Download or read book Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy written by Kyle G. Volk and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should the majority always rule? If not, how should the rights of minorities be protected? In Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy, Kyle G. Volk unearths the origins of modern ideas and practices of minority-rights politics. Focusing on controversies spurred by the explosion of grassroots moral reform in the early nineteenth century, he shows how a motley but powerful array of self-understood minorities reshaped American democracy as they battled laws regulating Sabbath observance, alcohol, and interracial contact. Proponents justified these measures with the "democratic" axiom of majority rule. In response, immigrants, black northerners, abolitionists, liquor dealers, Catholics, Jews, Seventh-day Baptists, and others articulated a different vision of democracy requiring the protection of minority rights. These moral minorities prompted a generation of Americans to reassess whether "majority rule" was truly the essence of democracy, and they ensured that majority tyranny would no longer be just the fear of elites and slaveholders. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century, minority rights became the concern of a wide range of Americans attempting to live in an increasingly diverse nation. Volk reveals that driving this vast ideological reckoning was the emergence of America's tradition of popular minority-rights politics. To challenge hostile laws and policies, moral minorities worked outside of political parties and at the grassroots. They mobilized elite and ordinary people to form networks of dissent and some of America's first associations dedicated to the protection of minority rights. They lobbied officials and used constitutions and the common law to initiate "test cases" before local and appellate courts. Indeed, the moral minorities of the mid-nineteenth century pioneered fundamental methods of political participation and legal advocacy that subsequent generations of civil-rights and civil-liberties activists would adopt and that are widely used today.
Download or read book Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy written by Kyle G. Volk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should the majority always rule? If not, how should the rights of minorities be protected? In Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy, Kyle G. Volk unearths the origins of modern ideas and practices of minority-rights politics. Focusing on controversies spurred by the explosion of grassroots moral reform in the early nineteenth century, he shows how a motley but powerful array of self-understood minorities reshaped American democracy as they battled laws regulating Sabbath observance, alcohol, and interracial contact. Proponents justified these measures with the "democratic" axiom of majority rule. In response, immigrants, black northerners, abolitionists, liquor dealers, Catholics, Jews, Seventh-day Baptists, and others articulated a different vision of democracy requiring the protection of minority rights. These moral minorities prompted a generation of Americans to reassess whether "majority rule" was truly the essence of democracy, and they ensured that majority tyranny would no longer be just the fear of elites and slaveholders. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century, minority rights became the concern of a wide range of Americans attempting to live in an increasingly diverse nation. Volk reveals that driving this vast ideological reckoning was the emergence of America's tradition of popular minority-rights politics. To challenge hostile laws and policies, moral minorities worked outside of political parties and at the grassroots. They mobilized elite and ordinary people to form networks of dissent and some of America's first associations dedicated to the protection of minority rights. They lobbied officials and used constitutions and the common law to initiate "test cases" before local and appellate courts. Indeed, the moral minorities of the mid-nineteenth century pioneered fundamental methods of political participation and legal advocacy that subsequent generations of civil-rights and civil-liberties activists would adopt and that are widely used today.
Download or read book Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by One World. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Download or read book The Unheavenly Chorus written by Kay Lehman Schlozman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 727 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the current state of democracy in the United States, 'The Unheavenly Chorus' looks at the political participation of individual citizens - alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests - in order to demonstrate that American democracy is marred by ingrained and persistent class-based inequality.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 2018 written by Freedom House and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 1265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.
Download or read book The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery written by W. Caleb McDaniel and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garrison signaled the importance of these ties to his movement with the well-known cosmopolitan motto he printed on every issue of his famous newspaper, The Liberator: "Our Country is the World--Our Countrymen are All Mankind." That motto serves as an impetus for McDaniel's study, which shows that Garrison and his movement must be placed squarely within the context of transatlantic mid-nineteenth-century reform. Through exposure to contemporary European thinkers--such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Giuseppe Mazzini, and John Stuart Mill--Garrisonian abolitionists came to understand their own movement not only as an effort to mold public opinion about slavery but also as a measure to defend democracy in an Atlantic World still dominated by aristocracy and monarchy. While convinced that democracy offered the best form of government, Garrisonians recognized that the persistence of slavery in the United States revealed problems with the political system.
Download or read book Elite Capture written by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.
