Product Description
Politics in Rutherford County were heated a century ago: the developing textile industry, the growing population, an agricultural crisis and race relations inflamed everyone. Mills Higgins Flack, a leader of the Farmers’ Alliance and the county’s first Populist in the state House, was allegedly murdered on August 28, 1900, by Avery Mills, an African American. This book documents the murder and the lynching of Avery Mills. The author (Flack’s great-great-grandson) considers the phenomena of racial lynching, the Populist movement in the county, the white supremacy movement of the state’s Democratic party and the county’s KKK activities. ... Read more

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The social, political, and economic factors that shaped southern cities. Historian Thomas Hanchett cites Charlotte, North Carolina, as an example to support his argument that racial and economic segregation are not age-old givens, but rather resulted from a gradual process of industrial development and urban renewal. 4 color and 59 b&w illustrations. ... Read more

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Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods.

The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Absorbing and Provocative
This opened my eyes to women's status in the Gilded Age in a typical good-sized Midwestern town.I couldn't put it down.

Revelations about Davenport in the Gilded Age
My godson is taking his orals for his PhD, and as a requirement, was told to read this, among 100 other assigned books. As he knew I was a Davenport native, he thought I might enjoy reading this.As a female, I found it especially fascinating as it deals mostly with the status of women, both prostitutes and women who owned small businesses, worked as clerks and in other professions, in the Gilded Age.I had no idea that prostition was once legalized in Davenport and such establishements were licensed.I also was surprised to learn how the German influence led to widespread flauting of Prohibition.I had gone to the Lend-A-Hand club as a small girl after school, and reading the history of that venerable institution was really heartening.My grandfather ran a Shell Service station at the base of the Government Bridge and it was amazing to read how that area was a hotbed of vice from 1880-1920.

I bought this book for my mother, who grew up in Davenport, and who is now 90.She knew many of the names in the book, attended school with one of the girls, and was amazed to hear all this come to life.Many of the facts and stories were told her by HER mother, and she was taken back in time when these stories were confirmed.She is now busily engaged in digesting the book.


But the book is better than simply a Davenport history snapshot.As a woman, I was disheartened in the extreme to read of the cruelty practiced on young girls, as young as 11 who were forced into prostitution after having been raped.The Good Shepherd Home in Dubuque proved a godsend for many of the unfortunate girls.They were given a new life and dignity.It left me with new respect for the work of the Catholic Church in restoring people's lives.


This book gave me a view of middle America that caught me off guard.I hope this book gains wide currency, as it deserves it. ... Read more

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Cities were the core of a changing economy and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the Civil War.In New Men, New Cities, New South, Don Doyle argues that if the plantation was the world the slaveholders made, the urban centers of the New South formed the world made by merchants, manufacturers, and financiers.The book's title evokes the exuberant rhetoric of New South boosterism, which continually extolled the "new men" who dominated the city-building process, but Doyle also explores the key role of women in defining the urban upper class.

Doyle uses four cities as case studies to represent the diversity of the region and to illuminate the responses businessmen made to the challenges and opportunities of the postbellum South.Two interior railroad centers, Atlanta and Nashville, displayed the most vibrant commercial and industrial energy of the region, and both cities fostered a dynamic class of entrepreneurs.These business leaders' collective efforts to develop their cities and to establish formal associations that served their common interests forged them into a coherent and durable urban upper class by the late nineteenth century.The rising business class also helped establish a new pattern of race relations shaped by a commitment to economic progress through the development of the South's human resources, including the black labor force.But the "new men" of the cities then used legal segregation to control competition between the races.

Charleston and Mobile, old seaports that had served the antebellum plantation economy with great success, stagnated when their status as trade centers declined after the war.Although individual entrepreneurs thrived in both cities, their efforts at community enterprise were unsuccessful, and in many instances they remained outside the social elite.As a result, conservative ways became more firmly entrenched, including a system of race relations based on the antebellum combination of paternalism and neglect rather than segregation.Talent, energy, and investment capital tended to drain away to more vital cities.

