Customer Reviews:
Great intro to Am. Gov't.......2007-05-28
I never thought I'd be interested in gov't until I read this. It tells what the founders were thinking when they instituted this gov't we have and what their intentions were when they wrote the constitution. I thought that the gov't was here for the fat cats to sit on their butts and live off us all, but when I learned that the ppl that wrote everything had the interests of the gen. pop. in mind I thought that was pretty darn cool!
Average customer rating:
- Well written, hugely informative
- One of the most important books in Chicano history
- Excellent book by David Gutiérrez
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Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity
David G. Gutiérrez
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ASIN: 0520202198 |
Book Description
Covering more than one hundred years of American history, Walls and Mirrors examines the ways that continuous immigration from Mexico transformed--and continues to shape--the political, social, and cultural life of the American Southwest. Taking a fresh approach to one of the most divisive political issues of our time, David Gutiérrez explores the ways that nearly a century of steady immigration from Mexico has shaped ethnic politics in California and Texas, the two largest U.S. border states.
Drawing on an extensive body of primary and secondary sources, Gutiérrez focuses on the complex ways that their pattern of immigration influenced Mexican Americans' sense of social and cultural identity--and, as a consequence, their politics. He challenges the most cherished American myths about U.S. immigration policy, pointing out that, contrary to rhetoric about "alien invasions," U.S. government and regional business interests have actively recruited Mexican and other foreign workers for over a century, thus helping to establish and perpetuate the flow of immigrants into the United States. In addition, Gutiérrez offers a new interpretation of the debate over assimilation and multiculturalism in American society. Rejecting the notion of the melting pot, he explores the ways that ethnic Mexicans have resisted assimilation and fought to create a cultural space for themselves in distinctive ethnic communities throughout the southwestern United States.
Customer Reviews:
Well written, hugely informative.......2003-11-14
David Gutierrez' book is one of the most informative, thorough books available on the Chicano experince in the US Southwest. This book is not just for activists or chicano studies scholars. If you have ever wondered why immigration policy exists in its present form, or why racial tensions still persist within the southwest, read this book. It is very densly packed with valuable infomation and excellent sources, and it presents such information in a fairly unbiased manner. This is an impressive work of research that should be in the library of every house in America.
One of the most important books in Chicano history.......2001-02-26
This book truly marks a turning point in Chicano history by interrogating the similarities and differences between Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the U.S. The metaphor of Walls and Mirrors sums up the relationship between immigrants and longtime U.S. residents: they shared cultural, labor/class, and daily social ties, but political and civic goals divided them.
This book, then, is a political history that examines the importance of both legal and cultural citizenship in Texas and California communities. It looks at the impact of the Cold War, agribusiness labor needs, and civil rights struggles on debates over immigration at both the local and national level.
Excellent book by David Gutiérrez.......1998-02-07
David Gutiérrez has written a unique and fantastic book on the Chicano experience in America. Fantastic read, and as a U-M Wolverine who has heard David Gutiérrez speak in person, I can say it is worthy of the praise it has received. The man knows his material!
Book Description
In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson.
In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance--combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent of progress.
Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting the civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam.
Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and the Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs.
Customer Reviews:
An enlightening book on public diplomacy .......2007-01-11
If you think Las Vegas tourist ads and "listening tours" are components of public diplomacy and international relations, you need to read this book. If you think media coverage is intense now, you need to read this book. Dudziak gets into the reality and impact of media coverage forty years ago and its impact on the global information war of the time that is remarkably similar to today: "Following World War II, anything that undermined the image of American democracy was seen as threatening world peace and aiding Soviet aspiration to dominate the world... Nations were divided between a way of life 'distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression' and a way of life that "relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms."
Dudziak looks at the impact of race and the civil rights movement in the United States on American public diplomacy and foreign policy. The impact of America's "color bar" on foreign relations is astonishing and Dudziak helps contextualize the movement and government responses within contemporary pressures.
Indiscriminate actions against foreign and American dignitaries reinforced the accessibility of race-based norms to all and played into Soviet propaganda and provided a painful counternarrative that impacted US foreign relations. The US Ambassador, Chester Bowles, to India, speaking in 1952 at Yale University said, "A year, a month, or even a week in Asia is enough to convince any perceptive American that the colored peoples of Asia and Africa, who total two-thirds of the world's population, seldom think about the United States without considering the limitations under which our 13 million Negroes are living."
As we attempted to project democracy and its emphasis on equality and freedom, in opposition to Soviet tyranny, discrimination in the US was well known beyond our borders. Dudziak presents "With Us or Against Us" examples with Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker as examples, among others. In the case of Baker, State Department officers justified censorship and hardship imposed on Baker by discounting her personal beliefs. Her "derogatory" remarks "concerning racial discrimination in the United States" were deemed to be "presenting a distorted and malicious picture of actual conditions." If we do not practice democracy, how well will our promotion of it be received? This was a real question of the time that other history books ignore and was the very question Ambassador Bowles asked.
As Dudziak wrote, "Domestic difficulties were managed by US presidents with an eye toward how their actions would play overseas." Disingenuous or factually misleading statements to justify domestic policies and opinions are not the mainstay of any single generation. While not intending to be destructive to the nation, these policies have a severely detrimental affect on domestic cohesion and leadership within the foreign relations. Dudziak implies the race issue in the international press was the seed of negative views of the US. The golden temple of American democracy was seen as something falling short, even hypocritical. Locksley Edmunson, writing in 1973, could be speaking of today with our Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and alleged secret CIA prisons when he wrote, "Those states best technically equipped to maintain world order are not necessarily the ones whose credentials recommend them as the most appropriate guardians of a global conscience."
You can read different things out of Mary Dudziak's book. As a student of public diplomacy, my take-away centered on the impact on foreign policy, which the author does a good job investigating. The take-away? Practice what you preach, or at least be effective in making them think you're trying to.
Causes and Effects.......2001-06-05
Upon first consideration one would think that the reciprocal influences of the Cold War and American civil rights activity would be self-evident. Perhaps, but Dudziak's book is full of surprises and details how galling the "American Dilemma" was to U.S. foreign policy-makers and various presidents and how each responded to the concerns of African, Asian, American, and European countries regarding the United States civil rights struggle over several decades. Why was civil rights legislation important to American foreign policy? How was Eisenhower's response to school desegregation in Little Rock influenced by foreign perceptions? How did the international attention to civil rights activity affect John Kennedy's domestic policies? Why was the State Department so concerned about Asian and African criticisms of the United States' record on civil rights? How was the Civil Rights Act of 1965 viewed by the international community? How did the views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X affect United States foreign policy efforts? Was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to an American activist also an international signal that worried a president and the State Department? These questions and many more are answered by Dudziak.
Dudziak deserves recognition and commendations for clearly demonstrating that the United States civil rights movement had a global as well as a national impact on America's foreign policy efforts and placed the United States squarely between the demands of a persecuted domestic minority and the scrutiny of the nations to which it declared itself the leader of human rights, liberty, and freedom in contrast to the totalitarian regimes of communist countries.
This book is well worth reading and an important addition to the growing number of books on the history of race relations that was not, and is not,taught in school. Kudos to Dudziak for an important job well done.
Eye Opening and Important -- A Great Read!.......2001-01-11
Mary Dudziak revisits a familiar chapter in American history--the civil rights movement--but provides readers with a completely new perspective on it.
We know about the work that was being done in the streets. But now Dudziak helps us see the movement through the eyes of America's cold war policymakers. For them, civil rights was a foreign policy problem, and Dudziak helps us see how this explains many of the movements successes and (maybe more important) many of its defeats.
Essential reading for everyone interested in American history, civil rights, constitutional law (yes, even Brown v. Board of Education must be seen in light of this analysis), and foreign policy.
Excellent!.......2001-01-08
This book is fabulous. Clear and articulate, it reads like a story and explores an aspect of the civil rights movement most authors and historians have neglected. It is meticulously researched and filled with information from sources ranging from presidential telephone conversations to news wires to official publications. The civil rights movement cannot be fully understood without reflecting upon the information contained in this book.
Book Description
Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.
Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes peopleâand distributes rights and benefits to themâaccording to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market valueâsuch as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian citiesâare denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.
Book Description
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, America finds itself on the brink of a new racial consciousness. The old, unquestioned confidence with which individuals can be classified (as embodied, for instance, in previous U.S. census categories) has been eroded. In its place are shifting paradigms and new norms for racial identity. Eva Marie Garroutte examines the changing processes of racial identification and their implications by looking specifically at the case of American Indians.
Book Description
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century.
Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and imported contract workers. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the "illegal alien," a new legal and political subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social reality but a legal impossibility--a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal status created new challenges for liberal democratic society and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.
