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“Ic Þa Beheold Þone Ormætan Lig”: Anglo-Saxon Constructions of the Apocalypse Legend as Religious and Communal Threats of Damnation
James E. Doan
This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The third, The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016), focused on a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture.
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Introduction
James E. Doan and Barbara Brodman
This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The third, The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016), focused on a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture.
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When Worlds Collide: A Study of Detective/Sci-Fi Fusion in Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman Trilogy
Christine Jackson
This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The third, The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016), focused on a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture.
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"A gray web woven by a thousand spiders’: Dream Sequence Construction in Film Noir.”
Marlisa Santos
Despite a glut of black and white filters, the digital revolution in videography has all but abandoned the art, science, beauty, and power of cinematic lighting that literally illuminated the Golden Age of motion pictures. Film Noir Light and Shadow explores an era before CGI – a time when every photon mattered and the lighting of a set served a grander purpose than simply rendering its subjects visible. Edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, the duo behind numerous critically acclaimed studies of other aspects of noir, this anthology presents a series of essays that examine the visual style of the filmmakers of cinema's classic period. Some focus on individual pictures or directors; others discuss elements of style or sub-groups of movies within the movement. All are sharply focused on what makes the noir phenomenon unique in American – and global – cinematic history. Aside from highlighting the innovative work of its editors and their late colleague Robert Porfirio, Film Noir Light and Shadow also shares its light with a bevy of contributors who have written and edited their own books on the subject – a list of luminaries that includes Sheri Chinen Biesen, Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, Julie Grossman, Delphine Letort, Robert Miklitsch, R. Barton Palmer, Homer Pettey, Marlisa Santos, Imogen Sara Smith, and Tony Williams. As befits the topic, this volume is lavishly illustrated with 500 images that capture the richness and breadth of the classic period's imagery, making it an ideal companion for students of the genre, film historians, sprocket fiends, and the retrospectively inclined.
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“I never did think he was crazy”: Mystery and Criminality in Boetticher's Psychological Noirs
Marlisa Santos
No one was more dismissive of Budd Boetticher's early films than Boetticher himself. He disparaged them on numerous occasions in interviews, from calling working on them “a learning experience … I faked it” and even going so far as to say, “They were terrible pictures.” And, indeed, what limited critical treatment of Boetticher's work exists focuses on either his work with Westerns or bullfighting in cinema, rather than on his intriguing early forays into the war and mystery arenas. Two of the first ten films in Boetticher's canon are particularly worthy of further study, Escape in the Fog (1945) and Behind Locked Doors (1948). Both arguably films noir, these economical— both clock in at just over an hour—but expressive pictures reveal the early elemental precursors of what would become Boetticher's minimalist style and his interest in issues fundamental to the human condition, such as the negotiation between knowledge and mystery and the lines between the lawful and criminal.
Escape in the Fog, in true noir fashion, begins with a dream, a measure of unreality that will frame the entirety of the narrative. Eileen Carr (Nina Foch), a former army nurse, awakens screaming from this dream in a secluded inn, where she is recovering from a bomb attack. The dream sequence, which parallels a later and “real” sequence in the film, is shrouded in dense fog. Reviews of Escape in the Fog will often comment that this proliferation of fog, though expertly used, is perhaps the only stylistic mark of note in the film. Indeed, Boetticher spares no use of the fog machine in these scenes, creating an obfuscated atmosphere of uncertainty and dread. In both scenes, Carr is walking on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, where she meets a policeman who initially suspects that she is contemplating suicide, and cautions her about walking there alone: “You never can tell what'll come outta the fog.” And this warning proves to be true, as Carr witnesses a car pulling up near her, men falling out of it struggling, and one of them getting shot, whereupon the dream ends. Mark Osteen notes: “noir dreams stage ruptures in identity and integration that are not just individual but collective.”
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The "I" and the "Eye": Mediated Perspective in the Documemoir
Kathleen J. Waites
The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were and the influences that shape us along the way.
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The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic
Barbara Brodman and James Doan
This book is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The essays in this collection expand that scope to include a multicultural and multigeneric discussion of a pantheon of supernatural creatures who interact and cross species-specific boundaries with ease. Angels and demons are discussed from the perspective of supernatural allegory, angelic ethics and supernatural heredity and genetics. Fairies, sorcerers, witches and werewolves are viewed from the perspectives of popular nightmare tales, depictions of race and ethnicity, popular public discourse and cinematic imagery. Discussions of the “undead and still dead” include images of death messengers and draugar, zombies and vampires in literature, popular media and Japanese anime.
