CRSC Books

Quixote's Soldiers A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981

David Montejano
2010

David Montejano - In the mid-1960s, San Antonio, Texas, was a segregated city governed by an entrenched Anglo social and business elite. The Mexican American barrios of the west and south sides were characterized by substandard housing and experienced seasonal flooding. Gang warfare broke out regularly. Then the striking farmworkers of South Texas marched through the city and set off a social movement that transformed the barrios and ultimately brought down the old Anglo oligarchy. In Quixote's Soldiers, David Montejano uses a wealth of previously untapped...

Opening Minds, Improving Lives: Education and Women’s Empowerment in Honduras

Erin Murphy-Graham
2012

Erin Murphy-Graham - Juanita was seventeen years old and pregnant with her first child when she began an activity that would "open" her mind. Living in a remote Garifuna village in Honduras, Juanita had dropped out of school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a new educational program, Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (Tutorial Learning System or SAT), was started in her community. The program helped her see the world differently and open a small business.


Empowering women through education has become a top priority of...

Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America

Jonathan Simon
2014

Jonathan Simon - In this “impassioned plea for human dignity” (Kirkus Reviews) Jonathan Simon—called “one of the outstanding criminologists of his generation” by Nikolas Rose of the London School of Economics—charts a surprising path to end mass incarceration in America. Using the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Plata on overcrowding in California prisons as his starting point, Simon suggests that incarcerating people on a “mass” scale simply cannot be accomplished in comportment with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual...

Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear

Jonathan Simon
2007

Jonathan Simon - In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of...

Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s

Marion Fourcade
2009

Marion Fourcade - Economists and Societies is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional...

Rallying for Immigrant Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America

Irene Bloemraad
Kim Voss
2011

Irene Bloemraad - From Alaska to Florida, millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets across the United States to rally for immigrant rights in the spring of 2006. The scope and size of their protests, rallies, and boycotts made these the most significant events of political activism in the United States since the 1960s. This accessibly written volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of this historic moment. Perfect for students and general readers, its essays, written by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and grassroots organizers,...

The New Scarlet Letter?: Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record

Steven Raphael
2014

Steven Raphael - The numbers are eye-opening. In 2007, on any given day, 2.2 percent of all males in the United States were incarcerated, including 7.9 percent of all black males. Some 2.6 percent of white males , 7.7 percent of Hispanic males, and 16.6 percent of black males have spent time in state or federal prison at some point in their lives. And for a male child born in 2001, the likelihood of going to prison is 5.9 percent for whites, 17.2 percent for Hispanics, and a whopping 32.2 percent for blacks. Of those who spend time in prison, the overwhelming...

After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction

Ian Haney López
Mary Louise Frampton
Jonathan Simon
2008

Ian Haney López - Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed a pyrrhic war on crime, with sobering numbers at once chilling and cautionary. Our imprisoned population has increased five-fold, with a commensurate spike in fiscal costs that many now see as unsupportable into the future. As American society confronts a multitude of new challenges ranging from terrorism to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to global warming, the war on crime may be up for reconsideration for the first time in a generation or more. Relatively low crime rates indicate that the public...

Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

G. Cristina Mora
2014

G. Cristina Mora - 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.

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Punishing the Poor The Neoliberal Government of the Social Insecurity

Loic Wacquant
2009

Loic Wacquant - The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation...