Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
177
result(s) for
"Vigilance committee"
Sort by:
Flush Times and Fever Dreams
In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the \"Arkansas morass\" in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart's adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart's story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America's Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
eBook
Uncivil Disobedience
Uncivil Disobedienceexamines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people.
Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a \"bottom-up\" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law.
Uncivil Disobediencecalls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.
eBook
Faces Like Devils
In the twenty-first century, the word vigilante usually conjures up images of cinematic heroes like Batman, Zorro, the Lone Ranger, or Clint Eastwood in just about any film he's ever been in. But in the nineteenth century, vigilantes roamed the country long before they ever made their way onto the silver screen. In Faces Like Devils, Matthew J. Hernando closely examines one of the most famous of these vigilante groups—the Bald Knobbers.
Hernando sifts through the folklore and myth surrounding the Bald Knobbers to produce an authentic history of the rise and fall of Missouri's most famous vigilantes. He details the differences between the modernizing Bald Knobbers of Taney County and the anti-progressive Bald Knobbers of Christian County, while also stressing the importance of Civil War-era violence with respect to the foundation of these vigilante groups.
Despite being one of America's largest and most famous vigilante groups during the nineteenth century, the Bald Knobbers have not previously been examined in depth. Hernando's exhaustive research, which includes a plethora of state and federal court records, newspaper articles, and firsthand accounts, remedies that lack. This account of the Bald Knobbers is vital to anyone not wanting to miss out on a major part of Missouri's history.
eBook
Taking the Law into their Own Hands
Over much of Africa, crime and insurgency are a serious problem and one in which the distinction between the two is being eroded. Left without state protection people have sought to preserve their lives and property through vigilante groups and militias that pay scant attention to the law or human rights. Likewise, the state security forces, under pressure to cut crime and rebel activity, readily discard lawful procedures. Torture provides them with vital information, whilst extra-judicial executions save the need to go through the prolonged criminal justice system. After a general overview of the role of the rule of law in a democratic society, Bruce Baker provides five case studies that capture the current complex realities and their impact on the new democracies. The citizen responses considered are vigilantes in East African pastoral economies, The Bakassi Boys an anti-crime group in Nigeria and private policing initiatives in South Africa. The state responses are those of the Ugandan Defence Forces towards the Lords Resistance Army, the Senegalese army towards the Casamance secessionists and the Mozambique Police response towards criminals.
Contents: Introduction. Lawlessness and Democracy in Africa: The importance of the rule of law in democracy; The construction of attitudes towards the law. The Army Takes the Law into its Own Hands: The Ugandan peoples defence force and the Northern rebellion; The Senegalese army and the Casamance secessionists. The Police and State Militia Take the Law into Their Own Hands: The Mozambican national police and crime; Anambra state vigilante service (Nigeria) and crime. The People Take the Law into Their Own Hands: Vigilantes and crime in South Africa; East Africa’s vigilantes and cattle rustling. The Implications for Democracy: Sustaining democracy in a context of lawless law enforcement; Bibliography; Index.
Bruce Baker, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, School of International Studies and Law, Coventry University, UK
eBook
Gateway to Freedom
The story of how three remarkable New Yorkers helped over 3000 African American slaves escape to a life of liberty in Canada, in the decades before the American Civil War.
eBook
The Role of River Vigilance Committees to Address New Socio-Climatic Conditions in Chile: Insights from Ostrom’s Design Principles for Common-Pool Resource Institutions
Chile is currently facing a mega-drought, which is expected to lead to a significant increase in the water stress level. Social conflicts related to water use are linked to the effects of climate change and a governance system marked by the privatization of the natural resources of public interest. This study aims to analyze whether the current Chilean water governance scheme can adapt to the effects of climate change through a critical observation of the role of the River Vigilance Committees (RVCs; private user organizations exercising the public function of water management), from the perspective of Ostrom’s design principles for long-enduring Common-pool Resource (CPR) institutions. We analyze legal approaches, management mechanisms, and decision-making processes under the socio-climatic conditions that the country is currently facing. The results indicate that, with a few exceptions, the Chilean governance system does not allow RVCs to effectively incorporate the design principles—and, therefore, to achieve adaptation—due to dispersed functions, the exclusion of water users, and a lack of planning at different levels. We propose that water governance should consider the creation of River Basin Boards with broader planning powers, as well as the incorporation of different relevant stakeholders.
Journal Article
Gateway to freedom
When slavery was a routine part of life in America's South, a secret network of activists and escape routes enabled slaves to make their way to freedom in what is now Canada. The 'underground railroad' has become part of folklore, but one part of the story is only now coming to light. In New York, a city whose banks, business and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy, three men played a remarkable part, at huge personal risk. In Gateway to Freedom, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner tells the story of Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, furniture polisher; and Charles B. Ray, a black minister. Between 1830 and 1860, with the secret help of black dockworkers, the network led by these three men helped no fewer than 3,000 fugitives to liberty. The previously unexamined records compiled by Gay offer a portrait of fugitive slaves who passed through New York City -- wherethey originated, how they escaped, who helped them in both North and South, and how they were forwarded to freedom in Canada.
eBook
Labor rights are civil rights
In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched,Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation.
The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights.
He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.
eBook
The Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau
This is the second volume in the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau's correspondence in more than half a century. When completed, the edition's three volumes will include every extant letter written or received by Thoreau-in all, almost 650 letters, roughly 150 more than in any previous edition, including dozens that have never before been published.Correspondence 2 contains 246 letters, 124 written by Thoreau and 122 written to him. Sixty-three are collected here for the first time; of these, forty-three have never before been published. During the period covered by this volume, Thoreau wrote the works that form the foundation of his modern reputation. A number of letters reveal the circumstances surrounding the publication of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in May 1849 and Walden in August 1854, as well as the essays Resistance to Civil Government (1849; now known as Civil Disobedience ) and Slavery in Massachusetts (1854), and two series, An Excursion to Canada (1853) and Cape Cod (1855). Writing and lecturing brought Thoreau a small group of devoted fans, most notably Daniel Ricketson, an independently wealthy Quaker and abolitionist who became a faithful correspondent. The most significant body of letters in the volume are those Thoreau wrote to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, a friend and disciple who elicited intense and complex discussions of the philosophical, ethical, and moral issues Thoreau explored throughout his life.Following every letter, annotations identify correspondents, individuals mentioned, and books quoted, and describe events to which the letters refer. A historical introduction characterizes the letters and connects them with the events of Thoreau's life, a textual introduction lays out the editorial principles and procedures followed, and a general introduction discusses the history of the publication of Thoreau's correspondence. Proper names, publications, events, and ideas found in both the letters and the annotations are included in the index, which provides full access to the contents of the volume.
eBook