Author: Kevin W. Saunders File Type: pdf Throughout history obscenity has not really been about sex but about degradation. Sexual depictions have been suppressed when they were seen as lowering the status of humans, furthering our distance from the gods or God and moving us toward the animals. In the current era, when we recognize ourselves and both humans and animals, sexual depiction has lost some of its sting. Its degrading role has been replaced by hate speech that distances groups, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, not only from God but from humanity to a subhuman level. In this original study of the relationship between obscenity and hate speech, First Amendment specialist Kevin W. Saunders traces the legal trajectory of degradation as it moved from sexual depiction to hateful speech. Looking closely at hate speech in several arenas, including racist, homophobic, and sexist speech in the workplace, classroom, and other real-life scenarios, Saunders posits that if hate speech is todays conceptual equivalent of obscenity, then the body of law that dictated obscenity might shed some much-needed light on what may or may not qualify as punishable hate speech. **

Author: Daphne Skillen File Type: pdf This book traces the life of free speech in Russia from the final years of the Soviet Union to the present. It shows how long-cherished hopes for an open society in which people would speak freely and tell truth to power fared under Gorbachevs glasnost how free speech was a real, if fractured, achievement of Yeltsins years in power and how easy it was for Putin to reverse these newly won freedoms, imposing a patrimonial media that sits comfortably with old autocratic and feudal traditions. The book explores why this turn seemed so inexorable and now seems so entrenched. It examines the historical legacy, and Russias culturally ambivalent perception of freedom, which Dostoyevsky called that terrible gift. It evaluates the allure of western consumerism and Soviet-era illusions that stunted the initial promise of freedom and democracy. The behaviour of journalists and their apparent complicity in the distortion of their profession come under scrutiny. This ambitious study covering more than 30 years of radical change looks at responses from above and from below, and asks whether the players truly understood what was involved in the practice of free speech.

Author: Lissa K. Wadewitz File Type: mobi For centuries, borders have been central to salmon management customs on the Salish Sea, but how those borders were drawn has had very different effects on the Northwest salmon fishery. Native peoples who fished the Salish Sea--which includes Puget Sound in Washington State, the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca--drew social and cultural borders around salmon fishing locations and found ways to administer the resource in a sustainable way. Nineteenth-century Euro-Americans, who drew the Anglo-American border along the forty-ninth parallel, took a very different approach and ignored the salmons patterns and life cycle. As the canned salmon industry grew and more people moved into the region, class and ethnic relations changed. Soon illegal fishing, broken contracts, and fish piracy were endemic--conditions that contributed to rampant overfishing, social tensions, and international mistrust. The Nature of Borders is about the ecological effects of imposing cultural and political borders on this critical West Coast salmon fishery. This transnational history provides an understanding of the modern Pacific salmon crisis and is particularly instructive as salmon conservation practices increasingly approximate those of the pre-contact Native past. The Nature of Borders reorients borderlands studies toward the Canada-U.S. border and also provides a new view of how borders influenced fishing practices and related management efforts over time. **

Author: Kate Haulman File Type: pdf In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux. In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which womens power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order. **Review[A] well-written, thoroughly researched work.--Journal of American History The book, several years in the making, displays Haulmans easy command of her subject and source material. . . . Without losing sight of the big picture, she pays focused attention to a few well-chosen artifacts and texts.--Womens Review of Books Haulman [has an] ability to capture the telling details that made the colonial social experience distinct.--New England Quarterly A rich and compelling study. --American Historical Review** Offers a number of fascinating insights into the ordering of power and American social relations in the eighteenth century. . . . Beautifully detailed and arresting set pieces that sparkle through the pages of her book, like gems strung together on an intricate necklace.--William and Mary Quarterly [Haulman] allows women and gender to take centre-stage in a narrative in which they are still too often rather marginal.--English Historical Review Haulmans terrific examination of the gendered implications of fashion is magnificently subtle and detailed. . . . [This book] will be important reading for scholars of gender, revolutionary political culture, and early American studies.--American Historical Review One of the most effective aspects of Haulmans book is the way she treats fashion in many different ways without losing the unity of her argument. . . . [She] successfully mixes methods from cultural anthropology, literary studies, and sociology.--The Historian An exciting, deeply researched work that examines the intersection of American culture and the changing nature of politics surrounding the American Revolution . . . . It would greatly benefit graduate students and researchers of early American life, specifically those with interests in politics, culture, and society.--Journal of American Culture Presents a subtle and detailed narrative of the changing ways that Anglo-Americans thought and argued about what to wear and what it meant.--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography ReviewIn this original interpretation, Kate Haulman makes the luxuries of clothing and accoutrements--the details of their trade, their changing design, and the uses to which women and men put them--central to our understanding of imperial relations in the era of the American Revolution and the early republic.--Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies Women and the Obligations of Citizenship Novel, richly detailed, and deeply researched, Kate Haulmans book is both a revolutionary history of the meaning of fashionability in early America and a chronicle of the evolution of the transatlantic fashion system. Never have the changes within the world of dress been presented with such thoroughness or their cultural significance been glossed with such specification and care.--David Shields, University of South Carolina