Explore the vast range of titles available.

Vice Patrol analyzes how reconfigurations in postwar gay public life, psychiatric research, and policing surveillance technologies recast Americans’ chimerical commitments to purging sexual vice. Before a more radical, visible queer liberation movement emerged after 1969, vice enforcement was not a monolithic project but rather a conglomeration of newly empowered post-Prohibition liquor agents, policing units, and judicial institutions. Enforcement practices and institutional priorities generated inconsistencies over policing sexual difference, creating conflicts that became embedded in judicial processes, themselves fraught with institutional pressures and contradictions. These legal and administrative configurations did more than enforce existing law regulating sexual deviance; they actively produced identifiable targeted groups believed to be predisposed to sexual criminality. Vice Patrol’s insights are urgent; they reveal and explain the historical, institutional, and political processes of negotiating human expression into criminal acts requiring state policing intervention. The intrusive tactics that Lvovsky chronicles did not disappear; they were redirected, which is best articulated in the liberal disillusionment with “urban renewal” and with the Nixon administration's “War on Crime” that targeted “high crime” areas in urban communities of color, propelling forward racialized mass incarceration.

Yvonne Pitts explores inheritance practices by focusing on nineteenth-century testamentary capacity trials in Kentucky in which disinherited family members challenged relatives' wills. These disappointed heirs claimed that their departed relative lacked the capacity required to write a valid will. These inheritance disputes criss-crossed a variety of legal and cultural terrains, including ordinary people's understandings of what constituted insanity and justice, medical experts' attempts to infuse law with science, and the independence claims of women. Pitts uncovers the contradictions in the body of law that explicitly protected free will while simultaneously reinforcing the primacy of blood in mediating claims to inherited property. By anchoring the study in local communities and the texts of elite jurists, Pitts demonstrates that 'capacity' was a term laden with legal meaning and competing communal values about family, race relations and rationality. These concepts evolved as Kentucky transitioned from a conflicted border state with slaves to a developing free-labor, industrializing economy.

In the late nineteenth century, Americans opposed to universal suffrage launched a new line of attack, asserting that women lacked the rationality required for enfranchisement because of innate biological disabilities. After the Civil War, debates about women’s mental and physical capacity shifted from those rooted in divine ordinance and Enlightenment rationality to those grounded in science and evolutionary theory. New research conclusions combined with an existing system of legal dependency to form a powerful new discourse of exclusion which still echoes today. As the twentieth century turned, practitioners of the newly prestigious scientific disciplines provided rationales for anti-suffragists to label these sex-based differences as physical and mental disabilities. Women’s rights advocates rejected these characterizations, but rarely refuted the assumption that disability justified exclusion. This article approaches these debates with disability as the center of inquiry to explore the intertwined nature of legal and biological power.

The decline of rural agricultural communities is a national trend that includes Apopka, Florida. Over time, instead of the city annexed into the larger city of Orlando, Florida, Apopka has grown into the second-largest city in Orange County. The following questions beg to be answered: Why did Apopka become the second-largest city instead of cities closer to Orlando? What is special about Apopka that draws people to this city? The research-based on secondary sources illustrates the national trends of change in small agricultural towns, not only in the southeast but also in other regions of the country. The primary sources cover the local causes and effects of the changes that have occurred in Apopka and in the Central Florida region, which has produced the growth of Apopka. The decline in agriculture and expansion of size is from environmental elements and a shift in the economic base from agriculture to tourism. The primary sources include articles from local newspapers, the Orlando Business Journal, and environmental research results from the University of Florida. The research will include the effects on Apopka’s residents and the impact of environmental causes on the farmworkers who labored on the different farms in the area. The proposed project is an Omeka website that would help the Museum of the Apopkans to update its exhibits by moving into the 21st century.