The essence of democracy is popular sovereignty. The people rule. In the United States, citizens exercise this right through elected officials who they believe will best represent their own values and interests. But are those interests and values always being followed? Authors Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer provide the first systematic examination of the extent to which the governments closest to the American public—its 10,000-plus local school boards—respond to the wishes of the majority. Ten Thousand Democracies begins with a look at educational reforms from the Progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the civil rights movement and ending with Pennsylvania's 2004 tax relief measure. Berkman and Plutzer explore what factors determine education spending levels in school districts, including the effects of public opinion, the nature of local political institutions, and the roles played by special interests. The authors show how board members are selected, how well the boards represent minorities, whether the public can bypass the board through referenda, and how the schools are financed. By providing an innovative statistical portrait that combines public opinion data with Census data for these school districts, the authors answer questions central to democratic control of our schools: how responsive are school boards to their public and when? How powerful are such special interests such as teachers' unions and senior citizens? By using the lens of America's public school districts to examine the workings of democracy, Ten Thousand Democracies offers new insight not only into the forces shaping local education policy but also how democratic institutions may function throughout all levels of government.
Winner of the William Anderson Award of the American Political Science AssociationExplores the role of state politics in shaping the national agenda during the 1980s. By focusing on the federal tax policy from 1978-1986, Berkman argues that a conservative political agenda slowly replaced the liberal agenda dominant since World War II. The state roots model asserts that national policymakers, particularly members of Congress, are products of their state political systems and environments. Berkman applies this model to the tax-cutting policies that took hold nationally in 1978, before Regan came to office, and continued in the tax acts of 1981 and 1986.
Who should decide what children are taught in school? This question lies at the heart of the evolution-creation wars that have become a regular feature of the U.S. political landscape. Ever since the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" many have argued that the people should decide by majority rule and through political institutions; others variously point to the federal courts, educational experts, or scientists as the ideal arbiter. Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer illuminate who really controls the nation's classrooms. Based on their innovative survey of 926 high school biology teachers they show that the real power lies with individual educators who make critical decisions in their own classrooms. Broad teacher discretion sometimes leads to excellent instruction in evolution. But the authors also find evidence of strong creationist tendencies in America's public high schools. More generally, they find evidence of a systematic undermining of science and the scientific method in many classrooms.
These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did. The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American 'robber baron'. Taking in Malcolm X and Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol, Charles Manson and Emma Goldman, Tsars, Presidents, and pop stars, Age of Assassins traces the process that turned thought into action and murder into an icon. In tackling the history of political violence, the book is unique in its range and attention to detail, summoning up an age of assassination that is far from over.
A "lively, fast-paced history" (Adam Hochschild, bestselling author of American Midnight) of America’s anarchist movement and the government’s tireless efforts to destroy it In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement. American Anarchy tells the gripping tale of the anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how their battles over freedom and power still shape our public life.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of political violence swept across the globe, causing widespread alarm. Described by the media of the day as "propaganda of the deed," assassinations, bombings and assaults carried out by anarchists--both individuals and conspirators--were intended to incite revolution and established the precedents of modern terrorism. Much has been written about these actions and the responses to them yet little attention has been given to the actors themselves. Drawing on wide range of sources, the author profiles numerous insurgents, their deeds and their motives.
W. W. Norton is excited to announce that award-winning authors Elizabeth Phelps and Elliot Berkman will bring their ideas and energy to Psychological Science 7e. Our authors are committed to encouraging students to learn and evaluate psychology through the lens of methods, replication, and the open science era. Looking beyond the text, Liz and Elliot applied their experience with the introductory psychology course to all aspects of the teaching and learning tools, including InQuizitive's adaptive assessment, new ZAPS 3.0 interactive labs with instructor support, a hands-on approach to visualizing brain science through a new interactive 3D brain, and exciting new interactive neuron animations. They are committed to introducing students to a more modern view of the field?one that shows the real-world impact of psychology and showcases the work of diverse researchers throughout.??
Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.
