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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms
In 1964, less than one year into his tenure as publisher of the
Bogalusa Daily News, New Orleans native Lou Major found himself
guiding the newspaper through a turbulent period in the history of
American civil rights. Bogalusa, Louisiana, became a flashpoint for
clashes between African Americans advocating for equal treatment
and white residents who resisted this change, a conflict that
generated an upsurge in activity by the Ku Klux Klan. Local members
of the KKK stepped up acts of terror and intimidation directed
against residents and institutions they perceived as sympathetic to
civil rights efforts. During this turmoil, the Daily News took a
public stand against the Klan and its platform of hatred and white
supremacy. Against the Klan, Major's memoir of those years,
recounts his attempts to balance the good of the community, the
health of the newspaper, and the safety of his family. He provides
an in-depth look at the stance the Daily News took in response to
the city's civil rights struggles, including the many fiery
editorials he penned condemning the KKK's actions and urging
peaceful relations in Bogalusa. Major's richly detailed personal
account offers a ground-level view of the challenges local
journalists faced when covering civil rights campaigns in the Deep
South and of the role played by the press in exposing the nefarious
activities of hate groups such as the Klan.
Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana examines the political
economy surrounding the use of enslaved laborers in the capital of
Spanish imperial Cuba from 1762 to 1835. In this first book-length
exploration of state slavery on the island, Evelyn P. Jennings
demonstrates that the Spanish state's policies and practices in the
ownership and employment of enslaved workers after 1762 served as a
bridge from an economy based on imperial service to a rapidly
expanding plantation economy in the nineteenth century. The Spanish
state had owned and exploited enslaved workers in Cuba since the
early 1500s. After the humiliating yearlong British occupation of
Havana beginning in 1762, however, the Spanish Crown redoubled its
efforts to purchase and maintain thousands of royal slaves to
prepare Havana for what officials believed would be the imminent
renewal of war with England. Jennings shows that the composition of
workforces assigned to public projects depended on the availability
of enslaved workers in various interconnected labor markets within
Cuba, within the Spanish empire, and in the Atlantic world.
Moreover, the site of enslavement, the work required, and the
importance of that work according to imperial priorities influenced
the treatment and relative autonomy of those laborers as well as
the likelihood they would achieve freedom. As plantation production
for export purposes emerged as the most dynamic sector of Cuba's
economy by 1810, the Atlantic networks used to obtain enslaved
workers showed increasing strain. British abolitionism exerted
additional pressure on the slave trade. To offset the loss of
access to enslaved laborers, colonial officials expanded the
state's authority to sentence deserters, vagrants, and fugitives,
both enslaved and free, to labor in public works such as civil
construction, road building, and the creation of Havana's defensive
forts. State efforts in this area demonstrate the deep roots of
state enslavement and forced labor in nineteenth-century Spanish
colonialism and in capitalist development in the Atlantic world.
Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana places the processes of
building and sustaining the Spanish empire in the imperial hub of
Havana in a comparative perspective with other sites of empire
building in the Atlantic world. Furthermore, it considers the human
costs of reproducing the Spanish empire in a major Caribbean port,
the state's role in shaping the institution of slavery, and the
experiences of enslaved and other coerced laborers both before and
after the beginning of Cuba's sugar boom in the early nineteenth
century.
An explosive, long-forgotten story of police violence that exposes
the historical roots of today's criminal justice crisis A deeply
researched and propulsively written story of corrupt governance,
police brutality, Black resistance, and violent white reaction in
turn-of-the-century New Orleans that holds up a dark mirror to our
own times.--Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams On a
steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers
confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep
in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running
high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the
city's history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and
murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody
rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the
police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands. Building
outwards from these dramatic events, To Poison a Nation connects
one city's troubled past to the modern crisis of white supremacy
and police brutality. Historian Andrew Baker immerses readers in a
boisterous world of disgruntled laborers, crooked machine bosses,
scheming businessmen, and the black radical who tossed a flaming
torch into the powder keg. Baker recreates a city that was home to
the nation's largest African American community, a place where
racial antagonism was hardly a foregone conclusion--but which
ultimately became the crucible of a novel form of racialized
violence: modern policing. A major new work of history, To Poison a
Nation reveals disturbing connections between the Jim Crow past and
police violence in our own times.
As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more
'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude sections of
their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But
it doesn't always go to plan. William I. Robinson exposes the
nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, arguing for the
urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The
global police state uses a variety of ingenious methods of control,
including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the
persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of
environmental activists. Movements have emerged to combat the
increasing militarization, surveillance and social cleansing;
however many of them appeal to a moral sense of social justice
rather than addressing its root - global capitalism. Using shocking
data which reveals how far capitalism has become a system of
repression, Robinson argues that the emerging megacities of the
world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the
oppressed face off against the global police state.
As the European Union undergoes a major, self-proclaimed democratic
exercise - the Conference on the Future of Europe - and approaches
Treaty change, this volume offers a new model of citizen
participation to address Europe's long-standing democracy
challenge, and respond to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Proposed are a set of democratic innovations, ranging from
citizens' assemblies to regulatory gaming to citizens' initiatives
and lobbying, which are complementary, not antagonistic, to
existing representative democracy across the European continent.
These innovations are emerging bottom-up across the continent and
getting traction at local, national and EU level in a new era
powered by technology. This book brings together academics as well
as practitioners to give a forward-looking, holistic view of the
realities of EU citizen participation across the spectrum of
participatory opportunities. They all converge in arguing that,
after many years of proven experimentation, the EU must
institutionalize supranational, participative and deliberative,
democratic channels to complement representative democracy and each
other, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of EU citizen
participation. While this institutional approach will not magically
treat the EU democratic malaise, it should make the system more
intelligible, accessible, and ultimately responsive to citizen
demand-without necessarily undertaking Treaty reform. The attempt
to harness citizen participation to help address the current EU
crisis needs the type of multi-faceted approach presented in this
book. One that recognises the potential of existing and new
democratic mechanisms, and also, importantly, the links between
different instruments of citizen participation to improve the
overall quality of EU's democratic system.
Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation demonstrates how religion
structured the possibilities and limitations of American
abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the
American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three
largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive
work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in
secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status
anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political
maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the
United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion
played in shaping the ideological contours of the early
abolitionist movement. Wright first examines the ideological
distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the
aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white
Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from
slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white
Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation
over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to
all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel
across the American continent and eventually all over the globe.
These denominations established numerous reform organizations,
collectively known as the ""benevolent empire,"" to reckon with the
problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization
Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by
promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United
States. Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections.
Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation
into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's
proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions
that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the
most potent force in American nationalism Christianity and led to
schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches.
These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation
farther down the path to secession and war. Wright's provocative
analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost
destroyed the American nation.
Ever since its inception, one of the essential tasks of the EU has
been to establish the internal market. Despite the impressive body
of case law and legislation regarding the internal market, legal
and factual barriers still exist for citizens seeking to exercise
their full rights under EU law. This book analyses these barriers
and proposes ways in which they may be overcome. Next to analysing
the key barriers to exercising economic rights more generally, this
book focuses on three areas which represent the applications of the
four basic freedoms: consumer rights, the rights of professionals
in gaining access to the market, and intellectual property rights
in the Digital Single Market. With chapters from leading
researchers, the main pathways towards the reduction and removal of
these barriers are considered. Taking into account important
factors including the global financial crisis, as well as practical
barriers, such as multilingualism, the solutions provided in this
book present a pathway to enhance cross-border realization of
European citizens? access to their economic rights, as well as
increasing in the cultural richness of the EU. EU Citizens?
Economic Rights in Action is an important book, which will be an
essential resource for students of EU citizenship and economics, as
well as for EU policymakers and practitioners interested in the
field.
Each state in Europe has its own national laws which affect
religion and these are increasingly the subject of political and
academic debate. This book provides a detailed comparative
introduction to these laws with particular reference to the states
of the European Union. A comparison of national laws on religion
reveals profound similarities between them. From these emerge
principles of law on religion common to the states of Europe and
the book articulates these for the first time. It examines the
constitutional postures of states towards religion, religious
freedom, and discrimination, and the legal position, autonomy, and
ministers of religious organizations. It also examines the
protection of doctrine and worship, the property and finances of
religion, religion, education, and public institutions, and
religion, marriage, and children, as well as the fundamentals of
the emergent European Union law on religion.
The existence of these principles challenges the standard view in
modern scholarship that there is little commonality in the legal
postures of European states towards religion - it reveals that the
dominant juridical model in Europe is that of cooperation between
State and religion. The book also analyses national laws in the
context of international laws on religion, particularly the
European Convention on Human Rights. It proposes that national laws
go further than these in their treatment and protection of
religion, and that the principles of religion law common to the
states of Europe may themselves represent a blueprint for the
development of international norms in this field. The book provides
a wealth of legal materials for scholars and students. The
principles articulated in it also enable greater dialogue between
law and disciplines beyond law, such as the sociology of religion,
about the role of religion in Europe today. The book also
identifies areas for further research in this regard, pointing the
direction for future study.
The Research Handbook on Visual Politics focuses on key theories
and methodologies for better understanding visual political
communication. It also concentrates on the depictions of power
within politics, taking a historical and longitudinal approach to
the topic of placing visuals within a wider framework of political
understanding. The Handbook provides an introduction to the
theoretical underpinning of the study of visual politics as well as
an overview of the current thinking and research traditions in the
field of visual politics. The impressive selection of contributors
explore all types of media, including studies of the tools utilised
for visual politics such as social media, art and photography,
featuring the latest platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The
editors also include discussions of visual politics covering a
range of nations and political systems while placing current
practices in visual politics within their historical context.
Offering a rich range of studies exploring differing practices
within their contexts to highlight current studies and support the
development of future research, this Research Handbook is designed
for researchers and students interested in the broad field of
politics and the subfields of political communication, persuasion,
propaganda and rhetoric.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass encompasses eleven
chapters that recount Douglass's life as a slave and his ambition
to become a free man. In factual detail, the text describes the
events of his life and is considered to be one of the most
influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist of the
early 19th century in the United States.
On his way into Parliament on 2 February 1990 FW de Klerk turned to his wife Marike and said, referring to his forthcoming speech: 'South Africa will never be the same again after this.'
Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield sufficiently and just in time to avert a revolution? The transformation has been called a miracle, belying gloomy predictions of race war in which the white minority went into a laager and fought to the last drop of blood. Why did it happen?
Professor Welsh views the topic against the backdrop of a long history of conflict spanning apartheid’s rise and demise, and the liberation movement’s suppression and subsequent resurrection. His view is that the movement away from apartheid to majority rule would have taken far longer and been much bloodier were it not for the changes undergone by Afrikaner nationalism itself.
There were turning points, such as the Soweto uprising of 1976, but few believed that the transition from white domination to inclusive democracy would occur as soon – and as relatively peacefully – as it did. In effect, however, a multitude of different factors led the ANC and the National Party to see that neither side could win the conflict on its own terms.
Utterly dissimilar in background, culture, beliefs and political style, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk were an unlikely pair of liberators. But both soon recognised that they were dependent on each other to steer the transformation process through to its conclusion.
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