How does politics shape US government policies to control crime? How does the criminal justice system affect the activities of political actors? This lively text provides an overview of crime as a political issue and the impact of politics on US policymaking in the field of criminal justice. Recent policy responses to internet-related crimes are used as real-world examples of the political    More >

In this first comprehensive and critical account of the development of Johan Galtung's thought, Peter Lawler places Galtung's work in the context of past and contemporary debates in international relations, political theory, and the social sciences more generally. The starting point of the book is an examination of the young Galtung's writings on sociology and the foundational model    More >

At the core of A Russian Mother lies the profound ambivalence of two people who are chillingly remote yet obsessively attached. This painful symbiosis between a mother and son takes shape in fragments, as the narrative jumps back and forth in time until the late1970s. The narrator provides the psychological threads that unify the haphazard chronology, the chaotic uprootings, and the conflicting    More >

Zvi Sobel's absorbing book draws readers into the world of Yavneel, a small Israeli village that is home to several diverse communities: the established core of settler-farmers, new immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, and, since 1986, the ultraorthodox Bratslav Hasidim. Yavneel has become a microcosm of Israeli society at large, reflecting the country's social, religious,    More >

Tracing the social history of a historically Colored South African township, the authors of this revealing collection present the edited transcripts of life-story interviews with twenty-five current and past residents of Wentworth. This history from below resoundingly refutes unfounded generalizations about the townships' residents, illustrating the diversity of the community's members    More >

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The year 1994 symbolized the triumphal defeat in South Africa of almost three-and-a-half centuries of racial separation—dating from 1659, the year the Dutch East India Company planted a bitter almond hedge to keep indigenous people out of the company's Cape outpost. But, Michael Schmidt reminds us, for the majority of people in what remains one of the world’s most unequal    More >

The protagonist, Katharina Wüllner—like many other women who were born shortly after the turn of the century—married just after the First World War and then had to send her husband and sons to fight in World War II. Her life spans the regimes of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Weimar Republic, Hitler's Reich, the Allied Occupation, and finally the Federal Republic. Her story is in many    More >

A World Turned Upside Down looks at children's experiences during war from a psychological and social ecological perspective, offering thoughtful observations and dispelling myths about the realities of growing up in conflict situations. In addition, each contributor points to ways to foster well-being and nurture the kinds of social connections that can liberate children from the pathologies    More >

The preeminent American rabbi during four decades, Abba Hillel Silver was one of the earliest great liberal Jewish activists and perhaps the most widely sought after Jewish speaker in America in his day. For forty-six ears, he served as spiritual leader to the largest Reform Jewish congregation in the United States, The Temple, in Cleveland, long known for its non-Zionist orientation. In the 1920s    More >