Download or read book The World and Africa and Color and Democracy The Oxford W E B Du Bois written by W. E. B. Du Bois and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Collected in one volume for the first time, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy are two of W E. B. Du Bois's most powerful essays on race. He explores how to tell the story of those left out of recorded history, the evils of colonialism worldwide, and Africa's and African's contributions to, and neglect from, world history. More than six decades after W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, they remain worthy guides for the twenty-first century. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and two introductions by top African scholars, this edition is essential for anyone interested in world history.
Download or read book Democracy in Black written by Eddie S. Glaude (Jr.) and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A polemic on the state of black America that argues that we don't yet live in a post-racial society"--
Download or read book The Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of “The Federalist Papers”, a collection of separate essays and articles compiled in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton. Following the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, the governing doctrines and policies of the States lacked cohesion. “The Federalist”, as it was previously known, was constructed by American statesman Alexander Hamilton, and was intended to catalyse the ratification of the United States Constitution. Hamilton recruited fellow statesmen James Madison Jr., and John Jay to write papers for the compendium, and the three are known as some of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755–1804) was an American lawyer, journalist and highly influential government official. He also served as a Senior Officer in the Army between 1799-1800 and founded the Federalist Party, the system that governed the nation’s finances. His contributions to the Constitution and leadership made a significant and lasting impact on the early development of the nation of the United States.
Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Download or read book How Rights Went Wrong written by Jamal Greene and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
Download or read book Democracy Matters written by Cornel West and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-08-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Uncompromising and unconventional . . . Cornel West is an eloquent prophet with attitude.” — Newsweek“ "A timely analysis about the current state of democratic systems in America." — The Boston Globe In Democracy Matters, Cornel West argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of corruption that has plagued our own democracy: racism, free market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism. This impassioned and empowering call for the revitalization of America's democracy, by one of our most distinctive and compelling social critics, will reshape the raging national debate about America's role in today's troubled world.
Download or read book Kingdom of Nauvoo The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier written by Benjamin E. Park and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book Award • Mormon History Association A brilliant young historian excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, uncovering a “grand, underappreciated saga in American history” (Wall Street Journal). In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.
Download or read book Against Democracy written by Jason Brennan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bracingly provocative challenge to one of our most cherished ideas and institutions Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But Jason Brennan says they are all wrong. In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good. On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy, and that it's time to experiment and find out. A challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable, Against Democracy is essential reading for scholars and students of politics across the disciplines. Featuring a new preface that situates the book within the current political climate and discusses other alternatives beyond epistocracy, Against Democracy is a challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable.
Download or read book Atheists in American Politics written by Richard J. Meagher and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today atheists, it seems, are everywhere. Nonbelievers write best-selling books and proudly defend their views in public; they have even hired a lobbyist. But, as political scientist Richard J. Meagher shows, atheist political activism is not a new phenomenon. From the "Freethought" movement of the late 1800s, to postwar "rationalists" and "humanists," to today's proud atheists, nonbelievers have called for change within a resistant political culture. While atheist organizing typically has been a relatively lonely and sad affair, advances in technology and new political opportunities have helped atheists to finally gain at least some measure of legitimacy in American politics. In Atheists in American Politics, one of the first works to take atheism seriously as a social movement, Meagher highlights key moments within the political history of atheism and freethought, and examines how the changing circumstances that surround the movement help explain political mobilization. In doing so, this book also highlights the ways that social movements in general gain momentum, and how a number of interlocking factors are often necessary to enable a movement to "take off" in American politics.
Download or read book Empire Capitalism and Democracy written by Kyle G. Volk and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire, Capitalism, and Democracy: The Early American Experience documents the history of the United States from the opening of the Atlantic World to the post-Civil War era. Featuring a curated collection of primary sources, the text illustrates three interdependent forces that animated the history of early America: empire, capitalism, and democracy. Part I explores the origins of European contact with America, Indigenous civilizations, and the Atlantic slave trade. In Part II, sources address American independence from British rule, early ideas of liberty and equality, the creation of the U.S. Constitution, and the first years of American government. The final part speaks to key issues that divided Americans in the nineteenth century, including market revolution, slavery, western expansion, and ideas of freedom and democracy after the Civil War. The second edition features an increased focus on Indigenous experiences and includes 10 new readings. The book also includes fully updated introductions for each chapter. Accessible and enlightening, Empire, Capitalism, and Democracy is an ideal collection for foundational courses in U.S. history.
