Search results for ""temple university press,u.s.""

The book is a social history and sociology of American Jewry. It provides an up-to-date analysis of the contemporary American Jewish community, an analysis that includes educational, occupational, income, and political patterns of American Jews; the American Jewish family; anti-semitism; the relationship between American Jews and Israel; and the recent immigration of Soviet, Israeli, and Iranian Jews to the USA. In synthesizing a vast array of empirical studies, the author argues that while American Jews have been successful in their quest to integrate into the American social system, recent developments both in the American social and cultural system, at large, and within the Jewish community, in particular, indicate that this ethno-religious group is confronting the challenge to its continuity and its manifesting survivalist strengths which were not readily apparent in earlier generations.America's Jews in Transition should interest students in a wide range of fields, among them sociology, ethnic studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and religious studies. Because of its breadth and the freshness of its material, the book should also appeal to the general reader.

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The movement that changed religion and social policy in America is presented through primary resources

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“Muslim Americans are at a political crossroads,” write editors Brian Calfano and Nazita Lajevardi. Whereas Muslims are now widely incorporated in American public life, there are increasing social and political pressures that disenfranchise them or prevent them from realizing the American Dream. Understanding Muslim Political Life in America brings clarity to the social, religious, and political dynamics that this diverse religious community faces.In this timely volume, leading scholars cover a variety of topics assessing the Muslim American experience in the post-9/11 and pre-Trump era, including law enforcement; identity labels used in Muslim surveys; the role of gender relations; recognition; and how discrimination, tolerance, and politics impact American Muslims.Understanding Muslim Political Life in America offers an update and reappraisal of what we know about Muslims in American political life. The editors and contributors also consider future directions and important methodological questions for research in Muslim American scholarship. Contributors include Matt A. Barreto, Alejandro Beutel, Tony Carey, Youssef Chouhoud, Karam Dana, Oz Dincer, Rachel Gillum, Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Anwar Manje, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, Dani McLaughlan, Melissa R. Michelson, Yusuf Sarfati, Ahmet Tekelioglu, Marianne Marar Yacobian, and the editors.

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“Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story.”—Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people—from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon’s friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts—including “My Family’s Slave,” the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude.Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles—many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times—are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream’s field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon’s pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon’s respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

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Based on in-depth interviews with eighty people who have epilepsy, this book gives a first-hand account of what it is like to cope with a chronic illness, while working, playing, and building relationships. The authors recount how people discover they have epilepsy and what it means; how families respond to someone labeled 'epileptic'; how seizures affect a person's sense of self and self-control. Epilepsy patients explain what they want from their doctors and why the medication practices they develop may not coincide with 'doctor's orders'. The variety of experiences of epilepsy is suggested both by the interviews and by the range of terms for seizures Petit Mal, Grand Mal, auras, fits, absences. The principal difficulty for many people with epilepsy is not the medical condition but the social stigma. A person with epilepsy has to cope with discrimination in obtaining a job, insurance, or a driver's license, and he or she may be cautious about revealing this 'disabling' condition to an employer or even a spouse. People with epilepsy may manage information about themselves and their 'lapses' and look for 'safe places' like restrooms where they can be alone should a seizure begin. Many of those interviewed complained of overreactions to seizures by colleagues or bystanders: epilepsy patients were embarrassed at having provoked a public crisis or were annoyed at waking up in a hospital emergency room. This is a book for people who have epilepsy, for their families and friends; for health care professionals who deal with chronic illnesses; and, for students of medical sociology and the sociology of deviance. Joseph W. Schneider is Associate Professor of Sociology at Drake University. Peter Conrad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University.

