This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the state of political institutions, the military establishment and political parties in Pakistan. It provides a nuanced understanding of the practices of disenfranchisement by theocratic governments in the country which has relegated the people to the margins of their society. The volume provides an in-depth account of the political history of Pakistan focusing not only on national politics and foreign policy but also on their congruences with subnational systems of governance, the criminal justice system, bureaucracy, the electoral system and the police. It discusses challenging issues plaguing the country such as the continued dominance of the military, lagging economic development, lack of accountability within political institutions, sectarianism and terrorism. The author dissects and critically examines Pakistan's hegemonic politics and underlines the need for a new social contract based on the principles of inclusiveness and equality. The volume offers fresh perspectives on the multifaceted problems in Pakistan's politics. It will be of great interest to policy practitioners and to academics and students of politics, law and governance, sociology, international relations, comparative politics, Pakistan studies and South Asia studies.

This book collects Mudde's old and new blog posts, interviews and op-eds on the topic of the US far right, ranging from right-wing populists to neo-Nazi terrorists. The main emphasis of the book is on the two most important far right developments of the 21st century, the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Primarily aimed at a non-academic audience,the book explains terminology, clarifies the key organizations and people and their relationship to (liberal) democracy.

Julia Kristeva, herself a product of the famous May '68 Paris student uprising, has long been fascinated by the concept of rebellion and revolution. Psychoanalysts believe that rebellion guarantees our independence and creative capacities, but is revolution still possible? Confronted with the culture of entertainment, can we build and nurture a culture of revolt, in the etymological and Proustian sense of the word: an unveiling, a return, a displacement, a reconstruction of the past, of memory, of meaning? In the first part of the book, Kristeva examines the manner in which three of the most unsettling modern writers -- Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes -- affirm their personal rebellion.

In the second part of the book, Kristeva ponders the future of rebellion. She maintains that the "new world order" is not favorable to revolt. "What can we revolt against if power is vacant and values corrupt?" she asks. Not only is political revolt mired in compromise among parties whose differences are less and less obvious, but an essential component of European culture -- a culture of doubt and criticism -- is losing its moral and aesthetic impact.

Packinghouse Daughter, just published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, merges personal memoir and public history to tell a compelling story about family loyalty, small-town life, and working-class values in the face of a violent labor strike in 1959. The daughter of a Wilson & Co. packinghouse worker, Cheri Register recalls the meatpackers' strike that devastated and divided her hometown of Albert Lea, Minnesota. The violence that erupted when the company "replaced" its union workers with strikebreakers tested family loyalty and community stability, and attracted national attention when the governor of Minnesota called in the National Guard, declared martial law, and closed the plant. Register skillfully weaves her own memories, historical research, and first-person interviews of participants on both sides of the strike into a narrative that is thoughtful and impassioned about the value of blue-collar work and the dignity of those who do it.

The more Register researched and wrote about the strike, the more she had to admit that she could no longer divide labor issues into the simplified terms of her youth. As part of the first generation of her family to attend college, much less attain a Ph.D., Register struggles to acknowledge such complexities without dishonoring her working-class roots. Packinghouse Daughter also testifies to the hold that childhood experience has on personal values and notions of social class, despite the upward mobility that is the great promise of American democracy. Register's journey reflects the inner conflict felt by a generation that came of age in the 1960s, propelled into the middle-class by post-war prosperity, people like herself who feel"caught between the blue-collar values of the communities we left behind and our new status as the 'rich' people we used to scoff at".

Cheri Register is a freelance writer and teacher of creative writing, living in Minneapolis. The opening chapter of Packinghouse Daughter was cited as a "Notable Essay" in Best American Essays 1996. Other excerpts have appeared in Hungry Mind Review, the University of Chicago Magazine, and the book, Is Academic Feminism Dead? Her work on this memoir earned her a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship Grant, and a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society. Her other books include Living with Chronic Illness: Days of Patience and Passion and "Are Those Kids Yours?": American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries.

