Virtual Library

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.

Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.

Belew's disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.

Throughout its history, America's policies have alternatively embraced human rights, regarded them with ambivalence, or rejected them out of hand. The essays in Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of Human Rights in the United States put these shifting political winds into a larger historical perspective, from the country's very beginnings to the present day.

The contributing writers examine the global influences on early American attitudes toward human rights and, reviewing the twentieth century, note the high-water mark of human rights acceptance during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency. They examine the domestic tensions between civil and political rights on the one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. Taking the long view, many of the contributors emphasize the role played by social movements and grassroots activists in pressing a human rights agenda from the bottom up.

The essays examine the centrality of human rights in the early and mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement, the breadth of subnational human rights activism in the face of federal inaction on a range of human rights issues, and the ways both post-9/11 developments and government responses to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina spurred grassroots activism in the United States. Several essays explore in depth the emergence of new advocacy strategies, both in the context of litigating for civil and political rights and through the lens of particular economic rights sectors, such as labor. Though the setbacks for human rights have been many, Bringing Human Rights Home demonstrates the strength and resilience of the U.S. human rights movement and offers hope for its future.

Situé dans le monde sombre de la prostitution en milieu urbain, ce livre donne la parole à la multitude de femmes enfermées dans des ghettos africains. Ateba est calme et modeste, et prend soin de sa tante. Mais la mère qui l'a abandonnée lui manque très fort et elle crée des femmes imaginaires à qui elle parle. Puis, son monde est sécoué: Jean, le locataire lui oblige d'avoir une relation; la vielle prostituée du quartier meurt et son meilleur ami meurt en faisant un avortement. Pris entre les valeurs traditionnelles, les exigeances masculin, et la nécessité de survie, Ateba cherche à mettre fin à la tyrannie des hommes, qu'elle considere les responsables de sa souffrance.

From electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms to workplace surveillance systems, technologies originally developed for policing and prisons have rapidly expanded into nonjuridical domains, including hospitals, schools, banking, social services, shopping malls, and digital life. Rooted in the logics of racial disparity and subjugation, these purportedly unbiased technologies not only extend prison spaces into the public sphere but also deepen racial hierarchies and engender new systems for social control. The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Moving from traditional sites of imprisonment to the arenas of everyday life being reshaped by carceral technoscience, this volume culminates in a sustained focus on justice-oriented approaches to science and technology that blends historical, speculative, and biographical methods to envision new futures made possible.

Does oil wealth lead to political poverty? It often looks that way, but Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story. In this magisterial study, Timothy Mitchell rethinks the history of energy, bringing into his grasp as he does so environmental politics, the struggle for democracy, and the place of the Middle East in the modern world.

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its production acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the West an alternative, and with it came a new form of politics. Oil created a denatured political life whose central object—the economy— appeared capable of infinite growth. What followed was a Western democracy dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. We now live with the consequences: an impoverished political practice, incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—namely, the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fueled collapse of the ecological order.

This book explores the unintended consequences of compassion in the world of immigration politics. Miriam Ticktin focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—Ticktin asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? She demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, making conditions like HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. Ticktin’s analysis also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices that criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.

As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China’s Propaganda Department, this important book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese public.

Roberts finds that much of censorship in China works not by making information impossible to access but by requiring those seeking information to spend extra time and money for access. By inconveniencing users, censorship diverts the attention of citizens and powerfully shapes the spread of information. When Internet users notice blatant censorship, they are willing to compensate for better access. But subtler censorship, such as burying search results or introducing distracting information on the web, is more effective because users are less aware of it. Roberts challenges the conventional wisdom that online censorship is undermined when it is incomplete and shows instead how censorship’s porous nature is used strategically to divide the public.

Drawing parallels between censorship in China and the way information is manipulated in the United States and other democracies, Roberts reveals how Internet users are susceptible to control even in the most open societies. Demonstrating how censorship travels across countries and technologies, Censored gives an unprecedented view of how governments encroach on the media consumption of citizens.

Mesnil-Amar, a French Jewish woman, wrote a diary from 1944 to 1946. In the diary, she describes the arrest of her Jewish resistance fighter husband, his escape, her experiences evading arrest, participating in the Liberation, and coming to terms with the French state in the immediate post-war.. Mesnil-Amar’s diary sheds light on the particular and unique experiences of a French Jewish woman balancing her seemingly dueling French and Jewish identities in Petain and then De Gaulle’s Frances.

The activist documentary program Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle, which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced films in both French and English, stands out as a particularly influential and original part of the National Film Board of Canada's critically acclaimed body of work. The films produced by this program were among the first to add portable video to the tested arsenal of 16mm, and challenged audiences, subjects, and filmmakers to confront sexism, poverty, and marginalization in the hope of developing community as well as political awareness and empowerment.

Pioneering participatory, social change-oriented media, the program had a national and international impact on documentary film-making, yet this is the first comprehensive history and analysis of its work. The volume's contributors study dozens of films produced by the program, their themes, aesthetics, and politics, and evaluate their legacy and the program's place in Canadian, Québécois, and world cinema. An informative and nuanced look at a cinematic movement, Challenge for Change reemphasizes not just the importance of the NFB and its programs but also the role documentaries can play in improving the world.

For over 25 years, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard has tirelessly recounted what she endured during the Second World War, especially to young people. How she and her mother escaped from the Vél’ d’Hiv’ on the first night after the round-up on July 16th, 1942, and how they were reported in May 1944, thrusting them into the maelstrom of Nazi torment: Drancy, the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau and, finally, Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated on April 15th, 1945. 

Sarah has put her experiences down on paper for those she cares about most, interspersing the account of her life as a wife and mother deeply marked by the Holocaust with the story of her shattered adolescence.This powerful book delivers a universal message of hope and courage.