Title: Silence at Boalt Hall: the dismantling of affirmative action 
Author: Guerrero, Andrea 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Sociology | African American Studies | Asian American Studies | Politics | Gender Studies | Law | Politics | Politics
Publisher's Description: In 1995, in a marked reversal of progress in the march toward racial equity, the Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action at the University of California. One year later the electorate voted to do the same across the state of California. Silence at Boalt Hall is the thirty-year story of students, faculty, and administrators struggling with the politics of race in higher education at U.C. Berkeley's prestigious law school - one of the first institutions to implement affirmative action policies and one of the first to be forced to remove them. Andrea Guerrero is a member of the last class of students admitted to Boalt Hall under the affirmative action policies. Her informed and passionate journalistic account provides an insider's view into one of the most pivotal and controversial issues of our time: racial diversity in higher education. Guerrero relates the stories of those who benefited from affirmative action and those who suffered from its removal. She shows how the "race-blind" admission policies at Boalt have been far from race-neutral and how the voices of underrepresented minority students have largely disappeared. A hushed silence - the silence of students, faculty, and administrators unwilling and unable to discuss the difficult issues of race - now hangs over Boalt and many institutions like it, Guerrero claims. As the legal and sociopolitical battles over affirmative action continue on a number of consequential fronts, this book provides a rich and engrossing perspective on many facets of this crucial question.   [brief]
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Title: The longest night: polemics and perspectives on election 2000 
Author: Jacobson, Arthur J
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Social and Political Thought | Law
Publisher's Description: The American presidential election of 2000 was perhaps the most remarkable, and in many ways the most unsettling, that the country has yet experienced. The millennial election raised fundamental questions not only about American democracy, but also about the nation's constitution and about the legitimate role of American courts, state and federal, and in particular about the United States Supreme Court. The Longest Night presents a lively and informed reaction to the legal aftermath of the election by the most prominent experts on the subject. With a balance of opposing views - including those of some of the most distinguished foreign commentators writing on the subject today - the contributors present an unusual breadth of perspectives in addressing the judicial, institutional, and political questions involved in the disputed election. Their commentaries bring the confusion and frenzy of the event into clear focus and lay the groundwork for an essential public debate that is sure to continue well into the future. The Longest Night contains a thorough chronology of the events in Florida, a detailed account of the institutional structure of American presidential elections, a series of analyses both criticizing and defending the decisions in Bush v. Gore, American perspectives on the Florida struggle and America's electoral system, and a debate on maintaining or reforming the electoral college. The authors include participants in the legal and political battles surrounding the Florida election, foreigners charged with monitoring and supervising elections, and scholars from many disciplines specializing in constitutionalism, democracy, and American election law. Contributors   [brief]
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Title: Legislative leviathan: party government in the House
Author: Cox, Gary W
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | American Studies
Publisher's Description: This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of "legislative cartel." These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership.Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work.This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.   [brief]
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Title: A shield in space?: technology, politics, and the strategic defense initiative: how the Reagan Administration set out to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" and succumbed to the fallacy of the last move 
Author: Lakoff, Sanford A
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: In March 1983, Ronald Reagan made one of the most controversial announcements of his presidency when he called on the nation's scientists and engineers to develop a defensive shield so impenetrable as to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." This book provides the first comprehensive review and evaluation of the project launched to implement that announcement - the project officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative and more popularly as "Star Wars." The authors - a political scientist and a physicist who has played a key role in developing military technologies - provide an intriguing account of how political rather than technical judgment led to the initial decision, and they explain the technical issues in terms accessible to nonspecialists. Judging SDI as "a classic example of misplaced faith in the promise of technological salvation," the authors examine the implications of the program for strategy, arms control, the unity of the Western alliance, its prospective economic impact, and the way the American political process has dealt with all these issues.   [brief]
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Title: Political protest and cultural revolution: nonviolent direct action in the 1970s and 1980s
Author: Epstein, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Politics | American Studies | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From her perspective as both participant and observer, Barbara Epstein examines the nonviolent direct action movement which, inspired by the civil rights movement, flourished in the United States from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Disenchanted with the politics of both the mainstream and the organized left, and deeply committed to forging communities based on shared values, activists in this movement developed a fresh, philosophy and style of politics that shaped the thinking of a new generation of activists. Driven by a vision of an ecologically balanced, nonviolent, egalitarian society, they engaged in political action through affinity groups, made decisions by consensus, and practiced mass civil disobedience.The nonviolent direct action movement galvanized originally in opposition to nuclear power, with the Clamshell Alliance in New England and then the Abalone Alliance in California leading the way. Its influence soon spread to other activist movements - for peace, non-intervention, ecological preservation, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights.Epstein joined the San Francisco Bay Area's Livermore Action Group to protest the arms race and found herself in jail along with a thousand other activists for blocking the road in front of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. She argues that to gain a real understanding of the direct action movement it is necessary to view it from the inside. For with its aim to base society as a whole on principles of egalitarianism and nonviolence, the movement sought to turn political protest into cultural revolution.   [brief]
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Title: One step from the White House: the rise and fall of Senator William F. Knowland 
Author: Montgomery, Gayle B 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | Autobiographies and Biographies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: During the Cold War years of the 1950s, William F. Knowland was one of the most important figures in American politics. As the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, the wealthy California newspaper heir was recognized and respected by millions. His influence with President Eisenhower led to Earl Warren's appointment as chief justice, and Knowland set in motion a U.S.-China policy that remains part of our international direction today. Yet he committed suicide in 1974, following a personal decline that included political humiliation, a ruined marriage, and the loss of his family fortune.This is the first full-scale biography of Bill Knowland, written by two journalists who came to know him after he left Washington in 1958. Gayle B. Montgomery was a political editor at the Oakland Tribune , the newspaper owned by Knowland's father, the power-wielding Joseph R. Knowland. James W. Johnson was a Tribune editorial writer. Both men worked with Knowland when he returned to the newspaper after giving up his Senate seat in a failed bid to become governor of California. Knowland lost the governorship race to Edmund G. (Pat) Brown; had he won, many observers felt Knowland would have had a clear shot at the White House.This is a book not only about Mr. Republican, but also one that illuminates the strengths and deficiencies of Republican party politics during the years when the party was at its zenith. In portraying the life of Bill Knowland, the authors cast a glaring light both on the machinations of political power and on the Republican establishment's aspirations in the Warren-Eisenhower era.   [brief]
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Title: The Myth of the Independent voter 
Author: Keith, Bruce E
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Few events in American politics over the past two decades have generated more attention than the increasing number of voters calling themselves Independent. By the early 1970s Independents outnumbered Republicans, according to many eminent experts on voting behavior. Yet the authors of this incisive new commentary on American politics claim that most of this widespread speculation on declining party affiliation is simply wrong. They contend that most so-called Independents lean strongly toward one of the two parties and resemble - in all important respects - either Democrats or Republicans. Contrary to expert opinion, only a small segment of voters are truly "independent" of either major party.Based on the most up-to-date 1990 data, The Myth of the Independent Voter provides a roadmap of the political arena for the general reader and scholar alike. Debunking conventional wisdom about voting patterns and allaying recent concerns about electoral stability and possible third party movements, the authors uncover faulty polling practices that have resulted in a skewed sense of the American voting population.Demonstrating that most of what has been written about Independents for more than thirty years is myth, this challenging book offers a trenchant new understanding of the party system, voting behavior, and public opinion.   [brief]
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Title: The rise of a party-state in Kenya: from "Harambee" to "Nyayo!" 
Author: Widner, Jennifer A
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Although Kenya is often considered an African success story, its political climate became increasingly repressive under its second president, Daniel arap Moi. Widner charts the transformation of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) from a weak, loosely organized political party under Jomo Kenyatta into an arm of the president's office, with "watchdog" youth wings and strong surveillance and control functions, under Moi. She suggests that single-party systems have an inherent tendency to become "party-states," or single-party regimes in which the head of state uses the party as a means of control. The speed and extent of these changes depend on the countervailing power of independent interest groups, such as business associations, farmers, or professionals. Widner's study offers important insights into the dynamics of party systems in Africa.   [brief]
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Title: By popular demand: revitalizing representative democracy through deliberative elections 
Author: Gastil, John
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Politics
Publisher's Description: John Gastil challenges conventional assumptions about public opinion, elections, and political expression in this persuasive treatise on how to revitalize the system of representative democracy in the United States. Gastil argues that American citizens have difficulty developing clear policy interests, seldom reject unrepresentative public officials, and lack a strong public voice. Our growing awareness of a flawed electoral system is causing increased public cynicism and apathy. The most popular reforms, however, will neither restore public trust nor improve representation. Term limits and campaign finance reforms will increase turnover, but they provide no mechanism for improved deliberation and accountability. Building on the success of citizen juries and deliberative polling, Gastil proposes improving our current process by convening randomly selected panels of citizens to deliberate for several days on ballot measures and candidates. Voters would learn about the judgments of these citizen panels through voting guides and possibly information printed on official ballots. The result would be a more representative gov-ernment and a less cynical public. America has a long history of experimentation with electoral systems, and the proposals in By Popular Demand merit serious consideration and debate.   [brief]