"Hunt deliciously complicates the history of the 1960s by introducing a protest element not bound to college campuses or the counterculture. . . . It is a disturbing story, one that Hunt tells well."
--"Choice"

"All students of the concluding years of America's longest war should be grateful to Andrew Hunt for the clarity and grace with which he has told V.V.A.W.'s story."
--"Canadian Journal of History"

"This extraordinary and deeply moving history explodes all the encrusted stereotypes of GIs on one side of the barricades and anti-war protestors on the other. At along last we can again hear the voices of the thousands of courageous veterans who refused to be silent about the immoral war in Indochina."
"--Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz"

"A splendid addition to the growing literature on Vietnam veterans and their experiences during and after the war. Hunt's complex and moving history is a vital corrective to accounts which equate the anti-war movement with student activists as well as to those who persist in seeing veterans as passive victims."
"--Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars"

"Explodes one of the most persistent and pernicious myths attached to the 1960s: that the anti-war movement was anti-GI and anti-veteran. How could that be, when, as Hunt shows, many of the most committed and eloquent opponents of the Vietnam war were themselves veterans of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were heroes then, and they deserve to be remembered as heroes today."
"--Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College"

"For all kinds of veterans of the Sixties era, this book offers powerful testimony on the meaning of patriotismand moral courage. For younger people, whose images of the Sixties are often caught in the caricatures of the mass media, Hunt's sophisticated account of veterans' anti-war protest evokes new understanding, and I think, hard questions about a difficult time."
"--David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams"

The anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States is perhaps best remembered for its young, counterculture student protesters. However, the Vietnam War was the first conflict in American history in which a substantial number of military personnel actively protested the war while it was in progress.

In The Turning, Andrew Hunt reclaims the history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that transformed the antiwar movement by placing Vietnam veterans in the forefront of the nationwide struggle to end the war. Misunderstood by both authorities and radicals alike, VVAW members were mostly young men who had served in Vietnam and returned profoundly disillusioned with the rationale for the war and with American conduct in Southeast Asia. Angry, impassioned, and uncompromisingly militant, the VVAW that Hunt chronicles in this first history of the organization posed a formidable threat to America's Vietnam policy and further contributed to the sense that the nation was under siege from within.

Based on extensive interviews and in-depth primary research, including recently declassified government files, The Turning is a vivid history of the men who risked censures, stigma, even imprisonment for a cause they believed to be "an extended tour of duty."

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

This book analyses the emergence, strategies, and outcomes of the struggle to embed democratic governance and constitutional order in Kenya, showcasing both the power and the limits of citizen agency in the struggle to transform a postcolonial African state. Utilising data from primary interviews, media, and existing literature, this book analyses the emergence, diffusion, operational strategies, and outcomes of Kenyan constitutional reform struggles with a view to highlighting both the power and limits of social movement in transforming a postcolonial African state. It engages intersections of social movement and theories of democratisation to probe the production, operations, and outcomes of the disruptive yet creative power of the movements at the centre of the struggle to transform the Kenyan constitution. The book also appraises the "meanings" of, and developments after, the promulgation of the 2010 constitution with a view to illuminating the prospects for a transformative democratic political order in Kenya. This book is a useful tool in understanding the struggles specific to Kenya, but also offers insights into other democratic struggles on the African continent and beyond. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social movements and political change in Africa in general and Kenya in particular.

In 1991 the mosque at Ayodhya in India was demolished by Hindu fundamentalists who claim that it stood on the birthplace of a legendary Hindu hero. During recent conflicts in former Yugoslavia, ethnic groups destroyed mosques and churches to eliminate evidence of long-term settlement by other communities. Over successive centuries, however, a single building in Cordoba functioned as a mosque, a church and a synagogue. The Roman Emperor Diocletian's Palace in Split is occupied today by shops and residential apartments. What circumstances have lead to the survival and reinterpretation of some monuments, but the destruction of others?
This work asks whether the idea of world heritage is an essential mechanism for the protection of the world's cultural and natural heritage, or whether it subjugates a diversity of cultural traditions to specifically Western ideas. How far is it acceptable for one group of people to comment upon, or intercede in, the way in which another community treats the remains which it claims as its own? What are the responsibilities of multinational corporations and non-governmental organisations operating in the Developing World? Who actually owns the past: the landowner, indigenous people, the State or humankind?


eBook available with sample pages: 0203165098

Against Capital Punishment is the first full account of anti-death penalty activism in America during the years since the ten-year moratorium on executions ended in 1976. It traces the successful assault on capital punishment during the 1960s and the struggle of abolitionists against the backlash that has steadily gained momentum since the 1970s, and diagnoses the reasons for their inability to mobilize widespread opposition to executions. Finally, it assesses the prospects for the future of the death penalty in the United States. Haines has added a short postscript summarizing what has happened in the past four years.

