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: 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 color bind: California's battle to end affirmative action 
Author: Chavez, Lydia 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Public Policy | California and the West
Publisher's Description: The Color Bind tells the story of how Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, two unknown academics, decided to write Proposition 209 in 1992 and thereby set in motion a series of events, far beyond their control, destined to transform the legal, political, and everyday meaning of civil rights for the next generation. Going behind the mass media coverage of the initiative, Lydia Chávez narrates the complex underlying motivations and maneuvering of the people, organizations, and political parties involved in the campaign to end affirmative action in California.For the first time, the role of University of California regent Ward Connerly in the campaign - one largely assigned to public relations - is put into perspective. In the course of the book Chávez also provides a rare behind-the-scenes journalistic account of the complex and fascinating workings of the initiative process. Chávez recreates the post-election climate of 1994, when the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) appeared to be the right-time, right-place vehicle for Governor Pete Wilson and other Republican presidential prospects. President Clinton and the state Democratic Party thought the CCRI would splinter the party and jeopardize the upcoming presidential election. The Republicans, who saw the CCRI as a "wedge issue" to use against the Democrats, found to their surprise that the initiative was much more divisive in their own party.Updating her text to include the most current material, Chávez deftly delineates the interplay of competing interests around the CCRI, and explains why the opposition was unsuccessful in its strategy to fight the initiative. Her analysis probes the momentous - and national - implications of this state initiative in shaping the future of affirmative action in this country.   [brief]
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Title: Manufacturing militance: workers' movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985
Author: Seidman, G
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | African Studies | Labor Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Challenging prevailing theories of development and labor, Gay Seidman's controversial study explores how highly politicized labor movements could arise simultaneously in Brazil and South Africa, two starkly different societies. Beginning with the 1960s, Seidman shows how both authoritarian states promoted specific rapid-industrialization strategies, in the process reshaping the working class and altering relationships between business and the state. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s, workers in these countries challenged social and political repression; by the mid-1980s, they had become major voices in the transition from authoritarian rule.Based in factories and working-class communities, these movements enjoyed broad support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration.In Brazil, Seidman takes us from the shopfloor, where disenfranchized workers organized for better wages and working conditions, to the strikes and protests that spread to local communities. Similar demands for radical change emerged in South Africa, where community groups in black townships joined organized labor in a challenge to minority rule that linked class consciousness to racial oppression. Seidman details the complex dynamics of these militant movements and develops a broad analysis of how newly industrializing countries shape the opportunities for labor to express demands. Her work will be welcomed by those interested in labor studies, social theory, and the politics of newly industrializing regions.   [brief]
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Title: The Free Speech Movement: reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
Author: Cohen, Robert 1955 May. 21-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Gender Studies | United States History | Education
Publisher's Description: This is the authoritative and long-awaited volume on Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, this collection of scholarly articles and personal memoirs illuminates in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The contributors - whose perspectives range from that of FSM leader Mario Savio to University of California president Clark Kerr - -shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown "little Free Speech Movement of 1966."   [brief]
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Title: Echoes of the past, epics of dissent: a South Korean social movement
Author: Abelmann, Nancy
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Politics | Sociology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent , the story of a South Korean social movement, offers a window to a decade of tumultuous social protest in a postcolonial, divided nation. Abelmann brings a dramatic chapter of modern Korean history to life - a period in which farmers, student activists, and organizers joined to protest the corporate ownership of tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 Land Reform.From public sites of protest to backstage meetings and negotiations, from farming villages to university campuses, Abelmann's highly original study explores this movement as a complex process always in the making. Her discussion moves fluently between past and present, local and national, elites and dominated, and urban and rural. Touching on major historical issues, this ethnography of dissent explores contemporary popular nationalism and historical consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Cultures in conflict: social movements and the state in Peru
