The Two Faces Of America

Download or read book The Two Faces of American Freedom written by Aziz Rana and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.

Download or read book America, Amerikkka written by Rosemary Radford Ruether and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America views itself as a nation inhabiting a "promised land" and enjoying a favoured relation with God. This view of unique election has been coupled with racial exclusivism and the marginalization of non-white citizens. America, Amerikkka traces the historical and ideological patterns behind America’s sense of itself. In its examination of America’s "chosenness", the book ranges across the doctrine of the "rights of man" in the 18th and 19th centuries, the role of America in the twentieth century as "global policeman", and the enforcement of neo-colonial relations over the "third world". The volume argues for a vision of global relations between peoples based on justice and mutuality, rather than hegemonic dominance.

Download or read book The Two Faces of America written by Leonard C. Garrett Sr. and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonard C. Garrett Sr. was born May 17, 1930 to parents sharecropping a 40 acres slave plot given his mothers parents when they were freed from slavery. Forced from the farm by the Ku Klux Klan, his parents fled to Tampa, Florida. An avid reader, He learned that outside the southern states, for those with Hope, America offered Opportunity, and through Shared Sacrifice, a better America for the Generation that follows. He quit high school and joined the air force, moved his parents out of the projects, and set out to achieve his American dream. Retiring from the air force he joined a major bank as a junior executive and at age fifty-four, had achieved an American dream never believed possible. The Election of 1980 had Unleashed the Wealthy, Greedy, Corrupt, and the politically Powerful from the Bonds of Shared Sacrifice and; empowered conservative ideology driven southern states to roll-back Supreme Court decisions and Laws guaranteeing civil rights of black and Latino Americans. He was harvested, convicted, and sentenced to prison for crimes fabricated by the US attorney, covered up by a Fraudulent Judgment on appeal, denied access to the Court to seek redress, and was held falsely imprisoned for 10 years all; covered-up by a corrupt conservative criminal justice system. Today at age 81, Garrett is among the millions of Americans driving past gated communities into cities with closed factories, boarded-up homes, and neighborhoods of unemployed, elderly, and less-advantaged Americans suffering the question, what happened to the American that We sacrificed so much to make great?

Download or read book The Two Faces of Justice written by Jiwei Ci and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Justice is a human virtue that is at once unconditional and conditional. Under favorable circumstances, we can be motivated to act justly by the belief that we must live up to what justice requires, irrespective of whether we benefit from doing so. But our will to act justly is subject to conditions. We find it difficult to exercise the virtue of justice when others regularly fail to. Even if we appear to have overcome the difficulty, our reluctance often betrays itself in certain moral emotions. In this book, Jiwei Ci explores the dual nature of justice, in an attempt to make unitary sense of key features of justice reflected in its close relation to resentment, punishment, and forgiveness. Rather than pursue a search for normative principles, he probes the human psychology of justice to understand what motivates moral agents who seek to behave justly, and why their desire to be just is as precarious as it is uplifting. A wide-ranging treatment of enduring questions, The Two Faces of Justice can also be read as a remarkably discerning contribution to the Western discourse on justice re-launched in our time by John Rawls.

Download or read book Faces of America written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the family trees and genealogical identity of twelve remarkable Americans: Stephen Colbert, Louise Erdrich, Eva Longoria, Yo Yo Ma, and others. Since 2007, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been helping African Americans find long-buried details about their ancestors by researching their family trees and then, when the paper trail ends, by analyzing their DNA and marrying that information to a wealth of historical data. Now, in Faces of America, Gates explores the family trees of twelve of America’s most recognizable and extraordinary citizens, individuals who learn that they are of Asian, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Jewish, Latino, Native American, Swiss, and Syrian ancestry: Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian and television personality Stephen Colbert, writer Louise Erdrich, writer Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, cellist Yo Yo Ma, writer and director Mike Nichols, former monarch of Jordan Queen Noor, surgeon and author Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and Olympic gold medalist and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. In addition, each of the subjects in Faces of America underwent dense genotyping to trace their genetic ancestry on their father’s line, their mother’s line, and their percentages of European, Asian, Native American, and African ancestry. Readers will share in the surprise and delight, the shock and sadness of these twelve individuals themselves as Gates unveils their rich family stories, traced back to their arrival on America’s shores, and beyond, deep into the history of their ancestors’ countries of origin. In this compelling book, Gates demonstrates that where we come from profoundly and fundamentally informs who we are today.

Download or read book Two Faces of Exclusion written by Lon Kurashige and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination. In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism; they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the twenty-first century's tightly integrated Pacific world.

Download or read book America Is in the Heart written by Carlos Bulosan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.