In many respects, as Doyle shows, the business class of the New South failed in its quest for economic development and social reform.Nevertheless, its legacy of railroads, factories, urban growth, and changes in the character of race relations shaped the world most southerners live in today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Tracing the transition years
Doyle traces the transition years between Old South and New South in Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston and Mobile between 1860 and 1910.Wonderful compilation of both quantitative and qualitative sources; the sources from newspapers during the time act like time capsules into the period.The newspaper sources combined with some photographs and maps make Doyle's book a well-researched place for students of Southern history and culture to enjoy an insightful glimpse into particular loci in the south.Chapters include:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Urbanization of Dixie
The New Order of Things
Ebb Tide
Patrician and Parvenu
The Atlanta Spirit
The Charleston Style
New Class
Gentility and Mirth
The New Paternalism
Paternalism and Pessimism
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Students interested in the too-often forgetten urban south should get this book ... Read more

Product Description
In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans' intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence.

Robertson describes how the nineteenth-century approach to childhood as a single phase of innocence began to shift at the end of the century to include several stages of childhood development, prompting reformers to create legal categories such as statutory rape and carnal abuse to protect children. However, while ordinary New Yorkers' involvement in the prosecution of those offenses reshaped their understandings of who was a child and produced a new concern to establish the age of their sexual partners, their beliefs in childhood innocence and in a concept of sexuality centered on sexual intercourse remained unchanged. As a result, families' use of the law and jurors' decisions ultimately diminished the protection the new laws offered to children. Robertson's study, based on the previously unexamined files of the New York County district attorney's office, reveals the importance of child sexuality and sex crimes in twentieth-century American culture. ... Read more

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In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5–4 verdict in the case of Milliken v. Bradley, thereby blocking the state of Michigan from merging the Detroit public school system with those of the surrounding suburbs. This decision effectively walled off underprivileged students in many American cities, condemning them to a system of racial and class segregation and destroying their chances of obtaining a decent education.

In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The school system in Syracuse is a slough of despair, the one in Raleigh a beacon of hope. Grant argues that the chief reason for Raleigh’s educational success is the integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse’s decline has been the growing class and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty.

Hope and Despair is a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.

Customer Reviews (6)

Why is Syracuse a Basket Case?
The city of Syracuse, NY -- as distinct from its lovely suburbs -- provides a small-scale picture of the social pathologies that beset so many American cities of the Northeast and Midwest.It has an economically depressed urban core, crime-ridden neighborhoods with houses abandoned and vacant, and a school enrollment that is largely poor and minority with low graduation rates and weak performance on standardized tests. Syracuse bills itself as environmentally advanced, the "Emerald City," yet its common council refuses even so cost-free an improvement to its urban environment as banning unsightly billboards along the interstate highways that slice through the city. But that is a small problem compared to the failure of Syracuse schools to educate and graduate its students, a deficit that nearly forces middle-income families with children to live in the suburbs.
How did Syracuse and so many other northern cities reach this state of educational (and urban) decay?In contrast, Raleigh, NC has for decades been economically thriving and, most relevantly, successful with its schools, which have high achievement and graduation rates for black as well as white students, for poor as well as middle-class students.Is Raleigh's success a simple consequence of its economic growth?Apparently not since other southern cities with similar growth have not had the same educational success.Professor Grant shows convincingly that much of Raleigh's success stemmed from its willingness to integrate its schools over the entire metropolitan area, city and suburbs.
Sociologists of education know well that changing the culture of a school, from ghetto to middle class, is the most important element in school success, in teacher satisfaction, and in producing successful graduates.And the best way to do that is to mix minority students into a predominately middle-class student body.Since urban residence patterns remain segregated by race and economics, this necessarily means busing, a solution some reviewers of this book find unappealing.No doubt there are costs to school integration, but Grant's comparison of Raleigh to Syracuse shows that the benefits are substantial.

interesting examination of segregation in American schools
This book gives an engaging historical account of how government policies led to segregation in America's cities - which resulted in failing schools with high concentrations of poverty - and how one school system is addressing the problem by attempting to balance schools for socioeconomic diversity.

