Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780813153957
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2014
Illustrations: Illus
Description:
Since 1950 more than three million people have left their homes in Appalachia in search of better jobs and a better life in the cities of the Midwest and Southeast. Today they constitute one of the largest minorities in many of those cities. Yet they have been largely overlooked as a social group and ignored as a potential political force, partly because so little has been written about them.
This important book is the first to explore the Appalachian migration and its impact on the cities, on Appalachia, and on the migrants themselves, from the perspectives of sociology, economics, geography, and social planning. Eleven contributors offer new insights into the complex patterns of migration streams, the numbers of Appalachians in specific urban areas, their residential and occupational patterns in the cities, their adjustments to urban life and work, and the enormous social and economic impact of this mass movement.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 184
ISBN: 9780813152875
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2014
Description:
While much has been written in recent years on death and dying, there has been little treatment of how people cope with death in the absence of religious belief, and virtually no examination of the potential political repercussions of a wider acceptance of mortality in American society. Alfred Killilea's strikingly original book revolves around a central irony: though the subject of death has been largely shunned in American culture lest it rob life of meaning and contentment, confronting death may be crucial to enable us as individuals and as a society to affirm life, even to survive, in this nuclear age.Killilea argues that the denial of death has fostered a disavowal of limits in general, and that a greater awareness of our mortality would provide a much needed catalyst for change in our political response to narcissism and nuclearism.
He traces how, from John Locke to the present, a politics and an economics based on growth for the sake of growth have required an avoidance of human vulnerability. Our confrontation with mortality, Killilea argues, would goad us to question our roles as mere acquirers and to take more seriously the need for equality and community in our society.In charting how we can come to terms with death and how profoundly our attitudes toward death affect our attitudes toward politics, Killilea vides lucid and authoritative commentaries on such provocative thinkers as Earnest Becker, Robert Jay Lifton, Michael Novak, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Jonathan Schell. Scholars in many fields as well as interested lay readers will find the treatment of these issues and thinkers compelling. This easily accessible book is an urgent reminder that the most valuable spur to the examined life extolled by Socrates is the knowledge that we will die.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780813155807
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2014
Illustrations: Illus
Description:
The Southern Appalachian Region is the largest American "problem area" -- an area whose participation in the economic growth of the nation has not been sufficient to relieve the chronic poverty of its people. The existence of the problem was recognized a generation ago, but in the past decade the resistance of such areas to economic advance has acquired a more urgent significance in American thought.In 1958, a group of scholars undertook to make a new survey of the Southern Appalachian Region.
Aided by grants from the Ford Foundation ultimately amounting to $250,000, they set out to analyze the direction and extent of the changes which had taken place since the last survey (in1935), to define the problem in terms of the present situation, and -- if possible -- to arrive at recommendations for action which might enable the leaders of the Region and the nation to attack the problem with practical measures. In this volume are presented their comprehensive reports on the Region's population, its economy, its institutions, and its culture.The problems defined by this survey are a challenge to the whole nation, for the consequences of success or failure in solving them will not be limited to the Southern Appalachian Region.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780813154565
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2014
Description:
In these four notable essays based on Centennial lectures, four eminent scholars analyze the tensions affecting university education today and the forces which will shape the American university of the future.Kenneth D. Benne, director of the Human Relations Center of Boston University, describes the fragmentation which has come to characterize the university in 1965 in three divergent philosophies of university education and calls for the universities to undertake a radical change of their social organization.
For, he says, only by restoring the community of learning can the universities exercise their proper leadership in resolving the conflicts and tensions of modern society.The place of the university as a clearing house of ideas and as the training center for new professions and services is set forth by Sir Charles Morris, vice chancellor of the University of Leeds, and by Henry Steele Commager, professor of American Studies at Amherst College.Finally, Gunnar Myrdal of the Institute of International Economic Studies in the University of Stockholm, looking at the probable social and economic trends of the future, sees the expansion of professional, practical, and research training, but warns that the social and moral implications of knowledge cannot be ignored, especially in view of the increasing demands of the developing countries upon the affluent nations.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780813150963
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2014
Illustrations: Illus
Description:
Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region's land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region's people.
Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region -- Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55,000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights.The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region -- local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging.Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 136
ISBN: 9780813152813
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2014
Illustrations: Illus
Description:
This important book reexamines old assumptions concerning the nature of group cohesion in industrial firms as it is influenced by management actions. Based upon a carefully controlled study, it offers a sound theoretical base and a replicable method, both vital to students of group processes and organizational theorists. The study indicates that high stress was positively related to intragroup conflict regardless of group sanctions encouraging cohesiveness but that when managers rewarded group behavior under high stress a climate was created in which competitive behavior could occur without inducing conflict and nonproductive behavior.
Timely, thoroughly documented, the book extends and integrates prior work in an area vital to managers and theorists alike. Its research design and results should establish the book as the central authority on group cohesiveness in industry.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 542
ISBN: 9780813145525
Pub Date: 10 Jul 2014
Illustrations: 1 b&w photo
Description:
Written by both well-established and rising scholars, Radical Future Pasts seeks to open up new possibilities for theoretical inquiries and engagements with practical political struggles. Unlike conventional "state of the discipline" collections, this volume does not summarize the history of political theory. Rather than accept traditional ideas about the political past, the contributors reinterpret canonical and current texts to demonstrate fresh interpretations and narratives.
Led by editors Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman, and inspired by the work of Peter Euben, the contributors both explore and exemplify the range and importance of political theory's different genres while concentrating on such themes as time and temporality, the politics of tragedy, and political movements and subjectivities. A groundbreaking volume featuring the best new scholarship in the field, this provocative book will be useful to scholars and students interested in political theory and its relationship to political practice.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780819574640
Pub Date: 01 Jul 2014
Illustrations: 29 illus., 185 thumbnail illus.
Description:
Musicians make music. Producers make records. In the early days of recorded music, the producer was the "artists-and-repertoire man," or A&R man, for short.
A powerful figure, the A&R man chose both who would record and what they would record. His decisions profoundly shaped our musical tastes. Don Law found country bluesman Robert Johnson and honky-tonk crooner Lefty Frizzell. Cowboy Jack Clement took the initiative to record Jerry Lee Lewis (while his boss, Sam Phillips, was away on business). When Ray Charles said he wanted to record a country-and-western album, Sid Feller gathered songs for his consideration. The author's extensive interviews with music makers offer the fullest account ever of the producer's role in creating country music. In its focus on recordings and record production, Producing Country tells the story of country music from its early years to the present day through hit records by Hank Williams, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, and Merle Haggard, among many others.Includes original interviews with producers Chet Atkins, Pete Anderson, Jimmy Bowen, Bobby Braddock, Harold Bradley, Tony Brown, Blake Chancey, Jack Clement, Scott Hendricks, Bob Johnston, Jerry Kennedy, Blake Mevis, Ken Nelson, Jim Ed Norman, Allen Reynolds, Jim Rooney, James Stroud, Paul Worley, and Reggie Young, among others.
Pages: 212
ISBN: 9780813145419
Pub Date: 24 Jun 2014
Series: Material Worlds
Illustrations: 26 b&w photos
Pages: 212
ISBN: 9780813168326
Pub Date: 19 Nov 2015
Series: Material Worlds
Illustrations: 26 b&w photos
Description:
For millennia, the rituals of death and remembrance have been fixed by time and location, but in the twenty-first century, grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. Today, the dead live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at any time. This dramatic cultural shift has made the physical presence of death secondary to the psychological experience of mourning.