Ngai's analysis is based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
The construction of the illegal immigrant and discriminatory US policies.......2006-12-01
The United States of America is the great melting pot of the world's immigrants, or is it? A white, middle-class, Protestant, European American lifestyle is what the great melting pot of American folklore was truly intended to articulate to the immigrants of the early 20th century. Mai Ngai counters this image of the US as the embracive playground of diverse immigrants and powerfully weaves the tale of how race, nationality, assimilation, and immigration all became interwoven concepts in overtly discriminatory US immigration policy of the mid-20th century in her newest book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. As Mae says, "The telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship has been an enduring narrative of American history, but it has not always been the reality of migrants' desires or their experiences and interactions with American society and state." (5)
Throughout the history of the United States, there has been a clear struggle to define who can gain citizenship in this great nation. Ngai's book attempts not to tackle this debate, but rather how the construction of the illegal immigrant came about because "the promise of citizenship applies only to the legal alien, the lawfully present immigrant. The illegal immigrant has no right to be present, let alone embark on the path to citizenship." (6) Her book begins in 1924 with the adoption of the Johnson-Reed Act which established numeric quotas for immigration from countries across the globe. Prior to the 1920s, immigration was relatively unrestricted as, "the free global movement of labor was essential to economic development in the New World." (17) Ngai points out that it is vital to note that this pre-Johnson Reed Act period did see the exclusion of Chinese laborers who migration disturbed the precious ideas of manifest destiny in the West. She stresses that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was most important because the Supreme Court gave Congress absolute control over immigration as part of foreign relations.
Throughout her book, Ngai focuses on what she believes to be the two biggest consequences of the Johnson-Reed Act, the first being creation of the concept of illegal alien and the second being racially ranking the desirability for certain groups to immigrate to the United States. Perhaps the most powerful quote of the entire book goes, "Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility - a subject barred from citizenship and without rights." (4) Ngai points out that the irony of this newly created status is that the undocumented or illegal immigrants are woven into the economic fabric and labor market of our nation, and yet as they are cheap labor, they are disposable labor who can easily lose their ability to live in even the subhuman conditions in this oh so great nation.
Now that this new quota system was to be implemented, how would the country establish what the quotas would be for the varying countries of the world? Easy, they compared it to the approximate composition of the US population circa 1790, a clearly discriminatory and completely inaccurate and unreliable practice! As the rising popularity of eugenics was during this time period, there had been increased emphasis on census and racial definition and maintaining "racial hygiene". "Euro-American identities turned both on ethnicity - that is, a nationality-based cultural identity that is defined as capable of transformation and assimilation - and on racial identity defined by whiteness." (7) In this construction of the white American, those non-white, browner immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Mexico were deemed less desirable and lower class peoples who subsequently had a lower quota for the number of immigrants allowed. Ngai points to Mexicans as a changing population in regards to the immigration and whiteness policy of time, as originally they were deemed white as the need for immigrant farm workers was needed in the Southwest, but then subsequently deportation and repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans became the common practice.
Ngai wonderfully illustrates how as this period of quota-based immigration restrictions continued, the treatment of Filipinos, Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese worsened to the extent of which no matter how long they or their families had been woven into the fabric of the US, they were viewed and abused as second-class foreigners. Ngai urges you to remember, these were systematic attempts at ranking races, excusing maltreatment, and elevating the political, economic, and racial status of white Euro-Americans, and not just subtle nuances of American policies. As the US struggled with its policies towards the Philippines, practices bounced back and forth from Filipinos being portrayed as being capable of "benevolent assimilation" but at the same time clearly of Asian ancestry and eventually was pushed towards independence and repatriation. As World War II arose, the massive discrimination and maltreatment that the Japanese and Chinese Americans endured only further reinforced their cultural ties to their home countries and therefore they were portrayed as disloyal citizens. In many cases these were actual citizens of the US, native-born patriotic people who had protected rights unlike those of their illegal immigrant counterparts. Ngai reminds us not to forget about the Cold War and the extreme measures that were taken to exclude Chinese people from immigration to the US and even participation as US citizens in order to protect us from evil communist China.
Ngai's phenomenal history comes to a close with the Immigration Act of 1965. Although this act overturned the racialized, discriminatory numeric quota system, it did sadly further extend the reach of numeric restrictions. For anyone who believes that racial hierarchy as part of US policy is a thing of the ancient past, for anyone who believes that African-Americans and their struggles for civil rights were the only systematically discriminated against population in recent US history, this is the book for you! Sit back and relax as Ngai takes you through this tremendously researched sensational tale of the United States and the construction of the illegal immigrant.