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Philosophers and Demons: Socrates, Descartes, and the Search for Certainty
Darren Hibbs
This book is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The essays in this collection expand that scope to include a multicultural and multigeneric discussion of a pantheon of supernatural creatures who interact and cross species-specific boundaries with ease. Angels and demons are discussed from the perspective of supernatural allegory, angelic ethics and supernatural heredity and genetics. Fairies, sorcerers, witches and werewolves are viewed from the perspectives of popular nightmare tales, depictions of race and ethnicity, popular public discourse and cinematic imagery. Discussions of the “undead and still dead” include images of death messengers and draugar, zombies and vampires in literature, popular media and Japanese anime.
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The Haunting of a Nation: Ghostly Public Discourses and Jamaican National Trauma
Andrea E. Shaw-Nevins
This book is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The essays in this collection expand that scope to include a multicultural and multigeneric discussion of a pantheon of supernatural creatures who interact and cross species-specific boundaries with ease. Angels and demons are discussed from the perspective of supernatural allegory, angelic ethics and supernatural heredity and genetics. Fairies, sorcerers, witches and werewolves are viewed from the perspectives of popular nightmare tales, depictions of race and ethnicity, popular public discourse and cinematic imagery. Discussions of the “undead and still dead” include images of death messengers and draugar, zombies and vampires in literature, popular media and Japanese anime.
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This Never Happened to the Other Fellow: On Her Majesty's Secret Service as Bond Woman's Film
Marlisa Santos
The release of Skyfall in 2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the James Bond film franchise. It earned over one billion dollars in the worldwide box office and won two Academy Awards. Amid popular and critical acclaim, some have questioned the representation of women in the film. From an aging M to the limited role of the Bond Girl and the characterization of Miss Moneypenny as a defunct field agent, Skyfall develops the legacy of Bond at the expense of women.
Since Casino Royale (2006) and its sequels Quantum of Solace (2008) and Skyfall constitute a reboot of the franchise, it is time to question whether there is a place for women in the new world of James Bond and what role they will play in the future of series. This volume answers these questions by examining the role that women have historically played in the franchise, which greatly contributed to the international success of the films.
This academic study constitutes the first book-length anthology on femininity and feminism in the Bond series. It covers all twenty-three Eon productions as well as the spoof Casino Royale(1967), considering a range of factors that have shaped the depiction of women in the franchise, including female characterization in Ian Fleming's novels; the vision of producer Albert R. Broccoli and other creative personnel; the influence of feminism; and broader trends in British and American film and television. The volume provides a timely look at women in the Bond franchise and offers new scholarly perspectives on the subject.
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The International Labor Solidarity Center in the Global Economy
Ronald W. Cox and G. Nelson Bass III
More than a decade into the new millennium, the fusion of corporate and state power is the essential defining feature of US foreign policy. This edited volume critically examines the relationship between corporations and the US state in the development of foreign policies related to globalization.
Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this work explores the role of corporations in using US foreign policies to advance the interests of transnational capital in a wide range of contexts, including:
- how US government policies have contributed to the globalization of production and finance
- the ways in which transnational corporations have influenced the US relationship with China, a crucial linkage in the new era of transnational accumulation
- how transnational corporate power has shaped capital-labour relations, humanitarian intervention, structural adjustment policies, low-intensity democracy and the G20 summits
- the "corporate centrism" of the Obama Administration, whose policies have been consistent with the growing power of transnational capital in US foreign policymaking
- the politics and consequences of the embedded relationship between various sectors of the transnational capitalist class, global institutions and the US state, including the limits and contradictions of this relationship during the ongoing capitalist crisis.
This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of both US foreign policy and international political economy.