"A valuable resourcea]the names of the authors and activists within it are undoubtedly ones we will encounter again and again over the decades to come."
--"Sojourner"

Still Lifting, Still Climbing is the first volume of its kind to document African American women's activism in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Covering grassroots and national movements alike, contributors explore black women's mobilization around such areas as the black nationalist movements, the Million Man March, black feminism, anti-rape movements, mass incarceration, the U.S. Congress, welfare rights, health care, and labor organizing. Detailing the impact of post-1960s African American women's activism, they provide a much-needed update to the historical narrative.

Ideal for course use, the volume includes original essays as well as primary source documents such as first-hand accounts of activism and statements of purpose. Each contributor carefully situates their topic within its historical framework, providing an accessible context for those unfamiliar with black women's history, and demonstrating that African American women's political agency does not emerge from a vacuum, but is part of a complex system of institutions, economics, and personal beliefs.

This ambitious volume will be an invaluable resource on the state of contemporary African American women's activism.

"Protest and Popular Culture" is at once a historical monograph and a critique of postmodernist approaches to the study of mass media, consumerism, and popular political movements. In it, Triece compares the self-representations of several late nineteenth and twentieth-century women's protest movements with representations of women offered by contemporaneous mass media outlets. She shows that from the late nineteenth century until the present day, U.S. women's protest movements sought to convince women that they are first and foremost laborer/producers, while the U.S. media has just as consistently sought to convince women that they are primarily consumers. Triece contends that these approaches to portraying women have been and continue to be constructed in opposition to one another. The leaders of women's protest movements, she argues, have long sought to convince women not to spend time and money on reshaping their selves through consumer purchases, but instead to focus attention on empowering themselves politically by asserting control over their own labor power. The mass media, meanwhile, has always treated such movements as potential threats to the financial well-being of the consumer sector (that is, of advertisers), and so has consistently trivialized them, while seeking simultaneously to convince women that they should devote attention and resources to buying things, not to struggling to overcome class and gender discrimination. Many cultural-studies scholars have argued that in recent years, rising prosperity has made consumerism into the primary site of both individual expression and "resistance" to the dominant socio-economic order, with self-definition through personal purchases supplanting the role formerly played by struggle for an end to inequities of all kinds. These scholars contend that as such, mass media no longer function to naturalize, and thus reinforce such inequities, and consumerism no longer serves to perpetuate them. Triece argues that her examples show that this argument is faulty, and that scholars should continue to take a traditional materialist view in all studies of mass media, consumerism, and popular protest.

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

In the 1960s a left-wing movement emerged in the United States that not only crusaded against social and economic exploitation, but also confronted the problem of personal alienation in everyday life. These new radicals - young, white, raised in relative affluence - struggled for peace, equality and social justice. Their struggle was cultural as well as political, a search for meaning and authenticity that marked a new phase in the long history of American radicalism. This text tells the story of the new left, illustrating the spiritual dimension of student activism. The author provides an account of how this radical movement developed in a campus environment - the University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important new left centres in the United States - while linking local developments to the national scene. Rossinow argues that the movement was deeply entwined with a personal quest for authenticity. This search reached a fever pitch during the decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as a moral imperative that intersected with the struggle for social justice. He shows the continuity between the religious search for meaning in the 1950s and the secular search for wholeness and realness in the new left and the counterculture. Rossinow also demonstrates the pivotal role played by the civil rights movement in forging these connections in the minds of white American youth and explains the new left's role as a force acting on its own to foment rebellion in white America. This study links the diverse strands of radical movements, from women's liberation to civil rights. Rossinow revises traditional images of radicalism and offers fresh insights on the gendered nature of the search for authenticity, and the reaction of feminists to issues of masculinity among radical men.

Since apartheid's dissolution in the early 1990s and its formal abolishment in April 1994, there has been increasing interest in the early history of African struggles against segregation and apartheid. This book focuses on the resistance to segregation in the eastern cape town of Port Elizabeth, long known for its tradition of political protest. Joyce Kirk presents a detailed study of men and women in South Africa as they sought to create their own space and voice within the emerging urban areas of nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Africa.In Making a Voice, Kirkexplores the roots of the tradition of resistance among members of the emergent African working and middle class who were, much earlier than previously realized, living permanently in the growing urban areas. Kirk also examines the changing ideological, economic, and political forces that influenced the colonial government to pursue legislation aimed at depriving Africans of land, housing, and property in the towns, as well as political rights and freedom of movement. Finally, Kirk identifies the ways Africans challenged the government's attempt to use public-health laws to impose residential segregation, the factors that undermined the largely political alliance between whites and blacks in the Cape colony, and the role African women played in challenging racial segregation.

Reforming Sex constructs and analyses a remarkable mass movement of doctors and lay people that demanded women's right to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education. Their story sheds light on current controversies about abortion, the role of doctors and the state in controlling women's bodies, and the possibilities for reforming and transforming relations between women and men.

The world wanted South Africa’s true, liberated history – and the writing of it – to begin in 1994, but deep contradictions have quickly bubbled to the surface, revealing a society gripped in turmoil.

The results of all this have been, of course, paradoxical: a series of elections since 1994 seemed to confirm the ANC’s hold, both popular and legitimate, on power. Yet, simultaneously, South Africa has found itself with one of the world’s highest rates of protest and dissent, expressed both in the work-place and on township streets, in universities and technicons, clinics and central city squares. 16 August 2014 saw the lives of nearly three dozen platinum mineworkers end prematurely and violently. The premeditated “Marikana Massacre” demonstrated to the world how little Nelson Mandela’s ANC had changed South Africa’s core power relations, notwithstanding the dramatic, heroic victory over racist rule in 1994.

South Africa: The Present as History traces South African history from early days through the long European conquest and into two decades of democracy. The current socio-economic paradox – one that finds inequality, unemployment and poverty worsening since 1994 – reflect Mandela’s early 1990s concessions, choices which reduced the pursuit of genuine socio-economic and political transformation to the mere realisation of what can best be termed ‘low-intensity democracy’.

Analysing tensions exemplified by Marikana, the authors consider potential futures for an increasingly volatile society. Genuine liberatory possibilities could continue to be vanquished – but that is not the only possible results of today’s turmoil.

Working-class Appalachian women on the picket line, fighting for better working conditions. White women organizing against the racial integration of schools. Native American women struggling for Indian treaty rights. African American women in the Black Panther Party. What prompts these women to adopt political stances outside mainstream politics? How are these women changed by personal experiences of militancy and activism?

Until recently, radical and militant activists have been viewed largely as male, while women have been assumed to be apolitical, more interested in domestic concerns and personal relationships than in public issues and political controversies. Despite evidence that women have been involved in a wide range of political activities, from revolutionary parties to racial hate groups, little attention has been paid to women's radical action.

No Middle Ground brings together a wide variety of contributors to uncover women's roles in radical and militant movements. Examining women's radicalism in the United States from the 1950s through the 1990s, the volume details women's activism in both right-wing and left-wing movements, in feminist as well as anti-feminist groups, and in both movements supporting racial equality and those favoring race supremacism. The essays shed light on the conditions which encourage women's militancy, the issues around which women mobilize, how they organize, and what divides them in organizations.

The essays and personal narratives in No Middle Ground advance our understanding of the gendered underpinnings of activism that occurs outside the "middle ground" of conventional electoral and pressure group politics. They suggest the significance of identity, consciousness, personal biography, and external context for understanding women's involvement with radical protest movements.

No Middle Ground brings new insight into women's oppositional politics, as well as into our understandings of radical action.

