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Yazoo
Integration in a Deep-Southern Town
Willie Morris
University of Arkansas Press, 2012
In 1970 Brown v. Board of Education was sixteen years old, and fifteen years had passed since the Brown II mandate that schools integrate "with all deliberate speed." Still, after all this time, it was necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to order thirty Mississippi school districts--whose speed had been anything but deliberate--to integrate immediately. One of these districts included Yazoo City, the hometown of writer Willie Morris. Installed productively on "safe, sane Manhattan Island," Morris, though compelled to write about this pivotal moment, was reluctant to return to Yazoo and do no less than serve as cultural ambassador between the flawed Mississippi that he loved and a wider world. "I did not want to go back," Morris wrote. "I finally went home because the urge to be there during Yazoo's most critical moment was too elemental to resist, and because I would have been ashamed of myself if I had not." The result, Yazoo, is part reportage, part memoir, part ethnography, part social critique--and one of the richest accounts we have of a community's attempt to come to terms with the realities of seismic social change. As infinitely readable and nuanced as ever, Yazoo is available again, enhanced by an informative foreword by historian Jenifer Jensen Wallach and a warm and personal afterword on Morris's writing life by his widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris.
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A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court
Rodney A. Smolla, ed.
Duke University Press, 1995
Despite its importance to the life of the nation and all its citizens, the Supreme Court remains a mystery to most Americans, its workings widely felt but rarely seen firsthand. In this book, journalists who cover the Court—acting as the eyes and ears of not just the American people, but the Constitution itself—give us a rare close look into its proceedings, the people behind them, and the complex, often fascinating ways in which justice is ultimately served. Their narratives form an intimate account of a year in the life of the Supreme Court.
The cases heard by the Surpreme Court are, first and foremost, disputes involving real people with actual stories. The accidents and twists of circumstance that have brought these people to the last resort of litigation can make for compelling drama. The contributors to this volume bring these dramatic stories to life, using them as a backdrop for the larger issues of law and social policy that constitute the Court’s business: abortion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, the right of privacy, crime, violence, discrimination, and the death penalty. In the course of these narratives, the authors describe the personalities and jurisprudential leanings of the various Justices, explaining how the interplay of these characters and theories about the Constitution interact to influence the Court’s decisions.
Highly readable and richly informative, this book offers an unusually clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the most influential institutions in modern American life.
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Year One of the Russian Revolution
Victor Serge
Pluto Press, 1992

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The Yellow River
The Problem of Water in Modern China
David A. Pietz
Harvard University Press, 2015

Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s contemporary water crisis, mapping the confluence of forces that have shaped the predicament that the world’s most populous nation now faces in managing its water reserves.

Chinese governments have long struggled to maintain ecological stability along the Yellow River, undertaking ambitious programs of canal and dike construction to mitigate the effects of recurrent droughts and floods. But particularly during the Maoist years the North China Plain was radically re-engineered to utilize every drop of water for irrigation and hydroelectric generation. As David A. Pietz shows, Maoist water management from 1949 to 1976 cast a long shadow over the reform period, beginning in 1978. Rapid urban growth, industrial expansion, and agricultural intensification over the past three decades of China’s economic boom have been realized on a water resource base that was acutely compromised, with effects that have been more difficult and costly to overcome with each passing decade. Chronicling this complex legacy, The Yellow River provides important insight into how water challenges will affect China’s course as a twenty-first-century global power.

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Yes Gawd!
How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States
Cravens III, Royal G.
Temple University Press, 2024
Yes Gawd! explores the effects of religious belief and practice on political behavior among the LGBT community, a population long persecuted by religious institutions and generally considered to be non-religious. Royal Cravens deftly shows how faith impacts the politics of LGBT people. He details how the queer community creates, defines, and experiences spirituality and spiritual affirmation as well as the consequences this has for their identity, socialization, and political development.