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The Irish Dracula: A Melodrama in Five Acts
James Doan
While working on the first volume in the project, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) I decided to try my hand at adapting the novel Dracula to a more literal Irish context. Set in London and Co. Sligo in 1888, it constitutes a prequel to the novel. The play, entitled The Irish Dracula: A Melodrama in Five Acts, received two initial readings: the first with the Irish Theatre of Florida in August 2012 and the second at the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) West meeting in Park City, Utah, in October 2012. Both Barbara Brodman and I were involved in the readings, along with actors, theatre professors and graduate students. I later received a mini-grant to do workshops and a staged dramatic reading of the play with Nova Southeastern University students in March and April 2013. The play fills a niche in the overall discourse on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. Though many scholars have noted the Irish origins of themes and authorship of the novel, no one has yet successfully adapted the novel to an Irish (or Anglo-Irish) context. I also decided that melodrama (literally “music + drama”) was the appropriate genre to use for an adaptation of Dracula to a theatrical form, insofar as it involves an exaggerated plot and characters to appeal to the audience's emotions. I hit upon the idea of a prequel which would introduce the real-life author of the novel, Bram Stoker and the legendary English actor/director, Henry Irving, for whom Stoker worked as a business manager for 27 years, and whom many consider a prototype for the title character in the novel. I then added characters based on those found in the novel, though translated into their respective Irish, English and Anglo-Irish counterparts, highlighting the hybrid nature of the political and cultural reality of late 19th-century Britain and Ireland. One of the main purposes for the workshops and for a fuller-scale production of the play in 2014, to be accompanied by Arthur Sullivan's instrumental music for the 1888 production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in London, which starred Henry Irving and which figures in The Irish Dracula, is to test the validity of this “translation,” to see how successful it is with a contemporary audience.
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How the Irish and Scots Became Indians: Colonial Traders and Agents and the Southeastern Tribes
James E. Doan
A leading journal of Irish Studies, New Hibernia Review opens each issue with a personal essay. For the first time, here is a selection of the finest of these, of which four have been recognized as "Notable Essays of the Year" in Best American Essays. This engaging collection sheds light on the perplexing state of being an Irish American-though the question is usually posed in deflected ways. Often deeply personal, each account in Extended Family: Essays on Being Irish American from New Hibernia Review tackles this question with verve; the conclusions range from the piquant, to the humorous, to the bittersweet. This book marks a welcome re-evaluation of the Irish Diaspora that is sure to challenge and stimulate our current understandings. James Silas Rogers has previously co-edited After the Flood: Irish America, 1945 - 1960 and published a poetry chapbook, Sundogs. He is the editor of New Hibernia Review at the University of St. Thomas, and served as president of the American Conference for Irish Studies from 2009 to 2011. "This elegantly written volume, gathered from many voices, shows that "Irish" is in the eyes of the beholder."-Irish Music & Dance Assoc. April 2013 "Luminous meditations on Irish life, heritage and experience... [the book] succeeds as well as it does by offering personal as well as political readings of contemporary Irish American experience."--Irish Voice
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The Vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican Lore
James E. Doan
Since the publication of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the vampire has been a mainstay of Western culture, appearing consistently in literature, art, music (notably opera), film, television, graphic novels and popular culture in general. Even before its entrance into the realm of arts and letters in the early nineteenth century, the vampire was a feared creature of Eastern European folklore and legend, rising from the grave at night to consume its living loved ones and neighbors, often converting them at the same time into fellow vampires.
A major question exists within vampire scholarship: to what extent is this creature a product of European cultural forms, or is the vampire indeed a universal, perhaps even archetypal figure? In this collection of sixteen original essays, the contributors shed light on this question. One essay traces the origins of the legend to the early medieval Norse draugr, an “undead” creature who reflects the underpinnings of Dracula, the latter first appearing as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.
In addition to these investigations of the Western mythic, literary and historic traditions, other essays in this volume move outside Europe to explore vampire figures in Native American and Mesoamerican myth and ritual, as well as the existence of similar vampiric traditions in Japanese, Russian and Latin American art, theatre, literature, film, and other cultural productions.
The female vampire looms large, beginning with the Sumerian goddess Lilith, including the nineteenth-century Carmilla, and moving to vampiresses in twentieth-century film, literature, and television series. Scientific explanations for vampires and werewolves constitute another section of the book, including eighteenth-century accounts of unearthing, decapitation and cremation of suspected vampires in Eastern Europe. The vampire’s beauty, attainment of immortality and eternal youth are all suggested as reasons for its continued success in contemporary popular culture.
