Between two worlds of father politics: USA or Sweden?
Author: Michael Rush The essential message of the two regimes model is that the social politics of fatherhood have taken on a global significance and that the USA and Sweden represent two ends of an international continuum of ways of thinking about fatherhood. The key selling points of the two regimes model are its topicality, originality, its global appeal, and its particularised appeal to readers in the USA, the Nordic countries, Great Britain, Ireland, the European Union, Japan and China. The book offers students a comparative analytical framework and new insights into why some welfare states have father-friendly social policies and others do not. The book makes an original contribution to the growing fields of welfare regime and gender studies by linking the epochal decline of patriarchal fatherhood to welfare state expansion over the course of the twentieth century and it raises new questions about the legitimacy of religiously inspired neo-patriarchy.
Author: Robert A. Pratt
On Sunday afternoon, March 7, 1965, roughly six hundred peaceful demonstrators set out from Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in a double-file column to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Leading the march were Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Upon reaching Broad Street, the marchers turned left to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge that spanned the Alabama River. When we reached the crest of the bridge, recalls John Lewis, I stopped dead still. So did Hosea. There, facing us at the bottom of the other side, stood a sea of blue-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen stretched from one side of U.S. Highway 80 to the other. Behind them were several dozen more armed menSheriff Clarks possesome on horseback, all wearing khaki clothing, many carrying clubs the size of baseball bats. The violence and horror that was about to unfold at the foot of the bridge would forever mark the day as Bloody Sunday, one of the pivotal moments of the civil rights movement. Alabama state troopers fell on the unarmed protestors as they crossed the bridge, beating and tear gassing them. In Selmas Bloody Sunday, Robert A. Pratt offers a vivid account of that infamous day and the indelible triumph of black and white protest over white resistance. He explores how the march itselfand the 1965 Voting Rights Act that followedrepresented a reaffirmation of the nations centuries-old declaration of universal equality and the fulfillment of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Selmas Bloody Sunday offers a fresh interpretation of the ongoing struggle by African Americans to participate freely in Americas electoral democracy. Jumping forward to the present day, Pratt uses the march as a lens through which to examine disturbing recent debates concerning who should, and who should not, be allowed to vote. Drawing on archival materials, secondary sources, and eyewitness accounts of the brave men and women who marched, this gripping account offers a brief and nuanced narrative of this critical phase of the black freedom struggle.
Author: Edited by Harriet B. Newburger, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter
Does the place where you lived as a child affect your health as an adult? To what degree does your neighbor's success influence your own potential? The importance of place is increasingly recognized in urban research as an important variable in understanding individual and household outcomes. Place matters in education, physical health, crime, violence, housing, family income, mental health, and discriminationissues that determine the quality of life, especially among low-income residents of urban areas.Neighborhood and Life Chances: How Place Matters in Modern America brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to present the findings of studies in the fields of education, health, and housing. The results are intriguing and surprising, particularly the debate over Moving to Opportunity, an experiment conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, designed to test directly the effects of relocating individuals away from areas of concentrated poverty. Its results, while strong in some respects, showed very different outcomes for boys and girls, with girls more likely than boys to experience positive outcomes. Reviews of the literature in education and health, supplemented by new research, demonstrate that the problems associated with residing in a negative environment are indisputable, but also suggest the directions in which solutions may lie.The essays collected in this volume give readers a clear sense of the magnitude of contemporary challenges in metropolitan America and of the role that place plays in reinforcing them. Although the contributors suggest many practical immediate interventions, they also recognize the vital importance of continued long-term efforts to rectify place-based limitations on lifetime opportunities.