" Wasserstrom has made a major contribution by shaping the history of student protest into a single, twentieth-century story and pattern of complexity. In doing so, he offers a model for rethinking the late imperial, republican, and communist periods as a historical unit conditioned by indigenous and global forces, and explained by sinological and comparative methods." -- Journal of Asian Studies
" It succeeds very well at what it sets out to do: to bring Shanghai and performance theory to bear upon our understanding of student activism in twentieth-century China. Enriched by a comprehensive bibliographical essay and suggestive comparisons with Russian, American, and European student movements, this study sets a new standard for research in social history." -- The China Quarterly

During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, many Korean-American businesses were looted and burned to the ground. Although nearly half of the looters arrested were Latinos, the media portrayed this aspect of the riots more in terms of the on- going conflicts between Korean-Americans and African- Americans. In another part of the world in 1984, the violence which ensued after the assassination of India's Indira Gandhi was portrayed by officials and state leaders as a spilling over of mass sentiments of grief and anger, a conflict between ethnic groups instead of a pogrom against the Sikhs.

Riots and Pogroms presents comparative studies of public violence in the twentieth-century in the United States, Russia, Germany, Israel, and India with a comparative, historical, and analytical introduction by the editor. The focus of the book is on the interpretive process which follows riots and pogroms, rather than on the search for their causes. Its emphasis is on the struggle for control over the meaning of riotous events, for the right to represent them properly. How do political and social forces seek to assign causes and attach labels to riots, attribute motives to rioters and pogromists, and explain why particular groups are selected for violent assaults? To what extent are the state and its agents implicated in those assaults? To what degree does organization and/or spontaneity play a role in these incidents?

"The Proliferation of Rights" explores how the assertion of rights has expanded dramatically since World War II. Carl Wellman illuminates for the reader the historical developments in each of the major categories of rights, including human rights, civil rights, women's rights, patient rights, and animal rights. He concludes by assessing where this proliferation has been legitimate and helpful, cases where it has been illusory and unproductive, and alternatives to the appeal to rights.

Ever since those turbulent times, Americans have been debating the era that began in 1960 at Greensboro and that ended in the early 1970s with gunfire at Wounded Knee. The Movement and the Sixties is a searching history of the social activism that defined a generation of young Americans and that called into question the very nature of "America".

What transformed Daniel and Philip Berrigan from conventional Roman Catholic priests into "holy outlaws" - for a time the two most wanted men of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI? And how did they evolve from their traditionally pious, second-generation immigrant beginnings to become the most famous (some would say notorious) religious rebels of their day? Disarmed and Dangerous, the first full length unauthorized biography of the Berrigans, answers these questions with an incisive and illuminating account of their rise to prominence as civil rights and antiwar activists. It also traces the brothers' careers as constant thorns in the side of church authority as well as their leadership of the ongoing Plowshares movement - a highly controversial campaign of civil disobedience against the contemporary arms trade and nuclear weapons. In the spring of 1968, the Berrigans stood side by side in a Catonsville, Maryland, parking lot, praying over the flames from a basket of draft files that they had just seized from a nearby Selective Service office, doused with napalm, and ignited. Their fire soon sparked a nationwide series of draft-file burnings, all aimed at halting the bitterly divisive Vietnam War. This initial protest led to harsh prison terms for the Berrigans and seven others, but it publicly established the Berrigans in roles they still fulfill: men of moral conscience who would suffer to confront the enormous power of the state. Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady plumb the Berrigans' contradictions: among them, Philip's secret marriage, while he was still a Josephite priest, to Elizabeth McAlister, then a Catholic nun, which led to their dismissals by their respective religious orders and Philip'sexcommunication from the church; and Daniel's speech faulting Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and the resulting criticism loosed upon him from pro-Israeli Americans and many of his allies on the left.

