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A new collection by the author of The World We Want, with essays on civility, public space, Obama, procrastination, suicide.
Philosopher and political scientist James Fishkin evaluates modern democratic practices, explains how the voice of the people has struggled to make itself heard in the past and combines a review of ideas and experiments--including his own idea for a National Issues Convention that was adapted by PBS in January 1996--to legitimately rediscover the people's voice.
When originally published in 1999, Words That Built a Nation was hailed for bringing together the United States’ most important historical essays, speeches, and documents into one accessible collection for kids. Now, this history lovers’ must-have is back, and it’s been revised, revamped, and expanded for the 21st century. From the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, the updated collection preserves the documents of the first edition and introduces the landmark statements that are impacting our nation today. With all new illustrations, a refreshed design, and complementary background information behind each of the documents, Words That Built a Nation is the ultimate tour of United States history, created to engage, inspire, and equip kids with the knowledge they need to change and shape their world. “This book is attractive and the presentation engaging.”—School Library Journal
Examining the current state of democracy in the United States, 'The Unheavenly Chorus' looks at the political participation of individual citizens - alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests - in order to demonstrate that American democracy is marred by ingrained and persistent class-based inequality.
There is a growing realization that many of the problems afflicting American elections can be traced to the electoral system itself, in particular to our winner-take-all approach to electing officials. Douglas Amy demonstrates that switching to proportional representation elections--the voting system used in most other Western democracies, by which officials are elected in large, multimember districts according to the proportion of the vote won by their parties--would enliven democratic political debate, increase voter choice and voter turnout, ensure fair representation for third parties and minorities, eliminate wasted votes and "spoliers," and ultimately produce policies that better reflect the public will. Looking beyond new voting machines and other quick fixes for our electoral predicament, this new edition of Real Choices/New Voices offers a timely and imaginative way out of the frustrations of our current system of choosing leaders.
This book confirms the idea put forth by Tocqueville that American democracy is rooted in civic voluntarism—citizens’ involvement in family, work, school, and religion, as well as in their political participation as voters, campaigners, protesters, or community activists. The authors analyze civic activity with a massive survey of 15,000 people.
Compiling decades of fieldwork, two acclaimed scholars offer strategies for strengthening democracies by nurturing the voices of children and encouraging public awareness of their role as citizens. Voice, Choice, and Action is the fruit of the extraordinary personal and professional partnership of a psychiatrist and a neurobiologist whose research and social activism have informed each other for the last thirty years. Inspired by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Felton Earls and Mary Carlson embarked on a series of international studies that would recognize the voice of children. In Romania they witnessed the consequences of infant institutionalization under the Ceaușescu regime. In Brazil they encountered street children who had banded together to advocate effectively for themselves. In Chicago Earls explored the origins of prosocial and antisocial behavior with teenagers. Children all over the world demonstrated an unappreciated but powerful interest in the common good. On the basis of these experiences, Earls and Carlson mounted a rigorous field study in Moshi, Tanzania, which demonstrated that young citizens could change attitudes about HIV/AIDS and mobilize their communities to confront the epidemic. The program, outlined in this book, promoted children’s communicative and reasoning capacities, guiding their growth as deliberative citizens. The program’s success in reducing stigma and promoting universal testing for HIV exceeded all expectations. Here in vivid detail are the science, ethics, and everyday practice of fostering young citizens eager to confront diverse health and social challenges. At a moment when adults regularly profess dismay about our capacity for effective action, Voice, Choice, and Action offers inspiration and tools for participatory democracy.
Covid-19 has highlighted limitations in our democratic politics – but also lessons for how to deepen our democracy and more effectively respond to future crises. In the face of an emergency, the working assumption all too often is that only a centralised, top-down response is possible. This book exposes the weakness of this assumption, making the case for deeper participation and deliberation in times of crises. During the pandemic, mutual aid and self-help groups have realised unmet needs. And forward-thinking organisations have shown that listening to and working with diverse social groups leads to more inclusive outcomes. Participation and deliberation are not just possible in an emergency. They are valuable, perhaps even indispensable. This book draws together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers. Together they make visible the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic and make the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts. Another, more democratic world can be realised in the face of a crisis. The contributors to this book offer us meaningful insights into what this could look like.
In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted. Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters. Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Asking how the citizens of modern democracy can reason with one another, this book carves out a controversial position between those who view religious voices as an anathema to democracy and those who believe democratic society is a moral wasteland because such voices are not heard.