Download or read book Much Sound and Fury or the New Jim Crow written by Michael A. Smith and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2003, several US states have passed new laws that complicate the process of voter registration and voting. Framed as controls on voter fraud, the laws have spawned controversy in both the courts and public opinion, the latter falling along a sharp partisan divide. Much Sound and Fury, or the New Jim Crow? offers a scholarly analysis, not of the intent but rather the impact of these laws. Beginning with a historical overview of the expanding and contracting right to vote, particularly regarding its impact on African Americans, subsequent chapters use quantitative analysis to analyze the impact of identification requirement laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements, felony disenfranchisement, and gerrymandering. Before 2020, the impact of the laws leaned slightly negative but was mixed. More recent developments, however, point to a far more alarming implication—widespread belief in factually-baseless allegations of fraud, which undermines Americans' trust and faith in our constitutional democracy; these allegations reached a crescendo in 2021 as a violent mob seized the US Capitol. The book concludes with an afterword on the 2020 elections and their aftermath.

Download or read book Reform and Reaction written by Michael A. Smith and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2024-07-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originating under the leadership of the late Burdett Loomis, Reform and Reaction tells the complex story of recent Kansas politics, beginning in the 1960s and concluding with the reversal of Governor Sam Brownback’s red-state policies in the 2016 and 2018 elections. The Kansas that emerged from the reapportionment decisions and the overhaul of state government in the 1960s and 1970s was one that found itself in a push-and-pull, reform-and-reaction pattern the authors refer to as the arc of Kansas politics. Reform-minded and policy-oriented politicians who tended toward a moderate, bipartisan approach pushed to modernize the state to better serve the needs of its citizens, following the maxim of Governor Robert Docking: “austere but adequate.” Because this approach avoided or rejected the narrow conservative interests of culture warriors, reformist administrations were followed by reactionary administrations that advanced a right-wing agenda. Brownback thus brought the era of “austere but adequate” to an abrupt end when he won the governorship in 2010. When voters became tired of this approach, a new set of reform politicians were elected—and so the arc continues. The only book tracing changes in Kansas government since the 1960s, including the loss of moderates in both parties, the Brownback era, and its aftermath, Reform and Reaction is the last book by the celebrated political scientist Burdett Loomis, who conceived the idea for the book and authored one of its chapters before his passing. Reform and Reaction not only illuminates the political history of Kansas but also sheds light on what may be in store for the future of the Sunflower State.

Download or read book Felony Disenfranchisement in America written by Katherine Irene Pettus and published by LFB Scholarly Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pettus traces felony disenfranchisement from Athenian democracy to the present. She analyzes the contradiction between present state disenfranchisement practices and voting rights jurisprudence and concludes that American citizens lack equal voting rights: the right to vote for national representatives is trumped by state laws that define felonies and the criteria for disenfranchisement. The majority of the disenfranchised today are African-American, and most felony convictions are drug-related. Nonetheless, drug use and trafficking are equally distributed across demographic groups. The current variation in state laws disenfranchising felons, the lack of standard definitions of felonies, and the racial disparities within the criminal justice system reproduce many of the inequalities of the colonial America, despite the development of federal citizenship and voting rights law since the end of the Civil War.

Download or read book Black Political Mobilization Leadership Power and Mass Behavior written by Minion K. C. Morrison and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Political Mobilization accounts for the political success of black Americans in the South. Minion Morrison returns to Mississippi, the center of much of the political activism of the 1960s, to analyze the remarkable improvement in black electoral participation in the years following passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mississippi's substantial black population has experienced marked electoral success despite a history of strict racial exclusion. The dramatic and widespread nature of mobilization there makes it one of the most illustrative case studies for exploring this period of political change in America. Mississippi represents a broader phenomenon of political change that sustains a new leadership class in the Southern region. Three rural Mississippi towns serve as the focal point for the study. They each have a population of under 2,000, have overwhelming Afro-American voting majorities, are poor and largely agricultural, have been affected by the civil rights movement of the '60s, and have elected a black mayor since 1973. The towns are prime examples of the character and process of minority electoral politics and mobilization in the rural South: A new class of black leaders is nurtured and installed in office in an environment where a newly and highly mobilized constituency takes advantage of its majority status in the electorate. This book combines good theory with lively interviews and rich case histories to highlight an essentially new variety of participatory democracy in American politics and government.

Download or read book The Saddest Words William Faulkner s Civil War written by Michael Gorra and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

Download or read book Political Theory and Partisan Politics written by Edward Bryan Portis and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-05-26 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political theorists typically define political action in terms of rational potential rather than conflict, and for this reason neglect the partisan nature of political experience. This volume redresses this neglect, focusing on the interrelated questions of whether the task of political theory is to find some means of containing partisan politics and whether political theory is itself separate from partisan politics.

