Synopses & Reviews
"Randy D. McBee's monograph opens up a new space for thinking about immigrant life, ethnicity, and youth in the context of social history."
The Journal of American History "This is a very important book that draws together astute analyses of youth, gender, morals, amusements and ethnic history. After you read it, you will never look into faces on the old dance photos in the same way."
American Historical Review
"This book adds important new insights to a growing literature that explores day-to-day immigrant life through the lens of popular amusments."
Journal of American Ethnic History
The rise of commercialized leisure coincided with the arrival of millions of immigrants to America's cities. Conflict was inevitable as older generations attempted to preserve their traditions, values, and ethnic identities, while the young sought out the cheap amusements and sexual freedom which the urban landscape offered. At immigrant picnics, social clubs, and urban dance halls, Randy McBee discovers distinct and highly contested gender lines, proving that the battle between the ages was also one between the sexes.
Free from their parents and their strict rules governing sexual conduct, working women took advantage of their time in dance halls to challenge conventional gender norms. They routinely passed certain men over for dances, refused escorts home, and embraced the sensual and physical side of dance to further accentuate their superior skills and ability on the dance floor. Most men felt threatened by women's displays of empowerment and took steps to thwart the changes taking place. Accustomed to street corners, poolrooms, saloons, and other all-male get-togethers, working men tried to transform the dance hall into something that resembled these familiar hangouts.
McBee also finds that men frequently abandoned the commercial dance hall for their own clubs, set up in the basements of tenement flats. In these hangouts, working men established rules governing intimacy and leisure that allowed them to regulate the behavior of the women who attended club events. The collective manner in which they behaved not only affected the organization of commercial leisure but also men and women's struggles with and against one another to define the meaning of leisure, sexuality, intimacy, and even masculinity.
Review
"Brimming with human detail and adventuresome argument, Dance Hall Days is a major contribution to both labor history and immigration studies. McBee never loses sight of the fact that workers' lives were about romance, intense same-sex friendships, dance, loneliness, longing, and marriage just as surely as they were about jobs. In its intimate portrayal of immigrants' lives, Dance Hall Days demonstrates the critical role of class, along with generation, gender, and community, in shaping the particular ways in which Americans encountered mass culture."-David Roediger,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Review
"In the diffuse and fragmented world of gender history it is rare to find a work of true originality anymore. Randy McBee's Dance Hall Days is, however, such a book. In this vigorously researched study of early twentieth-century heterosocial relations, McBee overturns the long-held consensus that dance hall and new amusement entrepreneurs manipulated the rise of mass culture and hence loosened social relations in the process. McBee's achievement is to see men and women as active agents in the creation of their own heterosocial leisure world, not only in dance halls and amusement parks but in picnics, religious festivals, and even men's social clubs. This often stunning and always surprising book combines traditional scholarly rigor with postmodern wit and savvy. It should become indispensable reading for historians and sociologists of American gender relations for many years to come. A remarkable achievement."--, -Kevin White,Portsmouth University
Review
"Brimming with human detail and adventuresome argument, Dance Hall Days is a major contribution to both labor history and immigration studies. McBee never loses sight of the fact that workers' lives were about romance, intense same-sex friendships, dance, loneliness, longing, and marriage just as surely as they were about jobs. In its intimate portrayal of immigrants' lives, Dance Hall Days demonstrates the critical role of class, along with generation, gender, and community, in shaping the particular ways in which Americans encountered mass culture."
"In the diffuse and fragmented world of gender history it is rare to find a work of true originality anymore. Randy McBee's Dance Hall Days is, however, such a book. In this vigorously researched study of early twentieth-century heterosocial relations, McBee overturns the long-held consensus that dance hall and new amusement entrepreneurs manipulated the rise of mass culture and hence loosened social relations in the process. McBee's achievement is to see men and women as active agents in the creation of their own heterosocial leisure world, not only in dance halls and amusement parks but in picnics, religious festivals, and even men's social clubs. This often stunning and always surprising book combines traditional scholarly rigor with postmodern wit and savvy. It should become indispensable reading for historians and sociologists of American gender relations for many years to come. A remarkable achievement."--,
"Randy D. McBee's monograph opens up a new space for thinking about immigrant life, ethnicity, and youth in the context of social history."
"This is a very important book that draws together astute analyses of youth, gender, morals, amusements and ethnic history. After you read it, you will never look into faces on the old dance photos in the same way."
"This book adds important new insights to a growing literature that explores day-to-day immigrant life through the lens of popular amusments."
Review
"Randy D. McBee's monograph opens up a new space for thinking about immigrant life, ethnicity, and youth in the context of social history."-The Journal of American History,
Review
"This is a very important book that draws together astute analyses of youth, gender, morals, amusements and ethnic history. After you read it, you will never look into faces on the old dance photos in the same way." -American Historical Review,
Review
"This book adds important new insights to a growing literature that explores day-to-day immigrant life through the lens of popular amusments." -Journal of American Ethnic History,
Review
“Expertly dissects the racist underpinnings of capital punishment while pushing some intellectual boundaries.”
-International Socialist Review,
Review
“The authors give the nation an unflinching view of the shameful influence of racism in death penalty cases. This is a must read for anyone who cares about fairness in application of the death penalty and respect for the rule of law in our modern society.”
-Senator Edward M. Kennedy,
Review
“Ogeltree and Sarat combine the most severe criminal punishment with the bugaboo of racial class and prejudice in their book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State. The professors astutely note that the death penalty is often used as a club to keep poor and desperate minorities in line in the larger white society.”
-Black Issues Book Review,
Review
“Professors Charles Ogletree and Austin Sarat gather an impressive lineup between racial politics in America and the killing of African-Americans.”
-Harvard Law Review,
Review
“An elegant compendium of essays written by sociologists, historians, criminologists, and lawyers. The essays starkly reveal how this country's death penalty has its roots in lynchings, and how it operates to sustain a racist agenda.”
-The Federal Lawyer,
Synopsis
The rise of commercialized leisure coincided with the arrival of millions of immigrants to America's cities. Conflict was inevitable as older generations attempted to preserve their traditions, values, and ethnic identities, while the young sought out the cheap amusements and sexual freedom which the urban landscape offered. At immigrant picnics, social clubs, and urban dance halls, Randy McBee discovers distinct and highly contested gender lines, proving that the battle between the ages was also one between the sexes.
Free from their parents and their strict rules governing sexual conduct, working women took advantage of their time in dance halls to challenge conventional gender norms. They routinely passed certain men over for dances, refused escorts home, and embraced the sensual and physical side of dance to further accentuate their superior skills and ability on the dance floor. Most men felt threatened by women's displays of empowerment and took steps to thwart the changes taking place. Accustomed to street corners, poolrooms, saloons, and other all-male get-togethers, working men tried to transform the dance hall into something that resembled these familiar hangouts.
McBee also finds that men frequently abandoned the commercial dance hall for their own clubs, set up in the basements of tenement flats. In these hangouts, working men established rules governing intimacy and leisure that allowed them to regulate the behavior of the women who attended club events. The collective manner in which they behaved not only affected the organization of commercial leisure but also men and women's struggles with and against one another to define the meaning of leisure, sexuality, intimacy, and even masculinity.
Synopsis
Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment.
In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essays approach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment.
From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.
About the Author
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., is Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School. He is co-editor (with Austin Sarat) of
From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America and
When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice (both from NYU Press).
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author or editor of more than seventy books, including ,When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition and (with Charles Ogletree) The Road to Abolition? On the Future of Capital Punishment (NYU Press, 2009).