Author: Stokes, Susan Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Anthropology | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: In this vivid ethnography set in contemporary Peru, Susan Stokes provides a compelling analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. Her research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter.This work is a new and vital chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements. It chronicles the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.   [brief]
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Title: Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement 
Author: Hirsch, Eric L 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Urban Revolt is a careful, incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American history - the late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements.Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants were channeled into particular kinds of jobs and excluded from others. Hirsch then demonstrates the political implications of emergent ethnic identities and communities.In the late nineteenth century, Chicagoans of German background - denied economic power by Anglo-Americans' control of craft unions and excluded from political influence by Irish-dominated political machines - formulated radical critiques of the status quo and devised innovative political strategies. In contrast, the Irish revolutionary movement in Chicago targeted the oppressive British political system; Irish activists saw no reason to overthrow a Chicago polity that brought them political and economic upward mobility. Urban Revolt gives a new perspective on revolutionary mobilization by de-emphasizing the importance of class consciousness, social disorganization, and bureaucracy. In his original and provocative focus on the importance of ethnicity in accounting for political choice, Hirsch makes a valuable contribution to the study of social movements, race, and working-class politics.   [brief]
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Title: Mobilizing against nuclear energy: a comparison of Germany and the United States
Author: Joppke, Christian
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Environmental Studies | German Studies | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In the past two decades young people, environmentalists, church activists, leftists, and others have mobilized against nuclear energy. Anti-nuclear protest has been especially widespread and vocal in Western Europe and the United States. In this lucid, richly documented book, Christian Joppke compares the rise and fall of these protest movements in Germany and the United States, illuminating the relationship between national political structures and collective action. He analyzes existing approaches to the study of social movements and suggests an insightful new paradigm for research in this area. Joppke proposes a political process perspective that focuses on the interrelationship between the state and social movements, a model that takes into account a variety of forces, including differential state structures, political cultures, movement organizations, and temporal and contextual factors.This is an invaluable work for anyone studying the dynamics of social movements around the world.   [brief]
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Title: Battling for American labor: wobblies, craft workers, and the making of the union movement
Author: Kimeldorf, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | History | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States - its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action - can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism.Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.   [brief]
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Title: Russian opera and the symbolist movement
Author: Morrison, Simon Alexander 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | Opera | Musicology | Composers | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Literature
Publisher's Description: An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the nineteenth century and the compositions of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, this exceptionally insightful and well-researched book explores how Russian symbolist poets interpreted opera and prompted operatic innovation. Simon Morrison shows how these works, though stylistically and technically different, reveal the extent to which the operatic representation of the miraculous can be translated into its enactment. Morrison treats these largely unstudied pieces by canonical composers: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, Scriabin's unfinished Mysterium, and Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. The chapters, revisionist studies of these composers and scores, address separate aspects of Symbolist poetics, discussing such topics as literary and musical decadence, pagan-Christian syncretism, theurgy, and life creation, or the portrayal of art in life. The appendix offers the first complete English-language translation of Scriabin's libretto for the Preparatory Act. Providing valuable insight into both the Symbolist enterprise and Russian musicology, this book casts new light on opera's evolving, ambiguous place in fin de siècle culture.   [brief]
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Title: Reorganizing the Rust Belt: an inside study of the American labor movement
