sooner than those who remained in London and thus can be said to have made the better choice.

Martin Luther King Jr exercised a tremendous degree of influence in a movement that between 1955 and 1965 successfully dismantled a system of legalised racial segregation and disfranchisement entrenched for over sixty years in the United States. How did King, who came from a subordinated group within American society, help effect this change? What background, characteristics, abilities and ideas enabled him to do this? Why was King so important in shaping the civil rights movement?

John A. Kirk looks at the sources of King's power in the black community and its relationship to wider American society, focusing particularly on the role of the black church, the philosophy of nonviolence and issues of leadership, whilst paying due attention to the voices of King's critics and detractors and to the limitations of his power. He locates King firmly within the context of other leaders and organisations, voices and opinions, and tactics and ideologies, which made up the movement as a whole.

Fifty years after the Montgomery bus boycott, which launched King's movement leadership, this book moves beyond the all-too-often oversimplified story of King's life and times to provide an innovative analytical framework for understanding the role played by one of the United States' most important historical figures.

John A. Kirk is senior lecturer in US History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively on the history of the civil rights movement, including "Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940 1970" (2002) which won the 2003 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award.""

This outstanding Handbook establishes the relationship between political citizenship and social movements as an area of study. As an in-depth and well-conceived source for beginners, experienced scholars and students alike, it provides theoretically rich, methodologically diverse, and empirically wide-ranging chapters on political struggles over citizenship. Moreover, the bridging between sociological and political theories of movements and citizenship reveals both in a different light.' - Engin Isin, The Open UniversitySince the 1960s, social movements and political citizenship have become buzzwords not only in social and political life but also in social and political science. The impact of the environmental and women's movements, and the advance of multicultural, European and cosmopolitan citizenship in modern history are cases in point. The study of citizenship traditionally refers to the individual dimension of social and political behavior. Social movement studies, however, refer to the collective dimension of such behavior. Despite distinct trajectories in their theoretical development, the social movement and citizenship paradigms converge where social movements are viewed as collective forms of political citizenship. This Handbook uniquely collates results of several decades of academic research in these two fields. The expert contributions successively address the different forms of political citizenship and current approaches and recent developments in social movement studies. Salient social movements in recent history are explored in depth, covering the environmental, women's, international human rights, urban, Tea Party, and animal rights movements. Social movements and political citizenship in the global South : China, India, Africa, and the Arab World, are discussed, presenting a novel empirical insight into these fields of study. Social scientists, MA and PhD students conducting research in social movements and citizenship, at a theoretical and empirical level, will benefit from the authoritative assessment of forms of political citizenship and major developments in social movement studies. Contributors: E. Ashbee, J. Bohman, P. Bond, A.M. Clark, R.J. Dalton, P. Danyi, J. Earl, B. Edwards, E. Evans, H. Flam, R.K. Garrett, S. Griggs, P. Hamel, D. Howarth, J. Hunt, M. Kane, D. Kapoor, S. MacGregor, N. Massoumi, N. Meer, R. Meijer, D.S. Meyer, S. Monro, L. Munro, E.D.H. Olsen, M. Reddy, J. Reger, D. Richardson, C. Scholl, S. Tijsterman, H-A. Van der Heijden, P. Wood, L. Xie

Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church History Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians' intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renee Dupont richly details, white southerners' evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi's religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi's evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South.

Immigration and refugee policies have traditionally been based on two assumptions: first, that national sovereignty implies absolute control of a country's borders and, second, that outsiders are to be admitted only when it serves the national interest. Moral or ethical concerns have not played a central role in policy formation anywhere in the world. This collection of essays challenges the traditional politically oriented position, analyzes the moral issues involved, and develops models for morally responsible immigration and refugee policies in a contemporary political setting. The editor's introduction reviews the history of U.S. immigration policy and provides a framework for considering immigration control issues. Written by leading authorities on immigration and refugee policy, this provocative volume offers an honest, sensitive exploration of some of the most difficult questions facing contemporary society. It will be of interest for studies in ethics, human rights, public policy, and political economy, as well as to general readers concerned with immigration and refugee issues.

This title uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

This book explores the alleged uniqueness of the European experience, and investigates its ties to a long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region. These movements, the book argues, were inspired by specific ideas about Europe, which they sought to realize on the ground through activism.

Mississippi is a unique case study as a result of its long-standing defiance of federal civil rights legislation and the fact that nearly half its population was black and relegated to second-class citizenship. According to the vast majority of Mississippi daily press editorials examined between 1948 and 1968, the notion that blacks and whites were equal as races of people was a concept that remained unacceptable and inconceivable. While the daily press certainly did not advocate desegregation, in contrast to what many media critics have reported about the Southern press promoting violence to suppress civil rights activity, Mississippi daily newspapers never encouraged or condoned violence during the time periods under evaluation. Weill places coverage of these important events within a historical context, shedding new light on media opinion in the state most resistant to the precepts of the civil rights movement. This is the first comprehensive examination of civil rights coverage and white supremacist rhetoric in the Mississippi daily press during five key events: the 1948 Dixiecrat protest of the national Democratic platform; the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools in 1954; the court-ordered desegregation of Ole Miss in 1962; Freedom Summer in 1964; and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. From nearly 5,000 issues of Mississippi daily newspapers, more than 1,000 editorials and 7,000 news articles are documented in this volume.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

The second amendment is the most hotly debated and controversial right in the Constitution. In light of the recent surge of school shootings and other gun-related crimes, gun policy has become one of our leading national concerns, affecting politicians, gun manufacturers, sport shooters, and ordinary citizens alike.

Showcasing viewpoints from all sides of the gun control debate, Gun Control and Gun Rights, presents the first balanced gun policy textbook for use by undergraduates, graduate students, law students and the general public.

This comprehensive anthology includes selections from legal cases, hunting stories, public policy briefs and journalistic accounts. Anyone looking for a fair, even-handed account of the gun issue will find it in this book.