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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Military life & institutions > General
Riots and demonstrations, the lifeblood of American social and
political protest in the 1960s, are now largely a historical
memory. But Mary Fainsod Katzenstein argues that protest has not
disappeared--it has simply moved off the streets into the country's
core institutions. As a result, conflicts over sexual harassment,
affirmative action, and the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and
people of color now touch us more than ever in our daily lives,
whether we are among those seeking change or those threatened by
its prospects. No one is more aware of this than women demanding
change from within the United States military and the American
Catholic church.
Women in uniform are deeply patriotic and women active in the
church are devoted to their callings. Yet Katzenstein shows that
these women often feel isolated and demeaned, confronted by
challenges as subtle as condescension and as blatant as career
obstruction. Although faithful to their institutions, many have
proved fearless in their attempts to reshape them. Drawing on
interviews with over a hundred women in the military and the
church--including senior officers, combat pilots, lay activists,
and nuns--this book gives voice to the struggles and vision of
these women as they have moved protest into the mainstream.
Katzenstein shows why the military and the church, similarly
hierarchical and insistent on obedience, have come to harbor deeply
different forms of protest. She demonstrates that women in the
military have turned to the courts and Congress, whereas feminists
in the church have used "discursive" protests--writing, organizing
workshops and conferences--to rethink in radical ways the meanings
of faith and justice. These different strategies, she argues,
reflect how the law regulates the military but leaves the church
alone.
"Faithful and Fearless" calls our attention to protest within
institutions as a new stage in the history both of feminism and of
social movements in America. The book is an inspiring account of
strength in the face of adversity and a groundbreaking contribution
to the study of American feminism, social protest, and the
historical development of institutions in American society.
Cultural practices and artifacts, in their multiple and varied
forms, are grounded on values, which are so deeply internalized by
people that usually remain in the background, as taken-for-granted
guides for interpretations and decisions in everyday life. Shaping
individual moral horizons is at the core of socialization
processes, through which older generations aim to disseminate their
culturally established values to the new ones, making use of
suggestions mainly implicit in daily experiences and interactions.
Despite the strength of these processes of cultural canalization,
people find particular ways of positioning and interpreting social
suggestions, drawing singular life trajectories and developing
themselves as unique beings. This is truthful also in case of
highly institutionalized settings like the military, in which
people play in many forms an agentic role in their own development,
being prepared to perform their professional duties in very complex
and challenging activity contexts. This book is an invitation to
dive deeper into human experiences lived in the military through
qualitative and in-depth approaches, observing their affective
qualities, the meanings they acquire and how they shape
individuals' identities, fostering the development and try-out of
specific ethical and moral values. The present work can contribute
to research and professional practice in fields related to human
development, social processes, education and people management in
the military, as well as in other institutional contexts,
especially by highlighting the affective, meaningful and
moral-ethical dimensions of cultural experiences.
Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper was a former slave who rose to become
the first African American graduate of West Point. While serving as
commissary officer at Fort Davis, Texas, in 1881, he was charged
with embezzlement and conduct unbecoming an officer and a
gentleman. A court-martial board acquitted Flipper of the
embezzlement charge but convicted him of conduct unbecoming. He was
then dismissed from the service of the United States. The Flipper
case became known as something of an American Dreyfus Affair,
emblematic of racism in the frontier army. Because of Flipper's
efforts to clear his name, many assumed that he had been railroaded
because he was black.In The Fall of a Black Army Officer, Charles
M. Robinson III challenges that assumption. In this complete
revision of his earlier work, The Court-Martial of Lieutenant Henry
Flipper, Robinson finds that Flipper was the author of his own
problems. The taint of racism on the Flipper affair became so
widely accepted that in 1999 President Bill Clinton issued a
posthumous pardon for Flipper. The Fall of a Black Army Officer
boldly moves the arguments regarding racism--in both Lt. Flipper's
case and the frontier army in general--beyond political
correctness. Solidly grounded in archival research, it is a
thorough and provocative reassessment of the Flipper affair, at
last revealing the truth.
This book is a call to action to address the transition many
soldiers face when returning to civilian life. It presents an
arts-based therapeutic approach to dealing with trauma, exploring
the development, performance, and reception of Contact!Unload, a
play based on the lives of military veterans overcoming stress
injuries encountered during military service. The book, which
includes the full script of the play, offers academic, artistic,
personal, and theoretical perspectives from people directly
involved in the performances as well as those who witnessed the
work. The play and book serve as a model for using arts-based
approaches to mental health care and as a powerful look into the
experiences of military veterans.
When the first American servicemen arrived in England in March
1942, the indigenous population greeted their presence with mixed
feelings. A certain level of resentment of these newcomers was
harboured by the English and expressed by many in the in the
well-worn phase of the time 'over-paid, over-sexed and over here'.
But without the presence of American servicemen in Britain and its
huge military and industrial muscle, the war with Germany would
probably have been lost. Using a combination of contemporary
eyewitness and documentary sources plus latter-day interviews,
linked together by engaging narrative, Helen Milligate takes a look
at the background to 'the friendly invasion' - where they all came
from, who they were, where they were stationed and what they did.
She examines how the 'Yanks' got on with the locals, how they
fitted in (or didn't), their impact on the social structure of
England in the 1940s, the problems they brought with them and their
impressions of England. She concludes with the journey home once
the war in Europe had ended, describing what the Yanks left behind
them and the wives and sweethearts they took 'stateside'.
All those nagging questions you have about the universe are
answered here, like "Is there a dark side to the Moon? What happens
when a comet hits the sun? Do the Martian canals have any water in
them? Is the moon hot inside? What would happen if the sun were to
collide with a black hole? Mars has polar ice caps: could polar
bears live on Mars? If I could go back to the time of the
dinosaurs, would the sky look the same as it does today? "and many
more.
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