Cravens also demonstrates the mobilizing power of faith for LGBT people by contrasting the effects of participation in faith and secular communities on political activism. He explores how factors such as coming out, race, and LGBT-affirming churches influence political attitudes and behavior and explains how the development of LGBT politico-religious activism provides opportunities for LGBT people to organize politically.

Ultimately, Cravens provides a cohesive account of how religion acts as a catalyst for and facilitator in the political development of LGBT people in the United States. In the process, he shows that there is room for both religion in LGBT communities and LGBT people in religious communities.
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Yesterday
A New History of Nostalgia
Tobias Becker
Harvard University Press, 2023

A sweeping reassessment of our longing for the past, from the rise of “retro” to the rhetoric of Brexit and Trump.

Nostalgia has a bad reputation. Its critics dismiss it as mere sentimentality or, worse, a dangerous yearning for an imagined age of purity. And nostalgia is routinely blamed for trivializing the past and obscuring its ugly sides. In Yesterday, Tobias Becker offers a more nuanced and sympathetic view. Surveying the successive waves of nostalgia that swept the United States and Europe after the Second World War, he shows that longing for the past is more complex and sometimes more beneficial than it seems.

The current meaning of “nostalgia” is surprisingly recent: until the 1960s, it usually just meant homesickness, in keeping with the original Greek word. Linking popular culture to postwar politics in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, Becker explains the shift in meaning. He also responds to arguments against nostalgia, showing its critics as often shortsighted in their own ways as they defend an idea of progress no less naïve than the wistfulness they denounce. All too often, nostalgia itself is criticized, as if its merit did not depend on which specific past one longs for.

Taking its title from one of the most popular songs of all time, and grounded in extensive research, Yesterday offers a rigorous and entertaining perspective on divisive issues in culture and politics. Whether we are revisiting, reviving, reliving, reenacting, or regressing, and whether these activities find expression in politics, music, fashion, or family history, nostalgia is inevitable. It is also powerful, not only serving to define the past but also orienting us toward the future we will create.

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Yesterday in Mexico
A Chronicle of the Revolution, 1919–1936
By John W. F. Dulles
University of Texas Press, 1961

Early in a sixteen-year sojourn in Mexico as an engineer for an American mining company, John W. F. Dulles became fascinated by the story of Mexico’s emergence as a modern nation, and was imbued with the urge to tell that story as it had not yet been told—by letting events speak for themselves, without any interpretations or appraisal.

The resultant book offers an interesting paradox: it is “chronicle” in the medieval sense—a straightforward record of events in chronological order, recounted with no effort at evaluation or interpretation; yet in one aspect it is a highly personal narrative, since much of its significant new material came to Dulles as a result of personal interviews with principals of the Revolution. From them he obtained firsthand versions of events and other reminiscences, and he has distilled these accounts into a work of history characterized by thorough research and objective narration.

These fascinating interviews were no more important, however, than were the author’s many hours of laborious search in libraries for accounts of the events from Carranza’s last year to Calles’ final retirement from the Mexican scene. The author read scores of impassioned versions of what transpired during these fateful years, accounts written from every point of view, virtually all of them unpublished in English and many of them documents which had never been published in any language.

Combining this material with the personal reminiscences, Dulles has provided a narrative rich in its new detail, dispassionate in its presentation of facts, dramatic in its description of the clash of armies and the turbulence of rough-and-tumble politics, and absorbing in its panoramic view of a people’s struggle.

In it come to life the colorful men of the Revolution —Obregón, De la Huerta, Carranza, Villa, Pani, Carillo Puerto, Morones, Calles, Portes Gil, Vasconcelos, Ortiz Rubio, Garrido Canabal, Rodríguez, Cárdenas. (Dulles’ narrative of their public actions is illumined occasionally by humorous anecdotes and by intimate glimpses.) From it emerges also, as the main character, Mexico herself, struggling for self-discipline, for economic stability, for justice among her citizens, for international recognition, for democracy.

This account will be prized for its encyclopedic collection of facts and for its important clarification of many notable events, among them the assassination of Carranza, the De La Huerta revolt, the assassination of Obregón, the trial of Toral, the resignation of President Ortiz Rubio, and the break between Cárdenas and Calles. More than sixty photographs supplement the text.

