The longevity of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas, suggests that it is possible for a social change organization to simultaneously address racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, environmental justice, and peace-and to succeed. Activism, Alliance Building, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center uses ethnographic research to provide an instructive case study of the importance and challenges of confronting injustice in all of its manifestations. Through building and maintaining alliances, deploying language strategically, and using artistic expression as a central organizing mechanism, The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center demonstrates the power of multi-issue organizing and intersectional/coalitional consciousness. Interweaving artistic programming with its social justice agenda, in particular, offers Esperanza a unique forum for creative and political expression, institutional collaborations, and interpersonal relationships, which promote consciousness raising, mobilization, and social change. This study will appeal to scholars of communication, Chicana feminism, and ethnography.

Midway between Billings, Montana, and Yellowstone National Park, tourists encounter the quaint little town of Red Lodge. Here one may see cowboys, Indians, and mountain men roaming a downtown that's on the National Register of Historic Places, attend a rodeo on the 4th of July, or join in a celebration of immigrants during the annual "Festival of Nations." One would hardly guess that until recently Red Lodge was really a down-and-out coal-mining town or that it was populated mainly by white Americans.

In many ways, Red Lodge is typical of western towns that have created new interpretations of their pasts in order to attract tourists through a mix of public pageants and old-timey facades. In Red Lodge and the Mythic West, Montana-born Bonnie Christensen tells how Red Lodge reinvented itself and shows that the "history" a community chooses to celebrate may be only loosely based on what actually happened in the town's past.

Tracing the story of Red Lodge from the 1880s to the present, Christensen tells how a mining town managed to endure the vagaries of the West's unpredictable extractive-industries economy. She connects Red Lodge to a myriad of larger events and historical forces to show how national and regional influences have contributed to the development of local identities, exploring how and why westerners first rejected and then embraced "western" images, and how ethnicity, wilderness, and historic preservation became part of the identity that defined one town.

Christensen takes us behind the main street facades of Red Lodge to tell a story of salesmanship, adaptation, and survival. Combining oral histories, newspapers, government records, and even minutes of organizationmeetings, she shows not only how people have used different interpretations of the past to create a sense of themselves in the present, but also how public memory is created and re-created.

Christensen's shrewd analysis transcends one place to illuminate broader trends in the region and offer a clearer understanding of the motivations behind the creation of "theme towns" throughout America. By explaining how and why we choose various versions of the past to fit who we want to be -- and who we want others to think we are -- she helps us learn more about the role of myths and myth-making in American communities, and in the process learn a little more about ourselves.

Exceptional communities possessing a definitive sense of place, the cities and towns presented in this book have created or re-created a style, ambience, or character that transcends the ordinary and is used as the basis for community economic development. Adapting the idea of concept marketing, these communities have found a niche or specialty to create community recognition and serve as a basis for garnering external investment, tourism, and other revenue-generating events. This book examines the use of popular and corporate culture, retail establishments, historical tradition, and surrealism in community concept marketing and profiles examples of communities from a diverse array of contexts and geographical settings. Bellows Falls, VT, for instance, a once-depressed former milltown has transformed itself to a vibrant community through an arts integrated development strategy, while Austin, MN, the home of Hormel Foods, has drawn on the town's corporate culture with the opening of a new SPAM Museum. Manchester, VT, taking a retail approach, has become a designer outlet mecca, and Walnut, IA, the state's "Antique City." Cape May, NJ, has restored its historic properties and successfully marketed itself as a seaside resort, while Holland, MI, exemplifies the surreal approach, marketing itself as a Dutch town. Considering these and other uniquely marketed communities, this book examines the elements necessary for a successful concept marketing strategy to community economic development.

The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery's expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public at titudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group's encounters with the law and placing these suits into conversation with similar en counters that arose in appellate cases nationwide Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.

This collection of eleven original essays interrogates the concept of freedom and recenters our understanding of the process of emancipation. Who defined freedom, and what did it mean to nineteenth-century African Americans, both during and after slavery? Some of the essays disrupt the traditional story and time-frame of emancipation.

