ALBERT

Description: This volume provides the first account of the pioneering efforts at sex reform in America from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. Despite the atmosphere of extreme prudery and the existence of the Comstock laws after the Civil War, a group of radicals emerged to attack conventional beliefs about sex, from traditional marriage to women’s chattel status in society. These men and women had in common a direct, unrespectable, iconoclastic style. They put forth outrageous journalism and had a penchant for martyrdom and for using the courts to publicize their ideologies.From rare and generally unknown sources, Hal D. Sears pieced together the story of the sex radicals and their surprising ideas. Moses Harman, a minister turned abolitionist and freethinker, is a central figure in the narrative. His Lucifer, the Light Bearer, the only journal of sexual liberty published from the early 1880s to 1907, was dedicated to free love, sex education, women’s rights, and related causes. To a great degree Harman’s publication defines the limits of social dissent in the late nineteenth century.Other members of the sex radical circle included E. B. Foote, a medical doctor who made a fortune with a home medical book crammed with sex information; Edwin Walker and Lillian Harman, who became a cause célèbre among radicals when their jailhouse honeymoon in Kansas challenged the right of the state to regulate marriage; Elmina Slenker, who promoted a theory of sexual energy sublimation and the idea that women were the superior sex; and Lois Waisbrooker, Dora Forster, Lillie White, and other feminists who, almost a century ago, taught and preached the very ideas we hear today in the women’s movement.Of course, all these people got into trouble with the law, mostly through the machinations of their archvillain, Anthony Comstock. Sears examines Comstock’s powers of postal censorship and describes Comstock’s personal vendettas against sexual dissenters, particularly the free love philosopher Ezra Heywood. He gives a legal history of obscenity and explains the sex radicals’ significance in the emergence of obscenity law.Although the sex radicals attest the important reform vitality of provincial culture in late nineteenthcentury America, until now they have been almost ignored by historians. Those who have studied sex radicalism at all, apart from its communitarian and sectarian aspects, have viewed it merely as a subsidiary of the more respectable feminist movement. In this book Sears gives careful consideration to the links between sex radicalism and spiritualism, feminism, anticlericalism, anarchism, and the freethought movement. He presents sex radicalism as a separate and unique movement which illuminates new reaches of the Victorian landscape and establishes a tradition for presentday liberation trends.

Description: Con el objeto de mostrar los éxitos y fracasos, los problemas y contradicciones de lo que conocemos como Infonavit, esta amplia e interdisciplinaria investigación analiza las diferentes etapas de acción del Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores (INFONAVIT), la intervención de aspectos políticos, de gestión y administración urbana, así como la propia experiencia de los habitantes en el uso de estos espacios. Se incluyen, por supuesto, las aristas sociales, psicológicas y hasta culturales que enmarcan el tema.

Description: Por ser México uno de los países más poblados del mundo y tener una elevada tasa de crecimiento demográfico en los últimos decenios, el Centro de Estudios Económicos y Demográficos se abocó a la tarea de analizar los niveles y tendencias de la mortalidad, la fecundidad, la migración interna, la fuerza de trabajo, el crecimiento y desarrollo urbano, con el fin de ofrecer al estudioso de las ciencias sociales los elementos necesarios para juzgar uno de los principales problemas nacionales.

Description: This ambitious book examines the constitutional and legal doctrines of the antislavery movement from the eve of the American Revolution to the Wilmot Proviso and the 1848 national elections. Relating political activity to constitutional thought, William M. Wiecek surveys the antislavery societies, the ideas of their individual members, and the actions of those opposed to slavery and its expansion into the territories. He shows that the idea of constitutionalism has popular origins and was not the exclusive creation of a caste of lawyers. In offering a sophisticated examination of both sides of the argument about slavery, he not only discusses court cases and statutes, but also considers a broad range of "extrajudicial" thought—political speeches and pamphlets, legislative debates and arguments.

Description: En Brasil existes circunstancias que dificultan extraordinariamente el discernimiento de los problemas rurales. Sucede que en las marchas territoriales conquistadas por la economía capitalista se desarrollaron tipos de culturas intermedias

Description: El estudio comienza en 1929, fecha en que termina la rebelion cristera y se abre en un periodo de "reacomodo social de la Iglesia" y de fortalecimiento del Estado, y culmina en el año de 1940, cuando sube a la presidencia de la república Manuel Ávila Camacho y se declara públicamente creyente, iniciandose así una nueva etapa en las relaciones entre estas dos fuerzas sociales. Aunque la autora se limíte a estudiar las relaciones de la parte urbana de la arquidiósecis de México con el gobierno en el distrito federal, dejando de lado la diosesis en provincia, ahí el enfrentamiento entre la iglesia y el Estado que desbordó los límites de la capital del país y tuvo amplias repercuciones a nivel nacional