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Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World
Testimonios on Violence
Roberto Cintli Rodríguez; Foreword by Patrisia Gonzales
University of Arizona Press, 2019
In Nahuatl yolqui is the idea of a warrior brought back from the dead. For author and activist Roberto Cintli Rodríquez, it describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. sheriffs.

Framed by Rodríguez’s personal testimony of police violence, this book offers a historia profunda of the culture of extralegal violence against Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States. In addition to Rodríguez’s story, this book includes several short essays from victims and survivors that bring together personal accounts of police brutality and state-sponsored violence. This wide-ranging work touches on historical and current events, including the Watts rebellion, the Zoot Suit Riots, Operation Streamline, Standing Rock, and much more.

From the eyewitness accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas to the protestors and allies at Standing Rock, this book makes evident the links between colonial violence against Red-Black-Brown bodies to police violence in our communities today. Grounded in the stories of the lives of victims and survivors of police violence, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World illuminates the physical, spiritual, and epistemic depths and consequences of racialized dehumanization.

Rodríguez offers us an urgent, poignant, and personal call to end violence and the philosophies that permit such violence to flourish. Like the Nahuatl yolqui, this book is intended as a means of healing, offering a footprint going back to the origins of violence, and, more important, a way forward.

With contributions by Raúl Alcaraz-Ochoa, Citalli Álvarez, Tanya Alvarez, Rebekah Barber, Juvenal Caporale, David Cid, Arianna Martinez Reyna, Carlos Montes, Travis Morales, Simon Moya Smith, Cesar Noriega, Kimberly Phillips, Christian Ramirez, Michelle Rascon Canales, Carolyn Torres, Jerry Tello, Tara Trudell, and Laurie Valdez.
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You Call This an Election?
America's Peculiar Democracy
Steven E. Schier
Georgetown University Press, 2003

Those who do not have their heads buried too deeply in partisan sands will know that there is something awry with the American form of electoral democracy. Florida's continuing ability to misplace votes recently and in the 2000 Presidential election is only part of the iceberg we have been made privy to-and Steven Schier takes a good, hard, evaluative look not only at what is there in plain sight, but that which lurks below the surface (and not only in Florida and not only with the electoral college). He further proposes practical improvements that will make our surprisingly peculiar democratic processes healthy, whole, and responsive again.

Identifying four essential evaluative criteria for a democracy that genuinely works, Schier asks us to examine the degree to which our system promotes political stability, the degree to which our elected officials are held accountable, what the problems are with voter turnout and how to improve it, and asks for a meaningful scrutiny of governmental policy.

No look at our peculiar democracy would be complete without an examination of other established democracies, nor a look at how special interests warp political parties and the concept of majority rule. The solution to many of our electoral problems, Schier argues, lies in enhancing the roles and influence of political parties. Schier proposes reforms that include broadening voter registration; giving parties large blocks of free TV time; adopting one-punch partisan ballots, making it easier for voters to cast a straight-party vote; abandoning initiatives which clutter up the ballot; and utilizing party-based financing to boost voter turnout. With these proposals, he encourages the creative consideration of election reform, and shows how the Florida 2000 race may have played out had these suggestions been in place.

Schier's book appeals to any and every citizen interested in our electoral system and its role in governmental politics. It is invaluable for professionals in political science and ideal for students in American government, political parties, elections, and political behavior courses, as well for political scientists. Any citizens concerned about the conduct of American elections will discover here a fresh and focused analysis of our problems at the ballot box.

