Situated on the banks of the Ohio River, Louisville, Kentucky, represents a cultural and geographical intersection of North and South. Throughout its history, Louisville has simultaneously displayed northern and southern characteristics in its race relations. In their struggles against racial injustice in the mid-twentieth century, activists in Louisville crossed racial, economic, and political dividing lines to form a wide array of alliances not seen in other cities of its size. In Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945–1980, noted historian Tracy E. K'Meyer provides the first comprehensive look at the distinctive elements of Louisville's civil rights movement. K'Meyer frames her groundbreaking analysis by defining a border as a space where historical patterns and social concerns overlap. From this vantage point, she argues that broad coalitions of Louisvillians waged long-term, interconnected battles during the city's civil rights movement. K'Meyer shows that Louisville's border city dynamics influenced both its racial tensions and its citizens' approaches to change. Unlike African Americans in southern cities, Louisville's black citizens did not face entrenched restrictions against voting and other forms of civic engagement. Louisville schools were integrated relatively peacefully in 1956, long before their counterparts in the Deep South. However, the city bore the marks of Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations until the 1960s. Louisville joined other southern cities that were feeling the heat of racial tensions, primarily during open housing and busing conflicts (more commonly seen in the North) in the late 1960s and 1970s. In response to Louisville's unique blend of racial problems, activists employed northern models of voter mobilization and lobbying, as well as methods of civil disobedience usually seen in the South. They crossed traditional barriers between the movements for racial and economic justice to unite in common action. Borrowing tactics from their neighbors to the north and south, Louisville citizens merged their concerns and consolidated their efforts to increase justice and fairness in their border city. By examining this unique convergence of activist methods, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South provides a better understanding of the circumstances that unified the movement across regional boundaries.

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

Like most of the nation during the 1930s, St. Louis, Missouri, was caught in the stifling grip of the Great Depression. For the next thirty years, the "Gateway City" continued to experience significant urban decline as its population swelled and the area's industries stagnated. Over these decades, many African American citizens in the region found themselves struggling financially and fighting for access to profitable jobs and suitable working conditions. To combat ingrained racism, crippling levels of poverty, and sub-standard living conditions, black women worked together to form a community-based culture of resistance—fighting for employment, a living wage, dignity, representation, and political leadership. Gateway to Equality investigates black working-class women's struggle for economic justice from the rise of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s to the social upheavals of the 1960s. Author Keona K. Ervin explains that the conditions in twentieth-century St. Louis were uniquely conducive to the rise of this movement since the city's economy was based on light industries that employed women, such as textiles and food processing. As part of the Great Migration, black women migrated to the city at a higher rate than their male counterparts, and labor and black freedom movements relied less on a charismatic, male leadership model. This made it possible for women to emerge as visible and influential leaders in both formal and informal capacities. In this impressive study, Ervin presents a stunning account of the ways in which black working-class women creatively fused racial and economic justice. By illustrating that their politics played an important role in defining urban political agendas, her work sheds light on an unexplored aspect of community activism and illuminates the complexities of the overlapping civil rights and labor movements during the first half of the twentieth century.

Offers a new conceptualization of black workingclass participation in the civil rights movement

How Hawai'i became an emblem of multiculturalism during its journey to statehood in the mid-twentieth century Gateway State explores the development of Hawai'i as a model for liberal multiculturalism and a tool of American global power in the era of decolonization. The establishment of Hawai'i statehood in 1959 was a watershed moment, not only in the ways Americans defined their nation’s role on the international stage but also in the ways they understood the problems of social difference at home. Hawai'i’s remarkable transition from territory to state heralded the emergence of postwar multiculturalism, which was a response both to independence movements abroad and to the limits of civil rights in the United States. Once a racially problematic overseas colony, by the 1960s, Hawai'i had come to symbolize John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. This was a more inclusive idea of who counted as American at home and what areas of the world were considered to be within the U.S. sphere of influence. Statehood advocates argued that Hawai'i and its majority Asian population could serve as a bridge to Cold War Asia—and as a global showcase of American democracy and racial harmony. In the aftermath of statehood, business leaders and policymakers worked to institutionalize and sell this ideal by capitalizing on Hawai'i’s diversity. Asian Americans in Hawai'i never lost a perceived connection to Asia. Instead, their ethnic difference became a marketable resource to help other Americans navigate a decolonizing world. As excitement over statehood dimmed, the utopian vision of Hawai'i fell apart, revealing how racial inequality and U.S. imperialism continued to shape the fiftieth state—and igniting a backlash against the islands’ white-dominated institutions.

