From Riots to Recession

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Scott L. Cummings

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s goals, methods, and contributions. It sets forth the book’s central aim—to deepen scholarship on lawyers and social movements by closely attending to the richness and complexity of contemporary practice at the local level—and then describes the L.A. low-wage worker organizing campaigns through which this aim is pursued. The campaigns are situated within theoretical perspectives on movement lawyering, labor studies, and local government law, and then placed in historical context. Tracing the history of Los Angeles’s economic and political transformation—from the postwar era to the 1992 civil unrest sparked by the Rodney King verdict through the 2008 recession—the chapter shows how the campaigns grew out of trends producing greater inequality while also creating the organizational foundation of community–labor activism to challenge it. The concluding section provides a demographic overview of the industries targeted by the L.A. campaigns—garment, day labor, retail, hospitality, grocery, and trucking—and a road map of the chapters that follow.

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 189-197
Author(s):  
Tsyrenov Chingis Ts. ◽  

The article shows the history of the heyday and decline of the four highest clans of the Southern Chinese Eastern Jin dynasty (Wang, Xie, Yu and Huan clans), which alternately with varying degrees of success acted as the second most powerful clan in the entire Eastern Jin Empire when the central power ceased to be a self-sufficient force and badly needed the support of noble clans (strong houses). The purpose of the study is to identify the main factors of the political longevity of the highest clans of the period under review. The methodology of this study includes the method of prosopographic and historical-genetic analysis of the four highest clans of the Eastern Jin era, between which there was a continuous and merciless political struggle for the highest civil and military posts in the Eastern Jin Empire. The perspective of clan issues and inter-clan relations in Jin history lies in the possibility of a detailed reconstruction of the specific historical context of the most important events in the history of China in the 4th‒5th centuries AD and will contribute to the development of elitology of early medieval China. As a result of the analysis of the history of the development of the four clans, it was concluded that the Wang clan achieved the greatest success during the Eastern Jin period, which was able to move from the local level of politics to the level of the Eastern Jin Empire. The very factor of the clan structures of Chinese society had a significant double impact on the historical and political process of the period of the Jin Empire, as well as the era of the Southern and Northern dynasties in general. The duality lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the continuous strife between the regional branches of the Sima clan (the revolt of the eight princes) undermined the basis of the power of the all-Chinese empire of Western Jin from the inside, and on the other hand, the same clan structures in combination with rather strong compatriot ties (the alliance of the regional branch of the ruling Clan Sima and the local noble clan Wang) allowed the ruling house of Sima to retain supreme power and minimized the loss of the Chinese ethnos in a troubled and turbulent era. The system of the highest clans of the Jin era, in fact, developed as a result of the abandonment of the Han institute of examinations for officials, which prevented the highest clans from distributing among themselves the most important posts in the empire. Keywords: Western Jin, Eastern Jin, South China, higher clans, examination institute, nine-rank report card, prosopographic analysis


Author(s):  
Christoph Klimmt

This comment briefly examines the history of entertainment research in media psychology and welcomes the conceptual innovations in the contribution by Oliver and Bartsch (this issue). Theoretical perspectives for improving and expanding the “appreciation” concept in entertainment psychology are outlined. These refer to more systematic links of appreciation to the psychology of mixed emotions, to positive psychology, and to the psychology of death and dying – in particular, to terror management theory. In addition, methodological challenges are discussed that entertainment research faces when appreciation and the experience of “meaning for life” need to be addressed in empirical studies of media enjoyment.


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.


Author(s):  
Stephen R. Barley

The four chapters of this book summarize the results of thirty-five years dedicated to studying how technologies change work and organizations. The first chapter places current developments in artificial intelligence into the historical context of previous technological revolutions by drawing on William Faunce’s argument that the history of technology is one of progressive automation of the four components of any production system: energy, transformation, and transfer and control technologies. The second chapter lays out a role-based theory of how technologies occasion changes in organizations. The third chapter tackles the issue of how to conceptualize a more thorough approach to assessing how intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can shape work and employment. The fourth chapter discusses what has been learned over the years about the fears that arise when one sets out to study technical work and technical workers and methods for controlling those fears.


Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin

This chapter examines the history of political-legal reasoning. It suggests that this history begins in the Renaissance with the emergence of a doctrine of ‘reason of state’, a doctrine which was widely debated between the late-sixteenth and early-eighteenth centuries but remained contentious throughout. It argues that reason of state continued to exert an influence in the modern political world, but that that influence is complicated by changes in the nature and forms of government. Most importantly, the modern state presents itself as a constitutional state and once the constitution is established as ‘fundamental law’, whatever remains of reason of state discourse is subsumed under the idea of ‘constitutional legality’. Consequently, those elements of the doctrine that live on in contemporary practice no longer fall into a distinct category of reason of state; they have become a facet of the emergence of the modern ‘state of reason’.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.


Author(s):  
Ellen Reese ◽  
Ian Breckenridge-Jackson ◽  
Julisa McCoy

This chapter explores the history of maternalist mobilization and women’s community politics in the United States. It argues that both “maternalism” and “community” have proved to be highly flexible mobilizing frames for women. Building on the insights of intersectionality theory, the authors suggest that women’s maternal and community politics is shaped by their social locations within multiple, intersecting relations of domination and subordination, as well as their political ideologies and historical context. The chapter begins by discussing the politically contradictory history of maternalist mobilization within the United States from the Progressive era to the present. It then explores other forms of women’s community politics, focusing on women’s community volunteerism, self-help groups, and community organizing. It discusses how these frames have been used both to build alliances among women and to divide or exclude women based on perceived differences and social inequalities based on race, nativity, class, or sexual orientation.


Author(s):  
Eugenia Roldán Vera ◽  
Susana Quintanilla

The Mexican policy of state provision of standardized textbooks for all was instituted in 1959 and still ongoing. This is an overview of the previous history of state intervention in the production and distribution of school textbooks, an examination of the particular circumstances in which the 1959 policy was figured and implemented, and a description of the characteristics of the different generations of textbooks that have since been published, corresponding with several educational reforms. The arguments for and against standardized textbooks mobilized by different sectors of society throughout sixty years are discussed in their historical context. Far from this being a debate about the authoritarian intervention of the state in education, issues of social equality and teaching quality have been central.


2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-267
Author(s):  
Rashmi Dyal-Chand

Preemption is one of the most important legal doctrines for today’s progressives to understand because of its power to constrain progressive policymaking and social movement lawyering at the state and local level. By examining the detailed history of a decades-long campaign by the labor and environmental movements to improve working conditions in an industry at the heart of the global supply chain, Scott L. Cummings’s Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port (2018) provides a case study about the doctrine and impacts of preemption. The study also inspires lawyers and activists alike to reexamine core questions of factual relevance, representation and voice, and precedent.


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