social movements

Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the 1820s as an African refuge for free blacks and liberated American slaves. While interest in African migration waned after the Civil War, it roared back in the late nineteenth century with the rise of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. The back-to-Africa movement held great new appeal to the South's most marginalized citizens, rural African Americans. Nowhere was this interest in Liberia emigration greater than in Arkansas.

Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle.

This collection of writings offers a glimpse into the minds of three N.A.A.C.P. leaders who occupied the center of black thought and action during some of the most troublesome and pivotal times of the civil rights movement. The volume delineates fifty-seven years of the N.A.A.C.P.'s program under the successive direction of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins.

Providing vivid examples of how sociologists are using sociological tools to make a positive impact on our society, this one-of-a-kind book helps students better understand how their study of sociology can be put to good use in today’s world.

Rights Make Might examines why the three most salient minority groups in Japan all expanded their activism since the late 1970s against significant headwinds, and chronicles how global human rights ideas and institutions empowered all three groups to engage in enhanced political activities. It also documents the contributions of the three groups to the expansion of global human rights activities, demonstrating the feedback mechanism from local groups to global institutions.

While transitions to democracy have been hailed as the most important phenomena of this century, few scholars understand the role that women have played in these metamorphoses. This article uses an historical in-depth case study to examine how and why women mobilized against the state in Chile. Previous social movement theories have not attended adequately to cultural and ideational elements (e.g., gender ideology), much less these factors in the Third World and authoritarian context.

How and why do movements transition from everyday resistance to overt collective action? This article examines this question taking repressive environments and threat as an important case in point. Drawing on primary and secondary data sources, I offer comparative insights on resistance group dynamics and perceptions of threat in three Nazi death camps—Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz—between 1941 and 1945.

The social movement for African-American civil rights is one of most studied and celebrated social phenomena of the twentieth century. One factor in explaining the movement's successes, however, is usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, and has not been explained adequately. This is the impact of the Cold on domestic United States race politics, and the process through the Cold War lessened resistance to civil rights movement demands.

Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination.

This study of the Mississippi civil rights movement and the War on Poverty examines the relationship between social movements and policy implementation. A "movement infrastructure" model is developed that focuses on organizational structure, resources, and leadership to account for the impact of social movements on policy implementation.