Presents a multi-layered social history of a soldier and his Italian American family during World War II.

Explores the contradiction between the Constitution's importance as a political document with its weakness as a symbol in American popular culture.

For almost a century, writers such as Ralph Ellison, Michael Ondaatje, and Ishmael Reed have expressed an affinity for jazz, hearing the music as a model for writing. Jarrett examines their work and the work of others who have brought jazz into language, pushing "interpretation" into the realm of "invention."

Presents Thomas Merton as the quintessential American outsider who defines himself in opposition to the world and then discovers a way back into dialogue with that world and compassion for it.

Uses concepts from social theory to explore the history and future of nuclear power in the U. S. and to explore the nature of technological change in the U. S. economy.

Examines how both negative and positive stereotypes of the "Indian" have influenced the study of Native American religions.

Focuses on affirmative action and its impact on colleges and universities since its inception in 1965. Suggests different perspectives on and approaches to affirmative action and offers and presents various voices on the impact and philosophical implications of affirmative action.

Examines broad shifts in American work values from their Calvinist origins to present controversies involving work, welfare, and affirmative action.

Analyzes American Indian education in the last century and compares the tribal, mission, and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.

This first book-length examination of the American reception of German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel explores the practical and strategic uses of Simmel's ideas.

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

This book uses recent psychoanalytic theory to analyze the work of three contemporary scholars--Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch--while viewing their work as expressing Jewish immigrant desires for integration into American culture.

This is the first descriptive analysis of how American Indian policies are made both at the statewide and at agency levels. Pertinent to all states, the study describes New York's historic policies and ...

What forces transformed a community in which industrial workers and other citizens exercised a real measure of power over their lives into a metropolis whose inhabitants were utterly dependent on Big ...

To the Iroquois, "extending the rafters" meant adding onto the longhouse, both in the literal sense of making room for new families and in the figurative sense of adding adopted individuals or tribes ...