Catalog Search Results
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"Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties have been an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly...
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"This book represents the first scholarly attempt to examine the broad geographical dimensions of the World War II U.S. contract farm labor programs together and in sweeping detail. It views these labor programs relationally and in tandem to reveal how they were co-constituted and mutually understood across time and multiple places, producing a liberal consensus during this period that lives on today. By examining debates among government officials,...
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"In 1964, as part of its landmark Civil Rights Act, Congress outlawed workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as sex, race, and religion. This provision, known as Title VII, laid a new legal foundation for women's rights at work. Though President Kennedy and other lawmakers expressed high hopes for Title VII, early attempts to enforce it were inconsistent. In the absence of a consensus definition of sex equality in the law...
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"While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the United States occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Melanie D. Newport situates the late twentieth century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing. Centering the political actions of people until now overlooked-jailed people, wardens,...
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The Port Huron Statement was the most important manifesto of the New Left student movement of the 1960s. Initially drafted by Tom Hayden and debated over the course of three days in 1962 at a meeting of student leaders, the statement was issued by Students for a Democratic Society as their founding document. Its key idea, "participatory democracy, " proved a watchword for Sixties radicalism that has also reemerged in popular protests from the Arab...
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"In Messengers of the Right, Nicole Hemmer explains how conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement, transforming audiences into activists and activists into a reliable voting base. Hemmer also explores how the idea of liberal media bias emerged, why conservatives have been more successful at media activism than liberals, and how the right remade both the Republican Party and American news media."--Book...
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Explores the history of disability activism, concentrating on the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), a national, cross-disability organization founded during World War II to address federal disability policy. Through extensive archival research, the author examines the history of the AFPH and its enduring legacy in the disability rights movement. Counter to most narratives that place the inception of disability activism in the...
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"The homeless have the legal right to exist in modern American cities, yet antihomeless ordinances deny them access to many public spaces. How did previous generations of urban dwellers deal with the tensions between the rights of the homeless and those of other city residents? Ella Howard answers this question by tracing the history of skid rows from their rise in the late nineteenth century to their eradication in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing...
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"Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government--especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the...