Overturning anti-miscegenation laws: news media coverage of the Lovings' legal case against the state of Virginia.

This study fills a gap in scholarship by exploring historical news coverage of interracial relationships. It examines coverage by The New York Times, Washington Post and Times-Herald, and Chicago Tribune of the progression of the landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court overturned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, which prohibited marriage between any White and non-White person. An analysis of the frames and sources used in these publications' news stories about the case indicate all three publications' coverage favored the Lovings.

The donor-conceived child's "Right to Personal Identity": the public debate on donor anonymity in the United Kingdom.

On 1 April 2005, with the implementation of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Disclosure of Donor Information) Regulations 2004, United Kingdom law was changed to allow children born through gamete donation to access details identifying the donor. Drawing on trends in adoption law, the decision to abolish donor anonymity was strongly influenced by a discourse that asserted the 'child's right to personal identity'. Through examination of the donor anonymity debate in the public realm, while adopting a social constructionist approach, this article discusses how donor anonymity has been defined as a social problem that requires a regulative response. It focuses on the child's 'right to personal identity' claims, and discusses the genetic essentialism behind these claims. By basing its assumptions on an adoption analogy, United Kingdom law ascribes a social meaning to the genetic relatedness between gamete donors and the offspring.

Rights to food with a human face in the global south.

This article seeks to dispel the popular myth surrounding the food crises which precipitated food riots in the global South in 2008. Arguing from a structural and historical perspective, the article suggests that global hunger is a deep-rooted crisis that is embedded in the social and structural variables associated within the nation-state that places a restraint on the self-regulating capacity of nation-states in the South. Internationalizing the food crisis, however, will do more harm to the south's agricultural transformation and rural development. The article argues for integrated rural development that will increase output growth through an institutional, technological, and marketing strategy.

"We were all trespassers": George Edward Lemmon, Anglo-American cattle ranching, and the Great Sioux Reservation.

With the opening of the Black Hills to white settlement in the mid-1870s, thousands of fortune-seekers made their way into Dakota Territory. George Edward Lemmon, a man later renowned as one of the world's most accomplished cowboys, was among them. During the 1880s his employer, the Sheidley Cattle Company, grazed thousands of cattle in western Dakota Territory, many of them on Sioux Indian land. Indeed, the company owed a great deal of its success to illegal grazing on the Great Sioux Reservation. Opportunists such as Lemmon supported Indian reservations because they could use those lands to make a profit. The interaction between large-scale white ranchers and the Indians of the Great Sioux Reservation provides insight into the development of the range cattle industry in the northern Great Plains and illuminates the motivations that led many ranchers to support, rather than oppose, the reservation system.

All anchors are not created equal: the effects of Per Diem versus lump sum requests on pain and suffering awards.

This experiment examined whether different quantifications of the same damage award request ($175,000 lump sum, $10/hour, $240/day, $7300/month for 2 years) influenced pain and suffering awards compared to no damage award request. Jury-eligible community members (N = 180) read a simulated personal injury case in which defendant liability already had been determined. Awards were: (1) larger for the $10/hour and $175,000 conditions than the $7300/month and control conditions and (2) more variable for the $10/hour condition than the $7300/month and control conditions. No differences emerged on ratings of the parties, their attorneys, or the difficulty of picking a compensation figure. We discuss the theoretical implications of our data for the anchoring and adjustment literature and the practical implications for legal professionals.

All connected? Geographies of race, death, wealth, votes and births.

In January 2010 we learnt that within London the best-off 10th of the population each had recourse to 273 times the wealth of the worse-off 10th of that population (Hills et al. 2010, An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK Report of the National Equality Panel, Government Equalities Office, London). It is hard to find any city in an affluent country that is more unequal. This wealth gap did not include the assets of the UK super-rich, who mostly live in or near London. In April 2010 the Sunday Times newspaper reported the wealth of the richest 1000 people in the UK had risen by an average of £77 million each in just one year, to now stand at £335.5 billion. Today in the UK we are again as unequal as we were around 1918. For 60 years we became more equal, but for the last 30 years, more unequal. Looking at inequality trends it is very hard, initially, to notice when the party of government changed. However, closer inspection of the time series suggests there were key times when the trends changed direction, when the future was much less like the past and when how people voted and acted appeared to matter more than at other times. With all three main parties offering what may appear to be very similar solutions to the issue of reducing inequality it seems unlikely that voting in 2010 will make much of a difference. However, today inequalities are now at unsustainable extremes. Action has been taken such that some inequalities, especially in education, have begun to shrink. The last two times that the direction of trends in inequalities changed, in the 1920s and 1970s, there were several general elections held within a relatively short time period. Inequality is expensive. The UK is not as well-off as it once was. It could be time for a change again. Which way will we go?

The government of chronic poverty: from exclusion to citizenship?