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A major reorientation of scholarly thought about communism and contemporary social movements

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Storytelling is perhaps the most common way people make sense of their experiences, claim identities, and 'get a life'. So much of our daily life consists of writing or telling our stories and listening to and reading the stories of others. But we rarely stop to ask: what are these stories? How do they shape our lives? And why do they matter? The authors ably guide readers through the complex world of performing narrative. Along the way they show the embodied contexts of storytelling, the material constraints on narrative performances, and the myriad ways storytelling orders information and tasks, constitutes meanings, and positions speaking subjects. Readers will also learn that narrative performance is consequential as well as pervasive, as storytelling opens up experience and identities to legitimization and critique.The authors' multi-leveled model of strategy and tactics considers how relations of power in a system are produced, reproduced, and altered in performing narrative. The authors explain this strategic model through an extended discussion of family storytelling, using Franco Americans in Maine as their exemplar. They explore what stories families tell, how they tell them, and how storytelling creates family identities. Then, they show the range and reach of this strategic model by examining storytelling in diverse contexts: a breast cancer narrative, a weblog on the Internet, and an autobiographical performance on the public stage.Readers are left with a clear understanding of how and why the performance of narrative is the primary communicative practice shaping our lives today. Author note: Kristin M. Langellier is Mark and Marcia Bailey Professor at the University of Maine where she teaches communication and women's studies. A former editor of "Text and Performance Quarterly", she has published numerous journal articles on personal narrative, family storytelling, and Franco American cultural identity. Eric E. Peterson is Associate Professor at the University of Maine where he teaches communication. He is coeditor of a recent book on public broadcasting and has published a variety of journal articles on narrative performance, media consumption, and communication diversity and identity.

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Interviews with Turkish maids yield surprising facts about class and gender roles

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A tiny African-American baby lies in a hospital incubator, tubes protruding from his nostrils, head, and limbs. \u0022He couldn't take the hit,\u0022 the caption warns. \u0022If you're pregnant, don't take drugs.\u0022 Ten years earlier, this billboard would have been largely unintelligible to many of us. But when it appeared in 1991, it immediately conjured up several powerful images: the helpless infant himself; his unseen environment, a newborn intensive care unit filled with babies crying inconsolably; and the mother who did this -- crack-addicted and unrepentant. Misconceiving Mothers is a case study of how public policy about reproduction and crime is made. Laura E. Gomez uses secondary research and first-hand interviews with legislators and prosecutors to examine attitudes toward the criminalization and/or medicalization of drug use during pregnancy by the legislature and criminal justice systems in California. She traces how an initial tendency toward criminalization gave way to a trend toward seeing the problem of \u0022crack babies\u0022 as an issue of social welfare and public health. It is no surprise that in an atmosphere of mother-blaming, particularly targeted at poor women and women of color, \u0022crack babies\u0022 so easily captured the American popular imagination in the late 1980s. What is surprising is the was prenatal drug exposure came to be institutionalized in the state apparatus. Gomez attributes this circumstance to four interrelated cause: the gendered nature of the social problem; the recasting of the problem as fundamentally \u0022medical\u0022 rather than \u0022criminal\u0022; the dynamic nature of t he process of institutionalization; and the specific feature of the legal institutions -- that is, the legislature and prosecutors' offices -- the became prominent in the case. At one level Misconceiving Mothers tells the story of a particular problem at a particular time and place -- how the California legislature and district attorneys grappled with pregnant women's drug use in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At another level, the book tells a more general story about the political nature of contemporary social problems. The story it tells is political not just because it deals with the character of political institutions but because the process itself and the nature of the claims-making concern the power to control the allocation of state resources. A number of studies have looked at how the initial criminalization of social problems takes place. Misconceiving Mothers looks at the process by which a criminalized social problem is institutionalized through the attitudes and policies of elite decision-makers.

