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During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.

American historians tend to believe that labor activism was moribund in the years between the First World War and the New Deal. The book challenges this perspective in this examination of the railroad unions of the time, arguing that not only were they active, but that they made a big difference in American Labor practices by helping to set legal precedents. The book explains how efforts by the Plumb Plan League and the Railroad Labor Executive Association created the Railroad Labor Act, its amendments, and the Railroad Retirement Act. These laws became models for the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, the significant contributions of the railroad laws are, more often than not, overlooked when the NLRA or Social Security are discussed. Offering a new perspective on labor unions in the 1920s, the book describes how the railroad unions created a model for union activism that workers' organizations followed for the next two decades.

In the 1990s, churches across the south-eastern United States were targeted and set ablaze. These arsonists predominately targeted African American congregations and captured the attention of the media nationwide. Using oral histories, newspaper accounts, and governmental reports, this book gives a chronological account of the series of church fires. The book considers the various forces at work, including government responses, civil rights groups, religious forces, and media coverage, in providing an analysis of the events and their fallout. Arguing that these church fires symbolize the breakdown of communal bonds in the nation, the text appeals for the revitalization of united Americans and the return to a sense of community.

Challenge of Change focuses on the engagement of right-wing women with the baby boom generation during the period 1950 through the mid-1970s, a time of tremendous change in America. It explores how women of the older generations, particularly those who were white, middle-class, and right-wing, sought to shape the entire values system of the younger generation. These women were active in grassroots campaigns in regions throughout the United States, campaigning as individuals, in women’s groups, and together with men in their efforts to achieve their goals. Their efforts frequently met with resistance from moderates, the left, and from the youth themselves; thus, the book also looks at reactions from baby boomers and women of the older generation who did not share rightist views. As many areas existed in which the far right and the mainstream concurred, these dimensions are also examined. The book explores ideas that define the “right” and “far right”, including the right’s allegations of “conspiracy” on the part of communists, liberals in government, scientists, and intellectual elites. Overall, this work provides a look into the roots of and growth of right-wing women’s influence, and reveals how women of more recent rightist movements, including the Tea Party movement, have much in common with those of the past. It also shows that the baby boom generation, being the largest generation in American history, became a major factor that the older generation had to deal with.

This book is about a state legislative committee that originated as a tool of massive resistance in Florida, but, through its investigations of gay and lesbian teachers, indecent literature, and liberal professors, became a conservative cultural watchdog and a forerunner in the modern culture wars. The committee's targets illuminate the extent to which national discussions about race, sexuality, education, and communism shaped political concerns on the local and state levels and intersected with the desire to maintain racial segregation beginning in the 1950s. The book also demonstrates that red-baiting civil rights activists, claims of protecting youth from homosexual predators, eradicating smut from newsstands and classrooms, and defending the rights of Christian college students could be politically useful, but also that these tactics were based on more than mere political expediency. They were carried out and popularly supported by people who believed that their values were, at best, being undermined through modernization and, at worst, being threatened with extinction through the liberal subversion of American institutions. The Johns Committee's anti-Communist critique of sexual and racial perversion bound them together under the rubric of subversion and the rhetoric of defending children. This book suggests rethinking the origins of the social conservatism that became central to the New Right and the Republican Party by examining the ideas invoked to marginalize and silence those who opposed segregation as well as the imagined links between sexual and political nonconformity in the postwar period.

The book examines the impact of deindustrialization on the American political economy through a case study of the New England region. New England experienced dramatic downsizing in textiles and other traditional industries beginning in the 1920s and lasting for much of the twentieth century. The book concentrates on events in Massachusetts, by far the most populous New England state and the one hit hardest by industrial decline. The volume spotlights developments in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s, when the problem of deindustrialization was new. Cold War–era episodes of industrial downsizing are examined as well. Attention focuses on cotton textiles, New England’s largest troubled sector in the post–World War I period and the one declining most rapidly at that time. The demise of traditional manufacturing in New England resulted in a number of initiatives to address the problem, backed by a variety of interest groups. The effects of industrial decline on the political economy played out principally through these efforts. Three distinct initiatives to counter deindustrialization were advanced in New England. First was what can be called “retrenchment”—a drive to reduce business regulations and taxes so as to enhance the competitiveness of area industries. Second was “federal assistance”—an effort to secure federal government aid for declining industries and locales affected by downsizing. Third was “economic development”—an attempt to develop new regional industries to replace those in decline. The study describes each effort in detail, looks at the groups who supported it, and assesses the outcome.

This book examines the major trends in drug trafficking and organized crime in the Americas in the twenty-first century. We have compiled a list of leading experts in the field. The book explores U.S. drug policies within the U.S. as well as abroad and examines drug-trafficking and organized crime in specific countries and regions. The book also analyzes regional and international drug control policies.

The Failure of Term Limits in Florida assesses the impact of term limitations on Florida’s state legislature and provides the theory and history behind the term limits movement. This book argues term limits have not provided the panacea that proponents claimed. Legislative tenure has been decimated and legislative experience cut deeply since term limits took effect in 2000. Forced turnover has facilitated more competition but only when a seat initially opens. Term limits have not dramatically increased the number of women and minorities elected to office as proponents envisioned. Politicians elected under term limits are shown to have significant elective experience coming into the Legislature and continue to vie for elected positions when they exit, certainly not the “citizen” legislators proponents preferred. Legislative process knowledge is not the important criteria for leadership selection under term limits; the ability to fundraise and campaign for fellow party members is now the key criterion. The Senate has become the repository of institutional memory and gained an advantage over the less experienced House. The legislative branch is severely weakened under term limits with the governor, staff, and lobbyists filling the void. While term limits remain a popular idea in Florida, the effect on the legislative institution has not been a positive one.

This book is a narrative history of the operations of the U.S. Middle District Court of Florida from its founding in 1962 to the present. The book sets the court in the social, economic, and political context of the time and place. With federal courthouses in Jacksonville, Ocala, Orlando, Tampa, and Fort Myers, the Middle District contains roughly half of Florida’s population of nearly nineteen million and is one of the busiest in the nation. Cases involving organized crime, drugs, civil rights, desegregation, redistricting, First Amendment, employment discrimination, voters rights, kidnapping, the environment, death penalty, abortion rights, the right to die, terrorism, espionage, and a whole host of other types of cases have been litigated in its courtrooms. Over its fifty years Middle District judges made many important decisions that shaped the law and affected thousands of lives in fundamental ways. The lives, times, and work of the district judges, magistrates, and bankruptcy judges are included in these pages. The book also narrates the story of prosecutors, marshals, attorneys, and the many other dedicated officials that made the Middle District of Florida function from its inception in 1962 to the present.

Few men make their mark in their profession as indelibly as historian Francis Butler Simkins (1897–1966). Known as an eccentric, Simkins is almost as famous for falling asleep while performing his ceremonial duties as president-elect of the Southern Historical Association as he is for his wildly influential and radical scholarship. Simkins was considered one of the most liberal voices in the academic dialogue about Reconstruction and race relations in the South during the first part of his career, but his outlook changed drastically during the 1950s. This man, whose scholarship once challenged racism, became a staunch conservative—arguing in his final book that the Jim Crow South was “everlasting” and would never change. This biography takes a close look at Simkins as a man, to understand better him as a historian. The book engages with Simkins' physical and mental eccentricities—his troubled health and career stresses—and explores the extent to which the historian was shaped by the values he learned during his childhood in segregationist South Carolina.