Right in Michigan's Grassroots

Right in Michigan's Grassroots
Author: JoEllen McNergney Vinyard
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2011-06-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472027638

"A real contribution to Michigan history that gets to the root of the movements in twentieth-century American history that upon reflection can bring a certain discomfort and unease." ---Francis X. Blouin, Director of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan Throughout the twentieth century, Michigan became home to nearly every political movement in America that emerged from the grassroots. Citizens organized on behalf of concerns on the "left," on the "right," and in the "middle of the road." Right in Michigan's Grassroots: From the KKK to the Michigan Militia is about the people who supported movements that others, then and later, would denounce as disgraceful---members of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, the followers of Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s, anti-Communists and the John Birch Society in the post–World War II era, and the members of the Michigan Militia who first appeared in the 1990s. The book explores the complex historical circumstances in Michigan that prompted the emergence of these organizations and led everyday men and women to head off, despite ridicule or condemnation, with plans unsanctioned and tactics unorthodox, variously brandishing weapons of intimidation, discrimination, fearmongering, and terror. Drawing heavily on primary sources, including the organizations' files and interviews with some of their leaders and surviving members, JoEllen Vinyard provides a far more complete portrait of these well-known extremist groups than has ever been available.

Michigan

Michigan
Author: Roger L. Rosentreter
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472028871

The history of Michigan is a fascinating story of breathtaking geography enriched by an abundant water supply, of bold fur traders and missionaries who developed settlements that grew into major cities, of ingenious entrepreneurs who established thriving industries, and of celebrated cultural icons like the Motown sound. It is also the story of the exploitation of Native Americans, racial discord that resulted in a devastating riot, and ongoing tensions between employers and unions. Michigan: A History of Explorers, Entrepreneurs, and Everyday People recounts this colorful past and the significant role the state has played in shaping the United States. Well-researched and engagingly written, the book spans from Michigan’s geologic formation to important 21st-century developments in a concise but detailed chronicle that will appeal to general readers, scholars, and students interested in Michigan’s past, present, and future.

Understanding Angry Groups

Understanding Angry Groups
Author: Susan C. Cloninger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440833516

This book examines the dynamics that lead to anger in individuals, within groups, and between groups; identifies the role of the media in angry group behavior; and offers solutions for dealing with angry groups and channeling that negative energy in positive ways. In today's society, we see angry groups in many forms—from animal rights and climate crisis activists to citizens opposed to allowing more immigrants of certain ethnicities or religions into the country, militia groups frustrated by acts of domestic terrorism and legislation that limits gun ownership and the ability to carry weapons in public, and those outraged by what they see as police brutality or the unnecessary use of deadly force against people of color. More than just evidence of civil unrest in society, angry groups across history and nations often ultimately affect our politics and our government, for better or worse, and sometimes result in injury, bloodshed, or financial costs that hit otherwise-uninvolved taxpayers. This book demonstrates how people across our nation are involved in, affected by, or harmed by angry groups; covers historical and modern perspectives on angry groups; ands offers suggestions for predicting and influencing the expression of angry group behavior. It provides readers with an understanding of such conflicts and of their origins and dynamics that may offer insights to successful resolution, and it identifies strategies that can reduce the suffering that comes from such conflicts.

Merze Tate

Merze Tate
Author: Barbara D. Savage
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2023-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0300270275

A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler Shortlisted for the Stone Book Award, sponsored by the Museum of African American History Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905-1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a "sex and race discriminating world." Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century. This book revives and critiques Tate's prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras. Barbara Savage's skilled rendering of Tate's story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate's life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women's history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.

Secret Societies in Detroit

Secret Societies in Detroit
Author: Bill Loomis
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439671923

Secret societies have operated in Detroit for most of the city's history. Many started for fun and companionship. Others had more serious ends in mind. The African American Mysteries: The Order of the Men of Oppression helped enslaved people escape the South for freedom in Canada. During the Civil War, so-called black lantern societies like the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Union League waged a covert war in Detroit and across the northern Midwest. In the last century, it wasn't uncommon for a sober suburbanite to catch the train to Detroit and don yellow silk pantaloons, a purple fez and embroidered vest to drink "Tarantula juice." Join Bill Loomis in this fascinating look into the secret world of these groups.

The Wrong Hands

The Wrong Hands
Author: Ann Larabee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2015-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0190201193

"[A] valuable account ... The Wrong Hands brilliantly guides us through [the] challenges to American democracy." -Howard P. Segal, Times Higher Education Gun ownership rights are treated as sacred in America, but what happens when dissenters moved beyond firearm possession into the realm of high explosives? How should the state react? Ann Larabee's The Wrong Hands, a remarkable history of do-it-yourself weapons manuals from the late nineteenth century to the recent Boston Marathon bombing, traces how efforts to ferret out radicals willing to employ ever-more violent methods fueled the growth of the American security state. But over time, the government's increasingly forceful targeting of violent books and ideas-not the weapons themselves-threatened to undermine another core American right: free expression. In the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing, a new form of revolutionary violence that had already made its mark in Europe arrived in the United States. At the subsequent trial, the judge allowed into evidence Johann Most's infamous The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, which allegedly served as a cookbook for the accused. Most's work was the first of a long line of explosive manuals relied on by radicals. By the 1960s, small publishers were drawing from publicly available US military sources to produce works that catered to a growing popular interest in DIY weapons making. The most famous was The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), which soon achieved legendary status-and a lasting presence in the courts. Even novels, such as William Pierce's The Turner Diaries, have served as evidence in prosecutions of right-wing radicals. More recently, websites explaining how to make all manner of weapons, including suicide vests, have proliferated. The state's right to police such information has always hinged on whether the disseminators have legitimate First Amendment rights. Larabee ends with an analysis of the 1979 publication of instructions for making a nuclear weapon, which raises the ultimate question: should a society committed to free speech allow a manual for constructing such a weapon to disseminate freely? Both authoritative and eye-opening, The Wrong Hands will reshape our understanding of the history of radical violence and state repression in America.

