Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Society of Freedom is a thought experiment about a hypothetical society in which everyone wants to live freely without violating freedoms of other people. Members of the society are rational and sufficiently intelligent to gradually act more rationally. They voluntarily accept a social contract with which they promise to make the maximum effort to avoid violating freedoms of others. The book analyzes the hypothetical society to discover its properties and high level principles that would be applicable to social life, lawmaking, law implementation, dispute resolution, economic system, education, and relations with other types of societies. In order to communicate his ideas effectively, the author creates and uses a specific terminology. First part of the book defines the key concepts related to freedom, authenticity, rationality, intelligence, social interaction and explains them with examples. Second part uses the terminology to construct and analyze Society of Freedom. The author brings together many different concepts and connects them in a natural and logical way. One of the main implications of the book is that it is theoretically possible for certain types of people to collaborate with the help of a social contract and gradually build a society in which everyone lives the way they prefer to live. Society of Freedom is therefore a valuable guide for everyone who wants to have more freedoms, who does not want to be restricted by any obstacles, and who does not want to do so at the expense of freedoms of other people. The book is also indirectly challenging the fundamentals of modern human societies and implicitly questioning the political, economic, legal systems and the social organization of humanity.

Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won explores the ways Afro-Brazilians in two major cities adapted to the new conditions of life after the abolition of slavery and how they confronted limitations placed on their new freedom. The book sets forth new ways of understanding why the abolition of slavery did not yield equitable fruits of citizenship, not only in Brazil, but throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Afro-Brazilians in Sao Paulo and Salvador lived out their new freedom in ways that raise issues common to the entire Afro-Atlantic diaspora. In Sao Paulo, they initiated a vocal struggle for inclusion in the creation of the nation's first black civil rights organization and political party, and they appropriated a discriminatory identity that isolated blacks. In contrast, African identity prevaled over black identity in Salvador, where social protest was oriented toward protecting the right of cultural pluralism. Of all the eras and issues studied in Afro-Brazilian history, post-abolition social and political action has been the most neglected. Butler provides many details of this period for the first time in English and supplements published sources with original oral histories, Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and new state archival documents currently being catalogued in Bahia. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won sets the Afro-Brazilian experience in a national context as well as situating it within the Afro-Atlantic diaspora through a series of explicit parallels, particularly with Cuba and Jamaica.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal Republic of Germany abruptly created a new social order as old institutions were abolished and new counterparts imported. This unique situation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the central tenets of life course sociology. The empirical chapters of this book draw a comprehensive picture of life course transformation, demonstrating how the combination of life course dynamics coupled with an extraordinary pace of system change affect individual lives. How much turbulence was created by the transition and how much stability was preserved? How did the qualifications and resources acquired before 1989 influence the fortunes in the restructured economy? How did the privatization and reorganization of firms impact individuals? Did the transformation experiences differ by age/cohort and gender? How stable were social networks at work and in the family? Were personality characteristics important mediators of post-1989 success or failure or were they rather changed by them? How specific were the East German life trajectories in comparison with Poland and West-Germany?

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER Part history and part cultural analysis, The Grift chronicles the nuanced history of Black Republicans. Clay Cane lays out how Black Republicanism has been mangled by opportunists who are apologists for racism. After the Civil War, the pillars of Black Republicanism were a balanced critique of both political parties, civil rights for all Americans, reinventing an economy based on exploitation, and, most importantly, building thriving Black communities. How did Black Republicanism devolve from revolutionaries like Frederick Douglass to the puppets in the Trump era? Whether it's radical conservatives like South Carolina Senator Tim Scott or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, they are consistently viral news and continuously upholding egregious laws at the expense of their Black brethren. Black faces in high places providing cover for explicit bigotry is one of the greatest threats to the liberation of Black and brown people. By studying these figures and their tactics, Cane exposes the grift and lays out a plan to emancipate our future.

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the do main of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scho lars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from both the Anglo American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work available to an international audience, but it also en courages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, aIthouogh some eidted volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of inter nationally renowned scholars.

Although there is constant conflict over its meanings and limits, political freedom itself is considered a fundamental and universal value throughout the modern world. For most of human history, however, this was not the case. In this book, Kurt Raaflaub asks the essential question: when, why, and under what circumstances did the concept of freedom originate? To find out, Raaflaub analyses ancient Greek texts from Homer to Thucydides in their social and political contexts. Archaic Greece, he concludes, had little use for the idea of political freedom; the concept arose instead during the great confrontation between Greeks and Persians in the early fifth century BCE. Raaflaub then examines the relationship of freedom with other concepts, such as equality, citizenship, and law, and pursues subsequent uses of the idea—often, paradoxically, as a tool of domination, propaganda, and ideology. Raaflaub's book thus illuminates both the history of ancient Greek society and the evolution of one of humankind's most important values, and will be of great interest to anyone who wants to understand the conceptual fabric that still shapes our world views.

This is the story of one womans courageous struggle against the relentless encroachment of darkness. Helen Harris, after a childhood marked by unplanned clumsiness, skinned knees, and being known as the class klutz, discovered she was a victim of retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a disease causing progressive blindness and having no known cure. Devastated by this prognosis of ever-growing darkness, this brave and stoic young girl determined nonetheless to make the most of her future. She was galvanized to furious activity, driven by anger at the abysmal absence of knowledge of RP in the medical community and, in fact, this world. But what could one woman do? Plenty. For someone with no experience in business, public relations, volunteerism, or recruitment, Helen Harris undertook to master them all. One lone woman with the mission to move the mountains of ignorance about a disease even Helen had never heard about, all the while trying to cope with the ever-growing darkness surrounding her and her sons. She came to know that RP was one of a family of related genetic diseases, one more terrifying than the other. These diseases, being of genetic origin, often strike multiple siblings in a family. This book will lead you through Helens amazing success in recruiting celebrities to their cause and shedding light into the darkness of RP, involving the medical world in the fight, and garnering support from the political world up to and including a president of the United States. Information on all the new technology that has been developed since Helens journey began are enclosed within the pages of the book.

This book examines two moral theories of rights justification and applies them to four social issues: redistributive taxation, affirmative action, pornography, and abortion. It assesses the ethical status of several candidate social policies that continue to be debated in the public arenas.

Stacey Moran is a distressed veteran with a deeply-hidden secret. In his new job as detective, Moran comes face to face with something evil that he thought had been conquered after the war. He follows the trail, confronting worlds that he has never experienced before. Among them are the Travelers, an enlightened subculture living on the outside of normal society's boundaries; and the Orbitals, pioneers and rebels who have made their homes off the Earth with a whole different set of rules. A strange substance called Honey threatens to derail the Unified World and Moran has to get to the bottom of it. He takes a journey through dark layers of corruption and mystery, from the highest pinnacle of New York City, through the forgotten ruins underneath to the reclusive and defiant provinces of space. His secret pulls him into a life-changing search for personal redemption.