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You Can Crush the Flowers
A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution
Bahia Shehab
Gingko, 2021
Part visual history, part memoir, You Can Crush the Flowers is a chronicle of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, as it manifested itself not only in the art on the streets of Cairo but also through the wider visual culture that emerged during the revolution. Marking the ten-year anniversary of the revolution, celebrated Egyptian-Lebanese artist Bahia Shehab tells the stories that inspired both her own artwork and the work of her fellow revolutionaries. Shehab narrates the events of the revolution as they unfolded, describing on one hand the tactics deployed by the regime to drive protesters from the street—from the use of tear gas and snipers to brute force, intimidation techniques, and virginity tests—and on the other hand the retaliation by the protesters online and on the street in marches, chants, street art, and memes. Throughout this powerful and moving account, which includes over one hundred images, Shehab responds to all these aspects of the revolution as both artist and activist. The result bears witness to the brutality of the regime and pays tribute to the protestors who bravely defied it.

 
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You Had a Job for Life
Story of a Company Town
Jamie Sayen
Brandeis University Press, 2023
A local story with profound national implications, now available as a paperback with a new preface by the author.
 
Absentee owners. Single-minded concern for the bottom line. Friction between workers and management. Hostile takeovers at the hands of avaricious and unaccountable multinational interests. The story of America’s industrial decline is all too familiar—and yet, somehow, still hard to fathom. Jamie Sayen spent years interviewing residents of Groveton, New Hampshire, about the century-long saga of their company town. The community’s paper mill had been its economic engine since the early twentieth century. Purchased and revived by local owners in the postwar decades, the mill merged with Diamond International in 1968. It fell victim to Anglo-French financier James Goldsmith’s hostile takeover in 1982, then suffered through a series of owners with no roots in the community until its eventual demise in 2007. Drawing on conversations with scores of former mill workers, Sayen reconstructs the mill’s human history: the smells of pulp and wood, the injuries and deaths, the struggles of women for equal pay and fair treatment, and the devastating impact of global capitalism on a small New England town. This is a heartbreaking story of the decimation of industrial America.
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front cover of You Had a Job for Life
You Had a Job for Life
Story of a Company Town
Jamie Sayen
University Press of New England, 2017
Absentee owners. Single-minded concern for the bottom line. Friction between workers and management. Hostile takeovers at the hands of avaricious and unaccountable multinational interests. The story of America’s industrial decline is all too familiar—and yet, somehow, still hard to fathom. Jamie Sayen spent years interviewing residents of Groveton, New Hampshire, about the century-long saga of their company town. The community’s paper mill had been its economic engine since the early twentieth century. Purchased and revived by local owners in the postwar decades, the mill merged with Diamond International in 1968. It fell victim to Anglo-French financier James Goldsmith’s hostile takeover in 1982, then suffered through a series of owners with no roots in the community until its eventual demise in 2007. Drawing on conversations with scores of former mill workers, Sayen reconstructs the mill’s human history: the smells of pulp and wood, the injuries and deaths, the struggles of women for equal pay and fair treatment, and the devastating impact of global capitalism on a small New England town. This is a heartbreaking story of the decimation of industrial America.
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You Work Tomorrow
An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-41
John Marsh, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2007
"An outstanding piece of scholarship and a welcome contribution to the field, this collection of neglected but powerful poetry speaks to our own time as much as it does to its own era."
---Nicholas Coles, University of Pittsburgh
"Opens up a dramatic new aspect of American literature for study, discussion, and enjoyment. The collection of poems is original and engaging and is sure to be useful for classes in literature, American history, and labor studies."
---Alan Wald, University of Michigan
You Work Tomorrow provides a glimpse into a relatively unknown aspect of American literary and labor history---the remarkable but largely forgotten poems published in union newspapers during the turbulent 1930s. Members of all unions---including autoworkers, musicians, teachers, tenant farmers, garment workers, artists, and electricians---wrote thousands of poems during this period that described their working, living, and political conditions. From this wealth of material, John Marsh has chosen poetry that is both aesthetically appealing and historically relevant, dispelling the myth that labor poetry consisted solely of amateurish and predictable sloganeering. A foreword by contemporary poet Jim Daniels is followed by John Marsh's substantive introduction, detailing the cultural and political significance of union poetry.
John Marsh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Coordinator of The Odyssey Project, a year-long, college-accredited course in the humanities offered at no cost to adults living below or slightly above the federal poverty level.
A volume in the series Class : Culture
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Younger Than That Now
The Politics of Age in the 1960s
Holly V. Scott
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Retrospectives of the 1960s routinely include the face of youth rebellion: long-haired students occupying campus buildings, young men burning draft cards, hippies dancing at Woodstock. In Younger Than That Now, Holly V. Scott explores how the idea of "youth" served as a tactic in the political and social activism of these years. In the early part of that decade, young white activists began to learn from the civil rights movement's defiance of racism. They examined their own lives and concluded that campus rules and the draft were repression as well. As a group, they were ripe for revolution, and their age gave them a unique perspective for understanding and protesting against injustice. In short, young people began to use their youth as a political strategy.