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Adapting Dracula to an Irish Context: Reconfiguring the Universal Vampire
James E. Doan and Barbara Brodman
In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Broadman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and Russian vampires in popular culture, and the vampire in contemporary novels, film and television. The essays in this collection continue that multi-cultural and multigeneric discussion by tracing the development of the post-modern vampire, in films ranging from Shadow of a Doubt to Blade, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Interview with the Vampire; the male and female vampires in the Twilight films, Sookie Stackhouse novels and True Blood television series; the vampire in African American women's fiction, Anne Rice's novels and in the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend; vampires in Japanese anime; and finally, to bring the volumes full circle, the presentation of a new Irish Dracula play, adapted from the novel and set in 1888.
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Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic
James E. Doan and Barbara Brodman
In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Brodman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and Russian vampires in popular culture, and the vampire in contemporary novels, film and television. The essays in this collection continue that multi-cultural and multigeneric discussion by tracing the development of the post-modern vampire, in films ranging from Shadow of a Doubt to Blade, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Interview with the Vampire; the male and female vampires in the Twilight films, Sookie Stackhouse novels and TrueBlood television series; the vampire in African American women’s fiction, Anne Rice’s novels and in the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend; vampires in Japanese anime; and finally, to bring the volumes full circle, the presentation of a new Irish Dracula play, adapted from the novel and set in 1888.
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The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend
James E. Doan and Barbara Brodman
Since the publication of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the vampire has been a mainstay of Western culture, appearing consistently in literature, art, music (notably opera), film, television, graphic novels and popular culture in general. Even before its entrance into the realm of arts and letters in the early nineteenth century, the vampire was a feared creature of Eastern European folklore and legend, rising from the grave at night to consume its living loved ones and neighbors, often converting them at the same time into fellow vampires.
A major question exists within vampire scholarship: to what extent is this creature a product of European cultural forms, or is the vampire indeed a universal, perhaps even archetypal figure? In this collection of sixteen original essays, the contributors shed light on this question. One essay traces the origins of the legend to the early medieval Norse draugr, an “undead” creature who reflects the underpinnings of Dracula, the latter first appearing as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.
In addition to these investigations of the Western mythic, literary and historic traditions, other essays in this volume move outside Europe to explore vampire figures in Native American and Mesoamerican myth and ritual, as well as the existence of similar vampiric traditions in Japanese, Russian and Latin American art, theatre, literature, film, and other cultural productions.
The female vampire looms large, beginning with the Sumerian goddess Lilith, including the nineteenth-century Carmilla, and moving to vampiresses in twentieth-century film, literature, and television series. Scientific explanations for vampires and werewolves constitute another section of the book, including eighteenth-century accounts of unearthing, decapitation and cremation of suspected vampires in Eastern Europe. The vampire’s beauty, attainment of immortality and eternal youth are all suggested as reasons for its continued success in contemporary popular culture.
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Chapter 4: Being a Member of the Colored Race: The Mission of Charles Young, Military Attache to Haiti, 1904-1907
David Kilroy
Haiti has long played an important role in global perception of the western hemisphere, but ideas about Haiti often appear paradoxical. Is it a land of tyranny and oppression or a beacon of freedom as site of the world's only successful slave revolution? A bastion of devilish practices or a devoutly religious island? Does its status as the second independent nation in the hemisphere give it special lessons to teach about postcolonialism, or is its main lesson one of failure?
Haiti and the Americas brings together an interdisciplinary group of essays to examine the influence of Haiti throughout the hemisphere, to contextualize the ways that Haiti has been represented over time, and to look at Haiti's own cultural expressions in order to think about alternative ways of imagining its culture and history.
Thinking about Haiti requires breaking through a thick layer of stereotypes. Haiti is often represented as the region's nadir of poverty, of political dysfunction, and of savagery. Contemporary media coverage fits very easily into the narrative of Haiti as a dependent nation, unable to govern or even fend for itself, a site of lawlessness that is in need of more powerful neighbors to take control. Essayists in Haiti and the Americas present a fuller picture developing approaches that can account for the complexity of Haitian history and culture.