This book makes me want to hop the border to Canada.......2005-11-20
This book is truly awful. I don't know what her publisher was thinking by letting this book get out. The tone: Nasal. The language: Sociological jargon. The argument: Garbage. Save a tree and find something better.
Reframing immigration history.......2005-11-03
Mae Ngai's ambitious book compels historians and general readers alike to critically reassess traditional understandings of and approaches to U.S. immigration. Much of the histories on U.S. immigration and immigration policies have told a similar tale. The United States, the narrative goes, has been tainted by a long history of exclusion, a blight on the nation's democratic tradition that was only recently removed with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Such a narrative not only reaffirms the myth of American universalism, but also consistently fails to produce any new critical knowledge about U.S. immigration and U.S. history. Impossible Subjects differs from these other works of immigration history in this important respect: it proceeds with the conviction that the United States was never a "nation of immigrants."
Ngai examines the era between 1924 and 1965, an unconventional periodization in immigration history that situates the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act (usually signifying the end of one regime) at the beginning of her study, and the Immigration Act of 1965 (usually signifying the beginning of another) at the end. Beyond simply filling a historiographical gap in immigration history, the focus on this period of immigration restriction enables a reevaluation of U.S. immigration laws, and more broadly of U.S history, on several levels. First, it demonstrates that restrictionist policies did not merely function as a tool for exclusion, but more, it created-through a racial and geographical remapping of the nation-new categories and concepts deeply implicated in race that defined the spaces and limits of national inclusion. Second, these categories and concepts, most notably "illegal aliens" and "national origins," are not natural or fixed conditions and markers, but are the product of positive law that, when scrutinized, reveal the ways in which its uses have shaped and defined the United States in the twentieth century, particularly its ideas and practices about race, citizenship, and the nation-state. Finally, this periodization allows for a reconfiguration of immigration history beyond a nationalist framework. By suggesting that the making of modern America rested on the exclusion of nonwhites from the geographical and ideological borders of the nation during this regime of restriction, the book argues against the normative telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship as the defining narrative of American history, a narrative that is confined to the nation-state and that invariably reproduces American exceptionalism.
By charting the historical origins of the "illegal alien" and the genealogy of immigration laws that have consistently reproduced it, Ngai has ultimately written a stunning history that goes far beyond narrating the history of U.S. immigration restriction. It is a book that deserves to be read widely.
The legally constructed "illegal aliens".......2004-07-04
IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS, written by Mae Ngai, is the best of recent books on the 20th-century American history of immigration. She reveals that the problem of "illegal immigrants," which has been regarded as one of the most serious problems since the late 20th century, is indeed a legal construction. According to the author, immigrants from Mexico were drawn into the U.S. Southeast because the Southeast political economy, especially agri-business, raised need for the massive wave of low-wage immigrant workers and at the same time defined them as the racially "foreign" people who were rendered alien to America, which was defined as the nation of Caucasians. What enabled the American Government and people to attach racialized foreignness to the Mexican immigrants (and, inevitably, American citizens of Mexican origin) were Immigration Acts, border policing, and discriminatory control of visas.
Mae Ngai argues that positive laws concerning immigration policy have constructed the category of "illegal aliens" from Mexico, and the implementation of the laws by Border Patrols and INS has reinforced the labeling of racially alien immigrants. She bases her analysis on the critical legal theory which suggests that laws constitute social formations. Her usage of the new legal theory in her inquiry into the American immigration history is highly excellent and persuasive.
The historical analysis of the immigration problems in this book seems to be applicable to other countries' history. For example, Ngai's insight shall give light to the recent Japanese conservative media discourses on the "illegal migrants" from China, South Korea, and Latin American nations which describe the undocumented migrant workers as illegal, criminal and, in case of women, prostitutes.
I would have dedicate five stars to this book if its text were easier to read (it is possible that I felt this book's text not very easy to read because I am not of a native-English tongue).