Author: Jason Dittmer
Nationalist superheroes—such as Captain America, Captain Canuck, and Union Jack—often signify the “nation-state” for readers, but how do these characters and comic books address issues of multiculturalism and geopolitical order? In his engaging book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero, geographer Jason Dittmer traces the evolution of the comic book genre as it adapted to new national audiences. He argues that these iconic superheroes contribute to our contemporary understandings of national identity, the righteous use of power, and the role of the United States, Canada, and Britain in the world.Tracing the nationalist superhero genre from its World War II origins to contemporary manifestations throughout the world, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero analyzes nearly one thousand comic books and audience responses to those books. Dittmer also interviews key comic book writers from Stan Lee and J. M. DeMatteis to Steve Englehart and Paul Cornell.At a time when popular culture is saturated with superheroes and their exploits, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero highlights the unique relationship between popular culture and international relations.
Author: Larry Grubbs
In 1961, as President John F. Kennedy proclaimed the beginning of a Decade of Development, the United States embarked on its first coherent Africa policy. Guided by the precepts of modernization theory, American policymakers, diplomats, academics, and Peace Corps volunteers were dispatched to promote economic growth and nation-building among the newly independent countries of sub-Saharan Africa. At the outset, Larry Grubbs shows, many of these secular missionaries were no less sanguine about their prospects for success than were their Christian predecessors a century earlier. But before long their optimism gave way to disillusionment, as rosy forecasts of sustained development collided with African political realities and colonial economies based on single-commodity exports subject to global price fluctuations. In this book, Grubbs presents a cultural history of this ill-fated American campaign to modernize Africa during its first decade of independence. Drawing on government documents and contemporary press accounts as well as an extensive body of scholarship on U.S.-Africa relations, he exposes the contradictions at the core of a self-serving idealism that promised to win the continent of Africa for the West in the context of the Cold War. While many Americans working in Africa considered themselves opponents of ethnocentrism, the modernization goals they served carried an ingrained, if unacknowledged, cultural and ideological sense of superiority and faith in American exceptionalism. Similarly, persistent myths about African backwardness and primitiveness continued to afflict U.S. policy, despite official pronouncements of confidence in the transformative power of Western expertise and can-do pragmatism in bringing African societies into the modern world. If the assumptions underlying U.S. policy toward Africa during the 1960s were simply relics of outmoded Cold War orthodoxies, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, Grubbs concludes, many of the same ideas imbue contemporary discussions of the ongoing crisis in Africa, from the campaigns to Save Darfur and stop the spread of AIDS to efforts to eliminate blood diamonds and forgive African debts.
Author: James Vallière Wright
Volume two examines such developments as the replacement of the earlier spearthrower by the bow and arrow, the introduction of pottery from the south, the importance of communal hunting of bison on the Plains, and the appearance of ranked societies on the West Coast.
Author: Edited by Sara Seager
For the first time in human history, we know for certain the existence of planets around other stars. Now the fastest-growing field in space science, the time is right for this fundamental source book on the topic which will lay the foundation for its continued growth.Exoplanets serves as both an introduction for the non-specialist and a foundation for the techniques and equations used in exoplanet observation by those dedicated to the field.Funding to make this important volume an affordable addition to anyone's library was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Author: Stephanie L. Hawkins
Tracing the National Geographic's rise to prominence during the first half of the 20th c., Stephanie Hawkins argues that far from being merely a handbook of Western imperialism or a venue for exotic display, the magazine created a forum for the negotiation of changing attitudes toward national identity, cultural diversity, and global interconnectedness. Its readers responded in complex ways to the magazine's iconic public image and were not at all the passive spectators they have been assumed to be.
Author: John Cullinan
This book brings together research relating to the economics of disability in Ireland. It addresses a range of issues of relevance to the economic circumstances of people with disabilities, considering topics such as social inclusion, poverty, the labour market, living standards and public policy. It also considers issues of specific relevance to children, working-age adults and older people with disabilities, providing important evidence that can help improve disability policies, services and supports. Each chapter presents a clear and relatively non-technical treatment of the specific topic under consideration, making it accessible to a greater number of interested readers. In doing so, it provides an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of the economics of disability and will serve as a useful and up-to-date resource for a range of interested parties both in Ireland and internationally.