South Yemen: Gateway to the World? tells the story of South Yemen and answers the question could it be a gateway to the world. The book traces the history of the country from the struggle for independence from the British which was gained in 1967. The first part provides an insight into the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen, the first and only socialist state in the Arab world its achievements – the emancipation of women, redistribution of land to the people, an impressive mass literacy programme - and its demise due to internecine struggles in the Yemeni Socialist Party. In 1990 South and North Yemen united but the southerners were discriminated against by the northern regime and in 1994 fought a second war for independence. They were defeated and until the Houthi coup in 2014 were second class citizens in a state which exploited their resources and marginalised their people. Another struggle for independence is now being waged as the southerners cannot live in one state with the fundamentalist Houthi regime which controls more than 80 percent of the north.

The Juvenile Court of Memphis, founded in 1910, directed delinquent and dependent children into a variety of private charitable organizations and public correctional facilities. Drawing on the court's case files and other primary sources, Jennifer Trost explains the complex interactions between parents, children, and welfare officials in the urban South. Trost adds a personal dimension to her study by focusing on the people who appeared before the court-and not only on the legal specifics of their cases. Directed for thirty years by the charismatic and well-known chief judge Camille Kelley, the court was at once a traditional house of justice, a social services provider, an agent of state control, and a community-based mediator. Because the court saw boys and girls, blacks and whites, native Memphians and newly arrived residents with rural backgrounds, Trost is able to make subtle points about differences in these clients' experiences with the court. Those differences, she shows, were defined by the mix of Progressive and traditional attitudes that the involved parties held toward issues of class, race, and gender. Trost's insights are all the more valuable because the Memphis court had a large African American clientele. In addition, the court's jurisdiction extended beyond children engaged in criminal or otherwise unacceptable conduct to include those who suffered from neglect, abuse, or poverty. A work of legal history animated by questions more commonly posed by social historians, Gateway to Justice will engage anyone interested in how the early welfare state shaped, and was shaped by, tensions between public standards and private practices of parenting, sexuality, and race relations.

This “fascinating, engaging” history of St. Louis’s monument to American expansion reveals a story of greed, discrimination, and community displacement (NextSTL.com). Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch is one of the world’s most widely recognized structures and attracts millions of tourists to St. Louis every year. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, its story is one of innovation and greed; civic pride and backroom deals. Weaving together social, political, and cultural perspectives, historian Tracy Campbell uncovers the complicated and troubling history of this iconic symbol. In this revealing account, Campbell shows that the so-called Gateway to the West was the scheme of shrewd city leaders who were willing to steal an election, destroy historic buildings, and drive out communities in order to make downtown St. Louis more profitable. Campbell also tells the human story of the architect Eero Saarinen, whose prize-winning design brought him acclaim but also charges of plagiarism, and who didn’t live to see the completion of his vision.

"The traditional narrative of the civil rights movement has been that the more moderate demands of the mainstream movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., worked, but that the more "radical" demands of the Black Power movement derailed further success. Mainstreaming Black Power upends the traditional narrative by showing how Black Power Activists in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles during the 1960s through the 1970s navigated the nexus of public policies, black community organizations, elected officials, and liberal foundations. Tom Adam Davies unites local and national perspectives and reveals how the efforts of mainstream white politicians, institutions, and organizations engaged with Black Power ideology, and how they ultimately limited both the pace and extent of change."--Provided by publisher.

Featuring the work of twenty-five fiction writers and poets, this anthology is a captivating introduction to the finest of contemporary Appalachian literature. Here are short stories and poems by some of the region’s most dynamic and best-loved authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Ron Rash, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Morgan, Lisa Alther, and Lee Smith among others. In addition to compelling selections from each writer’s work, the book includes illuminating biographical sketches and bibliographies for each author. These works encompass a variety of themes that, collectively, capture the essence of Appalachia: love of the land, family ties, and the struggle to blend progress with heritage. Readers will enjoy this book not just for the innate value of good literature but also for the insights it provides into this fascinating area. This book of fiction is an enlightening companion to non-fiction overviews of the region, including the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and A Handbook to Appalachia: An Introduction to the Region, both published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2006. In fact the five sections of this book are the same as those of the Encyclopedia. Educators and students will find this book especially appropriate for courses in creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature. Editor George Brosi’s foreword presents an historical overview of Appalachian Literature, while Kate Egerton and Morgan Cottrell’s afterword offers a helpful guide for studying Appalachian literature in a classroom setting. George Brosi is the editor of Appalachian Heritage, a literary quarterly, and, along with his wife, Connie, runs a retail book business specializing in books from and about the Appalachian region. He has taught creative writing, Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature. Kate Egerton is an associate professor of English at Berea College. She has taught Appalachian literature and published scholarship in that field as well as in modern drama. Samantha Cole majored in Appalachian Studies and worked for Appalachian Heritage while a student at Berea College. Morgan Cottrell is a West Virginia native who took Kate Egerton's Appalachian literature class at Berea College.