Political Science : Civil Rights

Twenty years in the making, this book is the definitive study of the political cultures that reigned in the three Alabama cities central to the development of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. With this bold offering, J. Mills Thornton III presents a landmark publication on the struggle for racial equality in America. After two decades of pain-staking research, he tells the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community-municipal history--at the grassroots level. Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities--Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders--independent of emerging national trends in racial mores--led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement. In Montgomery, the term served by liberal Dave Birmingham on the city council, his defeat by segregationist Clyde Sellers, and the consequent search by black leaders for a way to influence the political process outside of local elections were all vital to the origins of the bus boycott. In Birmingham, civil rights protests exploded in direct response to the business community's decision to engineer the abolition of the city council as a governing body. And in Selma, Joe Smitherman's defeat of Chris Heinz in 1964 ignited intense feelings of social commitment in the black community that led to voter registration drives. J. Mills Thornton III is Professor of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860. more...

Price: $23.96

This is a new edition - with a substantial new introduction - of a book which has had a significant impact on economics, philosophy and political science. Robert Sugden shows how conventions of property, mutual aid, and voluntary supply of public goods can evolve spontaneously out of the interactions of self-interested individuals, and can become moral norms. Sugden was among the first social scientists to use evolutionary game theory. His approach remains distinctive in emphasizing psychological and cultural notions of salience. more...

Price: $110.00

In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Ortiz's eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day. more...

Price: $12.95

A trailblazing book that details the close historic ties between Black America and India over the decades more...

Price: $54.50

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Price: $4.95