Bootlegged Aliens

Bootlegged Aliens
Author: Ashley Johnson Bavery
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812297377

In contemporary discourse, much of the discussion of U.S. border politics focuses on the Southwest. In Bootlegged Aliens, however, Ashley Johnson Bavery considers the North as a borderlands region, demonstrating how this often-overlooked border influenced government policies toward illegal immigration, business and labor union practices around migrant labor, and the experience of being an illegal immigrant in early twentieth-century industrial America. Bavery examines how immigrants, politicians, and employers helped shape national policies toward noncitizen laborers. In the process, she uncovers the northern industrial origins of an exploitative system that emerged on America's border with Canada, whose legacy remains central to debates about America's borders today. Bavery begins in the 1920s to explore how that decade's immigration restrictions launched an era of policing and profiling that excluded America's foreign born from the benefits of citizenship. On the border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, this process turned certain Europeans into undocumented immigrants, a group the press and policymakers referred to as bootlegged aliens. Over the next decade, deportation and policing practices stigmatized entire communities of ethnic Europeans regardless of their legal status. Moreover, restrictive laws allowed manufacturers to exploit workers in new ways. By the Great Depression, citizenship had become an invisible boundary that excluded hundreds of thousands of laborers from New Deal entitlements. Accepted wisdom suggests that the 1924 Immigration Act had allowed ethnic Europeans to shed ties to their homelands and assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture by the 1930s. Bavery challenges this perspective, finding that, instead of forging a common culture with their fellow workers, European immigrants coming through Canada to Detroit faced statewide registration drives, exclusion from key labor unions, and disqualification from the Works Progress Administration, the cornerstone of America's nascent welfare state. In the heart of industrial America, Bootlegged Aliens reveals, citizenship was highly contingent.

Making Republicans Liberal

Making Republicans Liberal
Author: Kristoffer Smemo
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2024-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1512826243

As poor and working people organized themselves on the job, in the streets, and at the polls during the mid-twentieth century, they forced Republicans to reckon with new demands for political and social citizenship in big cities across the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast. While rightwing Republicans mobilized to crush those movements, Making Republicans Liberal explores how another wing of the party responded to intensifying mass movement pressure. Beginning in the 1930s, Republican governors such as Earl Warren of California, George Romney of Michigan, and Nelson Rockefeller of New York spent the next four decades articulating their own vision of liberalism. These Republican liberals believed that strategically they could not win elections and govern in places where unions, civil rights groups, and other social movements organized voters. What may have begun as an opportunistic strategy soon mutated into an ideological commitment to use state power to realize working people’s demands for a greater say, and stake, in the decisions governing their lives. Republican liberals accepted labor’s right to organize, legislated antidiscrimination laws, and legalized abortion. Yet at the same time, each of those policies proved weaker than the alternatives supported by organized labor or mainline civil rights groups and paled in comparison to what people on strike and on the march really wanted. Kristoffer Smemo shows how this was the contradiction of Republican liberalism as a policy program and as an ideology. The reforms it ushered in at once asked too much from core, conservative Republican constituencies and offered too little to the movements struggling for change. As the movements making Republicans compromise fragmented and collapsed in the late twentieth century, so too did the material foundation for Republican liberalism.

God at the Grass Roots

God at the Grass Roots
Author: Mark J. Rozell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1995
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780847680986

Focuses on elections in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, South Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, California and Oregon.

Beyond Polarized American Democracy

Beyond Polarized American Democracy
Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2023-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000925803

Civil war in the United States is now a mainstream topic due to apparent signs of ongoing planning. This book reveals why in several ways. First, four major ideological drivers of possible conflict are identified. Next, ten arenas of ongoing nonviolent civil war are traced as increasingly for micro-level violence. Then several dozen alternative scenarios are traced to explain how civil war could break out very soon. Finally, measures are delineated about how the country might prevent calamity. Anarchists, Christian Nationalists, Libertarians, and Triumphalists are determined to impose their views on the diverse nation and reduce opponents to second-class status. They demonstrate their blatant determination through nonviolent political contests involving conspiracy theories, cultural differences, verbal contestation, anti-elitism, racism, well-armed groups with nationwide membership, political demonization, media disinformation, Congressional hyperpartisanship, reducing constitutional rights, and legal fights by some states against others. But often they go beyond and commit violence out of sheer enjoyment in making opponents suffer. Beyond Polarized American Democracy: From Mass Society to Coups and Civil War suggests remedies for each of ten types of nonviolent civil war, but most are long-term solutions that cannot deal with an imminent threat. Accordingly, the book reviews governmental and military resources as well as efforts to counteract the ideological contest through political innovations. The analysis flows from the sociological Mass Society Paradigm, which argues that democracy’s survival depends upon the ability of civil society to relay the needs of the people to institutions of government and provide effective pressure for corrective action. As developed to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany, the analysis applies lessons from studies of coups and civil wars to identify how to prevent the loss of democracy in the United States.