As the millennium approaches, apocalyptic fervor is sweeping the nation. Militias, white supremacists, survivalists, and cults have seized upon the Book of Revelation to trumpet their own fractured version of the end of the world. Millennium Rage is the only book that connects the strands of these fringe groups to a tradition that has underpinnings in American culture and mainstream religion. It moreover shows that many of these groups have stolen and twisted apocalyptic religious symbols to fit their own end: gearing up for Armageddon in this world, not the next. The Oklahoma bombers, the Sons of Gestapo, the Branch Davidians, and the Unabomber are, as Philip Lamy astutely demonstrates, extreme examples of burgeoning strains within society. "Ruby Ridge" and "Waco" have become rallying cries of a growing number of average Americans who feel disenfranchised and forgotten. Members of militia movements and white supremacists, whom Lamy interviewed for this book, have tapped into their reservoir of discontent and are channeling it for their own aims. As Lamy points out, rugged individualists and utopian groups have always dotted the American landscape. What is alarming, however, is the misuse of the Christian apocalypse to promote a religion that fans the flames of hate, preaching the destruction of minorities - including Jews, blacks, and immigrants - in a whirlwind showdown. Lamy asserts that this new religion, "Christian Identity," serves as a unifying factor among an array of extremist groups who call for a battle here on earth against Satan's supposed forces - minorities allegedly bent on a worldwide conspiracy to rule the world. Distorting the Bible and other literature through a prism of hate and fear, they have made some inroads into the consciousness of America, according to Lamy.

This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. The authors explore three distinctive forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Labor, they argue, was working at cross-purposes through these three modes of militancy promoted by different types of leaders with differing agendas and motivations. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement. As they convincingly illustrate, the multiplicity of worker responses to the Cultural Revolution cautions against a one-dimensional portrait of working-class politics in contemporary China.

An emotionally evocative, richly textured history based on autobiographical accounts of those who lived and shaped the struggle. The importance of many of Rogers' subjects and the uniqueness of New Orleans make this must reading for anyone interested in the history of the movement. But those interested in oral history and African-American autobiography will find riches aplenty as well. A welcome addition to a number of literatures
--"Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer"

Righteous Lives skillfully blends oral history with a perceptive analysis of three generations of civil rights leadership in New Orleans. Rogers has revealed not only what people did, but what they remember, and how their assessments of their activism have changed over time.
--"Donald A. Ritchie, U.S. Senate Historical Office"

"Rogers paints a slightly less rosy picture, one in which the Louisiana un-American Activities Committee staged a raid on the offices of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and the City Council passed laws prohibiting the right to peaceful assembly, paving the way to jailing protesters."
--"Gambit Weekly"

This important study provides fresh insights into the lives of both black and white civil rights leaders, documents the diversity of individuals and motivations, and traces movement history in a major southern city. Well written and well researched, this book is highly recommended for readers at all levels.
--"Choice"

Charts the distinctly different experiences and memories of 25 black and white civil rights activists of three 'generations' in New Orleans, opening with a deft sketch of the city's unusual racial background with its black Creole caste.
--"Publishers Weekly"

An important study, full of valuable information, profoundly moving testimony, and provocative insights.
--"The Journal of Southern History"

A major contribution to our understanding of the civil rights movement. RIGHTEOUS LIVES illustrates the complexity of movements for social change, the long history of seemingly spontaneous conflicts, and the personal consequences of political activism. Rogers reveals how issues of caste and class, of gender and generation divided the black community in New Orleans, while her in-depth interviews and observations bring to the surface previously unexamined contradictions within the white southern experience as well. RIGHTEOUS LIVES also offers perceptive and thought-provoking insights into broader issues of collective and individual memory, life history, and autobiography. It evokes the struggle for African-American self-determination in the Crescent City with clarity and conviction, and it stands as a fitting testimonial to the courageous men and women whose voices provide so much of the book's fascinating narratives and textures.
-- "George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego"

When former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke campaigned for governor in late 1991, race relations in Louisiana were thrust dramatically into the national spotlight. New Orleans, the political and economic hub of the state, is in many ways representative of Louisiana's unique racial mix, a fusion of African-American, Caribbean, European, and white Southern cultures. An old, colorful port famous for its French and Spanish heritage, distinctive architecture, and jazz, New Orleans was a peculiarly segregated city in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, despite its complicated racial and ethnic identity and heated desegregation battles, New Orleans, unlike other Southern cities such as Birmingham, did not explode.
In this moving work, Kim Rogers tells the stories, in their own words, of the New Orleans' civil rights workers who fought to deter the racial terrorism that scarred much of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Spanning three generations of activists, RIGHTEOUS LIVES traces the risks, triumphs, and disappointments that characterized the lives of New Orleans activists. Chronicling watershed moments in the movement, Rogers' compelling narrative illustrates how blacks and whites worked together to decompress the tensions that accompanied desegregation in the ethnic mosaic of New Orleans.