TEXAS POLITICS TODAY encourages critical thinking and civic participation with ideas, essays, and questions related to Texas politics, presented from different viewpoints. MindTap(TM) for Texas Politics-Cengage Learning's fully online learning solution-is automatically included with the book.
TEXAS POLITICS TODAY encourages critical thinking and civic participation with ideas, essays, and questions related to Texas politics, presented from different viewpoints. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.
Texas pride, like everything else in the state, is larger than life. So, too, perhaps, are the state’s challenges. Lone Star Tarnished approaches public policy in the nation’s most populous "red state" from historical, comparative, and critical perspectives. The historical perspective provides the scope for asking how various policy domains have developed in Texas history, regularly reaching back to the state’s founding and with substantial data for the period 1950 to the present. In each chapter, Cal Jillson compares Texas public policy choices and results with those of other states and the United States in general. Finally, the critical perspective allows us to question the balance of benefits and costs attendant to what is often referred to as "the Texas way" or "the Texas model." Jillson delves deeply into seven substantive policy chapters, covering the most important policy areas in which state governments are active. Through his lively and lucid prose, students are well equipped to analyze how Texas has done and is doing compared to selected states and the national average over time and today. Readers will also come away with the necessary tools to assess the many claims of Texas’s exceptionalism.
Never before has the story been told of the dramatic turning point when Ronald Reagan found his voice as a presidential contender and overcame the Republican establishment. Reagan's Comeback is the story of how one state, one man, and one month changed national politics forever. Chronicling how Reagan’s political career nearly ended, this turnabout story is told by those who made it happen: campaign volunteers, financiers, political activists, and media observers. Positioning Reagan to win in 1980, the birth of the “Reagan Democrat” transformed Texas from Democratic stronghold to the reliably Republican powerhouse it is today, since producing five Republican presidential candidates and two Republican presidents, with more to follow. Reagan’s rise and victory against Ford in 1976 mirrors the current climate between the Tea Party movement and the GOP. With the 2012 election in sight, there is no better time to finally tell the whole story of how the Reagan Revolution found its launching point.
This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. Updated in its 12th edition, Texas Government introduces the essentials of Texas government and its often colorful politics in a way that any reader can understand. With an emphasis on public policy and active learning, this popular and highly accessible textcontains an abundance of useful study aids and exercises in every chapter and a lively, straightforward writing style. Showing readers the impact that government has on their lives, this insightful and sometimes humorous critique of Texas government engages readers in the course material and encourages them to become active participants in their government. Note: MyPoliSciLab does not come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MyPoliSciLab, please visit: www.mypoliscilab.com or you can purchase a valuepack of the text + MyPoliSciLab (at no additional cost): ValuePack ISBN-10: 0205908810 / ValuePack ISBN-13: 9780205908813
The politics of food is changing fast. In rich countries, obesity is now a more serious problem than hunger. Consumers once satisfied with cheap and convenient food now want food that is also safe, nutritious, fresh, and grown by local farmers using fewer chemicals. Heavily subsidized and underregulated commercial farmers are facing stronger push back from environmentalists and consumer activists, and food companies are under the microscope. Meanwhile, agricultural success in Asia has spurred income growth and dietary enrichment, but agricultural failure in Africa has left one-third of all citizens undernourished - and the international markets that link these diverse regions together are subject to sudden disruption. Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know® carefully examines and explains the most important issues on today's global food landscape, including international food prices, famines, chronic hunger, the Malthusian race between food production and population growth, international food aid, "green revolution" farming, obesity, farm subsidies and trade, agriculture and the environment, agribusiness, supermarkets, food safety, fast food, slow food, organic food, local food, and genetically engineered food. Politics in each of these areas has become polarized over the past decade by conflicting claims and accusations from advocates on all sides. Paarlberg's book maps this contested terrain, challenging myths and critiquing more than a few of today's fashionable beliefs about farming and food. For those ready to have their thinking about food politics informed and also challenged, this is the book to read. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself.Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry.Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.
A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template. Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights. Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.
Approaching the politics of the Lone Star State from historical, developmental, and analytical perspectives, Cal Jillson's text avoids partisanship, ideology, and gimmicks to provide the most comprehensive, readable, and accurate brief description of Texas politics available today. Throughout the book students are encouraged to connect the origins and development of government and politics in Texas—from the Texas Constitution, to party competition, to the role and powers of the Governor—to its current day practice and the alternatives possible through change and reform. This text will allow teachers to share with their students the evolution of Texas politics, where we stand today, and where we are headed. Texas Politics is one of the briefest and most affordable texts on the market, yet it offers instructors and students an unmatched range of pedagogical aids and tools. Each chapter opens with a number of focus questions to orient readers to the learning objectives and concludes with a Chapter Summary, a list of Key Terms, Suggested Readings, and Web Resources. Key Terms are bolded in the text, listed at the end of the chapter, and included in a Glossary at the end of the book. Each chapter presents several photos and numerous tables and figures to highlight the major ideas, issues, individuals, and institutions discussed. Each chapter also contains a Let’s Compare feature, comparing selected states to Texas on various dimensions.