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When you think of American immigration, what images come to mind? Ellis Island. East Side tenements. Pushcarts on Eighth Avenue. Little Italy. Chinatown. El Barrio. New York City has always been central to the immigrant experience in the United States. In the last three decades, the volume of immigration has increased as has the diversity of immigrant origins and experiences. Contemporary immigration conjures up old images but also some new ones: the sweatshops and ethnic neighborhoods are still there, but so are cell phones, faxes, e-mails, and the more intense and multilayered involvement of immigrants in the social, economic, and political life of both home and host societies.In this ambitious book, nineteen scholars from a broad range of disciplines bring our understanding of New York's immigrant communities up to date by exploring the interaction between economic globalization and transnationalization, demographic change, and the evolving racial, ethnic, gender dynamics in the City.Urban and suburban, Asian, European, Latin American, and Caribbean, men and women and children the essays here analyze the complex forces that shape the contemporary immigrant experience in New York City and the links between immigrant communities in New York and their countries of origin. Hector R. Cordero-Guzman is an Assistant Professor at the Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy at the New School University in New York City. Robert C. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Barnard College and part of the Barnard Project on Migration and Diasporas. Ramon Grosfoguel is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Boston College.

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“Create a More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th century as a Methodist Church meeting camp, has, over time, become a thriving mecca for the LGBTQ+ community. In Queering Rehoboth Beach, historian and educator James Sears charts this significant evolution. Sears draws upon extensive oral history accounts, archival material, and personal narrativesto chronicle “the Battle for Rehoboth,” which unfolded in the late 20th century, as conservative town leaders and homeowners opposed progressive entrepreneurs and gay activists. He recounts not just the emergence of the gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, and organizations that drew the queer community to the region, but also the efforts of local politicians and homeowners, among other groups who fought to develop and protect the traditional identity of this beach town. Mor

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International competition and variable economic conditions have brought the threat of layoffs to the doorsteps of workers and managers in all sectors of our economy. One response to this problem is Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing. This new and promising program reduces the human and economic costs of layoffs by providing partial unemployment benefits to employees who have their workweeks reduced as an alternative to layoffs. Fred Best provides a balanced and thorough assessment of this policy in the United States, Canada, and Europe.Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing maintains the income and fringe benefits of all workers at near full-time levels, enabling firms to maintain the skills and working relations of their employees and preventing undue hardships among those who would otherwise lose their jobs. Best summarizes the history and effectiveness of these programs in terms of their economic and human impacts on employers, employees, government, and the economy. He presents key insights on how worktime and worker management cooperation can become powerful tools for combating joblessness and increasing economic performance. This definitive account of an important experiment in work hours will be of critical importance to managers, workers, policymakers, economists, and those concerned with employment issues. Fred Best is President of Pacific Management Research Associates in Sacramento, California.

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Discusses the power of the bicycle to impact mobility, technology, urban space and everyday life

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Since ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people's lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions. This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it. Although most of us think of history -- and learn it -- as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing and understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the \u0022one damned thing after another\u0022 concept of history. Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer \u0022rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present.\u0022 Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings -- in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance -- these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

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There has been an increase in testimonies from women politicians who have been targets of violence and from survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. The editors and contributors to of Gender and Violence against Political Actors seek to understand how gender influences both physical and psychological forms of violence and how sexual violence affects both men and women. Chapters focus on theoretical approaches demonstrating how different disciplinary starting points—e.g., politics, violence and gender—give rise to different lenses. Essays examine violence carried out during conflict and peacetime, and relate to the continuum of violence—physical, sexual, psychological, and online. In addition, six country case studies reveal how different types of political actors have been targets of violence. Gender and Violence against Political Actors ends by providing various approaches to responding to the problem of gendered violence in politics while also evaluating policy responses. Contributors: Kerryn Baker, Julie Ballington, Gabrielle Bardall, Gabriella Borovsky, Cheryl N. Collier, Sofia Collignon, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Eleonora Esposito, Nicole Haley, Rebekah Herrick, Sandra Håkansson, Roudabeh Kishi, Anne-Kathrin Kreft, Mona Lena Krook, Rebecca Kuperberg, Robert U. Nagel, Louise Olsson, Jennifer M. Piscopo, Tracey Raney, Juliana Restrepo Sanín, Paige Schneider, Maria Stern, Sue Thomas, and the editors

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Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change. The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social order—based on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealth—that determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and asks: How can we activate care justice or just care where people feel cared affirmatively and care being used for the wellbeing of community and for just world making?

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In Graphic Migrations, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India. She explores how stories of Partition migrations shape and influence the political and cultural imagination of secularism and contribute to gendered citizenship for South Asians in India and its diasporas.Daiya analyzes modern literature, Bollywood films, Margaret Bourke-White’s photography, advertising, and print culture to show how they memorialize or erase refugee experiences. She also uses oral testimonies of Partition refugees from Hong Kong, South Asia, and North America to draw out the tensions of the nation-state, ethnic discrimination, and religious difference. Employing both Critical Refugee Studies and Feminist Postcolonial Studies frameworks, Daiya traces the cultural, affective, and political legacies of Partition migrations. The precarity generated by modern migration and expressed through public culture prompts a rethinking of how dominant media represents gendered migrants and refugees. Graphic Migrations demands that we redraw the boundaries of how we tell the story of modern world history and the intricately interwoven, intimate production of statelessness and citizenship across the world’s communities.

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“I got 1-2-3-4 psychobilly DNA”—Norm and the Nightmarez Call it punk rockabilly with science-fiction horror lyrics. The outsider musical genre known as psychobilly, which began in 1980s Britain, fuses punk, heavy metal, new wave, and shock rock with carnivalesque elements. The participants in this underground scene sport coffin tattoos and 1950s fashions. Bands such as The Meteors, Nekromantix, and Demented Are Go play with a wild energy and a fast tempo. Sometimes fake blood runs down a performer’s mouth.Psychobilly is ethnomusicologist Kimberly Kattari’s fascinating, decade-long study of this little-known anti-mainstream genre. She provides a history and introduces readers to the core aspects of the music as she interviews passionate performers and fans. Kattari seeks to understand how psychobilly so strongly affects—and reflects—its participants’ lives and identities so strongly. She observes that it provides not only a sense of belonging but a response to feelings and experiences of socio-economic marginalization and stigmatization. Psychobilly shows how this subculture organized around music furnishes an outlet for members to resist normative expectations and survive; they adhere to their own rules by having a good time while going through a hard time.

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New Third Edition! If sociology could teach everyone just one thing, what would it be? The Forest and the Trees is one sociologist's response to the hypothetical-the core insight with the greatest potential to change how people see the world and themselves in relation to it. This Third Edition features: • Updated key references, data, resources, and examples, from global warming, Obama's election, and gay marriage to transgender/cisgender and the Occupy Movement • A glossary of terms • The short essays in Chapter 6, framed around the power of sociology, dig beneath easy and popular understandings to reveal what lies beneath • An additional analysis of how men's violence is made invisible even though most violence is perpetrated by men • Chapter 7's focus on sociology as a worldview with an analysis of the origins of white privilege

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Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the worldwide mass protest movements of 1968—against war, imperialism, racism, poverty, misogyny, and homophobia—the exciting anthology Architectures of Revolt explores the degree to which the real events of political revolt in the urban landscape in 1968 drove change in the attitudes and practices of filmmakers and architects alike.In and around 1968, as activists and filmmakers took to the streets, commandeering public space, buildings, and media attention, they sought to re-make the urban landscape as an expression of utopian longing or as a dystopian critique of the established order. In Architectures of Revolt, the editor and contributors chronicle city-specific case studies from Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The films discussed range from avant-garde and agitprop shorts to mainstream narrative feature films. All of them share a focus on the city and, often, particular streets and buildings as places of political contestation and sometimes violence, which the medium of cinema was uniquely equipped to capture.Contributors include: Stephen Barber, Stanley Corkin, Jesse Lerner, Jon Lewis, Gaetana Marrone, Jennifer Stob, Andrew Webber, and the editor.