Download or read book The Jim Crow Encyclopedia 2 volumes written by Nikki Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 950 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Crow refers to a set of laws in many states, predominantly in the South, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 that severely restricted the rights and privileges of African Americans. As a caste system of enormous social and economic magnitude, the institutionalization of Jim Crow was the most significant element in African American life until the 1960s Civil Rights Movement led to its dismantling. Racial segregation, as well as responses to it and resistance against it, dominated the African American consciousness and continued to oppress African Americans and other minorities, while engendering some of the most important African American contributions to society. This major encyclopedia is the first devoted to the Jim Crow era. The era is encapsulated through more than 275 essay entries on such areas as law, media, business, politics, employment, religion, education, people, events, culture, the arts, protest, the military, class, housing, sports, and violence as well as through accompanying key primary documents excerpted as side bars. This set will serve as an invaluable, definitive resource for student research and general knowledge. The authoritative entries are written by a host of historians with expertise in the Jim Crow era. The quality content comes in an easy-to-access format. Readers can quickly find topics of interest, with alphabetical and topical lists of entries in the frontmatter, along with cross-references to related entries per entry. Further reading is provided per entry. Dynamic sidebars throughout give added insight into the topics. A chronology, selected bibliography, and photos round out the coverage. Sample entries include Advertising, Affirmative Action, Armed Forces, Black Cabinet, Blues, Brooklyn Dodgers, Bolling v. Sharpe, Confederate Flag, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Detroit Race Riot 1943, Ralph Ellison, Eyes on the Prize, G.I. Bill, Healthcare, Homosexuality, Intelligence Testing, Japanese Internment, Liberia, Minstrelsy, Nadir of the Negro, Poll Taxes, Rhythm and Blues, Rural Segregation, Sharecropping, Sundown Towns, Booker T. Washington, Works Project Administration, World War II.

Download or read book Empire of Sin written by Gary Krist and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author Gary Krist, a vibrant and immersive account of New Orleans’ other civil war, at a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the battlegrounds of the Crescent City Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans’ thirty-years war against itself, pitting the city’s elite “better half” against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides. Surrounding him are the stories of flamboyant prostitutes, crusading moral reformers, dissolute jazzmen, ruthless Mafiosi, venal politicians, and one extremely violent serial killer, all battling for primacy in a wild and wicked city unlike any other in the world.

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 Race Incarceration and American Values written by Glenn C. Loury and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.

Download or read book Theater as Liturgy in the Post Christian Age written by Matthew Yde and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-05-24 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of one of the most talented and exciting American playwrights working today. Stephen Adly Guirgis has said that "God is the starting point and the finish line" of his work, and this book identifies him as a playwright with a distinctly Christian sensibility who uses the technique of "inculturation" to translate the gospel for a secular audience. Critics have noted that his plays are peopled with poor, suffering minority figures, but few have also noted that these figures bear a remarkable similarity to the dispossessed with whom Jesus identifies in Matthew 25. Beginning with his early play Den of Thieves and proceeding through each of his dramas, this work examines Guirgis's plays within a biblical context. While noting that Guirgis is a writer of the "post-Christian age" who staunchly resists identification as a "Christian playwright," the book situates him within the tradition of the "drama of ideas" as a powerful writer employing a dialectical method to inculcate the New Testament ethos and transform the theater space into a place of sacrament.

Download or read book Remembering Jim Crow written by William H. Chafe and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism—building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner written by Philip M. Weinstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-27 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by ten major scholars explores Faulkner's widespread cultural import.

Download or read book Black Silent Majority written by Michael Javen Fortner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-28 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration. Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics. Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.

Download or read book Faulkner s Inheritance written by Joseph R. Urgo and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald. William Faulkner once said that the writer collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box. Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. His Christian background, according to him, was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to the lumber room that would help him tell a story. Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas Mann--writers he would elsewhere declare as the two great men in my time. Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction, when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't.. Nevertheless, Faulkner's life was rich in what he did, saw, and read, and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature. Joseph R. Urgo is dean of the faculty at Hamilton College. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

Download or read book American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary written by Deborah Barker and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --

Download or read book The Body written by Lisa Jean Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This college-level handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of sociological and cultural perspectives on the human body. Organized along the lines of a standard anatomical textbook delineated by body parts and processes, this volume subverts the expected content in favor of providing tools for social and cultural analysis. Students will learn about the human body in its social, cultural, and political contexts, with emphasis on multiple, contested meanings of the body, body parts, and systems. Case studies, examples, and discussion questions are both US-based and international. Advancing critical body studies, the book explicitly discusses bodies in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, health, geography, and citizenship status. The framing is sociological rather than biomedical, attentive to cultural meanings, institutional practices, politics, and social problems. The authors use commonly understood anatomical frames to discuss social, cultural, political, and ethical issues concerning embodiment.