Mexican-American civil rights and labor activist Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) comes to life in this vivid portrait of the charismatic and influential fighter who boycotted supermarkets and took on corporations, the government, and the powerful Teamsters Union. Jacques E. Levy gained unprecedented access to Chavez and the United Farm Workers in writing this account of one of the most successful labor movements in history-which also serves as a guidebook for social and political change.
"As the landmark Roe v. Wade decision reaches its 40th anniversary, abortion remains a polarizing topic on America's legal and political landscape. Blending history, culture, and law, Before Roe v. Wade eplores the roots of the conflict, recovering through original documents and first-hand accounts the voices on both sides that helped shape the climate in which the Supreme Court ruled. Originally published in 2010, this new edition includes a new Afterword that explores what the history of conflict before Roe teaches us about the abortion conflict we live with today. Examining the role of social movements and political parties, the authors cast new light on a pivotal chapter in American history and suggest how Roe v. Wade, the case, because Roe v. Wade, the symbol. "--Cover, p. 4.
What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.
The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the reinvigorated Civil Rights Movement spurred American colleges and universities by the early 1960s to a good-faith effort to achieve racial integration. To overcome the shortage of black students who were prepared for elite academic programs, universities such as Yale began to admit substantial numbers of under-qualified black students. Disaster ensued. More than a third of these students dropped out in the first year and those who remained were often embittered by the experience. They turned to each other for support and found inspiration in black nationalism. What emerged by the late sixties were radical and sometimes militant black groups on campus, rejecting the ideal of racial integration and voicing a new separatist ethic. On campus after campus, black separatists won concessions from administrators who were afraid of further alienating blacks. The pattern of college administrators rolling over to black separatist demands came to dominate much of American higher education. The old integrationist ideal has been sacrificed almost entirely. Instead of offering opportunities for students to mix freely with students of dissimilar backgrounds, colleges promote ethnic enclaves, stoke racial resentment, and build organizational structures on the basis of group grievance.Neo-segregation is the voluntary racial segregation of students, aided by college institutions, into racially exclusive housing and common spaces, orientation and commencement ceremonies, student associations, scholarships, and classes. This case study of Yale University is part of a larger project from the National Association of Scholars, Separate but Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in American Higher Education. The Yale case study explains: 1) Yale's attempt to deal with the academic deficiencies of black students alternately by segregating them into remedial programs or mainstreaming them into programs they couldn't handle. 2) The readiness of black students to adopt race nationalist ideas and theatrics in preference to the ideals of racial integration. 3) Yale's willingness to buy temporary racial peace on campus by conceding to segregationist demands, even when this meant sacrificing academic standards and principles of equal application of rules regardless of race.