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How gender and class intersect in Malawi through women

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How race and class collide at a prestigious liberal arts college

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A look at Chinese filmmaking in the post-1989 American diaspora

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The face of U.S. television broadcasting is changing in ways that are both profound and subtle. Global Television uncovers the particular processes by which the international circulation of culture takes place, while addressing larger cultural issues such as identity formation. Focusing on how the process of internationally made programming such as Highlander: The Series and The Odyssey-amusingly dubbed \u201cEuropudding\u201d and \u201ccommercial white bread\u201d-are changing television into a transnational commodity, Barbara Selznick considers how this mode of production-as a means by which transnational television is created-has both economic rewards and cultural benefits as well as drawbacks. Global Television explores the ways these international co-productions create a \u201cglobal\u201d culture as well as help form a national identity. From British \u201cbrand\u201d programming (e.g, Cracker) that airs on A&E in the U.S. to children\u2019s television programs such as Plaza Sesamo, and documentaries, Selznick indicates that while the style, narrative, themes and ideologies may be interesting, corporate capitalism ultimately affects and impacts these programs in significant ways.

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Maintains that poverty has become, to the peril of us all, an ordinary part of life

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Western philosophy has long excluded the work of women thinkers from their canon. Presenting Women Philosophers addresses this exclusion by examining the breadth of women's contributions to Western thought over some 900 years. Editors Cecile T. Tougas and Sara Ebenreck have gathered essays and other writings that reflect women's deep engagement with the meaning of individual experience as well as the continuity of their philosophical concerns and practices. Arranged thematically, the collection ranges across eras and literary genres as it emphasizes the intellectual significance of written work by key figures -- for example, Hildegard of Bingen's visionary writings, Iris Murdoch's fiction, Hannah Arendt's historical narratives, and the oral storytelling in black women's literary tradition. The collection also brings to light the philosophical importance of little-known work by such writers as Mme de Sable and Mme de Condorcet. This wide-ranging collection offers non-philosophers an introduction to women's thought but also promises to engage advanced students of philosophy with new research on unrecognized contributions.

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\u0022Djelimady Tounkara has powerful hands. His muscled fingers and palms seem almost brutish to the eye, but when he grasps the neck of the guitar and brushes the nail of his right index finger across the strings, the sound lifts effortlessly, like dust in a wind. In Bamako, Mali, where musicians struggle, Djelimady is a big man, and all of his family's good fortunes flow from those hands.\u0022 Djelimady Tounkara is only one of the memorable people you will meet in this dramatic narrative of life among the griot musicians of Mali. Born into families where music and the tradition of griot story-telling is a heritage and a privilege, Djelimady and his fellow griots -- both men and women -- live their lives at the intersection of ancient traditions and the modern entertainment industry. During the seven months he spent living and studying with Djelimady, Banning Eyre immersed himself in a world that will fascinate you as it did him. Eyre creates a range of unforgettable portraits. Some of the people who stride through his pages are internationally known, musicians like Salif Keita, Oumou Sangare, and Grammy winner Ali Farka Toure. But the lesser-known characters are equally fascinating: Adama Kouyate, Djelimady's dynamic wife; Moussa Kouyate, the Tounkara family's own griot; Yayi Kanoute, the flamboyant jelimuso (female griot) who failed to take America by storm; Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the mysterious millionaire who rebuilt an entire town and whose patronage is much sought after by the griots of Bamako. But the picture Eyre draws is not just a series of portraits. Out of their interactions comes a perceptive panorama of life in Mali in the late twentieth century. The narrative gives us a street-level view of the transformation of musical taste and social customs, the impact of technology and the pressures of poverty, at a crucial time in Mali's history. In individual after individual, family after family, we see the subtle conflicts of heritage and change. Even the complications of democracy -- with democracy, mango vendors think they can charge anything they want, Djelimady points out -- are woven into an unforgettable saga of one man, his family, his profession, and the world of Malian music.