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Title: From friend to comrade: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927
Author: Van de Ven, Hans J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | Politics
Publisher's Description: Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, From Friend to Comrade demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927.Hans J. van de Ven's study is based on party documents of the 1920s that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists. He analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.   [brief]
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Title: No safe place: toxic waste, leukemia, and community action
Author: Brown, Phil
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ecology | Medicine | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Toxic waste, contaminated water, cancer clusters - these phrases suggest deception and irresponsibility. But more significantly, they are watchwords for a growing struggle between communities, corporations, and government. In No Safe Place , sociologists, public policy professionals, and activists will learn how residents of Woburn, Massachusetts discovered a childhood leukemia cluster and eventually sued two corporate giants. Their story gives rise to questions important to any concerned citizen: What kind of government regulatory action can control pollution? Just how effective can the recent upsurge of popular participation in science and technology be? Phil Brown, a medical sociologist, and Edwin Mikkelsen, psychiatric consultant to the plaintiffs, look at the Woburn experience in light of similar cases, such as Love Canal, in order to show that toxic waste contamination reveals fundamental flaws in the corporate, governmental, and scientific spheres.The authors strike a humane, constructive note amidst chilling odds, advocating extensive lay involvement based on the Woburn model of civic action. Finally, they propose a safe policy for toxic wastes and governmental/corporate responsibility. Woburn, the authors predict, will become a code word for environmental struggles.   [brief]
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Title: The color of gender: reimaging democracy 
Author: Eisenstein, Zillah R
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Gender Studies | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative volume, Zillah Eisenstein uncovers the hidden sexual and racial politics of the past decade. Beginning where she left off in her award-winning book The Female Body and the Law , Eisenstein takes the reader on a feminist-inspired road trip, traveling from the thicket of recent abortion decisions to the revolutions of 1989 to the murky chambers of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Along the way, she enunciates a wholly original conception of individual privacy and sexual rights.Eisenstein brings a range of topics to her discussion: the L.A. riots, crack babies, Murphy Brown, political correctness, the 1992 presidential election, the Gulf War. She seeks to redirect our thinking about democracy away from universal conceptions that mask racial and gender oppression to the specific realities of women and people of color. A respect for multiple differences - as represented in the needs of women of color and their bodies - is, she says, essential to inclusive universal rights. Reproductive freedoms and sexual equality, not abstract notions of civil liberties, provide the wellsprings of a meaningful democratic life. Using this perspective to evaluate the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, Eisenstein finds that the separation between their ideals and the reality of the market system illustrates the failings of democratic theory, especially for women.Eisenstein's controversial arguments will provoke a rethinking of what race and gender mean today.   [brief]
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Title: Saving the earth: the history of a middle-class millenarian movement 
Author: Gelber, Steven M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Christianity
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Title: I, candidate for governor: and how I got licked
Author: Sinclair, Upton 1878-1968
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History | Autobiography | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Here, reprinted for the first time since its original publication, is muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair's lively, caustic account of the 1934 election campaign that turned California upside down and almost won him the governor's mansion.Using his "End Poverty in California" movement (more commonly called EPIC) as a springboard, Sinclair ran for governor as a Democrat, equipped with a bold plan to end the Depression in California by taking over idle land and factories and turning them into cooperative ventures for the unemployed. To his surprise, thousands rallied to the idea, converting what he had assumed would be another of his utopian schemes into a mass political movement of extraordinary dimensions. With a loosely knit organization of hundreds of local EPIC clubs, Sinclair overwhelmed the moderate Democratic opposition to capture the primary election. When it came to the general election, however, his opposition employed highly effective campaign tactics: overwhelming media hostility, vicious red-baiting and voter intimidation, high-priced dirty tricks. The result was a resounding defeat in November. I, Candidate tells the story of Sinclair's campaign while also capturing the turbulent political mood of the 1930s. Employing his trademark muckraking style, Sinclair exposes the conspiracies of power that ensured big-money control over the media and other powerful institutions.   [brief]
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Title: Republican Beijing: the city and its histories
Author: Dong, Madeleine Yue 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.   [brief]
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Title: Legitimate differences: interpretation in the abortion controversy and other public debates 
Author: Warnke, Georgia