Book Description
As World War II drew to a close and the world awakened to the horrors wrought by white supremacists in Nazi Germany, the NAACP and African-American leaders sensed an opportunity to launch an offensive against the conditions of segregation and inequality in the United States. The "prize" they sought was not civil rights, but human rights. Only the human rights lexicon, shaped by the Holocaust and articulated by the United Nations, contained the language and the moral power to address not only the political and legal inequality but also the education, health care, housing, and employment needs that haunted the black community. The NAACP understood this and wielded its influence and resources to take its human rights agenda before the United Nations. But the onset of the Cold War and rising anti-communism allowed powerful southerners to cast those rights as Soviet-inspired and a threat to the American "ways of life." Enemies and friends excoriated the movement, and the NAACP retreated to a narrow civil rights agenda that was easier to maintain politically. Thus the Civil Rights Movement was launched with neither the language nor the mission it needed to truly achieve black equality. Carol Anderson is the recipient of major grants from the Ford Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and numerous awards for excellence in teaching. Her scholarly interests are 20th century American, African-American, and diplomatic history, and the impact of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy on the struggle for black equality in particular. Her publications include "From Hope to Disillusion published in Diplomatic History and reprinted in The African-American Voice in U.S. Foreign Policy.
Customer Reviews:
The author IS the prize........2006-08-03
Carol's book is an excellent insight into how the struggle for human rights was hampered by the motives of so many players who ultimately brought the force of human rights in the United Nations from a roar to a soft meow. Her voice is fresh and very well informed. I will also admit to a personal bias because I heard Carol speak at the Truman Presidential Library in July of 2006 and it was the passion of her presentation that brought me to read her book. In my opinion, her writing is a close second to seeing her speak in person and I am thankful for having had such a privelege. I look forward to reading her next books and being her personal groupie- Carol Anderson ROCKS!
Understanding Race in the U.S. today.......2004-02-18
This book was incredible for several reasons. As an African American, I struggle to understand why so little has changed in relations between blacks and whites in this country and more importantly, why there seems to be a deeply entrenched systemic barrier to real progress (economic, political, social and cultural) for many African Americans. Eyes off the Prize highlights the enormous difference between struggling for human rights versus concentrating solely on civil rights-I'd never really thought about the fact that those aren't the same struggles.
Further, while it is obvious that the author did a tremendous amount of research, this book is a real "page turner." Much of what I learned by reading this book was far beyond what I've known previously and the book dispelled many of the myths surrounding civil rights leaders in this country. Lastly, the conclusions made sense to me-I didn't feel like I was reading a distant, scholarly book-I felt as though the author brought me along on an incredible journey of the African American struggle for dignity and fairness in a hostile land.
I really enjoyed the book and gave it to all my friends and family for Christmas last year.
For full disclosure, I went to high school with the author--that's why I was curious about the book--but it is certainly not why I read every word!
The Illusion of Substantive Racial Progress.......2003-06-21
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a colleague of Carol Anderson's at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Yet, notwithstanding our friendship, I can objectively state that EYES OFF THE PRIZE is must reading for individuals seeking insights as to why America's racial problems persist.
More than a generation after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a disproportionate number of African Americans are undereducated, unemployed (or underemployed), and incarcerated. Anderson's exhaustively researched book persuasively suggests that the reason for continuing black inequality is that, during the crucial period covered in her book, African Americans changed (and were forced
to change) their focus from achieving HUMAN RIGHTS to achieving CIVIL RIGHTS.
This is not a book for the faint-of-heart. Anderson pulls no punches in telling her story of how African Americans lost sight of the "prize" of human rights. No doubt, some will find her analysis at times to be quite provocative. Yet, as a good historian, Anderson has not written a book to make people
feel good. She has written a book to make people think.
Book Description
This unique volume explores such themes as the political and economic forces that cause immigration; the alienation and uprootedness that often follow relocation; and the difficult questions of citizenship and assimilation.
Customer Reviews:
An interesting perspective on being American.......2002-05-02
The content of this book is derived primarily from first-person narratives and other primary source historical documents. These writings offer the reader a great deal to consider when thinking about the role of Americans in history. The narratives are moving and thought provoking, and really force the reader to reconsider what it really means to be an American. Questions abound about why we aren't told these stories in school, particularly regarding the role this country has played in the lives of other nations. A real "based on a true story" book!
Book Description
This book focuses on gender and civic membership in American constitutional politics from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment through Second Wave Feminism. It examines how American civic membership is gendered, and how the terms of civic membership available to men and women shape their political identities, aspirations, and behavior. The book also explores the dynamics of American constitutional development through a focus on civic membership—a legal and political construct at the heart of the constitutional order.
This is a book about gender politics and constitutional development, and about what each of these can tell us about the other. It considers the options and choices faced by women’s rights activists in the United States as they voiced their claims for civic inclusion from Reconstruction through Second Wave Feminism, and it makes evident the limits of liberal citizenship for women.
Books:
- History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Books Index
Books Home
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