Development trustees have increasingly sought to challenge chronic poverty by promoting citizenship amongst poor people, a move that frames citizenship formation as central to overcoming the exclusions and inequalities associated with uneven development. For sceptics, this move within inclusive neoliberalism is inevitably depoliticising and disempowering, and our cases do suggest that citizenship-based strategies rarely alter the underlying basis of poverty. However, our evidence also offers some support to those optimists who suggest that progressive moves towards poverty reduction and citizenship formation have become more rather than less likely at the current juncture. The promotion of citizenship emerges here as a significant but incomplete effort to challenge poverty that persists over time.

"We have always lived here": indigenous movements, citizenship and poverty in Argentina.

This article explores the nexus between indigenous mobilisation, citizenship, and poverty in Argentina. A subnational comparison of land struggles among the Diaguita Calchaqu in Tucumn and the Mbya Guaran in Misiones shows that changing global and national opportunity structures, most prominently a new multicultural citizenship regime, set the stage for indigenous mobilisation. In turn, local transformations of capitalist development motivate indigenous mobilising efforts, whereas leadership patterns and state-movement relations shape the capacity to mobilise. Diaguita and Mbya mobilisation reveals that indigenous movements play a central role in the activation of formal citizenship rights and the contestation of dominant notions of poverty. At the same time, the current design of multicultural citizenship and the adverse socioeconomic incorporation of indigenous communities also counteract indigenous mobilising efforts in Argentina.

What about a Disability Rights Act for Canada?: Practices and lessons from America, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The Harper government and most national political parties are committed to a federal act for dealing with accessibility rights for persons with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to identify progressive lessons from countries with similar legislation for consideration by Canadian authorities. Countries surveyed are the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. While disability rights legislation is widely accepted to be a necessary policy initiative in light of ongoing barriers and exclusion, experience suggests that such laws are far from a sufficient response to promote access. Other policy instruments required include supportive employment programs, tax incentives, and the direct provision of basic supports.

Forests, food, and fuel in the tropics: the uneven social and ecological consequences of the emerging political economy of biofuels.

The global political economy of biofuels emerging since 2007 appears set to intensify inequalities among the countries and rural peoples of the global South. Looking through a global political economy lens, this paper analyses the consequences of proliferating biofuel alliances among multinational corporations, governments, and domestic producers. Since many major biofuel feedstocks - such as sugar, oil palm, and soy - are already entrenched in industrial agricultural and forestry production systems, the authors extrapolate from patterns of production for these crops to bolster their argument that state capacities, the timing of market entry, existing institutions, and historical state-society land tenure relations will particularly affect the potential consequences of further biofuel development. Although the impacts of biofuels vary by region and feedstock, and although some agrarian communities in some countries of the global South are poised to benefit, the analysis suggests that already-vulnerable people and communities will bear a disproportionate share of the costs of biofuel development, particularly for biofuels from crops already embedded in industrial production systems. A core reason, this paper argues, is that the emerging biofuel alliances are reinforcing processes and structures that increase pressures on the ecological integrity of tropical forests and further wrest control of resources from subsistence farmers, indigenous peoples, and people with insecure land rights. Even the development of so-called 'sustainable' biofuels looks set to displace livelihoods and reinforce and extend previous waves of hardship for such marginalised peoples.

Contested visions of American democracy: citizenship, public housing, and the international arena.

This essay reexamines the history of public housing and the controversy it generated from the Great Depression to the Cold War. By recasting that history in the global arena, it demonstrates that the debate over public housing versus homeownership was also a debate over the meaning of American citizenship and democracy, pointing up starkly divergent notions about what was and was not American. Through an examination of national conflicts and neglected local struggles, this article further shows that the fight over public housing was far more meaningful and volatile than traditionally assumed. Both critics and advocates of public housing drew from international experiences and imagery in positioning the home as a constitutive feature of citizenship in American democracy. Fears of Bolshevism, fascism, and communism served to internationalize issues of race, space, and housing and together shaped the decision of whether a decent home was an American right or privilege.

"To serve the community best": reconsidering Black politics in the struggle to save Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, 1976-1984.

The move to consolidate, and eventually to close, Homer G. Phillips Hospital sparked a major uprising in St. Louis, Missouri, during the years 1976 through 1984. This article explores the struggle in St. Louis's black community to keep open, and later to reopen, Homer G. Phillips Hospital from a vantage point that demonstrates the diversity of opinion surrounding the struggle. For many black St. Louis residents, the physical space of Homer G. Phillips Hospital was a metaphor for identity, a manifestation of citizenship rights, and a means of delineating a territory of shared histories, understandings, and values. For others, it was a relic of segregation and racism. In seeking to understand the diversity of public reaction, this article addresses class antagonism, examines the varied and divergent motivations for eliminating or maintaining services at the hospital, and reconsiders the discourse of "black politics." It is a decisive illustration of how the national twin crises of deindustrialization and privatization affected a heterogeneous black community.