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Legitimate Differences challenges the usual portrayal of current debates over thorny social issues including abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogate mothering as moral debates. How can it be said that our debates oppose principles of life to those of liberty, principles of liberty to those of equality, principles of equality to those of fairness, and principles of fairness to those of integrity, when we as Americans share all these principles?Debates over such issues are not, Georgia Warnke argues, moral debates over which principles we should adopt. Rather, they are interpretive debates over the meanings of principles we already possess. Warnke traces the structure of these debates with reference to the work of Jane Austen, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Bernard Williams. In separate chapters on surrogate mothering, affirmative action, abortion, and pornography she articulates new understandings of the meanings of some of our principles and shows the equal legitimacy of some different interpretations of the meanings of others. Finally, she suggests that the orientation of American public policy ought to be directed less at finding single canonical interpretations of our principles than at accommodating different legitimate understandings of them. The perspective offered by Legitimate Differences should have a significantly beneficial effect on public discussions.   [brief]
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Title: From revolutionary cadres to party technocrats in socialist China 
Author: Lee, Hong Yung 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | China
Publisher's Description: Using a wide variety of sources previously unavailable, Hong Yung Lee offers for the first time a theoretical and historical perspective on China's ruling elite, examining their politics and the bureaucratic system in which they participate. He traces the evolution of these cadres from the guerrilla fighters who first joined the communist movement and founded the new regime in 1949 to the technocratic specialists who wield power today.In the revolution the Communist leaders built a peasant-based party organization whose members were largely recruited from uneducated poor peasants and hired laborers. Even after they became the founders of a new regime, their rural orientation and revolutionary experiences continued to affect the political process.Lee shows that the requirements of modernization have compelled the state to replace the revolutionary cadres with bureaucratic technocrats. Selected from the postliberation generation, the new leaders are more committed to problem-solving than to socialism. Despite uncertainties in the immediate future, this elite transformation signifies an end to modern China's revolutionary era. Lee argues that it seems only a matter of time before China will have a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime led by technocrats possessing a managerial perspective and a pragmatic economic orientation.   [brief]
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Title: Gender differences at work: women and men in nontraditional occupations
Author: Williams, Christine L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Nurses and marines epitomize accepted definitions of femininity and masculinity. Using ethnographic research and provocative in-depth interviews, Christine Williams argues that our popular stereotypes of individuals in nontraditional occupations - male nurses and female marines for example - are ent . . . [more]
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Title: From the royal to the republican body: incorporating the political in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France 
Author: Melzer, Sara E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | European Literature | Cinema and Performance Arts | Politics
Publisher's Description: In this innovative volume, leading scholars examine the role of the body as a primary site of political signification in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Some essays focus on the sacralization of the king's body through a gendered textual and visual rhetoric. Others show how the monarchy mastered subjects' minds by disciplining the body through dance, music, drama, art, and social rituals. The last essays in the volume focus on the unmaking of the king's body and the substitution of a new, republican body. Throughout, the authors explore how race and gender shaped the body politic under the Bourbons and during the Revolution. This compelling study expands our conception of state power and demonstrates that seemingly apolitical activities like the performing arts, dress and ritual, contribute to the state's hegemony. From the Royal to the Republican Body will be an essential resource for students and scholars of history, literature, music, dance and performance studies, gender studies, art history, and political theory.   [brief]
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Title: The activist's handbook: a primer for the 1990s and beyond
Author: Shaw, Randy 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | California and the West | Urban Studies | American Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The Activist's Handbook is a hard-hitting guide to winning social change in the 1990s. Randy Shaw, attorney and longtime activist for urban issues, shows how positive change can still be accomplished despite an increasingly grim political order, if activists employ the strategies set forth in this desperately needed primer.Inspiring "fear and loathing" in politicians, building diverse coalitions, and harnessing the media, the courts, and the electoral process to one's cause are only some of the key tactics Shaw advocates and explains. Central to all social-change activism, Shaw shows, is being proactive: rather than simply reacting to right-wing proposals, activists must develop an agenda and focus their resources on achieving it. The Activist's Handbook details the impact of specific strategies on campaigns across the country: battles over homelessness, the environment, AIDS policies, neighborhood preservation, and school reform among others. Though activist groups can have widely different aims, similar tactics are shown to produce success.Further, the book offers a sophisticated analysis of the American power structure by someone on the front lines. In showing how people can and must make a difference at both local and national levels, this is an indispensable guide not only for activists, but for everyone interested in the future of progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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