Author: Lopez, Steven Henry 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Economics and Business | Labor Studies | Public Policy | Anthropology | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: This gripping insider's look at the contemporary American trade union movement shows that reports of organized labor's death are premature. In this eloquent and erudite narrative, Steven Henry Lopez demonstrates how, despite a hostile legal environment and the punitive anti-unionism of U.S. employers, a few unions have organized hundreds of thousands of low-wage service workers in the past few years. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been at the forefront of this effort, in the process pioneering innovative strategies of grassroots mobilization and protest. In a powerful ethnography that captures the voices of those involved in SEIU nursing-home organizing in western Pennsylvania, Lopez illustrates how post-industrial, low-wage workers are providing the backbone for a reinvigorated labor movement across the country. Reorganizing the Rust Belt argues that the key to the success of social movement unionism lies in its ability to confront a series of dilemmas rooted in the history of American labor relations. Lopez shows how the union's ability to devise creative solutions - rather than the adoption of specific tactics - makes the difference between success and failure.   [brief]
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Title: Inside organized racism: women in the hate movement
Author: Blee, Kathleen M
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Social Problems | Public Policy | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Kathleen M. Blee's disturbing and provocative look at the hidden world of organized racism focuses on women, the newest recruiting targets of racist groups and crucial to their campaign for racial supremacy. Through personal interviews with women active in the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, Christian Identity sects, and white power skinhead gangs across the United States, Blee dispels many misconceptions of organized racism. Women are seldom pushed into the racist movement by any compelling interest, belief, or need, she finds. Most are educated. Only the rare woman grew up poor. Most were not raised in abusive families. Most women did not follow men into the world of organized racism. Inside Organized Racism offers a fascinating examination of the submerged social relations and the variety of racist identities that lie behind the apparent homogeneity of the movement. Following up her highly praised study of the women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, Blee discovers that many of today's racist women combine dangerous racist and anti-Semitic agendas with otherwise mainstream lives. Few of the women she interviews had strong racist or anti-Semitic views before becoming associated with racist groups. Rather, they learned a virulent hatred of racial minorities and anti-Semitic conspiratorial beliefs by being in racist groups. The only national sample of a broad spectrum of racist activists and the only major work on women racists, this well-written and important book also sheds light on how gender relationships shape participation in the movement as a whole.   [brief]
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Title: "Mi raza primero!" (My people first!): nationalism, identity, and insurgency in the Chicano movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978
Author: Chávez, Ernesto 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Chicano Studies | Sociology | Politics | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: ¡Mi Raza Primero! is the first book to examine the Chicano movement's development in one locale - in this case Los Angeles, home of the largest population of people of Mexican descent outside of Mexico City. Ernesto Chávez focuses on four organizations that constituted the heart of the movement: The Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, La Raza Unida Party, and the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, commonly known as CASA. Chávez examines and chronicles the ideas and tactics of the insurgency's leaders and their followers who, while differing in their goals and tactics, nonetheless came together as Chicanos and reformers. Deftly combining personal recollection and interviews of movement participants with an array of archival, newspaper, and secondary sources, Chávez provides an absorbing account of the events that constituted the Los Angeles-based Chicano movement. At the same time he offers insights into the emergence and the fate of the movement elsewhere. He presents a critical analysis of the concept of Chicano nationalism, an idea shared by all leaders of the insurgency, and places it within a larger global and comparative framework. Examining such variables as gender, class, age, and power relationships, this book offers a sophisticated consideration of how ethnic nationalism and identity functioned in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.   [brief]
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Title: Civic innovation in America: community empowerment, public policy, and the movement for civic renewal
Author: Sirianni, Carmen
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Print Media | Environmental Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: In this book, two leading experts on community action provide the first scholarly examination of the civic renewal movement that has emerged in the United States in recent decades. Sirianni Friedland examine civic innovation since the 1960s as social learning in four arenas (community organizing/development, civic environmentalism, community health, and public journalism), and they link local efforts to broader networks and to the development of "public policy for democracy." They also explore the emergence of a movement for civic renewal that builds upon the civic movements in these four arenas. In contrast to some recent studies that stress broad indicators of civic decline, this study analyzes innovation as a long process of social learning within specific institutional and policy domains with complex challenges and cross-currents. It draws upon analytical frameworks of social capital, policy learning, organizational learning, regulatory culture, democratic theory, and social movement theory. The study is based upon interviews with more than 400 innovative practitioners, as well as extensive field observation, case study, action research, and historical analysis.   [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: Islam, politics, and social movements