The author has managed to make the book an interesting read by weaving in details of his own family's life in Syracuse. Because I live in Raleigh/Wake County, I found the section on Raleigh's long history (dating back to the Civil War) of progressive racial integration policies fascinating, and it helped me put into proper perspective the "battle" that is currently being waged between those who support our school system's diversity policy, and those who do not.

This book is enlightening and well-written. If you have any interest in learning more about how our society can begin to tackle the problem of poverty, you will enjoy reading this book!

Excellent Investigation of the Usually Unspoken Racism of the North
Gerald Grant gives an excellent depiction of the current racial crisis of Northern cities.While the South has spent the past thirty years working on issues of racism and integrating their cities - the North has been pretending that racism does not exist in its environs.Grant's depiction of Syracuse and its school districts is spot on....an embarrasing truth of Northern life is incredible racial segregation that remains largely unspoken in polite company.The racism of neglect and avoidance are evident in the schools and neighborhoods Grant describes - the neighborhoods where he grew up and currently lives.

Mixed Bag - Unintended Consequences
No one can dispute that it is a worthwhile objective to raise the quality of urban schools. However, I suspect that the author did not spend enough time "in the trenches" speaking with parents and students to understand the unintended consequences of busing in Wake County schools. My family lives in Raleigh and we attend Wake County schools as do most of our friends.

(1) It is not uncommon for kids in the same neighboorhood to be assigned to different schools - destroying the concept of a neighborhood school.

(2) Because the home address is only one factor in school assignment, kids go to schools that may be quite a distance from their actual home despite the fact a school (which should be their neighborhood school) may be a mile or less from their home. This forces many kids onto a school bus (in and of itself is something not all parents want) often times an hour or more before school starts - the chief complaint being that kids spend too much time on the bus.

(3) On a related issue, due to growth in Wake County, kids are getting constantly moved around to accomodate open spots in new schools and to optimize/level attendance levels across all the schools. Kids are eligible to move approx every 3 years - this is not only very disruptive to the kids (as they may need to find new friends, and are often separated from siblings, etc) but creates logistical challenges for the parents as well.

The county is also using the concept of charter schools and magnet schools and I believe these mechanisms as well as enhanced teacher pay for those teachers that choose to teach in an urban school are all better options to achieve the desired school quality. Busing everyone around in my view is not working - the county certainly cannot produce any data that demonstrates it is working.

Hope!
It is about time that the Raleigh (Wake County) school system gets some credit for providing one of the best school systems in the country, despite that we spend less than other areas per student ($1350 less per student against the national average). We do this through innovation - keeping the 'walls' down between the urban and suburban areas, not allowing high-poverty schools, and much more... Thank you, Dr. Grant. I hope your message inspires more communities to learn to teach ALL students in an equal and exceptional way. ... Read more

Product Description
State rail programming and planning have matured greatlyin the past three decades.State and local governments responded towidespread rail line abandonment in the 1970s by attempting topreserve local rail services and corridors through the adoption ofrail freight assistance programs.States also sought to preserveexisting passenger rail services by subscribing to Amtrak’s 403(b)program.This program allows states to negotiate and contract withAmtrak to supplement existing service and build inter-city railservice along vital transportation corridors.

Prosperity in the mid-1980s changed the nature of state rail programs.States ventured into a variety of activities involving freight andpassenger rail programs, grade-crossing safety, right-of-wayacquisition and rail banking, high speed rail planning, and intermodalconnectivity at seaports, river ports, and truck-rail terminals.Moreover, some states appropriated new financing to establish stablefunding sources for the rail mode.The salient features of the 1990shave been the virtual disappearance of federal rail assistance and thetailoring of state rail programs to states’ individual needs.

The purpose of this report is to provide an in-depth look at fourdiverse, yet exemplary, state rail programs: California, Florida,North Carolina, and Washington State.The report examines theevolution, characteristics, management, costs, funding sources andbenefits of each program in detail.It also discusses lessons fromthese state rail programs that might benefit the State of Texas in theevent that Texas considers more active participation in state railprogramming.Detailed appendixes contain considerable documentationof state statutes, funding histories, program descriptions,feasibility studies, Amtrak 403(b) contracts, and similar sourcematerial. ... Read more

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The intense urbanization and industrialization of America's largest city from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class practice of heterosexual barter called "treating," Elizabeth Clement examines changes in sexual morality and sexual and economic practices.

Women "treated" when they exchanged sexual favors for dinner and an evening's entertainment or, more tangibly, for stockings, shoes, and other material goods. These "charity girls" created for themselves a moral space between prostitution and courtship that preserved both sexual barter and respectability. Although treating, as a clearly articulated language and identity, began to disappear after the 1920s and 1930s, Clement argues that it still had significant, lasting effects on modern sexual norms. She demonstrates how treating shaped courtship and dating practices, the prevalence and meaning of premarital sex, and America's developing commercial sex industry. Even further, her study illuminates the ways in which sexuality and morality interact and contribute to our understanding of the broader social categories of race, gender, and class. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent!
This is a wonderful book. It's fabulously researched, beautifully written, and has a compelling argument. Clement's book focuses on the 'gray area' of sexual exchange--the series of negotiations in between prostitution (on one end of the scale) and marriage (on the other)--that Kathy Peiss identified as 'treating.' In this fab book, however, Clement expands on Peiss' insight to show how central treating was to working class sexual practices, and situates treating in relationship to its near relations: prostitution, what we now call the 'sex industry' (exotic dancing, nude modeling, etc), heterosexual courtship practices, and what became known as 'dating' by the 1920s. Anyway, there's lots more to commend it. It's the next word on the history of prostitution and commodified sexuality in early 20th century America. I recommend it for teaching purposes, to be sure, but for general readers as well!

How we came to be a dating nation
This is a really in-depth and interesting study into the sexual and moral changes that occured in the United States during the first 50 years of the 20th century. I was taken with the level of scholarship, clear exposition, and insightful connections that the author brings to the whole subject of how gender/sexual roles evolved during this period. Although it is an academic book, it is nonetheless, an enjoyable and informative one.
J. W. Showalter, Ph.D. ... Read more

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The Road to Mobocracy is the first major study of public disorder in New York City from the Revolutionary period through the Jacksonian era.During that time, the mob lost its traditional, institutional role as corporate safety valve and social corrective, tolerated by public officials.It became autonomous, a violent menace to individual and public good expressing the discordant urges and fears of a pluralistic society.Indeed, it tested the premises of democratic government.

Paul Gilje relates the practices of New York mobs to their American and European roots and uses both historical and anthropological methods to show how those mobs adapted to local conditions.He questions many of the traditional assumptions about the nature of the mob and scrutinizes explanations of its transformation:among them, the loss of a single-interest society, industrialization and changes in the workforce, increased immigration, and the rise of sub-classes in American society.Gilje's findings can be extended to other cities.

The lucid narrative incorporates meticulous and exhaustive archival research that unearths hundreds of New York City disturbances—about the Revolution, bawdy-houses, theaters, dogs and hogs, politics, elections, ethnic conflict, labor actions, religion.Illustrations recreate the turbulent atmosphere of the city; maps, graphs, and tables define the spacial and statistical dimensions of its ferment.The book is a major contribution to our understanding of social change in the early Republic as well as to the history of early New York, urban studies, and rioting. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

How to read this book
This is a very good book on riots.It does not include the riots from "Gangs of New York."If you are going to read this book, read Chapter 10 first.It will give you all the definations of the words the author uses like, magistrate, marshals, watchmen.This will help in knowing what these people are supposed to do in the book.I didn't do this and was wondering throughout the book exactly what these people were supposed to be doing to stop the riots.All the riots get a bit tedious after awhile, but there are some good parts.After you read the book you will sort of have the idea that is all the people in NYC did was riot. ... Read more

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How have civil rights transformed racial politics in America? Connecting economic and social reforms to racial and class inequality, Conjuring Crisis counters the myth of steady race progress by analyzing how the federal government and local politicians have sometimes "reformed" politics in ways that have amplified racism in the post civil-rights era.



