Security Studies

The American women’s movement has been shrouded in myths, argue three leading scholars in this bold and revisionist history. Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women’s movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that dramatically rewrites a century of American women’s history.

In Stop the Islamization of America, the renowned activist Pamela Geller lays bare the chilling details of the Muslim Brotherhood's strategy of steady subversion and erosion of our freedoms, while offering a practical guide for how to fight back.

As a young woman, Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney asked her grandmother for career advice. She was shocked by the reply: "Get married." Though much has changed for women since then, more has remained the same. On a January night in 2008, Maloney and her daughter attended a Hillary Clinton rally in New Hampshire. Men in the audience held "Iron My Shirt" posters aloft. This small incident provoked outrage, but it provided an important peephole onto larger problems that women face today.

A sharecropper, a warrior, and a truth-telling prophet, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) stands as a powerful symbol not only of the 1960s Black freedom movement, but also of the enduring human struggle against oppression. This is a rhetorical biography that tells the story of Hamer's life by focusing on how she employed symbols - images, words, and even material objects such as the ballot, food, and clothing - to construct persuasive public personae, to influence audiences, and to effect social change.

In the quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world - and indeed are still being felt today.

Seen as godless by the religious and weak by the atheists, secularism mostly has been misunderstood. In How to Be Secular, Berlinerblau argues for a return to America’s hard-won secular tradition; the best way to protect religious diversity and freedom lies in keeping an eye on the encroachment of each into the other. Berlinerblau passionately defends the virtues of secularism, reminds us what it is and what it can protect, and urges us to mobilize around its cause, which is for all Americans to continue to enjoy freedom for - and from - religion.

Most Americans consider a free press essential to democratic society - either as an independent watchdog against governmental abuse of power or as a wide-open marketplace of ideas. But few understand that far-reaching public policies have shaped the news citizens receive. In an age when mass communication ranges from independent cable channels to the Internet, it is essential to assess these policies and their effects if we want the media to continue fulfilling their role.

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train", she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders.

Tell is the riveting story of Major Margaret Witt’s dedicated and decorated military career as a frontline flight nurse, and of her love and devotion to her partner - now wife - Laurie Johnson. Tell captures the tension and drama of the politically charged legal battle that led to the congressional repeal of the controversial law and helped pave the way for a suite of landmark political and legal victories for gay rights.

In 1964 a small group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana, defied the nonviolence policy of the mainstream civil rights movement and formed an armed self-defense organization - the Deacons for Defense and Justice - to protect movement workers from vigilante and police violence. With their largest and most famous chapter at the center of a bloody campaign in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Bogalusa, Louisiana, the Deacons became a popular symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent strategy.

In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O'Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O'Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police

Beyond the Sand and Sea is an extraordinary and inspiring book for anyone searching for pinpricks of light in the darkness. Meticulously reported over three years, it reveals the strength of a family of Somali refugees who never lost faith in America - and exposes the broken refugee resettlement system that kept that family trapped for more than two decades and has turned millions into permanent exiles.

Too often, all oppressed people in America are lumped together under the moniker people of color, as if each group's experience under the yoke of systemic racism has the same repercussions. But the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) hold a unique claim: ADOS, after all, is the only group whose ancestors were forcibly brought to America, enslaved, built much of the wealth of the country, yet continue to be excluded from the same social, political, and economic rights of other Americans. To that end, Rev. Dr. Kevin W. Cosby lays out the first theology of the ADOS movement.

Judith Sevinç Basad empört sich - und stemmt sich vehement gegen die sich aufgeklärt wähnende Meinungsmache, gegen Denkverbote und Unschärfen in den Argumenten einer selbsternannten kulturellen Elite. Ist es denn, genau betrachtet, wirklich so, dass die "Privilegierten" den sozialen Aufstieg von Migrantenkindern verhindern? Kann nur eine Frau wissen, wie man Politik für Frauen macht? Ist "MeToo" eine durchgängig lautere Bewegung? Ist es im Kampf gegen Rassismus mit der Entmachtung des "alten weißen Mannes" getan?

In the wake of his controversial national best-seller, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy grapples brilliantly and judiciously with another stigma of our racial discourse: "selling out", or racial betrayal, which is a subject of much anxiety and acrimony in Black America. He atomizes the vicissitudes of the term and shows how its usage bedevils Blacks and Whites, while elucidating the effects it has on individuals and on our society as a whole.

The school careers of two teenage girls who lived across town from each other - one black, one white - were altered by a court-ordered desegregation plan for Durham, NC in 1970. LaHoma and Cindy both found themselves at the same high school from different sides of a court-ordered racial “balancing act”. This plan thrust each of them involuntarily out of their comfort zones and into new racial landscapes. Their experiences, recounted in alternating first-person narratives, are the embodiment of desegregation policies, situated in a particular time and place.

En la prensa escrita y en la digital, en las redes sociales y en los medios tradicionales, un torrente de mentiras, propaganda e inexactitudes - motivadas por el afán de dinero, notoriedad o poder - se mezcla y confunde con el reporte de hechos reales. Jamás ha sido tan fácil ser engañado: a la censura y el espionaje se han sumado la sobreinformación y las fake news. En este escenario, que parece sacado de una distopía orwelliana, la ética periodística, la confirmación y el rigor parecen reliquias olvidadas.

Who was Ernest Withers? Most Americans may not know the name, but they do know his photographs. Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and ’60s: Martin Luther King, Jr., riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Till’s uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at one of his nephew’s killers; scores of African-American protestors, carrying a forest of signs reading "I am a man." But while he enjoyed unparalleled access to the inner workings of the civil rights movement, Withers was working as an informant for the FBI.

In an age of PR, public protest and other forms of dissent have lost their meaning and impact. The intense media interest in rioting and political violence, as well as an existing obsession with youth culture, have led to an oversaturation and misrepresentation of what these movements are about. Political protest has become a pantomime where activists are always villains, and therefore the politics of these groups are routinely ignored.

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, Our Bodies, Whose Property? challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies.