The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence

Is the NSA spying on Americans? It wouldn't be the first time. Does the CIA still assassinate people? Depends on what you mean by "assassinate." Is the intelligence community really a "deep state" that subverts American democracy? Not exactly, but it has interfered in politics too often in US history. These types of questions have preoccupied the American people and international audiences in recent years. But the origins of these and other controversies reach back even further in US history. The Spy and the State provides readers with the foundation to understand the past, navigate the present, and shape the future of American intelligence.

The Spirit of New York, Second Edition: Defining Events in the Empire State's History

In this lively and engaging book, Bruce W. Dearstyne presents New York State history through an exploration of nineteen dramatic events. From the launch of the state government in April 1777 through the debut of the musical play Hamilton in 2015, Dearstyne puts the fascinating people who made history at the center of the story: John Jay, the lead writer of the first state constitution; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the irrepressible crusader for women's rights; Glenn Curtiss, New York's aviation pioneer; Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers; and Lois Gibbs, an environmental activist. This new edition is updated with four recent significant events, including the stories of New Yorkers who joined the "Occupy" protests and those who struggled through Superstorm Sandy. The stories in this book illustrate the "spirit" of New York—the elusive traits that make New York State unique—and the complexity of its history.

The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary

The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary offers new approaches to the study of documentary produced within, or connected to, the United States. Leading scholars of nonfiction and emerging voices in the field examine documentary as a dynamic cultural form that draws on wide-ranging technologies, coheres around different representational modes, and is used for a variety of artistic, political, and entertainment purposes. A pressing concern of many of this volume’s authors—like many of the filmmakers they write about—is documentary’s ability to not just reach viewers, but to actively engage them in building a more equitable and just world. This volume’s twenty-six essays place the act of documentary making within a broader historical context, including macro-level analysis of how policy initiatives or economic shifts impact filmmakers as well as granular attention to how participants of a social movement mobilize film for a cause.

The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America’s Enduring Conflict

In this wide-ranging volume, eminent historians John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault assemble a distinguished group of scholars to build on the growing body of work on the "Long Civil War" and break new ground. They cover a variety of related subjects, including antebellum missionary activity and colonialism in Africa, the home front, the experiences of disabled veterans in the US Army Veteran Reserve Corps, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal struggles with the war's legacy amid the growing civil rights movement. The contributors offer fresh interpretations and challenging analyses of topics such as ritualistic suicide among former Confederates after the war and whitewashing in Walt Disney Studios' historical Cold War-era movies. Featuring many leading figures in the field, The Long Civil War meaningfully expands the focus of mid-nineteenth-century history as it was understood by previous generations of historians.

The Effectiveness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: The Case of Indigenous Territorial Rights

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has the most developed jurisprudence on indigenous rights, yet this case law is understudied. This book addresses this gap by exploring the Court and its cases from both the perspective of international law and the legal protection of indigenous territories. Setting out the network of actors and institutions involved in such litigation, it examines the motivations and constraints in domestic politics affecting international orders (and by extension the impact of the Court). It provides both an important statement on the effectiveness of international tribunals and a fascinating insight into the evolution of indigenous rights.

The Caribbean on the Edge: The Political Stress of Stability, Equality, and Diplomacy

In a time of persistent uncertainty, fragile eco-structures, the politics of "populism," and limits in institutional leadership, The Caribbean on the Edge acts as an analytical roadmap to a challenging era of globalization for the countries on the edge of history in the Caribbean, those often at a policy standstill pondering which way and how to turn. Winston Dookeran traces ideas that have evolved in development and diplomacy over the last decade to identify the path for new analytical leadership. The Caribbean on the Edge deeply engages the political issues involved in development, governance, and diplomacy.

Safeguarding Virginia’s Autonomy: Sir William Berkeley, Francis Moryson, Henry Randolph, and the Revisal of 1662

Between 1632 and 1748, Virginia’s General Assembly revised the colony’s statutes seven times. These revisals provide an invaluable opportunity to gauge how governors, councilors, and burgesses created a hybrid body of colonial statute law that would become the longest strand in the American legal fabric. In Statute Law in Colonial Virginia, Warren Billings presents a series of snapshots that depict the seven revisions of the corpus juris the General Assembly undertook. In so doing, he highlights the good, the corrupt, and the loathsome applications of broad legislative authority throughout the colonial era. Each revision was built on prior written law and embodies the members’ legal knowledge and statutory craftsmanship, revealing their use of an unbridled discretion to further the interests they represented. Statutes undergirded Virginia’s evolving legal culture, and by examining these revisals and their links, Billings casts light on the hybrid nature of Virginia statute law and its relation to English laws.