In the 1990s at Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina, the city's dominant political coalition of white civic and business leaders had lost control of the city council. Amid accusations of racism in the police department, two white council members joined black colleagues in support of the NAACP's demand for an investigation. George Baca's ethnographic research reveals how residents and politicians transformed an ordinary conflict into a "crisis" that raised the specter of chaos and disaster. He explores new territory by focusing on the broader intersection of militarization, urban politics, and civil rights. ... Read more

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Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged.

Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation.

Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War. ... Read more

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Italians were the largest group of immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and hundreds of thousands led and participated in some of the period's most volatile labor strikes. Yet until now, Italian women's political activism and cultures of resistance have been largely invisible. In Living the Revolution, Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian working-class women who helped shape the vibrant, transnational, radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement.
&9;
Guglielmo imaginatively documents the activism of two generations of New York and New Jersey women who worked in the needle and textile trades. She explores the complex and distinctive ways immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday resistance and political activism. And she shows how their commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements diminished as they became white working-class Americans. The rise of fascism, the Red Scare, and the deprivations of the Great Depression led many to embrace nationalism and racism, ironically to try to meet the same desires for economic justice and dignity that had inspired their enthusiasm for anarchism, socialism, and communism.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

captivating!
I bought this book for my mother and read it cover to cover before I could let it go. This is a beautifully written tale of Italian immigrant women's lives, that takes you from turn-of-the-century Sicily and Naples to the slums of New York City, from the southern Italian fields to New York City's sweatshops. You'll meet a fascinating cast of characters: garment and textile workers, union activists, socialists, anarchists, feminists, fascists and anti-fascists, but also women who just fought for dignity in their everyday lives in subtle yet powerful ways. Read this book and buy it for your family and friends. It's a rare gem: intensely smart and hard to put down. ... Read more

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In this study of busy, complex Regional City—and it is a real city—the author has analyzed the power structure from top to bottom.He has searched out the men of power and, under fictitious names, has described them as they initiate policies in their offices, their homes, their clubs.They form a small, stable group at the top of the social structure. Their decision-making activities are not known to the public, but they are responsible for whatever is done, or not done, in their community.

Beneath this top policy group is a clearly marked social stratification, through which decisions sift down to the substructures chosen to put them into effect.The dynamic relations within the power structure are made clear in charts, but the real interest lies in the author's report of what people themselves say.The African American community is also studied, with its own power structure and its own complicated relations with the large community.The method of study is fully described in an Appendix.

The book should be of particular value to sociologists, political scientists, city-planning executives, Community Council members, social workers, teachers, and research workers in related fields.As a vigorous and readable presentation of facts, it should appeal to the reader who would like to know how his/her own community is run.

Community Power Structure is not an exposŽ.It is a description and discussion of a social phenomenon as it occured.It is based on sound field research, including personal observation and interviews by the author. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

"There appears to be a tenuous line of communication between the governors of our society and the governed...
...This situation does not square with the concepts of democracy we have been taught to revere." So says Floyd Hunter in the introduction to this remarkable book that is now over 50 years old. Hunter has degrees in sociology and anthropology, and he uses the tools of these disciplines (and writes with their jargon) in analyzing the power structure of "Regional City," his pseudonym for Atlanta, Georgia. He describes a vastly different city of 1953 than exists today. The power structure is almost exclusively white, and all too many decisions were made at the Piedmont Country Club (though he does not name it). It is still the days of segregation; he refers to Georgia as "Old State," and at least puts the "Negro problem" in quotes.

In the chapter concerning the more private aspects of power, he concludes with a 15-point analysis of the elements and dynamics of power which one of Atlanta's professionals gave him and they include: "Building a little business on the side if you are a `public servant'", "the newsreels that show no news, only horse races, beauty contests, train wrecks, and screwballs," (and CNN is headquartered in Atlanta today!), "Letting the `practical boys' `buy in'", and "agreement, from top down, on the `line'". In another section, Hunter references Andrew Carnegie's concept that every man is in his place, that the preacher should preach, the physician to practice, etc., but for the few who would be `presumptuous' enough to question policy decisions that they would be: "...considered insubordinate and `punished,' first by a threat to his job security, followed possibly by expulsion from his job if his insubordination continued."