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An in-depth examination of contemporary Chicana writers

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A story of spirit, growth, and survival in a city that reflects America's urban problems

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A new environmental ethic calls for the protection of the Earth while recognizing the special nature of humans

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New Deal photographs reveal the inexorable "pull of the city" even as they lament the demise of rural America

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Breaking out of Chinatown by shooting and dribbling

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Examining the political economy of high-stakes educational testing

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A pioneering study of women's movements in two developing-world revolutions and post-revolutionary transitions to neo-liberal democracies

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A pioneer in animal ethics tells his story

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Emphasizes the influence of regional demographics over the cult of Berlusconi's personality

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True life tales and scrumptious recipes from Philly's trendsetting restaurant

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Why do special interests defeat the majority's preference in elections and legislation?

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Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling examines the organizational structures of drug smuggling from Colombia to the US. Career drug smugglers describe a series of often disconnected networks that enable smugglers to best organize their business in a way that will minimize the risks of apprhension and maximize profits.

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How true stories, almost-true stories, urban legends, myths and even outright lies captivate us and bind us together

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The Coolie Speaks focuses on Chinese laborers who worked side by side with African slaves in Cuba and wrote of their experiences of new bondage. Examining these narratives of resistance, the book reconceptualizes diasporic representations and histories to offer transformative re-examinations of "Chinese," "African," and "Latino" in mutually imbricated contexts.

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A persuasive argument against "forgive and forget"

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Fifteen gripping and inspiring stories told by young Vietnamese who came to the US after the fall of Saigon and during the "boat people" exodus are contextualized within a succinct history of Vietnam and the international politics of refugee resettlement

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On April 20, 1999, two Colorado teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School. That day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve fellow students and a teacher, as well as wounding twenty-four other people, before they killed themselves. Although there have been other books written about the tragedy, this is the first serious, impartial investigation into the cultural, environmental, and psychological causes of the massacre.Based on first-hand interviews and a thorough reading of the relevant literature, Ralph Larkin examines the complex of factors that led the two young men to plan and carry out their deed. For Harris and Klebold, Larkin concludes, the carnage was an act of revenge against the "jocks" who had harassed and humiliated them, retribution against evangelical students who acted as if they were morally superior, an acting out of the mythology of right-wing paramilitary organization members to "die in a blaze of glory," and a deep desire for notoriety.Rather than simply looking at Columbine as a crucible for all school violence, Larkin places the tragedy in its proper context, and in doing so, examines its causes and meaning.

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Describes the ways that the news media influences the development of our public past and how those publicly available pasts affect our understanding of current events

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Looking at the films of the prolific, often controversial, and always provocative director

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Octavius Valentine Catto was an orator who shared stages with Frederick Douglass, a second baseman on Philadelphia’s best black baseball team, a teacher at the city’s finest black school and an activist who fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights. With his racially-charged murder, the nation lost a civil rights pioneer—one who risked his life a century before Selma and Birmingham. In Tasting Freedom Murray Dubin and Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Biddle painstakingly chronicle the life of this charismatic black leader—a “free” black whose freedom was in name only. Born in the American south, where slavery permeated everyday life, he moved north where he joined the fight to be truly free—free to vote, go to school, ride on streetcars, play baseball and even participate in July 4th celebrations. Catto electrified a biracial audience in 1864 when he proclaimed, “There must come a change,” calling on free men and women to act and educate the newly freed slaves. With a group of other African Americans who called themselves a “band of brothers,” they challenged one injustice after another. Tasting Freedom presents the little-known stories of Catto and the men and women who struggled to change America.

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The role of Africa in the global economy is changing as a result of new corporate strategies, changing international trade regulation and innovative ways of overseeing the globalized production and distribution of goods. African participants in the global economy are facing demands for higher levels of performance and quality. Their responses have generated the occasional success but also many failures. Noted researchers Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte describe the central processes that are at the same time integrating some into the global economy while marginalizing others. They show the effects of these processes on African countries, farms and firms through an innovative combination of Global Value Chain analysis and Convention Theory. In doing so, the authors present a timely overview of the economic challenges that lay ahead in Africa and point to ways to best address them.

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