Farming the Desert: agriculture in the World War II-era Japanese-American relocation centers.

In 1942 over 110,000 Japanese Americans were evacuated from the West Coast to ten inland, barbed wire-enclosed relocation centers in the name of national security. Agriculture was a key component of the eight arid to semi-arid centers located in the western United States. Each center's agricultural program included produce for human consumption, feed crops, and livestock. Some centers also grew seed, ornamental, and war crops. Evacuees raised and consumed five types of livestock and sixty-one produce varieties, including many traditional foods. Seasonal surpluses were preserved, shipped to other centers, or sold on the open market. Short growing seasons, poor soils, initially undeveloped lands, pests, equipment shortages, and labor issues hampered operations. However, imprisoned evacuee farmers proved that diverse agricultural programs could succeed in the harsh settings primarily because of labor-intensive farming methods, ingenuity, and the large markets provided by the centers. These agricultural programs played major roles in feeding, providing meaningful employment, and preparing evacuees for life outside the centers, and readied lands for post-war "homesteaders."

The view from the cotton: reconsidering the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

Having been evicted from their homes because of incentives created by the New Deal's AGricultural ADjustment Act, sharecroppers in Arkansas formed the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) in 1934. Led by socialists and radicals, the organization ultimately claimed upward of thirty thousand members and constituted an assault on the social, economic, and racial status quo of the South. Historians have celebrated the STFU, especially its commitment to biracial cooperation and equality. This article digs beneath this carefully constructed image of the union to scrutinize the internal dynamics of the movement. It revises a number of interpretations surrounding the STFU. Although the greatest obstacles to the union's success were external, it also faced internal divisions that diminished its efficacy. The STFU's decentralized structure did not foster strong connections between leadership and membership, resulting in misunderstandings. But most importantly, the union struggled to live up to its creed of biracialism and equal treatment of African Americans. Ultimately, the STFU was less an aberration that tirelessly confronted the social and racial ills of the South and more an organization that reflected some of those ills even as it grappled with them.

Who pays for providing spiritual care in healthcare settings? The ethical dilemma of taxpayers funding holistic healthcare and the first amendment requirement for separation of church and state.

All US governmental, public, and private healthcare facilities and their staff fall under some form of regulatory requirement to provide opportunities for spiritual health assessment and care as a component of holistic healthcare. As often the case with regulations, these facilities face the predicament of funding un-reimbursable care. However, chaplains and nurses who provide most patient spiritual care are paid using funds the facility obtains from patients, private, and public sources. Furthermore, Veteran healthcare services, under the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), are provided with taxpayer funds from local, state, and federal governments. With the recent legal action by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. (FFRF) against the Veterans Administration, the ethical dilemma surfaces between taxpayers funding holistic healthcare and the first amendment requirement for separation of church and state.

How personal is the political? Democratic revolution and fertility decline.

Existing theory has identified the capacity of political revolutions to effect change in a variety of social institutions, although relationships between revolution and many institutions remain unexplored. Using historical data from twenty-two European and four diaspora countries, the author examines the temporal relationship between timing of revolution and onset of fertility decline. The author hypothesizes that specific kinds of revolutionary events affect fertility by engendering ideological changes in popular understandings of the individual's relationship to society and ultimately the legitimacy of couples' authority over their reproductive capacities. Results demonstrate that popular democratic revolutions -- but not institutionalized democratic structures -- predict the timing of the onset of fertility decline.

Notes and comments "High and dry?" The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act and liability protection for pharmaceutical manufacturers.

In an era filled with fears of bioterrorism, Congress approved the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA) to encourage development of vaccines and other countermeasures. By providing pharmaceutical manufacturers with protection from liability for potential side effects, Congress has attempted to motivate manufacturers to produce a national stockpile of countermeasures. As part of PREPA, the government established a compensatory system intended to provide compensation to persons injured by countermeasures used during a public health emergency. Although the Act provides for a compensation fund, it fails to allocate monies for that fund. Thus, in the absence of further congressional action, PREPA will not provide compensation to those injured by countermeasures. Failing to assure the American public of a compensation program constitutes bad public policy and risks inspiring potential vaccinees to refuse necessary drugs. Additionally, arguments as to the constitutionality of the Act exist should Congress fail to adequately fund the program, and the existence of those arguments undermines the purpose of the Act--namely to assure pharmaceutical manufacturers that they will not be sued into oblivion should they attempt to aid national pandemic protection. In addition to detailing both the Act and the statutory precedent for congressional attempts to spur biodefense, this Article addresses important issues of healthcare, tort, and constitutional law that will continue to manifest themselves in this new era of bioterrorism.