America spends more than any other developed nation on healthcare--$2.1 trillion in 2007 alone. But 47 million Americans remain uninsured, and of those Americans who are insured, many suffer from poor health. In his ground-breaking proposal, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel offers up a plan to comprehensively restructure the delivery and quality of our healthcare. By eliminating employer-healthcare and establishing an independent program to evaluate healthcare plans and insurance companies, he offers a no-nonsense guide to how government can institute private insurance options that will allow each of us a choice of doctor and plan. With the rate of healthcare costs rapidly outpacing our gross domestic product, we can no longer afford to maintain our fragmented delivery of care, or entertain reforms that seek to patch, rather than cure, a fractured system. Accessible, straightforward, and revolutionary in its approach, "Healthcare, Guaranteed" is an inarguable guide to lasting healthcare reform.

From stem cell research to intelligent design to global warming, political conflict over science is heating up. In his 2005 bestseller, The Republican War on Science, journalist Chris Mooney made the case that, again and again, even overwhelming scientific consensus has met immovable political obstacles. And, again and again, those obstacles have arisen on the right-from the Bush administration, from coalitions of Republicans and from individually powerful Republicans. As the new paperback edition announces, Mooney's book, "brings this whole story together for the first time, weaving the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience." Looking for a Fight, Is There a Republican War on Science? started life as a 'book event'-an online, roundtable-style critical symposium on Mooney's work, hosted at Crooked Timber (crookedtimber.org). Eight contributors offered reviews, discussion and critical commentary. And Mooney responded to his critics. Now the event is a book, available here in print for the first time and online (for free download at parlorpress.com). "Man, you guys worked me hard ." - Chris Mooney

Current Events / Political Activism Take Action in 2004...
With the 2004 Presidential election right around the corner, it is time for every American disillusioned by President Bush and his administration to take action. Whether you're a first time activist or a professional campaigner, "Stop Bush in 2004: How Every Citizen Can Help" is every citizen's comprehensive action handbook. Within its pages you will learn all the effective ways of taking action during the Presidential Campaign including activism directed to hinder the Bush Campaign, aid the Democratic Campaign, improve media coverage, engage students, and affect the economy. You will learn how to choose the actions that are best for you and which actions are the most effective. "Stop Bush in 2004" provides a complete overview of all aspects necessary for taking effective action: What to know and do prior to taking action, how to successfully organize, highlights of Bush's record, and a full list of resources. It's time to participate and take responsibility for our government. Join the citizen's campaign to stop Bush and Company before four more years of harm are thrust upon us. They can be beaten. We must all take action

Pressure Groups are an increasingly important feature of the political landscape and they are active on many levels, local, national or European. They reflect a diverse compass of interests from the well-known (the National Farmers' Union) to the less familiar (the Zip Fastener Association) and interact with a wide range of political players in different parts of the political system: parties, the media, government and parliament. They are involved at every stage of the political process, from raising issues and agenda setting to policy implementation and monitoring. Subjects covered include: *Classifying pressure groups *How pressure groups operate *Pressure group resources *Trends in pressure group activity *Protest politics and direct action *Pressure groups and the Scottish Parliament *Pressure groups and the European Union *The abolition of hunting with dogs *Pressure groups and democracy This book provides an accessible guide to the role of Pressure Groups in our democracy, establishing clear definitions and analysing their role and performance. It includes the findings of recent research into the workings of British pressure groups in the European Union and of the ways in which lobbyists consult with the devolved legislatures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The federal government wastes your tax dollars worse than a drunken sailor on shore leave. The 1984 Grace Commission uncovered that the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat and $436 for a hammer. Twenty years later things weren't much better. In 2004, Congress spent a record-breaking $22.9 billion dollars of your money on 10,656 of their pork-barrel projects. The war on terror has a lot to do with the record $413 billion in deficit spending, but it's also the result of pork over the last 18 years the likes of:
- $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa
- $102 million to study screwworms which were long ago eradicated from American soil
- $273,000 to combat goth culture in Missouri
- $2.2 million to renovate the North Pole (Lucky for Santa )
- $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in California
- $1 million for ornamental fish research
Funny in some instances and jaw-droppingly stupid and wasteful in others, "The Pig Book" proves one thing about Capitol Hill: pork is king

Founded in May 1783 at Steuben's headquarters near Newburg, N.Y., by officers of the Continental army and navy, the Society of the Cincinnati was at one time one of America's most controversial organizations. In Liberty without Anarchy, Minor Myers relates how the officers, who had not been paid for four years, began to circulate rumors of a military coup. The society, with Washington as President-General, was formed to exert political pressure on Congress to guarantee payment in response to the angry men.

