Baker provides the first comprehensive analysis of the history and structure of the U.S. Attorney General. She documents how attorneys general have differed in their responses, seeing themselves as either advocates of the president or neutral expounders of the law. She focuses in particular on Robert Kennedy, Edwin Meese, Elliot Richardson, Griffin Bell, Robert Jackson, Edward Levi, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Roger Taney.
The 22 essays in this volume discuss contemporary trends in democratization, nationalism, political socialization, authoritarianism, and other topics such as conflicting loyalties in Europe and the US. Since there are seven different countries represented among the authors who have contributed to this volume, they have produced a unique, international, comparative and cross-national research perspective on significant issues in contemporary politics, socialization, and education. This book provides an interesting collection of empirical research findings and scholarly syntheses of quantitative and qualitative research efforts. Major emphasis in these studies is on the impact of socialization forces and political socialization of youth from various sources. Some research studies are quasi-longitudinal, treating different regions in Europe, and emphasizing significant themes such as racism, intolerance, xenophobia, the European Union, and democratic political philosophy and citizenship.
The final chapter relates the evolution of these conflicting loyalties to the global weakening of the nation-state, and distinguishes what is particular to the Soviet state and its demise from more significant questions of analytical importance posed by the collapse of a major contemporary multi-national state.
James L. Gelvin brings a new and distinctive perspective to the perennially fascinating topic of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. Unlike previous historians who have focused on the activities and ideas of a small group of elites, Gelvin details the role played by non-elites in nationalist politics during the early part of the twentieth century. Drawing from previously untapped sources, he documents the appearance of a new form of political organization—the popular committee—that sprang up in cities and villages throughout greater Syria in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. These committees empowered a new type of nationalist leadership, made nationalist politics a mass phenomenon for the first time, and articulated a view of nation and nationalism that continues to inform the politics of the region today. Gelvin does more than recount an episode in the history of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. His examination of leaflets, graffiti, speeches, rumors, and editorials offers fresh insights into the symbolic construction of national communities. His analysis of ceremonies—national celebrations, demonstrations, theater—contributes to our understanding of the emergence of mass politics. By situating his study within a broader historical context, Gelvin has written a book that will be of interest to all who wish to understand nationalism in the region and beyond.
During the American Civil War, Maryland did not join the Confederacy but nonetheless possessed divided loyalties and sentiments. These divisions came to a head in the years that followed the war. In Loyalty on the Line, David K. Graham argues that Maryland did not adopt a unified postbellum identity and that the state remained divided, with some identifying with the state’s Unionist efforts and others maintaining a connection to the Confederacy and its defeated cause. Depictions of Civil War Maryland, both inside and outside the state, hinged on interpretations of the state’s loyalty. The contested Civil War memories of Maryland not only mirror a much larger national struggle and debate but also reflect a conflict that is more intense and vitriolic than that in the larger national narrative. The close proximity of conflicting Civil War memories within the state contributed to a perpetual contestation. In addition, those outside the state also vigorously argued over the place of Maryland in Civil War memory in order to establish its place in the divisive legacy of the war. By using the dynamics interior to Maryland as a lens for viewing the Civil War, Graham shows how divisive the war remained and how central its memory would be to the United States well into the twentieth century.
A previously hidden corner of history reveals that the Palmer family of Alabama named their children after northern Union heroes like Sherman and Grant rather than Confederate favorites such as Jackson and Lee. Margaret M. Storey's welcome study uncovers and explores those Alabamians who, like the Palmers, maintained allegiance to the Union when their state seceded in 1861 - and beyond. Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Storey's extensive, groundbreaking research discloses a socioeconomically diverse group that included slaveholders and nonslaveholders, business people, professionals, farmers, and blacks. Narratives of their wartime experiences, culled by Storey from the papers of the Southern Claims Commission - a federal agency established in 1871 to consider the wartime property damage claims of loyal white and black southerners - indicate in astonishingly rich detail the chaos and destruction that occurred on the southern home front. Alabama. And by treating the years 1861-1874 as a whole, she clearly connects loyalists' sometimes brutal wartime treatment with their postwar behavior. Ties among kin and neighbors as well as between masters and slaves shaped and sustained unionists' ability to oppose the Confederacy and aid the North. After the war, those same ties fueled loyalists' resistance to Democratic control and gave rise to their demands that only the truly loyal receive authority in the South. By extending the study of unionism into the Deep South, Storey sheds important light on the internal strife of the Confederacy as well as the nature of resistance itself.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the birth of new nation states in the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 'Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans' explores the effects of the Ottoman reform era upon Balkan societies in order to shed much-needed light on the history of this region during the early nation-state period. Focusing on developments which go beyond the over-researched dimension of political or elite discourse, this book offers insights into the complex ways in which Balkan societies were transformed from different regional viewpoints - focusing o.
There is widespread concern today about the “radicalization” of young muslim men, and the deprived areas of Western cities are believed to have become breeding grounds of home-grown extremism. But how do young Muslims growing up in the cities of the West really live? This book takes us beyond the rhetoric and into the housing estates on the outskirts of Paris to meet Adama, Radouane, Hassan, Tarik, Marley, and a shadowy figure whose name suddenly and brutally became known to the world at the time of the Charlie Hebdo shootings: Amédy Coulibaly. Seeing Amédy through the eyes of close friends and other young Muslim men in the neighbourhoods where they grew up, Fabien Truong uncovers a network of competing loyalties and maps the road these youths take to resolve the conflicts they face: becoming Muslim. For these young men, Islam stands, often alone, as a resource, a gateway – as if it were the last route to “escape” without betrayal and to “fight” in a meaningful and noble way. Becoming Muslim does not necessarily lead to the radicalized “other”. It is more like a long-distance race, a powerful reconversion of the self that allows for introspection and change. But it can also lead to a belligerent presentation of the self that transforms a dead-end into a call to arms.