Some in the New Left were dubious of this strategy and asked how it might damage long-term progress. Young feminists and people of color were particularly quick to question the idea that age alone was enough to sustain a movement. And the media often presented young people as impulsive and naive, undermining their political legitimacy. In tracing how "youth" took on multiple meanings as the 1960s progressed, Scott demonstrates the power of this idea to both promote and hinder social change.
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Your Britain
Media and the Making of the Labour Party
Laura Beers
Harvard University Press, 2010

In the early twentieth century, new mass media—popular newspapers, radio, film—exploded at the same time that millions of Britons received the vote in the franchise expansions of 1918 and 1928. The growing centrality of the commercial media to democratic life quickly became evident as organizations of all stripes saw its potential to reach new voters. The new media presented both an exciting opportunity and a significant challenge to the new Labour Party.

Laura Beers traces Labour’s rise as a movement for working-class men to its transformation into a national party that won a landslide victory in 1945. Key to its success was a skillful media strategy designed to win over a broad, diverse coalition of supporters. Though some in the movement harbored reservations about a socialist party making use of the “capitalist” commercial media, others advocated using the media to hammer home the message that Labour represented not only its traditional base but also women, office workers, and professionals. Labour’s national leadership played a pivotal role in the effective use of popular journalism, the BBC, and film to communicate its message to the public. In the process Labour transformed not only its own national profile but also the political process in general.

New Labour’s electoral success of the late twentieth century was due in no small part to its grasp of media communication. This insightful book reminds us that the importance of the mass media to Labour’s political fortunes is by no means a modern phenomenon.

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Your Pocket Is What Cures You
The Politics of Health in Senegal
Foley, Ellen E
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. Your Pocket Is What Cures You examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health.

While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, Your Pocket Is What Cures You remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

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Your Spirits Walk Beside Us
The Politics of Black Religion
Barbara Dianne Savage
Harvard University Press, 2012

Even before the emergence of the civil rights movement with black churches at its center, African American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. In her revelatory book, Barbara Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community whose debates over engagement in the struggle for racial equality were as vigorous as they were persistent. Rather than inevitable allies, black churches and political activists have been uneasy and contentious partners.

From the 1920s on, some of the best African American minds—W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Mays, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles S. Johnson, and others—argued tirelessly about the churches’ responsibility in the quest for racial justice. Could they be a liberal force, or would they be a constraint on progress? There was no single, unified black church but rather many churches marked by enormous intellectual, theological, and political differences and independence. Yet, confronted by racial discrimination and poverty, churches were called upon again and again to come together as savior institutions for black communities.

The tension between faith and political activism in black churches testifies to the difficult and unpredictable project of coupling religion and politics in the twentieth century. By retrieving the people, the polemics, and the power of the spiritual that animated African American political life, Savage has dramatically demonstrated the challenge to all religious institutions seeking political change in our time.

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Youth Employment and Joblessness in Advanced Countries
Edited by David G. Blanchflower and Richard B. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The economic status of young people has declined significantly over the past two decades, despite a variety of programs designed to aid new workers in the transition from the classroom to the job market. This ongoing problem has proved difficult to explain. Drawing on comparative data from Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, these papers go beyond examining only employment and wages and explore the effects of family background, education and training, social expectations, and crime on youth employment.