In spite of America's identity as a liberal democracy, the vile act of lynching happened frequently in the Southern United States over the course of the nation's history. Indeed, lynchings were very public events, and were even advertised in newspapers, begging the question of how such a brazen disregard for the law could have occurred so freely and openly. Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State seeks to explain the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the American liberal regime and the illiberal act of lynching. Drawing on legal cases, congressional documents, presidential correspondence, and newspaper reports, Daniel Kato explores the federal government's pattern of non-intervention regarding lynchings of African Americans from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. Although popular belief holds that the federal government was unable to address racial violence in the South, this book argues that the actions and decisions of the federal government from the 1870s through the 1960s reveal that federal inaction was not primarily a consequence of institutional or legal incapacities, but rather a decision that was supported and maintained by all three branches of the federal government. Inaction stemmed from the decision not to intervene, not the powerlessness of the federal government. To cement his argument, Kato develops the theory of constitutional anarchy, which crystallizes the ways in which federal government had the capacity to intervene, yet relinquished its responsibility while nonetheless maintaining authority. A bold challenge to conventional knowledge about lynching, Liberalizing Lynching will serve as a useful tool for students and scholars of political science, legal history, and African American studies.

This book is a one-stop comprehensive guide to geographical inquiry. A step-by-step account of the hows and the whys of research methodology. Introduces students to the complexities of geographical perspective and thought, essentials of fieldwork, formulation of research topics, data collection, analysis and interpretation as well as presentation a

Housing fulfills a basic human need for shelter. It protects us from the weather and from hostile intruders. Often it is an expression of personal identity and social status. A home is a major personal financial investment and housing is an important part of the economy. The home is also invested with profound psychological and social meaning. It helps meet our needs to feel rooted and to belong. It is a center of privacy, a refuge from the world, and at the same time the place where we interact with our family, friends, and acquaintances. As such the home is an important factor in personal and social development, particularly in childhood.

Because of the complex role of housing in human life, residential environments are an important area of study in a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, architecture, economics, environmental design, geography, psychology, and sociology. The dwelling is the nucleus around which the discourse about residential environments is articulated, but it is not its only component. Residential environments also involve other elements such as the neighborhood, neighbors, and the larger urban community. This multidisciplinary study of residential environments conveys the complex nature of people's experiences with thier residences, neighborhoods, and communities.

The 21st century is often characterized as the age of globalization, with the world's economies becoming more and more interconnected at an unprecedented rate. And while the phenomenon of globalization isn't necessarily new, it has taken on a drastically different form since the 1980s: competition amongst multinational and global organizations is more intense, and non-Western multinationals are now emerging as important players in the global economy. Today, professional managers need to reconcile the opportunities and challenges associated with the rapid growth of Asian, Eastern European, and Latin American countries. To do so, adopting what's called 'the global mindset' is becoming an essential skill for managers within these global organizations. The key advantages of developing a global mindset are many. In Global Organizations: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Future, authors Rabi S. Bhagat, Annette S. McDevitt, and B. Ram Baliga offers an insightful and comprehensive overview of the most important issues today for managers looking to develop and nurture their own global mindset for their company's future. Global Organizations expertly provides readers with research- and evidence-based knowledge on the significance of developing a sophisticated global mindset regardless of national identity or geographic locale.

Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

The anthropological approach to the expulsion of the foreign women from the post-exilic community argues that it was the result of a witch-hunt. Its comparative approach notes that the community responded to its weak social boundaries in the same fashion as societies with similar social weaknesses. This book argues that the post-exilic community's decision to expel the foreign women in its midst was the direct result of the community's inability to enforce a common morality among its members. This anthropological approach to the expulsion shows how other societies with weak social moralities tend to react with witch-hunts, and it suggests that the expulsion in Ezra 9-10 was precisely such an activity. It concludes with an examination of the political and economic forces that could have eroded the social morality of the community.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Preface.

"Possibly the best title of the season."--"Books to Watch out For"

"A thrilling, imaginative, and brilliant reading of contemporary cultural politics from one of the freshest voices in the field today. Dwight McBride's graceful prose, sharp wit, and sound judgments leap from every page. His essays sparkle with abundant intelligence--and a striking personal investment--as they lead the reader through a complex array of ideas, practices, and situations without losing sight of the ultimate intellectual and political liberation at which they aim. Bravo!"
--Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

aA fair warning from an intelligent, well-informed writera
--Alter Magazine

"McBride has emerged as one of the most eloquent public voices in both queer studies and black studies. In this wide-ranging book--written with intelligence, passion, and humor--he brings the insights of each field to the blind spots of the other. We all have something to learn from him."
--Michael Warner, Rutgers University

"McBride's heady collection is an accessible think piece, starting with its agreeable title and its pointed essay of the same name."
--"Time Out New York"

"This collection breaks new ground for contemporary cultural criticism. McBride's look at homophobia in traditional African-American studies is an emphatic but penetrating critique of the discipline, and his explication of the ghettoization of black men in gay male porn is truly original work with ramifications well outside of queer studies."
--"Publishers Weekly"

