Through individual stories, essays, and critical analyses, this anthology introduces issues of race, class, and gender within an interdisciplinary framework. Themes of identity, power, and change are examined from many different perspectives and voices. New articles covering environmental and post-Katrina issues provide the reader with information about recent concerns of Americans living in the United States.

CALIFORNIA: THE POLITICS OF DIVERSITY, 6E, is a comprehensive text that explores the uniqueness and excitement of California's political environment through two key themes: diversity and hyperpluralism. An experienced educator with a background in local government, Lawrence brings an informed, insightful perspective to the examination of the numerous pressures that make governing the state increasingly challenging. To help readers better understand California politics in a national context, the text also discusses aspects of American politics such as the democratic, elite, and pluralist theories and shows how those concepts can aid in understanding California politics.

A revisionist analysis of the history of American immigration asserts that nationalism and multiculturalism can co-exist

Product Description: Explores the cultural roots of American identity

Product Description: With a mixed-race president, a Latino population that is now the largest minority, and steadily growing Asian and Pacific Islander populations, race is both the most dynamic facet of American identity and the defining point of American disunity...read more

Product Description: One of the world's leading historians of race relations, George Fredrickson in his newest book probes the history of racial and ethnic diversity in the United States and other parts of the world. Diverse Nations explores recent interpretations of slavery and race relations in the United States and introduces comparative perspectives on Europe, South Africa, and Brazil...read more

Book Description: The result of work initiated by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, this collection provides an excellent overview of the contemporary racial and ethnic terrain in the United States. The well-respected contributors to Twenty-First Century Color Lines combine theoretical and empirical perspectives, answering fundamental questions about the present and future of multiracialism in the United States: How are racial and ethnic identities promoted and defended across a spectrum of social, geopolitical and cultural contexts? What do two generations of demographic and social shifts around issues of race look like “on the ground?” What are the socio-cultural implications of changing demographics in the U...read more

Product Description: In this updated and expanded edition, Arthur Schlesinger argues that the image of the American nation as a cultural melting pot in which differences of race, wealth, religion and nationality are submerged in democracy is being replaced by an orthodoxy which celebrates difference and abandons assimilation...read more

From outlawing polygamy and mandating public education to protecting the rights of minorities, the framing of group life by the state has been a subject of considerable interest and controversy throughout the history of the United States. The subject continues to be important in many countries. This book deals with state responses to cultural difference through the examination of a number of encounters between individuals, groups, and the state, in the United States and elsewhere. The book opens the concepts of groups and the state, arguing for the complexity of their relations and interpenetrations. Carol Weisbrod draws on richly diverse historical and cultural material to explore various structures that have been seen as appropriate for adjusting relations between states and internal groups. She considers the experience of the Mormons, the Amish, and Native Americans in the United States, the Mennonites in Germany, and the Jews in Russia to illustrate arrangements and accommodations in different times and places. The Minorities Treaties of the League of Nations, political federalism, religious exemptions, nonstate schools, and rules about adoption are among the mechanisms discussed that sustain cultural difference and create frameworks for group life, and, finally, individual life. At bottom, Emblems of Pluralism concerns not only relations between the state and groups, public and private, but also issues of identity and relations between the self and others.

Product Description: This anthology examines the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality and the institutional bases for these relations. While other texts discuss various forms of stratification and the impact of these on members of marginalized groups, The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality provides a thorough discussion of how such systems of stratification are formed and perpetuated and how forms of stratification are interconnected...read more

Product Description: Addresses the concerns of the marginalized in the American school curriculum.

Product Description: The Meaning of Difference focuses on the social construction of difference as it operates in American formulations of race and ethnicity, sex and gender, social class, sexual orientation, and disability. The conceptual structure of this text-reader comes from four framework essays that addressing the construction of difference, the experience of difference, the social meaning of difference, and social actions that might bridge differences...read more

Product Description: After Multiculturalism: The Discourse on Race and the Dialectics of Liberty provides an individualistic critique of multiculturalist thought in social theory and public policy through a survey of the discourses on race by major individualist theorists...read more

Product Description: Key Benefit:This reader, which examines race, class, gender, and other forms of social location and difference, explores the ways that diversity can be both a source of inequality as well as celebration and cultural enrichmentKey Topic:Thirty four readings explore race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical and mental disability...read more

Product Description: After Multiculturalism: The Discourse on Race and the Dialectics of Liberty provides a unique critique of multiculturalist thought in social theory and public policy from an individualist perspective. Contemporary academic and policy discourse on race and racism in the United States is dominated by collectivist social theories that are founded on the idea that the only meaningful challenges to racism are those that foster collective social identities and seek to influence and direct the use of state power in the interest of particular racial and ethnic groups...read more

Product Description: More than 15 years have passed since Joe Barndt wrote his influential and widely acclaimed Dismantling Racism (1991, Augsburg Books). He has now written a replacement volume - powerful, personal, and practical - that reframes the whole issue for the new context of the twenty-first century...read more

Product Description: Specifically addressing how interpersonal communication as process is potentially impeded because of how we are socialized to think about racial differences, this exciting and much-anticipated second edition of Interracial Communication: Theory Into Practice guides readers in applying the valuable contributions of recent communication theory to improving everyday communication among the races...read more

Product Description: Race and racial diversity are important aspects of America and have been shown to substantially affect social relations and the political system, often in ways inconsistent with the values of equality. However, greater civic association and a general sense of community, embodied in the concept of social capital, are said to have tremendous beneficial effects and profoundly influence American society...read more

Product Description: Examine the sociological meaning in Hurricane Katrina, same-sex marriage, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and scores of modern, compelling issues such as these in Andersen and Taylor's updated new edition of this easy-to-understand text...read more

Product Description: Our Diverse Society is a follow-up to The Diverse Society: Implications for Social Policy (1976) which presented the case for inclusion of ethnicity in the analysis of social problems and policy. Our Diversity Society builds upon that case and centers on the implications of diversity on social institutions and the role of social policy in enhancing or restricting diversity...read more

Product Description: Examine the sociological meaning in Hurricane Katrina, same-sex marriage, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and scores of modern, compelling issues such as these in Andersen and Taylor's updated new edition of this easy-to-understand text...read more

Product Description: In the wake of a bitter presidential campaign and in the face of numerous divisive policy questions, many Americans wonder if their country has split in two. People are passionately choosing sides on contentious issues such as the invasion of Iraq, gay marriage, stem-cell research, and the right to die, and the battle over abortion continues unabated...read more