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Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema
Marlisa Santos
Although it is a somewhat underrepresented form of literature in popular sensibility, poetry finds relevance in the modern world through its appearance in cinema. Film adaptations of poems and depictions of poets on the screen date back to the silent era and continue to the present day. However, there have been few serious studies of how cinema has represented the world of poetic expression. In Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema, Marlisa Santos has compiled essays that explore the relationship between one of the world’s oldest art forms—poetry—and one of the world’s newest art forms—film. The book is divided into three sections: poets on film, poetry as film, and film as poetry. Topics include analyses of poet biopics (such as Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), filmic representations of poets or poetic studies (including Pyaasa), films inspired by particular poems (such as Splendor in the Grass), and the avant-garde phenomenon of the “poem-film” (such as The Tree of Life). Poetic influences considered in this volume range from William Shakespeare to e.e. cummings, and the films discussed hail from several different countries, including the U.S., the U.K., India, China, Italy, and Argentina. Featuring a great diversity in the age, genres, and countries of origin of the films, these essays provide an in-depth look at how poetry has been interpreted on film over the years. By addressing a heretofore unexamined aspect of film studies, Verse, Voice, and Vision will appeal to fans and scholars of both literature and cinema.
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The Southern Roots of the Reapportionment Revolution
Charles Zelden
In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.
Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.
Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden. -
Thurgood Marshall: Race, Rights, and the Struggle for a More Perfect Union
Charles Zelden
Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991. He was the first African American to hold that position, and was one of the most influential legal actors of his time. Before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson, Marshall was a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Federal Judge (1961-1965), and Solicitor General of the United States (1965-1966). Marshall won twenty-nine of thirty-two cases before the Supreme Court – most notably the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, which held segregated public schools unconstitutional. Marshall spent his career fighting racial segregation and legal inequality, and his time on the court establishing a record for supporting the "voiceless American." He left a legacy of change that still affects American society today.
Through this concise biography, accompanied by primary sources that present Marshall in his own words, students will learn what Marshall did (and did not do) during his life, why those actions were important, and what effects his efforts had on the larger course of American history.
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Organized Labor and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Solidarity Center in Historical Context
G. Nelson Bass III
During the Cold War the foreign policy of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), was heavily criticized by scholars and activists for following the lead of the U.S. state in its overseas operations. In a wide range of states, the AFL-CIO worked to destabilize governments selected by the U.S. state for regime change, while in others the Federation helped stabilize client regimes of the U.S. state. In 1997 the four regional organizations that previously carried out AFL-CIO foreign policy were consolidated into the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center). My dissertation is an attempt to analyze whether the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO in the Solidarity Center era is marked by continuity or change with past practices. At the same time, this study will attempt to add to the debate over the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the post-Cold War era, and its implications for future study.
Using the qualitative "process-tracing" detailed by of Alexander George and Andrew Bennett (2005) my study examines a wide array of primary and secondary sources, including documents from the NED and AFL-CIO, in order to analyze the relationship between the Solidarity Center and the U.S. state from 2002-2009. Furthermore, after analyzing broad trends of NED grants to the Solidarity Center, this study examines three dissimilar case studies including Venezuela, Haiti, and Iraq and the Middle East and North African (MENA) region to further explore the connections between U.S. foreign policy goals and the Solidarity Center operations.
The study concludes that the evidence indicates continuity with past AFL-CIO foreign policy practices whereby the Solidarity Center follows the lead of the U.S. state. It has been found that the patterns of NED funding indicate that the Solidarity Center closely tailors its operations abroad in areas of importance to the U.S. state, that it is heavily reliant on state funding via the NED for its operations, and that the Solidarity Center works closely with U.S. allies and coalitions in these regions. Finally, this study argues for the relevance of "top-down" NGO creation and direction in the post-Cold War era.
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Ulster Presbyterian Immigration to America
James E. Doan
Irish Protestant identities, available for the first time in paperback, is a major multi-disciplinary portrayal and analysis of the often overlooked Protestant tradition in Ireland. A distinguished team of contributors explore what is distinctive about the religious minority on the island of Ireland. Protestant contributions to literature, culture, religion and politics are all examined. Accessible and engaging throughout, the book examines the contributions to Irish society from Protestant authors, Protestant churches, the Orange Order, Unionist parties and Ulster loyalists. Most books on Ireland have concentrated upon the Catholicism and Nationalism which shaped the country in terms of literature, poetry, politics and outlook. This book instead explores how a minority tradition has developed and coped with existence in a polity and society in which some historically felt under-represented or neglected.
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