Edward Brown, in his review of this book posted at Amazon, used a great subject line: "The Real Wizards of Oz." Because this book is very much about the people "behind the curtain," who wield power with the booming voice that amplifies the decisions of a pathetic little man, and the decisions remain acceptable to the rest of us if no one pulls the curtain back. Power in "Regional City," is more than one man, of course, when power was almost exclusively in the hands of men, but the largest "takeaway" for me from this book is how FEW the men actually are. (The author has numerous circular graphs and tables that illustrate this concentration of power.)Hunter gives fictionalized names to 40, and persuasively concludes that all decisions of substance concerning the city's governance are made by them, with various "front men," like a mayor, being their mouthpieces, and in some cases, enforcers.

Over the subsequent 50 plus years, with the increased concentration of wealth in the hands of even fewer people, the concentration of power in the political process has only intensified. How many decisions that affect our lives are made in the backrooms of Davos, without even a fig leaf of a "democratic process"?

Though in ways the book is of a city whose structure has radically changed, Hunter's theme of the concentration of political and economic power in the hand of a few, and the stark contrast with the "democratic process" which purportedly gives an equal voice to all, remains an essential 5-star read today.

The Real Wizards of Oz
Floyd Hunter's, "The Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers" sums up the essential difference between "The Haves" and "Have-Nots." On page 2, Hunter captures the essence of his theory by stating, "The difference between the leaders (in a community) and other men lies in the fact that social groupings have apparently given definite social function over certain persons and not to others." In other words, in each community lies a cabal of "movers and shakers" who create public policy and influence the dynamics that go on in that environment.Nothing surprising about that!However, the notion that one lives in a democratic society where he has an equal voice in the creation of a power structure is dispelled in this book.In fact, your professional status and pedigree have more to do with you joining these ranks than anything else.

Hunter has methodically broken down the power influences in society that shape individual lives without any "ax to grind" or political ideology to promote.

This is an excellent tome for those who:

· Want to understand the concept of power in a community
· Desire to uncover how things get done in society
· Wonder why the same faces are always in the forefront of economic and social development
· Are interested in the layers of a hierarchy and where you fit in.

I highly recommend this book as a means of learning the lay of the land in a community structure and where you stand as an influencer.



Edward Brown
Core Edge Image & Charisma Institute
www.charismatoday.blogspot.com

The Truth Twists Your Stomach
Hunter's fascinating account into the thoroughly-researched community power structure of an anonymous U.S. metropolis city exposes the well-known account of big business's monopoly power over political, economic, and civic institutions. The sad part is this book was published almost sixty years ago! The main premises for Hunter's book not only still apply, but apply ever more so today than they did then. The rise of big business finally took COMPLETE monopoly power over society after the rise of Neoliberalism (thanks to Reagan, Thatcher, and Volker). The so-called "free market" and lack of any type of regulation has devastated the environment, has mad slaves out of oppressed people working under horrible conditions for meager pay, and has now caught up with American society as well (read "Bad Money" by Kevin Philips and "The Global Class War" by Jeff Faux for more on the divergence of the higher class interest from the interests of the average American). This book contains loads of information on how the general power structure is drawn in big cities. It is a must read for anyone interested in learning about where community power REALLY comes from (it does not come from the mayor). The reality of this book is not so kind so, if you have cardiac problems, then read at your own risk... ... Read more

Product Description
In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African American settlement produced such compelling and influential forms of Black Power politics.

During an era of expansion and political struggle in California's system of public higher education, black southern migrants formed the BPP. In the early 1960s, attending Merritt College and other public universities radicalized Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many of the young people who joined the Panthers' rank and file. In the face of social crisis and police violence, the most disfranchised sectors of the East Bay's African American community--young, poor, and migrant--challenged the legitimacy of state authorities and of an older generation of black leadership. By excavating this hidden history, Living for the City broadens the scholarship of the Black Power movement by documenting the contributions of black students and youth who created new forms of organization, grassroots mobilization, and political literacy.
... Read more