Seizing citizenship : Frederick Douglass's abolitionist republicanism

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass maintained that enslaved Black Americans were already American citizens. Through a systematic analysis of his political writings from the 1840s through the 1890s, Philip Yaure shows that Douglass' declaration of Black Americans' citizenship is the locus of a profound innovation in republican political philosophy. Seizing Citizenship argues that Frederick Douglass reimagined the republican concept of citizenship, on which persons are citizens because they contribute to the polity, to cast the everyday resistance of Black Americans against slavery and white supremacy as activity that constitutes them as American citizens.The resistance of Black Americans forged them into a people with the collective power to remake America's civic ethos in a racially just and inclusive fashion. Douglass advanced an abolitionist republicanism, on which persons seize standing as free citizens of a free polity through the struggle to dismantle the oppressive institutions that dominate and exploit them.

Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression

In a time when mass joblessness and precarious employment are becoming issues of national concern, it is useful to reconsider the experiences of the unemployed in an earlier period of economic hardship, the Great Depression.

Focusing on the bellwether city of Chicago, this book reevaluates those struggles, revealing the kernel of political radicalism and class resistance in practices that are usually thought of as apolitical and un-ideological. From communal sharing to 'eviction riots', from Unemployed Councils to the nationwide movement behind the remarkable Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill, millions of people fought to end the reign of capitalist values and usher in a new, more socialistic society. Today, their legacy is their resilience, their resourcefulness, and their proof that the unemployed can organize themselves to renew the struggle for a more just world.

Prince, musical genre, and the construction of racial identity

Throughout his career, the Minneapolis musician Prince was known for fusing different musical genres as well as moving between different identities--sexual lothario, devout man of God, androgynous sprite--qualities that fit the postmodernism of the 1980s. This volume takes a fresh look at Prince's work, arguing that his music was deeply informed by the history and techniques of Black culture, and that his multigenre fluency and changeable image were weapons that he deployed in a career-long fight against the racially segregated structures of the American music industry. Using a methodology that mixes musicology with African American literary theory, queer theory, and gender studies, this book analyzes the ways that Prince mixed and manipulated musical genres that are indexed to racial identities--such as "White" rock or new-wave, and "Black" funk, gospel, or R&B--in order to construct pluralistic identities.

New Deal Radio: The Educational Radio Project

New Deal Radio examines the federal government's involvement in broadcasting during the New Deal period, looking at the U.S. Office of Education's Educational Radio Project. The fact that the United States never developed a national public broadcaster, has remained a central problem of US broadcasting history. Rather than ponder what might have been, authors Joy Hayes and David Goodman look at what did happen. There was in fact a great deal of government involvement in broadcasting in the US before 1945 at local, state, and federal levels. Among the federal agencies on the air were the Department of Agriculture, the National Park Service, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Theatre Project. Contextualizing the different series aired by the Educational Radio Project as part of a unified project about radio and citizenship is crucial to understanding them. New Deal Radio argues that this distinctive government commercial partnership amounted to a critical intervention in US broadcasting and an important chapter in the evolution of public radio in America.

On fire: five civil rights sit-ins and the rhetoric of protest

The social, political, and legal struggles that made up the American civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century produced and refined a wide range of rhetorical strategies and tactics. Arguably the most astonishing and certainly the least understood are the sit-in protests that swept the nation at the beginning of the 1960s. This concentrated collection of essays examines the origins and rhetorical methods of five distinct civil rights sit-ins of 1960. For students of rhetoric, protest, and sociopolitical movements, it demonstrates how we can read the sit-ins by using diverse rhetorical lenses as essentially persuasive conflicts in which participants invented and deployed arguments and actions in attempts to change segregated communities and the attitudes, traditions, and policies that maintained segregation.

Making the early modern metropolis : culture and power in pre-revolutionary Philadelphia

Philadelphia was the most dynamic city in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America. In Making the Early Modern Metropolis, Daniel Johnson takes a thematic approach to Philadelphia's related economic, legal, and popular cultures to provide a comprehensive view of its urban development, taking readers into this colonial city's homes, workshops, taverns, courtrooms, and public spaces to provide a detailed exploration of how everyday struggles shaped the city's growth. Until now, histories of early Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania at large, have emphasized its novel commitment to liberal and modern religious, economic, and political principles. Making the Early Modern Metropolis reveals that it was in the interplay of inherited and often competing systems of belief during a period of profound transformation throughout the Atlantic world that early modern cities like Philadelphia were shaped.