"McBride's prose is smart, on-target, and very readable. These essays are notsimply illuminating, but some of the most eye-opening commentaries on gay culture to be published in years."
--"Between the Lines"

"This is one thought-provoking book."
--" HX/HOMO XTRA"

"Dwight A. McBride writes eloquently about the issues of race and homosexuality."
--"Philadelphia Gay News"

"McBridge expends more intellectual energy justifying his dislike of the popular clothing chain than perhaps any other person on the planet."
--"Evenings Out Chronicle"

"Eloquent collection...engagingly- and, for an academic, unorthodoxly- autobiographical."
--"San Francisco Bay Time"

"McBride's volume is a provacative and wide ranging exploration of a range of issues relating to race and sexuality."--"Bay Area Reporter"

"The book's namesake essay- a scathingly detailed and systematic study of the history, advertising practices, and hiring policies that comprise the "cult of Abercrombie"- makes the collection a mindblowing must-read...timely, disconcerting, and riveting in a way that academic writing should be, but rarely is."--"Girlfriends"

"Working across cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, and race, ethnicity, and feminist studies, McBride attempts to ponder, address, and, where possible, rescue both African American studies and queer theory from the pitfalls of ignoring each other. This project is admirable to the extent that, not unlike black feminists a decade or more ago, scholars and intellectuals of McBride's generation refuse to make choices between race and sexuality- especially when that sexuality is considered deviant."
--"GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies"

Why hate Abercrombie? In a world rife with human cruelty andoppression, why waste your scorn on a popular clothing retailer? The rationale, Dwight A. McBride argues, lies in "the banality of evil," or the quiet way discriminatory hiring practices and racist ad campaigns seep into and reflect malevolent undertones in American culture.

McBride maintains that issues of race and sexuality are often subtle and always messy, and his compelling new book does not offer simple answers. Instead, in a collection of essays about such diverse topics as biased marketing strategies, black gay media representations, the role of African American studies in higher education, gay personal ads, and pornography, he offers the evolving insights of one black gay male scholar.

As adept at analyzing affirmative action as dissecting "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," McBride employs a range of academic, journalistic, and autobiographical writing styles. Each chapter speaks a version of the truth about black gay male life, African American studies, and the black community. Original and astute, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch is a powerful vision of a rapidly changing social landscape.

Praise for "Impossible Witnesses":

"A necessary and compelling work.
--Toni Morrison

"McBride teases out complexity and depth heretofore overlooked. Don't miss this important text!"
--Cornel West

"Ambitious and thought-provoking."
--The Journal of American History

The last few decades has seen a prolonged debate over the nature and importance of social class as a basis for ideology, class voting and class politics. The prevailing assumption is that, in western societies, class inequalities are no longer important in determining political behaviour. In The End of Class Politics? leading scholars from the US, UK and Europe argue that the evidence on which the assumptions about the decline importance of class is based is unfounded. Instead, the book argues that the class basis of political competition has to some degree evolved, but not declined. Furthermore, the social basis of political competition and sweeping claims about the new politics of postindustrial society need to be re-examined.

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe offers a series of studies focusing on the problems of conceptualisation of social group identities, including national, royal, aristocratic, regional, urban, religious, and gendered communities. The geographical focus of the case studies presented in this volume range from Wales and Scotland, to Hungary and Ruthenia, while both narrative and other types of evidence, such as legal texts, are drawn upon. What emerges is how the characteristics and aspirations of communities are exemplified and legitimised through the presentation of the past and an imagined picture of present. By means of its multiple perspectives, this volume offers significant insight into the medieval dynamics of collective mentality and group consciousness. Contributors are Daniel Bagi, Mariusz Bartnicki, Zbigniew Dalewski, Georg Jostkleigrewe, Bartosz Klusek, Pawel Kras, Wojciech Michalski, Martin Nodl, Andrzej Pleszczynski, Euryn Rhys Roberts, Stanislaw Rosik, Joanna Sobiesiak, Karol Szejgiec, Michal Tomaszek, Tomasz Tarczynski, Przemyslaw Tyszka, Tatiana Vilkul, and Przemyslaw Wiszewski.

