Urban sprawl has gained much national attention in recent years. Sprawl involves not only land-use issues but also legal, political, and social concerns. It affects our schools, the environment, and race relations. Comprehensive enough for high school students and also appropriate for college undergraduates, Remaking American Communities delves into the challenges of urban sprawl by turning to some of America's top thinkers on the problem, including Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association. Other cutting-edge essays include a foreword about the emergence of sprawl by nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce, views about race and class by former mayor of Albuquerque David Rusk, and a discussion of transportation dynamics by Curtis Johnson, president of the Citistates Group. ø The essays in this collection explore the core issues of sprawl and the agenda for dealing with it. Complete with a glossary, resources, and contact information for smart-growth alliances, this book is extremely user-friendly. David C. Soule offers an unbiased viewpoint of this national phenomenon in a way that will be accessible to students and those with little background in the issue.

Over the past three decades, the contours of American social, economic, and political life have changed dramatically. The post-war patterns of broadly distributed economic growth have given way to stark inequalities of income and wealth, the GOP and its allies have gained power and shifted U.S. politics rightward, and the role of government in the lives of Americans has changed fundamentally. Remaking America explores how these trends are related, investigating the complex interactions of economics, politics, and public policy. Remaking America explains how the broad restructuring of government policy has both reflected and propelled major shifts in the character of inequality and democracy in the United States. The contributors explore how recent political and policy changes affect not just the social standing of Americans but also the character of democratic citizenship in the United States today. Lawrence Jacobs shows how partisan politics, public opinion, and interest groups have shaped the evolution of Medicare, but also how Medicare itself restructured health politics in America. Kimberly Morgan explains how highly visible tax policies created an opportunity for conservatives to lead a grassroots tax revolt that ultimately eroded of the revenues needed for social-welfare programs. Deborah Stone explores how new policies have redefined participation in the labor force—as opposed to fulfilling family or civic obligations—as the central criterion of citizenship. Frances Fox Piven explains how low-income women remain creative and vital political actors in an era in which welfare programs increasingly subject them to stringent behavioral requirements and monitoring. Joshua Guetzkow and Bruce Western document the rise of mass incarceration in America and illuminate its unhealthy effects on state social-policy efforts and the civic status of African-American men. For many disadvantaged Americans who used to look to government as a source of opportunity and security, the state has become increasingly paternalistic and punitive. Far from standing alone, their experience reflects a broader set of political victories and policy revolutions that have fundamentally altered American democracy and society. Empirically grounded and theoretically informed, Remaking America connects the dots to provide insight into the remarkable social and political changes of the last three decades.

Uncovers the long history and rich traditions of giving among people of color. Focusing on four communities--Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos--Joseph draws compelling portraits of cultural heroes and heroines who personify the benevolent nature of their unique heritages. The author maintains that by understanding and affirming these traditions, we can form a new vision of the larger American community based on shared values, universal compassion, and a new spirituality.

"During the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Congress responded to growing gaps between immigration policy and immigration reality by making major changes in immigration laws and their administration. In 1986, the United States enacted the world's largest legalization program for unauthorized foreigners and introduced sanctions on employers who knowingly hired illegal foreign workers. Instead of slowing illegal immigration, however, this program allowed more foreigners to arrive legally and illegally, which prompted another round of reforms in 1996 aimed at ensuring that new arrivals would not receive welfare payments." "On September 11, 2001, foreigners in the United States hijacked four commercial planes. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, bringing them down and killing 3,000 people. President George W. Bush declared war on terrorists and the countries that harbor them, and Congress enacted legislation to fight terrorism. This includes new measures for tightening procedures for issuing visas to foreign visitors, tracking foreign students and visitors while they are in the United States, and giving immigration authorities new power to arrest and detain foreigners suspected of ties to terrorism. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished, and its functions of preventing illegal immigration and providing services to foreign visitors and immigrants were separated in the new Department of Homeland Security." "However, anti-terrorism measures have not slowed immigration to the United States. America is poised to remain the world's major destination for immigrants, and as patterns in U.S. history suggest, most of the newcomers will soon become Americans. However, past success in integrating immigrants does not guarantee that integrating newcomers will be easy or automatic. As immigrants continue to make and remake the country, the United States must develop an immigration policy for the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the first comprehensive study of how U. S. immigration policies have shaped--demographically, economically, and socially--the six largest Asian American communities.