Finding Francis: One Family's Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Finding Francis, finding family, freeing history Francis is found. Beyond Francis, a family is found-in archival material that barely deigned to notice their existence. This is the story of Francis Sistrunk and her children, from enslavement into forced migration across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. It spans decades before the Civil War and continues into post-emancipation America. A family story full of twists and turns, Finding Francis reclaims and honors those women who played an essential role in the historical survival and triumph of Black people during and after American slavery. Elizabeth West has created a remarkable "biohistoriography" of everyday Black resistance, grounded in a determination to maintain enduring connections of family, kinship, and community despite the inhumanity and rapacity of slavery. 

The Hillary Effect: Perspectives on Clinton’s Legacy

This volume of over thirty essays is organised around five primary dimensions of Hillary Clinton’s influence: policy, activism, campaigns, women’s ambition and impact on parents and their children. Combining personal narrative with scholarly expertise in political science, this volume looks at American politics through the career of Hillary Clinton in order to illuminate overarching trends related to elections, gender and public policy. Featuring an extraordinarily varied list of contributors working within the field of political science, and a fresh interdisciplinary approach, this book will appeal to broad range of politically engaged audiences, practitioners and scholars.

Making Choices, Making Do: Survival Strategies of Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression

Making Choices, Making Do is a comparative study of Black and white working-class women's survival strategies during the Great Depression. Based on analysis of employment histories and Depression-era interviews of 1,340 women in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and South Bend and letters from domestic workers, Lois Helmbold discovered that Black women lost work more rapidly and in greater proportions. The benefits that white women accrued because of structural racism meant they avoided the utter destitution that more commonly swallowed their Black peers. When let go from a job, a white woman was more successful in securing a less desirable job, while Black women, especially older Black women, were pushed out of the labor force entirely. Helmbold found that working-class women practiced the same strategies, but institutionalized racism in employment, housing, and relief assured that Black women worked harder, but fared worse. Making Choices, Making Do strives to fill the gap in the labor history of women, both Black and white.  

Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

As the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world-from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments-social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people? Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizbeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology can help us understand how and why they do this challenging work.  

An Unfinished Revolution: Edna Buckman Kearns and the Struggle for Women's Rights

Through the lens of one family's history, An Unfinished Revolution tells the story of the suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for women's rights in the United States. The book opens with ten-year-old Marguerite Kearns listening to her grandfather Wilmer's stories about how he met her grandmother Edna, a ninth-generation Quaker and ardent suffrage campaigner, and how he fell in love with her. Wilmer, who became a male suffrage activist himself, also shares the story of the "Spirit of 1776" suffrage campaign wagon that Edna and others used while organizing in New York State in 1913. With the women's suffrage movement as the backdrop, this memoir and family history illuminates how activism passes from one generation to another—and how a horse-drawn suffrage campaign wagon became a symbol of freedom and equality.

Black Movement

The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1970 fundamentally altered the political, social, and cultural landscapes of major urban centers like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and changed the country as well. By the late twentieth century, Black people were mayors, police chiefs, and school superintendents, often at parity and sometimes overrepresented in municipal jobs in these and other cities, which were also hubs for Black literature, music, film, and politics. Since the 1970s, migration patterns have significantly shifted away from the major urban centers of the Great Migration, leaving some iconic Black communities replaced by mostly non-Black residents. Though many books have examined Black urban experiences in America, this is the first written by historians focusing on the post–Great Migration era.  

A Common Country: Solidarity and the Making of American Democracy

Nathan Pippenger shows that for American democracy to flourish, egalitarians must not reject the ideal of shared American peoplehood, but instead lay their own distinctive claim to its meaning. In contrast to reactionaries promoting a version of American nationalism that locks out many people or egalitarians suspicious of appeals to shared civic belonging, Pippenger demonstrates that throughout US history, progressive appeals to expand the reach of "We the People" did most to improve the quality of democracy and overcome nativism, racism, and oligarchy.

Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism

Within a week, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News' Ingraham Angle. This newly empowered politician, Darren Bailey, would go on to steer the pro-business Republican party in Illinois toward extremism. Democratic backsliding emerges across all levels of politics, but the threats posed by small-town politicians have been overshadowed by national-level politicians. This microstudy of a single politician's debut in the public eye showcases a novel approach to media corpus construction that combines proprietary and open databases, aggregated search tools, and targeted searching, and includes local, regional, and national news across digital-first, radio, news publishers, broadcast and cable television, and social media.