From 1958 to 1978 in New York a series of atmospheric irruptions emerged in the history of music, fraught with dissonance, obscurity, and volume. Beyond expanding musical resources into dissonance and noise with a familiar polemical edge, a group of musicians were thinking with sound: crafting metaphysical portals, aiming one to go somewhere, to get out of oneself. For many artists and thinkers of the postwar period, the self was taken to be ideological, given, normal. Their strange, intense, disorienting music was a way out, beyond, through the other, through the collective, through an ecstatic mystery. Their work had material underpinnings: radios, amplifiers, televisions, multi-track recording studios, and long-playing records. Some of the results were intricate, esoteric, and fractured; some of it oceanic and inconsistent. It was often difficult to tell the difference. In this new project, Michael Gallope discusses the work of several musicians who played key roles in these musical irruptions: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, and Richard Hell and Patti Smith. Their work involved a larger group of collaborators, some of them among the mid-twentieth century's most celebrated artists and musicians: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and John Coltrane. This project is a history of the thinking embedded in their collective work, and it is a critical exposition of this period of time. Gallope details how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music's ineffability. He contends that the musicians at the center of each chapter-all of whom are understudied, and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers-not only challenged the rules by which music was written and practiced, but also confounded gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social process of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self"--
The Russian Revolution was as red as blood. The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers’ paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself. What they ended up constructing was the largest prison that the world had ever seen, a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe. It was a country where people's lives meant nothing, less than nothing—and they knew it. But no matter what atrocity that the Soviets committed—the secret police, the torture chambers, the show trials, the labor camps and the mass starvation—there was always someone in the West rushing to justify their bloodshed. For decades it seemed perfectly obvious that the USSR wasn’t going anywhere—until it vanished from the face of the earth, gradually and then suddenly. This is the story of the rise and fall of that evil empire, and why it is so important for the good to never give up hope. This is the white pill.
Culture and Health offers an overview of different areas of culture and health, building on foundations of medical anthropology and health behavior theory. It shows how to address the challenges of cross-cultural medicine through interdisciplinary cultural-ecological models and personal and institutional developmental approaches to cross-cultural adaptation and competency. The book addresses the perspectives of clinically applied anthropology, trans-cultural psychiatry and the medical ecology, critical medical anthropology and symbolic paradigms as frameworks for enhanced comprehension of health and the medical encounter. Includes cultural case studies, applied vignettes, and self-assessments.
Since the early 2000s, global, underground networks of insurrectionary anarchists have carried out thousands of acts of political violence. This book is an exploration of the ideas, strategies, and history of these political actors that engage in a confrontation with the oppressive powers of the state and capital. This book challenges the reader to consider the historically ignored articulations put forth by those who communicate through sometimes violent political acts-vandalism, sabotage, arson and occasional use of explosives. These small acts of violence are announced and contextualized through written communiqués, which are posted online, translated, and circulated globally. This book offers the first contemporary history of these digitally-mediated networks, and seeks to locate this tendency within anti-state struggles from the past.
This title provides a systematic and accessible introduction to medical sociology, beginning each 1500 word entry with a definition of the concept, then examines its origins, development, strengths and weaknesses, offering further reading guidance for independent learning, and drawing on international literature and examples.
From the authors of the acclaimed Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, and featuring some of the most important cases in criminal law, The Devil's Advocates is the final volume of a must-have trilogy of the best closing arguments in American legal history. Criminal law is considered by many to be the most exciting of the legal specialties, and here the authors turn to the type of dramatic crimes and trials that have so captivated the public -- becoming fodder for countless television shows and legal thrillers. But the eight cases in this collection have also set historical precedents and illuminated underlying principles of the American criminal justice system. Future president John Adams makes clear that even the most despised and vilified criminal is entitled to a legal defense in the argument he delivers on behalf of the British soldiers who shot and killed five Americans during the Boston Massacre. The always-controversial temporary-insanity defense makes its debut within sight of the White House when, in front of horrified onlookers, a prominent congressman guns down the district attorney over an extramarital affair. Clarence Darrow provides a ringing defense of a black family charged with using deadly force to defend themselves from a violent mob -- an argument that refines the concept of self-defense and its applicability to all races. The treason trial of Aaron Burr, accused of plotting to "steal" the western territories of the United States and form a new country with himself as its head, offers a fascinating glimpse into a rare type of prosecution, as well as a look at one of the most interesting traitors in the nation's history. Perhaps the best-known case in the book is that of Ernesto Miranda, the accused rapist whose trial led to the Supreme Court decision requiring police to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present -- their Miranda rights. Each of the eight cases presented here is given legal and cultural context, including a brief historical introduction, a biographical sketch of the attorneys involved, highlights of trial testimony, analysis of the closing arguments, and a summary of the trial's impact on its participants and our country. In clear, jargon-free prose, Michael S Lief and H. Mitchell Caldwell make these pivotal cases come to vibrant life for every reader.
A sweeping history of revolutionary struggle and unbreakable alliances, Revolutionary Affinities takes readers from the Paris Commune to the Occupy movement, and through the heart of bloody fratricidal struggles to paint a vivid picture of the greatest anarchist and Marxist figures who dared to join forces, from Louise Michel to Subcomandante Marcos, from Emma Goldman to Walter Benjamin. With the urgent need for a unified front against the far right, there has never been a better time for this inspiring story. Authors Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy, two of the foremost voices in the French anti-authoritarian radical left, explore the promises—and challenges—of developing a fully sustainable, libertarian Marxist society by examining questions of political organization, economic policy, radical ecology, and more. Strikingly accessible, brilliantly illuminating, Besancenot and Löwy have given readers more than a history book, they’ve created a road map for the future.