A unique panoramic survey of ethnic groups throughout the United States that explores the diverse communities in every region, state, and big city. Race, ethnicity, and immigrants' lives and identity: these are all key topics that Americans need to study in order to fully understand U.S. culture, society, politics, economics, and history. Learning about "place" through our own historical and contemporary neighborhoods is an ideal way to better grasp the important role of race and ethnicity in the United States. This reference work comprehensively covers both historical and contemporary ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods through A–Z entries that explore the places and people in every major U.S. region and neighborhood. America's Changing Neighborhoods: An Exploration of Diversity uniquely combines the history of ethnic groups with the history of communities, offering an interdisciplinary examination of the nation's makeup. It gives readers perspective and insight into ethnicity and race based on the geography of enclaves across the nation, in regions and in specific cities or localized areas within a city. Among the entries are nearly 200 "neighborhood biographies" that provide histories of local communities and their ethnic groups. Images, sidebars, cross-references at the end of each entry, and cross-indexing of entries serve readers conducting preliminary as well as in-depth research. The book's state-by-state entries also offer population data, and an appendix of ancestry statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau details ethnic and racial diversity.

Each year, thousands of communities across the United States celebrate their ethnic heritages, values, and identities through the medium of festivals. Drawing together elements of ethnic pride, nostalgia, religious values, economic motives, cultural memory, and a spirit of celebration, these festivals are performances that promote and preserve a community's unique identity and heritage, while at the same time attempting to place the ethnic community within the larger American experience. Although these aims are pervasive across ethnic heritage celebrations, two festivals that appear similar may nevertheless serve radically different social and political aims. Accordingly, The Dutch American Identity examines five Dutch American festivals-three of which are among the oldest ethnic heritage festivals in the United States-in order to determine what such festivals mean and do for the staging communities. Although Dutch Americans were historically among the first ethnic groups to stage ethnic heritage festivals designed to attract outside audiences, and despite the fact that several Dutch American festivals have met with sustained success, little scholarship has focused on this ethnic group's festivals. Moreover, studies that have considered festivals staged by communities of European descent have typically focused on a single festival. The Dutch American Identity thus, on the one hand, seeks to call attention to the historical development and current sociocultural significance of Dutch American heritage festivals. On the other hand, this study aims to elucidate the ties that bind the five communities that stage these festivals together rather than studying one festival in isolation from the others. Creatively combining several methodologies, The Dutch American Identity describes and analyzes how the social, political, and ethical values of the five communities are expressed (performed, acted out, represented, costumed, and displayed) in their respective festivals. Rather than relying on familiar, even stereotypical, notions of "the Midwest," "rural America," "conservative America," etc., that often appear in contemporary political discourse, Schoone-Jongen shows just how complex and contradictory these festivals are in the ways they represent each community. At the same time, by placing these festivals within the context of American history, Schoone-Jongen also demonstrates how and why each festival is a microcosm of particular cultural, social, and political developments in modern America. The Dutch American Identity is an important book for sociology, performance studies, folklore, immigration history, anthropology, and cultural history collections.

In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the private sphere toward the public and political. Specifically, texts by women from such racially marked ethnic groups as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and experiences of these hybrid cultures and thus offer feminist and ethical revisions of traditional concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency.Focusing on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Michael shows that each writer emphasizes the positive, liberating effects of kinship and community. These hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into an increasingly diverse twenty-first century. Michael provides a rich lens through which to view both contemporary fiction and contemporary life.

An in-depth look at the transformative influence of Mexican artists on their U.S. counterparts during a period of social change The first half of the 20th century saw prolific cultural exchange between the United States and Mexico, as artists and intellectuals traversed the countries' shared border in both directions. For U.S. artists, Mexico's monumental public murals portraying social and political subject matter offered an alternative aesthetic at a time when artists were seeking to connect with a public deeply affected by the Great Depression. The Mexican influence grew as the artists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros traveled to the United States to exhibit, sell their work, and make large-scale murals, working side-by-side with local artists, who often served as their assistants, and teaching them the fresco technique. Vida Americana examines the impact of their work on more than 70 artists, including Marion Greenwood, Philip Guston, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Charles White. It provides a new understanding of art history, one that acknowledges the wide-ranging and profound influence the Mexican muralists had on the style, subject matter, and ideology of art in the United States between 1925 and 1945.

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation. Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.