Virtual Afterlives investigates emerging popular bereavement traditions. Author Candi K. Cann examines new forms of grieving and evaluates how religion and the funeral industry have both contributed to mourning rituals despite their limited ability to remedy grief. As grieving traditions and locations shift, people are discovering new ways to memorialize their loved ones. Bodiless and spontaneous memorials like those at the sites of the shootings in Aurora and Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as roadside memorials, car decals, and tattoos are contributing to a new bereavement language that crosses national boundaries and culture-specific perceptions of death.Examining mourning practices in the United States in comparison to the broader background of practices in Asia and Latin America, Virtual Afterlives seeks to resituate death as a part of life and mourning as a unifying process that helps to create identities and narratives for communities. As technology changes the ways in which we experience death, this engaging study explores the culture of bereavement and the ways in which it, too, is being significantly transformed.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 270
ISBN: 9780813145167
Pub Date: 17 Jun 2014
Series: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century
Illustrations: 10 b&w photos
Description:
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation's oldest civil rights organization, having dedicated itself to the fight for racial equality since 1909. While the group helped achieve substantial victories in the courtroom, the struggle for civil rights extended beyond gaining political support. It also required changing social attitudes.
The NAACP thus worked to alter existing prejudices through the production of art that countered racist depictions of African Americans, focusing its efforts not only on changing the attitudes of the white middle class but also on encouraging racial pride and a sense of identity in the black community.Art for Equality explores an important and little-studied side of the NAACP's activism in the cultural realm. In openly supporting African American artists, writers, and musicians in their creative endeavors, the organization aimed to change the way the public viewed the black community. By overcoming stereotypes and the belief of the majority that African Americans were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to whites, the NAACP believed it could begin to defeat racism.Illuminating important protests, from the fight against the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation to the production of anti-lynching art during the Harlem Renaissance, this insightful volume examines the successes and failures of the NAACP's cultural campaign from 1910 to the 1960s. Exploring the roles of gender and class in shaping the association's patronage of the arts, Art for Equality offers an in-depth analysis of the social and cultural climate during a time of radical change in America.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 480
ISBN: 9780813144917
Pub Date: 03 Jun 2014
Illustrations: 64 b&w photos, 2 figures, 5 tables
Description:
For more than two centuries, Kentucky women have fought for the right to vote, own property, control their wages, and be safe at home and in the workplace. Tragically, many of these women's voices have been silenced by abuse and violence. In Violence against Women in Kentucky: A History of U.
S. and State Legislative Reform, Carol E. Jordan chronicles the stories of those who have led the legislative fight for the last four decades to protect women from domestic violence, rape, stalking, and related crimes.The story of Kentucky's legislative reforms is a history of substantial toil, optimism, advocacy, and personal sacrifice by those who proposed the change. This compelling narrative illustrates, through their own points of view, the stories of survivors who serve as inspiration for change. Jordan analyzes national legislative reforms as well as the strategies that have been used to enact and enforce legislation addressing rape and domestic violence at a local level.Violence against Women in Kentucky is the first book to look at the history of domestic violence and rape in a state that consistently falls at the bottom of women's rights rankings, as told by the activists and survivors who fought for change. Detailing the successes and failures of reforms and outlining the work that is still to be done, this volume reflects on the future of women's rights legislation in Kentucky.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 196
ISBN: 9780813145136
Pub Date: 27 May 2014
Series: Blazer Lectures
Description:
In this updated edition of a groundbreaking classic, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women's wages in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on three issues that capture the transformation of women's roles: the battle over minimum wage for women, which exposes the relationship between family ideology and workplace demands; the argument concerning equal pay for equal work, which challenges gendered patterns of self-esteem and social organization; and the debate over comparable worth, which seeks to incorporate traditionally female values into new work and family trajectories. Together, these topics illuminate the many ways in which gendered social meaning has been produced, transmitted, and challenged.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 210
ISBN: 9780813145044
Pub Date: 22 May 2014
Description:
Most Americans admire the determination and drive of artists, athletes, and CEOs, but they seem to despise similar ambition in their elected officials. The structure of political representation and the separation of powers detailed in the United States Constitution were intended to restrain self-interested ambition. Because not all citizens have a desire to rule, republican democracies must choose leaders from pools of ambitious candidates while trying to prevent those same people from exploiting public power to dominate the less ambitious.
Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship is an engaging examination of this rarely studied yet significant phenomenon. Author Jeffrey A. Becker explores how American political institutions have sought to guide, inspire, and constrain citizens' ambitions to power. Detailing the Puritans' government by "moral community," the Founders' attempts to curtail ambition, the influence of Jacksonian populism, and twentieth-century party politics, Becker presents an unfolding drama that culminates in a spirited discussion of the deficiencies in the current political system.This groundbreaking work reassesses the value and role of ambition in politics in order to identify the beliefs and practices that threaten self-government, as well as those that can strengthen democratic politics.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9789187351303
Pub Date: 22 May 2014
Description:
The on-going Eurozone crisis frequently makes front page news, but aspects of its deeper implications are more rarely discussed in media. In Crisis and Migration the authors analyse the current situation and its effects on politics and migration. In case studies they show how the economic downturn affects daily life on a local, national, and European level.
The authors reflect on the crisis from mutually rewarding micro-to-macro perspectives. Their focus is geared away from the crisis as an acute phenomenon -- instead they investigate it as a potential symptom of a chronic decline of the EU in relation to other regions. It is imperative to address the long-term consequences of the development and that scholars engage in that critical discussion. Alongside its senior authors, Crisis and Migration features contributors of a new generation of scholars who are likely to be prominent in the field in years to come. The book is vital reading for researchers in migration and European studies, policymakers, and journalists.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781459406230
Pub Date: 15 May 2014
Description:
A world without war: this is the vision that Douglas Roche has pursued for decades. A long-time Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament, Canadian ambassador for disarmament, and later a senator, Roche has been in the thick of international affairs for more than forty years. Though few of us realize it, today the world is more peaceful than in past centuries.
Wars have diminished destruction dramatically in the past two decades. This is no accident -- it is the cumulative result of the work of the world's peacemakers. Sometimes in public, often behind the scenes, talented high achievers are waging a campaign for peace that is in ascendance over the warlike intentions of the arms industry, military generals, and aggressive government leaders. Neither Roche nor the peacemakers shy away from the thorniest issues the world faces -- including the threat posed by nuclear weapons, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and multiple threats of genocidal violence. Roche shows how new ideas like the responsibility to protect innocent civilians from genocide or armed attack by their own government, and new institutions like the International Criminal Court are moving the world along the path to the end of war. To tell this story, Roche profiles some leading peacemakers of our time and the work they are doing, and also interviews keen observers of world politics who offer informed commentary on the work of the peacemakers. You will meet former prime ministers and foreign ministers, senior UN officials, religious figures, women's organization leaders and activists. Few are household names. Roche documents the many successes of the past two decades in reducing conflict in the world, and in creating structures and institutions which are making war less likely and more difficult for states to initiate. With a Resources section of websites, books and films.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 394
ISBN: 9780813145075
Pub Date: 13 May 2014
Series: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century
Illustrations: 25 b&w photos
Description:
The civil rights and anti--Vietnam War movements were the two greatest protests of twentieth-century America. The dramatic escalation of U.S.
involvement in Vietnam in 1965 took precedence over civil rights legislation, which had dominated White House and congressional attention during the first half of the decade. The two issues became intertwined on January 6, 1966, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) became the first civil rights organization to formally oppose the war, protesting the injustice of drafting African Americans to fight for the freedom of the South Vietnamese people when they were still denied basic freedoms at home.Selma to Saigon explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the national civil rights movement. Before the war gained widespread attention, the New Left, the SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) worked together to create a biracial alliance with the potential to make significant political and social gains in Washington. Contention over the war, however, exacerbated preexisting generational and ideological tensions that undermined the coalition, and Lucks analyzes the causes and consequences of this disintegration.This powerful narrative illuminates the effects of the Vietnam War on the lives of leaders such as Whitney Young Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as other activists who faced the threat of the military draft along with race-related discrimination and violence. Providing new insights into the evolution of the civil rights movement, this book fills a significant gap in the literature about one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.