Author: Burke, Edmund 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Taken together the essays in this work not only provide new research essential to the study of Islamic societies and Muslim peoples, but also set a new standard for the concrete study of local situations and illuminate the forces shaping the history of modern Muslim societies.This collection is unique in its sophisticated interpretation of the social protest and political resistance movements in Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors take two principal approaches to the study of their subject. Utilizing "new cultural history," they explore how particular movements have deployed the cultural and religious resources of Islam to mobilize and legitimize insurgent political action. Others rely on "new social history" to study the economic, political, and social contexts in which movements of anti-colonial resistance and revolution have developed. This work brings together contributions from specialists on Islamic North Africa, Egypt, the Arab fertile crescent, Iran and India.   [brief]
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Title: Between feminism and labor: the significance of the comparable worth movement 
Author: Blum, Linda M
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: "Equal pay for equal work" has long been a forceful slogan of the feminist and labor movements. Now, however, as the American economy depends more and more on "women's work," it has become clear that this objective does not benefit the majority of women, who are employed in sex-segregated jobs. In Between Feminism and Labor , Linda M. Blum examines the movement for comparable worth, or equal pay for comparable work, as a strategy to raise wages for the "pink-collar" jobs that are most frequently occupied by women. She explores the larger political implications of the movement and provides the first study of pay equity to focus directly on the mobilization of the female work force at the grass-roots level.Through two case studies of local comparable worth movements - in San Jose and Contra Costa County, California - Blum probes several important issues. She asks whether comparable worth can contribute to the formation of active labor-feminist alliances, and after a nuanced, intelligent analysis of the complexities and contradictions of comparable worth, endorses its radical potential to improve women's wages and forge links between gender- and class-based politics. Between Feminism and Labor also situates comparable worth in the context of the limitations of affirmative action, a strategy seeking to move women into male jobs as opposed to raising the value of women's work. It is the first study to contrast these two strategies and to place them within the theoretical and political debates over the validation of gender difference versus the requirement of gender neutrality. As such, the book should stimulate debate among those concerned with the future of the feminist movement, as well as those interested in the future of organized labor and progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: The Antislavery debate: capitalism and abolitionism as a problem in historical interpretation
Author: Bender, Thomas
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: This volume brings together one of the most provocative debates among historians in recent years. The center of controversy is the emergence of the antislavery movement in the United States and Britain and the relation of capitalism to this development.The essays delve beyond these issues, however, to raise a deeper question of historical interpretation: What are the relations between consciousness, moral action, and social change? The debate illustrates that concepts common in historical practice are not so stable as we have thought them to be. It is about concepts as much as evidence, about the need for clarity in using the tools of contemporary historical practice.The participating historians are scholars of great distinction. Beginning with an essay published in the American Historical Review ( AHR ), Thomas L. Haskell challenged the interpretive framework of David Brion Davis's celebrated study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution . The AHR subsequently published responses by Davis and by John Ashworth, as well as a rejoinder by Haskell. The AHR essays and the relevant portions of Davis's book are reprinted here. In addition, there are two new essays by Davis and Ashworth and a general consideration of the subject by Thomas Bender.This is a highly disciplined, insightful presentation of a major controversy in historical interpretation that will expand the debate into new realms.   [brief]
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Title: Red city, blue period: social movements in Picasso's Barcelona 
Author: Kaplan, Temma 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Art | European History | Cultural Anthropology | Gender Studies | Art History
Publisher's Description: In Red City, Blue Period , Kaplan combines the methods of anthropology and the new cultural history to examine the civic culture of Barcelona between 1888 and 1939. She analyzes the peculiar sense of solidarity the citizens forged and explains why shared experiences of civic culture and pageantry sometimes galvanized resistance to authoritarian national governments but could not always overcome local class and gender struggles. She sheds light on the process by which principles of regional freedom and economic equity developed and changed in a city long known for its commitment to human dignity and artistic achievement.Although scholars increasingly recognize the relationship between so-called high art and popular culture, little has been done to explain what opens the eyes of artists to folk figures and religious art. Kaplan shows how artists like Picasso and Joan Miró, playwright Santiago Russinyol, the cellist Pablo Casals, and the architect Antonio Gaudí, as well as anarchists and other political activists, both shaped and were influenced by the artistic and political culture of Barcelona.   [brief]
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