Description: Tradicionalmente, la historiografía ha retratado al Segundo Imperio como un accidente que a México le vino de fuera. El periodo durante el cual gobernó al Archiduque rubio y barbado ha sido interpretado como ajeno, como un paréntesis en el desarrollo histórico nacional, producto exclusivamente de las ambiciones del emperador de los franceses y del Habsburgo segundón. El Imperio se pinta como una aventura espuria en la que a excepción de unos cuantos conservadores despechados, los mexicanos tuvieron muy poco que ver: antes bien el país entero olvidó sus antiguas disensiones para seguir las banderas de Patria y República que empuñaba Benito Juárez. Sin embargo, esta página romántica de la Historia Patria cuadra mal con la realidad de un régimen que si bien es cierto fue impuesto por las bayonetas francesa, también fue deseado, organizado y administrado por mexicanos. ¿Quiénes fueron estos? ¿Por qué colaboraron con el usurpador, adhiriéndose a un proyecto político que a posteriori parece absurdo? Al intentar dar respuesta a estas preguntas, esta obra intenta revalorar el episodio imperial como parte integral de la historia mexicana.

Description: Stretching from November 1963 to January 1969, the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson was marked both by division and tumult and by significant accomplishments. In this volume, Robert Divine has brought together seven senior scholars who, in new essays, explore aspects of domestic and foreign policy during the Johnson years. This collection is a sequel to Divine’s earlier volume (originally published as Exploring the Johnson Years).The seven essays that compose Volume Two, together with Divine’s incisive and perceptive historiographical overview, offer new insights into Johnson’s complex character and leadership style. The LBJ that emerges from these pages is a very human figure who understands the corrosive, pervasive impact of the Vietnam War on his administration and who struggles to try to preserve the domestic programs he fought so long and hard to achieve.In exploring the antiwar movement, tax and foreign economic policies, environmental and health care questions, and the space program, these essays demonstrate how domestic issues were critically affected by the Vietnam War and provide a fuller understanding of Johnson’s vital but flawed legacy to the nation.

Description: Lucius Polk Brown was a professional chemist who became a bureaucrat in the field of public health during the Progressive era, when middleclass reformers first attempted to order American society through integrated systems. In his native state of Tennessee, between 1908 and 1915 Brown created a public health enforcement agency, began educating the masses to public health needs, waged flamboyant campaigns against those who violated the laws, and attracted widespread support for pure food and drug control. Moving on to become director of the Bureau of Food and Drugs in the New York City Department of Health in 1915, he continued his battle for public health reform amidst the maze of government agencies and political power struggles surrounding Tammany Hall.In Many respects Brown was typical of Progressive reformers. A middleclass, AngloSaxon Protestant and a professional, he represented a link between the nineteenthcentury agrarian and the twentiethcentury urbanite. More importantly, Brown exemplified a new character on the American scene: a scientist out of the agriculturalexperimentstation mold entering public life, ready to challenge politicians on their own ground.This book contains fresh insights on the history of the public health movement in America, one area of reform that has not received the attention it deserves. Except for incidental references, the major figures of food and drug regulation at the local level have been largely ignored by historians. Lucius Polk Brown’s quest for pure food and drugs is representative of what municipal and state officials, as scientific people, encountered when they fought for the passage of new laws, struggled to enforce existing ones, and battled with the politicians, quacks, ignorance that threatened their efforts.Brown’s diversified career provides a unique opportunity for studying a scientific reformer caught up in the political turmoil of the Progressive era. His experience in government service spanned twelve years and touched on two dissimilar political systems. In focusing on Brown’s struggles, achievements, and failures, Margaret Ripley Wolfe provides a comparative study of state and municipal health administrations, of bureaucratic development in a rural southern state and a northern metropolis. For that reason this book should be of interest to political scientists and public health officials as well as to social historians and students of the Progressive era.

Description: From the earliest days of their empire in the New World, the Spanish sought to gain control of the native peoples and lands of what is now Sonora. While missionaries were successful in pacifying many Indians, the Seris—independent groups of hunter-gatherers who lived on the desert shores and islands of the Gulf of California—steadfastly defied Spanish efforts to subjugate them. Empire of Sand is a documentary history of Spanish attempts to convert, control, and ultimately annihilate the Seris. These papers of religious, military, and government officials attest to the Seris’ resilience in the face of numerous Spanish attempts to conquer them and remove them from their lands. The documents include early observations of the Seris by Jesuit missionaries, descriptions of the collapse of the Seri mission system in 1748, accounts of the invasion of Tiburón Island in 1750 and the Sonora Expedition of 1767–71, and reports of late eighteenth-century Seri hostilities. Thomas E. Sheridan’s introduction puts the documents in perspective, while his notes objectively clarify their significance. By skillfully weaving the documents into a coherent narrative of Spanish–Seri interaction, he has produced a compelling account of empire and resistance that speaks to anthropologists, historians, and all readers who take heart in stories of resistance to oppression.