Many Americans, Thomas Jefferson principal among them, viewed the new organization with suspicion, as a seedbed for a hereditary American aristocracy. As Myers points out, the fears were well-founded: many society members were monarchists, and in 1786 Steuben himself wrote to Prince Henry of Prussia inquiring whether he might be interested in becoming king of the United States. Prince Henry declined.

The interest in monarchy ended with the adoption of the federal Constitution in 1787, with many society members as delegates to the Convention, but it was not until 1827 that the original pay dispute was resolved and the officers awarded a pension. With unprecedented access to the society's papers and documents, Minor Myers has produced a highly readable history of this fascinating organization, in which he concludes that the Society is an important reminder of the road the American revolutionaries avoided--the road that led from revolution to army coup to military dictatorship--a road taken by most of the armed revolutions of the last two hundred years.

tag: The history of how a powerful and potentially subversive group of officers made the choice for liberty during the Revolutionary War

In 1968 Miguel ""Mickey"" Melendez was a college student, developing pride in his Cuban and Puerto Rican cultural identity and becoming increasingly aware of the effects of social inequality on Latino Americans. Joining with other like-minded student activists, Melendez helped form the central committee of the New York branch of the Young Lords, one of the most provocative and misunderstood radical groups to emerge during the 1960s. Incorporating techniques of direct action and community empowerment, the Young Lords became a prominent force in the urban northeast. From their storefront offices in East Harlem, they defiantly took back the streets of El Barrio. In addition to running clothing drives, day-care centers, and food and health programs, they became known for their media-savvy tactics and bold actions, like the takeovers of the First People's Church and Lincoln Hospital. In this memoir, Melendez describes with the unsparing eye of an insider the idealism, anger, and vitality of the Lords as they rose to become the most respected and powerful voice of Puerto Rican empowerment in the country. He also traces the internal ideological disputes that led the group, but not the mission, to fracture in 1972. Written with passion and compelling detail, We Took the Streets tells the story of how one group took on the establishment - and won.

Whether picketing outside abortion clinics, speaking out at school board meetings, or attending anti-death penalty vigils, many Americans have publicly opposed local, state, or federal government policies on the basis of their religious convictions. In The Fracture of Good Order , Jason Bivins examines the growing phenomenon of Christian protest against civil authority and political order in the United States. He argues that since the 1960s, there has been a proliferation of religious activism against what protesters perceive as government's excessive power and lack of moral principle. Calling this phenomenon ""Christian antiliberalism,"" Bivins finds at its center a belief that American politics is based on a liberal tradition that gives government too much social and economic influence and threatens the practice of a religious life. Focusing on the Catholic pacifism of Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the Jonah House resistance community, the Christian Right's homeschooling movement, and the evangelical Sojourners community, Bivins combines religious studies with political theory to explore the common ground shared by these disparate groups. Despite their vast ideological and institutional differences, Bivins argues, these activists justify their actions in overtly religious terms based on a rejection of basic tenets of the American political system. Analyzing the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional forms of political identity and affiliation that characterize American civic life today, Bivins sheds light on the complex relations between religion and democratic society. |Bivins examines Christian activist groups not usually considered together, from the Berrigan brothers to the New Christian Right movement, to show that despite their differing agendas, all are opposed to the government's excessive power and lack of moral influence. Christian antiliberalism, as Bivins calls it, brings religious language and symbolic actions to bear on a political system whose authority is perceived as morally bankrupt.

The story of one of America's first historic preservationists and the city she fought to save One of the most remarkable women born in the Reconstruction South, Susan Pringle Frost was an outspoken champion of a host of important causes, including women's rights, a more active and accountable local government, and better treatment of African Americans. In his biography of this dynamic Charlestonian, Sidney Bland enumerates Frost's many accomplishments and chronicles what he considers to be her greatest achievement--spearheading a historic preservation movement in Charleston that became the model for preservationists throughout the country. Bland recounts Frost's early life as a member of an illustrious Charleston family and her entrance into the workplace, caused partly by her father's financial failures. He tells how she defied convention by establishing a real estate office in Charleston's all-male professional district, sparked an interest in preservation by buying and renovating houses on and around Charleston's oldest thoroughfare, and founded the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, one of the nation's oldest historic preservation groups and the forerunner of the Preservation Society of Charleston. Offering vivid insight into the courage, perseverance, and eccentricity of a woman he considers a complex and often inconsistent crusader, he credits Frost with garnering support for the city's landmark Historic District Zoning Ordinance and traces specific staples of present-day historic preservation methods to her visionary initiatives. A finalist for the South Carolina Historical Society's best book of the year in South Carolina history, Preserving Charleston's Past, Shaping Its Future illuminates the life of a pioneer in historic preservation and a feminist whose activism helped save Charleston's old architecture and generated a wider preservation movement.

Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents
Anne E. Gorsuch

A vivid account of Bolshevik efforts to "Sovietize" young people in the 1920s.

"A very impressive work broad, learned, and very readable." Lynn Mally

"A welcome and fascinating addition to the social and cultural history of the 1920s in Russia and to the comparative study of youth politics and culture in contemporary Europe and elsewhere." Mark von Hagen

In Bolshevik Russia, the successful transformation of young people into communists was crucial for the future of the Soviet state. Soviet youth needed to be shaped into communists in every aspect of their daily lives work, leisure, gender relations, and family life. But how could the Bolsheviks accomplish this enormous project? What did it mean to be "made communist"? What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief? Drawing from a wide range of sources diaries, party speeches, propagandistic writings, scientific studies, and literature Anne E. Gorsuch reveals the rich diversity of youth cultures in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. She explores the relationship between representation and reality and between official ideology and popular culture, along with the meaning of these relationships for the making of a Soviet state and society. From the clash between ultracommunist visions of what Russian young people should be and the flamboyant style of flappers and foxtrotters so prominently imported from the capitalist West, emerges a vivid picture of the construction of Soviet youth. Thoughtful and appealing, Youth in Revoluntionary Russia is essential reading for those interested in popular culture and Soviet history.
Anne E. Gorsuch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia.

Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, editors

Contents
Introduction: Youth and Culture
The Politics of Generation
The Urban Environment
Making Youth Communist
Excesses of Enthusiasm
Gender and Generation
Flappers and Foxtrotters
Life and Leisure on the Street
Discourses of Delinquency
Epilogue"

"Jan's book shows the vitality of the civil society in both cities and suburbs in New Jersey. It is the first book to demonstrate the strength of the civil society in both cities and suburbs in our state. Civic leaders in cities and suburbs should read the book to find plenty of insights and solid organizing advice to help them to mobilize their communities for change."-Ira Resnick, Neighborhood Leadership Initiative Community Foundation of New Jersey Civic movements are essential to Americans' freedom and quality of life. Active citizens have led the way from the American Revolution to urban renewal. But fiery emotions and good intentions without skillful organization can lead to frustrated civic involvement. How can individual concerns be transformed into effective community action? Jan Barry provides a pragmatic, common-sense handbook to civic action. Using case studies from his home state of New Jersey, Barry has crafted what he calls a "guidebook for creative improvement on the American dream." He dissects civic actions such as environmental campaigns, mutual-help groups, neighborhood improvement projects, and a grassroots peace mission to Russia. Looking for patterns to explain successes and failures, Barry includes his own experiences as a Vietnam veteran peace activist to inspire and coach fledgling activists. The result is a wealth of practical, non-partisan information on membership recruitment, organizational skills, public speaking, lobbying, publicity, conflict resolution, and more. Rising above any particular political, social, or religious beliefs, Barry shows would-be activists how to confront one enduring truth -"Democracy is a lot harder to do than it is to talk about or fight over."

In this book, Bryant Simon brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the twentieth century. His revealing and moving account explores how this group of southern laborers thought about and participated in politics and public power. Taking a broad view of politics, Simon looks at laborers as they engaged in political activity in many venues--at the polling station, on front porches, and on the shop floor--and examines their political involvement at the local, state, and national levels. He describes the campaign styles and rhetoric of such politicians as Coleman Blease and Olin Johnston (himself a former millhand), who eagerly sought the workers' votes. He draws a detailed picture of mill workers casting ballots, carrying placards, marching on the state capital, writing to lawmakers, and picketing factories. These millhands' politics reflected their public and private thoughts about whiteness and blackness, war and the New Deal, democracy and justice, gender and sexuality, class relations and consumption. Ultimately, the people depicted here are neither romanticized nor dismissed as the stereotypically racist and uneducated ""rednecks"" found in many accounts of southern politics. Southern workers understood the political and social forces that shaped their lives, argues Simon, and they developed complex political strategies to deal with those forces. |Brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands from 1920 to 1945. Examines laborers as they engaged in political activity and shows how their politics reflected their public and private opinions.