The common wisdom that business contributions to the common good are counterproductive in the new competitive global marketplace does not hold up to empirical research. In fact, doing good is good for business, and a majority of businesses do provide some form of community support, which Besser discovered in her exhaustive survey of the Iowa business community. Business owners and managers often act out of a sense of community spirit and a certain obligation to better the common good. While the increasingly globalized economy has encouraged a number of large corporations to become freewheelers, the vast majority of companies are firmly rooted in place and look at their locales with more than just a utilitarian eye.

Extensive interviews with Iowa business owners, managers, and business and community leaders are combined with findings from prior studies of corporate citizenship, and the evidence clearly indicates that the majority of businesses provide some form of community support. Most owners feel they should do more than just make a profit, so they often seek ways to give back to their communities, a move that is usually nurtured within the business community itself. However, corporate altruism carries risks. Many business owners have unwittingly offended customers and clients by their acts of civic spirit. Besser concludes her book by addressing the potential threats to business social responsibility posed by globalization and recommends steps to enhance socially responsible capitalism. Anybody interested in the complex interaction of businesses and the communities they reside in will enjoy reading this positive revisitation of the mutually supportive relationship between trade and polity.

Modern Germany explores life, society, and history in this comprehensive thematic encyclopedia, spanning such topics as geography, pop culture, the media, and gender. Germany and its capital, Berlin, were the fulcrum of geopolitics in the twentieth century. After the Second World War, Germany was a divided nation. Many German citizens were born and educated and continued to work in eastern Germany (the former German Democratic Republic). This title in the Understanding Modern Nations series seeks to explain contemporary life and traditional culture through thematic encyclopedic entries. Themes in the book cover geography; history; politics and government; economy; religion and thought; social classes and ethnicity; gender, marriage, and sexuality; education; language; etiquette; literature and drama; art and architecture; music and dance; food; leisure and sports; and media and pop culture. Within each theme, short topical entries cover a wide array of key concepts and ideas, from LGBTQ issues in Germany to linguistic dialects to the ever-famous Oktoberfest. Geared specifically toward high school and undergraduate German students, readers interested in history and travel will find this book accessible and engaging. Provides examples of how the post-war division of Germany continues to play a role in German society Discusses German politics as well as the nation's role in the European Union Contains contemporary, first-person accounts of everyday life in Germany in a "Day in the Life" appendix Illuminates the text through photos that illustrate key topics Provides fun facts and anecdotal information in sidebars, helping to engage readers

Probing at the very core of the American political consciousness from the colonial period through the early republic, this thorough and unprecedented study by Larry E. Tise suggests that American proslavery thought, far from being an invention of the slave-holding South, had its origins in the crucible of conservative New England. Proslavery rhetoric, Tise shows, came late to the South, where the heritage of Jefferson's ideals was strongest and where, as late as the 1830s, most slaveowners would have agreed that slavery was an evil to be removed as soon as possible. When the rhetoric did come, it was often in the portmanteau of ministers who moved south from New England, and it arrived as part of a full-blown ideology. When the South finally did embrace proslavery, the region was placed not at the periphery of American thought but in its mainstream.

We often think identity is personal. But the identities that shape the world, our struggles, and our hopes, are social ones, shared with countless others. Our sense of self is shaped by our family, but also by affiliations that spread out from there, like our nationality, culture, class, race and religion.

Taking these broad categories as a starting point, Professor Appiah challenges our assumptions about how identity works. In eloquent and lively chapters, he weaves personal anecdote with historical, cultural and literary example to explore the entanglements within the stories we tell ourselves. We all know there are conflicts among identities; but Professor Appiah explores how identities are created by conflict.

Identities are then crafted from confusions - confusions this book aims to help us sort through. Religion, Appiah shows us, isn't primarily about beliefs. The idea of national self-determination is incoherent. Our everyday racial thinking is an artefact of discarded science. Class is not a matter of upper and lower. And the very idea of Western culture is a misleading myth. We will see our situation more clearly if we start to question these mistaken identities. This is radical new thinking from a master in the subject and will change forever the way we think about ourselves and our communities.