Marketing Public Health: Strategies to Promote Social Change was designed to help public health practitioners understand basic marketing principles and strategically apply these principles in planning, implementing, and evaluating public health initiatives. The first edition has been widely used by public health practitioners at all levels of government and in the private sector as a tool to help run more effective campaigns to change individual behavior, improve social and economic conditions, advance social policies, and compete successfully for public attention and resources. This thorougly revised, second edition includes new case studies, written by respected and well-known guest contributors from the front lines and will help illustrate the principles and strategies in a way that makes it immediately apparent to readers how the material can be used in modern, real-life public health campaigns. Current themes in the social marketing world, such as the concept of branding, have also been incorporated into the book in both its narrative and its case studies and examples.
This book provides a general introduction to the biological and evolutionary bases of religion and is suitable for introductory level courses in the anthropology and psychology of religion and comparative religion. Why did human ancestors everywhere adopt religious beliefs and customs? The presence and persistence of many religious features across the globe and time suggests that it is natural for humans to believe in the supernatural. In this new text, the authors explore both the biological and cultural dimensions of religion and the evolutionary origins of religious features.
Focusing on American folk music and roots music since the 1950s, The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance analyzes the intrinsic contradictions of a commercialized folk culture. In recent years, both Rounder Records and the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance have sought to make folk music widely available, while simultaneously respecting its defining traditions and unique community atmosphere. Tracing the histories of these organizations, Michael F. Scully explores the lively debates about the difficulty of making commercially accessible music, honoring tradition, and remaining artistically relevant, all without "selling out." He combines rich interviews of music executives and practicing folk musicians with valuable personal experience to reveal how this American subculture remains in a "never-ending revival" based on fluid definitions of folk and folk music.
Health and illness underpin our everyday existence. Health allows us to live full lives and to function as social beings; illness disrupts our lives, sometimes seriously. But health not only affects individuals, it also impacts upon society as a whole. Medical breakthroughs and scandals, health scares and health service problems all vie for the attention of politicians and public alike. Michael Bury provides a lively introduction to the sociology of health and illness for students approaching the topic for the first time. Drawing on classic writings and up-to-date research, he discusses the conceptualization and patterning of health and illness in contemporary society. He highlights a range of factors, such as gender, age, ethnicity and class, which influence the occurrence and distribution of illness over time. The book then focuses on debates about the body, the role of health services and the politics of health policy. In conclusion, Bury argues that we must take a dynamic view of health and illness as processes that are shaped by social circumstances and altering perceptions. This short introduction will be essential reading for all students studying the sociology of health as part of their degree programme.
In the brave new world of angels and procurers, rent-a-death prostitutes will let you sexually abuse them and even hack them to pieces for a fee. In anticipation of your own death, be sure to keep up payments on your life crystal. After you die, you can enjoy life to the hilt in a very attractive new body with your memories intact. Young body, old memories. Violent death is the ultimate repeatable pleasure.
The Russian Revolution was as red as blood. The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers’ paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself. What they ended up constructing was the largest prison that the world had ever seen, a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe. It was a country where people's lives meant nothing, less than nothing—and they knew it. But no matter what atrocity that the Soviets committed—the secret police, the torture chambers, the show trials, the labor camps and the mass starvation—there was always someone in the West rushing to justify their bloodshed. For decades it seemed perfectly obvious that the USSR wasn’t going anywhere—until it vanished from the face of the earth, gradually and then suddenly. This is the story of the rise and fall of that evil empire, and why it is so important for the good to never give up hope. This is the white pill.
I was born March 8, 1947 into a railroad family. I had two major passions in my early teens: the Democratic Party and John F. Kennedy. With his assassination and then the failure to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the summer of 1964, I lost all mooring with Party politics. The following May 1965, I graduated from Pocatello High School; I was eighteen, registered for the draft, and the nation was at war. Mr. Johnsons escalation of the war in Vietnam, along with the sending of troops into the Dominican Republic, completed my crisis of faith; I was no longer a Democrat. My history is an intellectually personal one of the awakening and growth of a radical in love with the wonderment of the radical life-style. This is a story of an insurrection and rebellion on the limits placed upon essential human quality in a consumer-based society. This rebellion is, at its core, anti-capitalist, anti-state, anti-bureaucratic, anti-clerical, anti-patriarchal and anti-positivist. This rebellion has continually evolved as age brought more insight and wisdom. One tradition replaces another, not that they are outgrown or abandoned, but that they lead naturally by life experiences to new ways of dealing with life. This is a rebellion born in experience and not an abstraction of an isolated rebel. Particularly because of the rebellion that was the 1960s, I soon discovered the philosophy of the Russian Anarchists of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and Berkman. With the collapse of the movement in the early 1970s, the veterans and history of the old left became beautiful beacons in the night. The Industrial Workers of the World, Socialist party USA, Communist Party USA, and the Socialist Workers Party became my foundation.
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