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas--before and after 1848--that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg shows, they developed a rich theoretical tradition that influenced not only subsequent strains of feminist thought but also ideas about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally. By focusing on rights discourse and political theory, Isenberg moves beyond a narrow focus on suffrage. Democracy was in the process of being redefined in antebellum America by controversies over such volatile topics as fugitive slave laws, temperance, Sabbath laws, capital punishment, prostitution, the Mexican War, married women's property rights, and labor reform--all of which raised significant legal and constitutional questions. These pressing concerns, debated in women's rights conventions and the popular press, were inseparable from the gendered meaning of nineteenth-century citizenship. |Illuminates the origins of American feminism by showing how antebellum feminists moved beyond suffrage to influence thinking about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally.

Women reformers in the United States and Germany maintained a brisk dialogue between 1885 and 1933. Drawing on one another's expertise, they sought to alleviate a wide array of social injustices generated by industrial capitalism, such as child labor and the exploitation of women in the workplace. This book presents and interprets documents from that exchange, most previously unknown to historians, which show how these interactions reflected the political cultures of the two nations.

On both sides of the Atlantic, women reformers pursued social justice strategies. The documents discussed here reveal the influence of German factory legislation on debates in the United States, point out the differing contexts of the suffrage movement, compare pacifist and antipacifist reactions of women to World War I, and trace shifts in the feminist movements of both countries after the war.

Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany provides insight into the efforts of American and German women over half a century of profound social change. Through their dialogue, these women explicate their larger political cultures and the place they occupied in them.

Agenda-setting is a key component in the democratic process if political outsiders are to have their concerns taken seriously. However, their efforts sometimes fail for reasons other than insufficient resources or incompetent leaders: opponents often succeed in keeping new issues from ever reaching the agendas of decision-makers.

This is the first book devoted to examining why some issues proposed by aggrieved individuals or groups are denied access to policy agendas. It develops a theoretical framework for the study of agenda setting and agenda denial, emphasizing the cultural strategies opponents use to impede and defeat policy initiatives, and examining specific strategies of avoidance, attack, and redefinition that explain why certain issues don't receive consideration.

The book contains seven case studies that examine the policy process from the perspective of the strategies opponents of policy initiatives use and demonstrate that agenda denial can result when opponents succeed in portraying initiatives as threats to widely held world views and identities. Four cases involving federal agencies show how the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have kept issues off their own agendas, how the accounting profession has avoided SEC regulation, and how pro-life forces kept the French abortion pill off the FDA agenda. Two cases focusing on public health issues examine why national health insurance has never made it onto the federal agenda and how local agencies in Texas prevented residents of minority neighborhoods from obtaining clean water. Finally, a case from outside the U.S. shows how Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past failed to become an issue in his campaign for President of Austria.

While most books emphasize issue initiators, Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial makes a unique addition to the agenda-setting literature by focusing on the actions of opponents and emphasizing the political importance of cultural resources and culturally constituted ideas to the ongoing debate in political science concerning how open and democratic our system really is.

The biographies of more than 800 women form the basis for Elna Green's study of the suffrage and the antisuffrage movements in the South. Green's comprehensive analysis highlights the effects that factors such as class background, marital status, educational level, and attitudes about race and gender roles had in inspiring the region's women to work in favor of, or in opposition to, their own enfranchisement.
Green sketches the ranks of both movements--which included women and men, black and white--and identifies the ways in which issues of class, race, and gender determined the composition of each side. Coming from a wide array of beliefs and backgrounds, Green argues, southern women approached enfranchisement with an equally varied set of strategies and ideologies. Each camp defined and redefined itself in opposition to the other. But neither was entirely homogeneous: issues such as states' rights and the enfranchisement of black women were so divisive as to give rise to competing organizations within each group. By focusing on the grassroots constituency of each side, Green provides insight into the whole of the suffrage debate.

This masterful biography by one of America's foremost historians of women tells the story of Florence Kelley, a leading reformer in the Progressive Era. The book also serves as a political history of the United States during a period of transforming change when women worked to end the abuses of unregulated industrial capitalism. Kelley's story shows how changes in women's public culture combined with changes in men's public culture to produce results that neither could have achieved alone. In this volume, the first of two, Kathryn Kish Sklar explores the decades between 1830 and 1900, an era when women's organizations lent unprecedented power to their activism. After analyzing how earlier generations set the stage for women's centrality in the 1890s, she depicts the first forty years of Florence Kelley's life, telling of her childhood as a member of an elite Philadelphia family, her graduation from Cornell University in 1882, her immersion in European socialism, her search for a meaningful place within American political culture, and her rise to extraordinary public power in Chicago as a resident at Jane Addams's Hull House. Kelley's long career demonstrates that women's activism embodied the most deeply rooted characteristics of the American polity, particularly American traditions of voluntarism and limited government, the weakness of class as a vehicle for political mobilization, and the strength of gender. During the crisis-ridden years of massive immigration, industrialization, and urbanization between 1870 and 1900, Florence Kelley and other women offered an effective alternative to the male-dominated status quo.

The Grand Army of the Republic, the largest of all Union Army veterans' organizations, was the most powerful single-issue political lobby of the late nineteenth century, securing massive pensions for veterans and helping to elect five postwar presidents from its own membership. To its members, it was also a secret fraternal order, a source of local charity, a provider of entertainment in small municipalities, and a patriotic organization. Using GAR convention proceedings, newspapers, songs, rule books, and local post records, Stuart McConnell examines this influential veterans' association during the years of its greatest strength.
Beginning with a close look at the men who joined the GAR in three localities -- Philadelphia; Brockton, Massachusetts; and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin - McConnell goes on to examine the Union veterans' attitudes towards their former Confederate enemies and toward a whole range of noncombatants whom the verterans called "civilians": stay-at-home townsfolk, Mugwump penion reformers, freedmen, women, and their own sons and daughters. In the GAR, McConnell sees a group of veterans trying to cope with questions concerning the extent of society's obligation to the poor and injured, the place of war memories in peacetime, and the meaning of the "nation" and the individual's relation to it.
McConnell aruges that, by the 1890s, the GAR was clinging to a preservationist version of American nationalism that many white, middle-class Northerners found congenial in the face of the social upheavals of that decade. In effect, he concludes, the nineteenth-century career of the GAR is a study in the microcosm of a nation trying to hold fast to an older image of itself in the face of massive social change.

Based on original materials gathered from extensive international travel, hundreds of interviews and empirical field research, thims text studies Pan-African organizations and their political activities inside black communities.

"[Fogel's] exceedingly careful testing of all possible sources and his pioneering methodological approach have allowed [him] both to increase our knowledge of an institutions operation and disintegration and to renew our methods of research." —from the citation to Robert William Fogel for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Over the past quarter-century, Robert William Fogel has blazed new trails in scholarship on the lives of the slaves in the American South. Now he presents the dramatic rise and fall of the "peculiar institution," as the abolitionist movement rose into a powerful political force that pulled down a seemingly impregnable system.

"Few historians have more skillfully integrated economic with social, intellectual, and political history. . . . Pleasurable as well as instructive reading for anyone interested in the most fateful of our national crimes and the most fearful of our national crises. . . . [A] splendid book." —Eugene D. Genovese, Los Angeles Times Book Review

The work explores the field of public health advocacy from the twin perspectives of the sociology of news production and public health activism. The second section offers an A-Z of strategies for gaining media attention, with many entries illustrated by case histories. Covering theory and practice, the guide is intended for public health and community medicine workers, community health action groups, and students of mass communication, media studies or public health.

In this groundbreaking study, Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr examines the origins, historical development, and political strategies of one of the oldest and most influential Islamic revival movements, the Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan. He focuses on the inherent tension between the movement's idealized vision of the nation as a holy community based in Islamic law and its political agenda of socioeconomic change for Pakistani society.
Nasr's work goes beyond the exploration of a single party to examine the diverse sociopolitical roots of contemporary Islamic revivalism, challenging many of the standard interpretations about political expressions of Islam.

America's governing system is unique in the extent to which scientists and other outside experts participate in the policy process. No other nation uses these experts so extensively, not merely for advice on the allocation of resources to science but also in broad policy issues. This wide-ranging study traces the rise of scientists in the policy process and shows how outside experts interrelate with politicians and administrators to produce a unique and dynamic policy process. It also shows how the very openness of American government creates the potential for unusual conflicts of interest. Bruce Smith focuses on the experience of agency and presidential-level advisory systems over the past several decades. He chronicles the special complexities and challenges resulting from the Federal Advisory Committee Act--the "open meeting" law--to provide a better understanding of the role of advisory committees and offers valuable lessons to guide their future use. He looks at science advice in the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, and then examines how science advisory mechanisms have worked at the White House. Rather than simply providing a description of structures and institutions, Smith shows the advisory systems in action--how advisory systems work or fail to work in practice. He analyzes how the advisers influence the policymaking process and affect the life of the agencies they serve. Smith concludes with an assessment of the relationship between science advice and American democracy. He explains that the widespread use of outside advisers clearly reflects America's preference forpluralism. By scrutinizing agency plans, goals, and operations, advisers and advisory committees serve a variety of functions and attempt to strike a balance between openness and citizen access to government and the need for discipline and sophisticated expertise in policymaking. At the root of the advisory process is a paradox: scientists are called on because of their special expertise, but they are useful only if they learn to play by the rules of the political game. The challenge to the nation is to reconcile the integrity of science with the norms of democracy.