The movement of research animals across the divides that have separated scientist investigators and research animals as Baconian dominators and research equipment respectively might well give us cause to reflect about what we think we know about scientists and animals and how they relate to and with one another within the scientific coordinates of the modern research laboratory. Scientists are often assumed to inhabit the ontotheological domain that the union of science and technology has produced; to master 'nature' through its ontological transformation. Instrumental reason is here understood to produce a split between animal and human being, becoming inextricably intertwined with human self-preservation. But science itself is beginning to take us back to nature; science itself is located in the thick of posthuman biopolitics and is concerned with making more than claims about human being, and is seeking to arrive at understandings of being as such. It is no longer relevant to assume that instrumental reason continues to hold a death grip on science, nor that it is immune from the concerns in which it is deeply embedded. And, it is no longer possible to assume that animal human relationships in the lab continue along the fault line of the Great Divide. This book raises critical questions about what kinship means, or might mean, for science, for humanimal relations, and for anthropology, which has always maintained a sure grip on kinship but has not yet accounted for how it might be validly claimed to exist between humanimals in new and emerging contexts of relatedness. It raises equally important questions about the position of science at the forefront of new kinships between humans and animals, and questions our assumptions about how scientific knowing is produced and reflected upon from within the thick of lab work, and what counts as 'good science'. Much of it is concerned with the quality of humanimal relatedness and relationship. For the Love of Lab Rats will be of great interest to scientists, laboratory workers, anthropologists, animal studies scholars, posthumanists, phenomenologists, and all those with an interest in human-animal relations.

There is a crisis in America revolving around social and political life, and the contributors to this essay collection believe it has provoked a renewed attention to the issue of community in political thought. The 14 essays approach the question of community and political thought from a variety of perspectives, ranging from political philosophy to social theory. All the essays, however, share the concern of the opening essay by Hertzke and McRorie about moral ecology, or determining what is required for a vital and free social and political life and preserving it from erosion by individualism in its various forms.

Two of the essays, by Jardine and Stier, deal with understanding the communitarian impulse. Three, by Frohnen, Stone, and Woolfolk, evaluate perhaps the first major contribution to the communitarian movement, "Habits of the Heart." While McClay's chapter seeks to restore the connection between federalism and communitarianism, Sharpe's essay connects the liberal-communitarian debate to the classic works of de Tocqueville and Arendt. Two essays, by Knippenberg and Lawler, criticize the quirky communitarianism of America's leading professor of philosophy, Richard Rorty. Lawler also criticizes Bloom for his similarity to Rorty, joining Nichols in her discussion of BlooM's excessive debt to Rousseau. McDaniel and Mahoney present unfashionable appreciations, not without criticism, of the achievement of Leo Strauss's illiberal if not exactly communitarian thought. Finally, Anderson discusses Raymond Aron's prudent opposition to the oxymoronic global community. This is a unique and significant collection for all students and researchers interested in contemporary social and political thought.

examines Thai-Chinese relations, dating back to the first Thai dynasty (Sukhothai) to the present (Ratanakosin). The study explores the Thai domestic policies that have affected the Chinese population since World War II and assimilation policies of the Thai government towards the Chinese. This book also analyzes both Skinner's and Chan and Tong's arguments, and their main idea in the context of the present day environment and situation for the ethnic Chinese. This research supports the Skinnerian paradigm, which asserts that "a majority of the descendants of Chinese immigrants in each generation merge with Thai society and become indistinguishable from the indigenous population to the extent that fourth-generation Chinese are practically non-existent." The validation of the Skinnerian paradigm rejects Chan and Tong's hypothesis, which claims that Skinner has "overemphasized the forces of assimilation" and that the Chinese in Thailand have not assimilated but retained their Chinese identity. To support Skinner's assertion and reject Chan and Tong's argument, this book presents rich empirical data collected via surveys conducted with the ethnic Chinese in Thailand from 2003-2004. This study uncovers that the forces of assimilation occur at two levels. On the first level, the Chinese in Thailand possess natural attributes which facilitate social and cultural integration and assimilation into Thai society. On the second level, government pro-assimilation policies, driven by the bilateral relations between Thailand and China and the political situation in both countries, are also responsible for the assimilation of the Chinese in Thailand. As the most current in-depth study on the Chinese in Thailand, The Chinese Emigres of Thailand in the Twentieth Century is a critical addition for all collections in Asian Studies as well as Ethnic and Immigrant Studies.

Communes and utopian communities are groups of men and women who share a central or common belief and choose to live together away from mainstream society. Many of the individuals in these communes are characterized by or aspire to perfection. This reference source contains biographies and historical overviews of 20th-century communes and utopias in the United States and those individuals involved with them. Sutton provides a comprehensive history of both religious and secular utopian communities. Entries include Amity Colony, Farm Eco-Village, Holy City, David Koresh, Shaker Communities, The Farm, and Donald Walters, among many others.

Each entry includes a list of print and electronic sources for further reading. An appendix listing 20th-century American communal and utopian societies is also provided. Ideal for students and researchers interested in anthropology, labor history, politics, cults, sects, workers movements and welfare communities.