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Vagrant Nation - Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Hardcover)
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Vagrant Nation - Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Hardcover)
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Prior to the 1950s, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest
people for a wide variety of activities performed in the streets.
Throughout the country, vagrancy laws were far-reaching and
pervasive. Yet by the end of the 1960s, streets across America
hosted both massive political protests and a cultural revolution
that reshaped not only the nation's public spaces, but more broadly
its public life. For the era or against it, virtually all agreed
that America after the 1960s was starkly different than before it.
What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff provides a truly
groundbreaking explanation of the transformation. Focusing on Court
decisions that loosened vagrancy laws and opened up the streets to
Americans in all their variety, she shows how legal change helped
fuel highly public social movements advocating everything from
civil rights to peace to gay rights to cultural revolution. Indeed,
increased access to the streets increased their public presence and
thereby social power. The book is a brilliant example of how a
seemingly small event -alteratations to the relatively minor crime
of vagrancy-can contribute to a social revolution. Not only that,
Goluboff powerfully demonstrates how the courts can advance social
change-make history, so to speak. The vagrancy laws were that were
on the books virtually everywhere in the 1950s served as a catchall
device for police forces intent on establishing public order; you
could be arrested for everything from causing a disturbance to
behaving in a way contrary to the norm-fraternizing with a member
of another race, for example, or publically preaching
non-mainstream beliefs like communism. Given the very fluid
interpretation of vagrancy, police inevitably abused it to the
point where they could arrest almost any "nonconforming" person.
Once the Supreme Court began invalidating these laws, it opened up
public space to any manner of dissenter or nonconformist: hippies,
war protestors, civil rights activists, interracial couples, gays,
and, of course, vagrants-all the people occupying spaces previously
off-limits to them. Goluboff's account is not just a investigation
of the relationship between law and social change, however. It is
also a ground-up history-from Skid Row to the Supreme Court-of the
culture wars between the New Left and New Right. The results of
these battles are abundantly evident today in both positive
ways-like the increased openness to all in America's public
spaces-and negative ways-especially the explosion of homelessness
afterward. In sum, she shows that major societal changes can result
not only from big waves, but from seeming ripples too.
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