This volume brings together key studies, providing detailed analyses of the difficult economic situation plaguing young workers. Why have demographic changes and additional schooling failed to resolve youth unemployment? How effective have those economic policies been which aimed to improve the labor skills and marketability of young people? And how have youths themselves responded to the deteriorating job market confronting them? These questions form the empirical and organizational bases upon which these studies are founded.
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Youth in Postwar Guatemala
Education and Civic Identity in Transition
Michelle J. Bellino
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Winner of the 2018 Comparative & International Education Society's Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award and the 2018 Council on Anthropology of Education's Outstanding Book Award

In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala’s civil war, adolescents at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country’s history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy.

Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, to examine how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice traverse public and private spaces, as well as generations. Bellino documents the ways that young people critically examine injustice while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. In a country still marked by the legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised...
 
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The Youth Labor Market Problem
Its Nature, Causes, and Consequences
Edited by Richard B. Freeman and David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1982
This volume brings together a massive body of much-needed research information on a problem of crucial importance to labor economists, policy makers, and society in general: unemployment among the young. The thirteen studies detail the ambiguity and inadequacy of our present standard statistics as applied to youth employment, point out the error in many commonly accepted views, and show that many critically important aspects of this problem are not adequately understood. These studies also supply a significant amount of raw data, furnish a platform for further research and theoretical work in labor economics, and direct attention to promising avenues for future programs.
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Youth without Representation
The Absence of Young Adults in Parliaments, Cabinets, and Candidacies
Daniel Stockemer and Aksel Sundström
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Officeholders in contemporary parliaments and cabinets are more likely than not to be male, wealthy, middle-aged or older, and from the dominant ethnicity, whereas young adults have an insufficient presence in political office. Young adults—those aged 35 years or under—comprise a mere ten percent of all parliamentarians globally, and three percent of all cabinet members. Compared to their presence in the world’s population, this age group faces an underrepresentation of one to three in parliament and one to ten in cabinet. In this book, Stockemer and Sundström provide a holistic account of youths’ marginalization in legislatures, cabinets, and candidacies for office through a comparative lens. They argue that youths’ underrepresentation in political office constitutes a democratic deficit and provide ample evidence for why they think that youth must be present in politics at much higher rates. They further embed this book within what they label a vicious cycle of political alienation, which involves the declining political sophistication of the young, their waning electoral participation, and their insufficient of representation in office. Empirically, the authors combine a global focus with in-depth studies, discussing the country-level, party-level, and individual-level factors that bar young adults’ entry to positions of political power. This is the first comprehensive book on youth representation and it has relevance for those broadly interested in issues of representation, democracy, inequality, and comparative politics.

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Yugoslav-American Economic Relations Since World War II
John R. Lampe, Russell O. Prickett and Ljubisa S. Adamovic
Duke University Press, 1990
Yugoslav-American Economic Relations Since World War II provides a comprehensive study of the economic relations between the United States and Yugoslavia over the past four decades. The authors recount how Yugoslavia and the United States, despite great differences in size, wealth, and ideology, overcame early misunderstandings and confrontations to create a generally positive economic relationship based on mutual respect. The Yugoslav experience demonstrated, the authors maintain, that existence outside the bloc was possible, profitable, and nonthreatening to the Soviet Union.
The authors describe American official and private support for Yugoslavia’s decades-long efforts at economic reform that included the first foreign investment legislation in 1967 and the first introduction of convertible currency in 1990 for any communist country. Also examined are the origins of Yugoslavia’s international debt crisis of the early 1980s and the American role in the highly complex multibillion-dollar international effort that helped Yugoslavia surmount that crisis.
In the past, U.S. support for the Yugoslav economy was proffered in part, the authors claim, to counter perceived threats from the Soviet Union and its allies. This may have enabled Yugoslavia to avoid some of the hard but necessary economic policy choices; hence, future U.S. support, the book concludes, will likely be tied more closely to the economic and political soundness of Yugoslavia’s own actions.
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