Category Archives: History

In memoriam: Hugo Chávez

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—Michael D. Yates

The death of Hugo Chávez saddens those struggling for a better world. He was a great champion of the impoverished workers and peasants of both Venezuela and the world, and a steadfast and bold critic of the rapacious and murderous imperialism of the United States.

Monthly Review Press is proud of the books we have published on Venezuela, books which describe, analyze, and show solidarity with the Venezuelan road to democratic socialism. A key element in building a revolutionary, new society is to ensure the health of the people. This has been one of Chávez’s singular achievements; millions of poor Venezuelans have received (free) medical care for the first time. In cooperation with Cuba, Venezuela has begun to construct a system of patient-centered, decentralized, and preventive health care, a process examined in Steve Brouwer’s Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care. Remarkably, peasants and workers are themselves trained to be doctors, in a work and study program pioneered by Cuba.

Under Chávez, Venezuela has striven to secure its political and economic independence from the United States, which has had a sordid history of intervention in the country and in all of Latin America. Not only did he help to engineer a strong economy not dependent on the United States, he never hesitated to challenge with words and deeds its imperialist practices. Given the implacable hostility of the United States to Venezuela, examined with great care by Eva Golinger in Bush versus Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela, it is remarkable that Chávez remained in power, winning democratic elections and surviving a Bush-engineered coup. This is a testament to the depth of his revolution and the growing power of Latin American governments to steer a course independent of the United States, a power inspired by Venezuela.

Following the failed coup in April 2002, when massive popular protest propelled him back to the presidency, Chávez sat down with Marta Harnecker and provided insights into his own political trajectory and the nature of what he called “socialism for the twenty-first century.” His words were later published in Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

While Monthly Review Press must sell books to remain in operation, our main purpose has always been to promote radical thought and action in the world. We have published books in which authors have expressed the deepest admiration for Hugo Chávez, but praise for a radical leader is never our goal; it is the empowerment of the masses of workers and peasants we want to help achieve. And yet, it must be said that our love for Chávez has been amply repaid.

In April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad, Chávez arose from his seat, walked over to Barack Obama and handed him a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic work of the centuries-long exploitation of Latin America by the great imperialist nations (including, of course, the United States): Open Veins of Latin America. He inscribed the book, “For Obama, with affection.” As word of this spread around the world, the English edition of the book reached #2 on Amazon’s sales charts. This was a great boon to Monthly Review Press and to our distributor, NYU Press. We were inundated with emails and phone calls, and I remember having to quickly re-read the book (which I had used in my classes when I was a teacher), so that I could write and deliver, within one day, a review to an Australian magazine.

Let us hope that as the Venezuelan revolution continues and as the imperial power of the United States someday diminishes in response to popular revolt here, it won’t be necessary for the president of one country to give such a book to the leader of another. Because Hugo Chávez’s dream and that of every revolutionary person will have been realized… That there be no rich and poor, that there be no exploiter and exploited, that there be only one healthy and happy humanity.

Michael D. Yates is a writer, editor, and labor educator. He is Associate Editor of Monthly Review and Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press.

Which women’s histories? Feminism, race, and Women’s History Month

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—Alison Piepmeier

To tell you the truth, I’m a bit skeptical of Women’s History Month. I’m skeptical of all the themed months. In part, I’m skeptical because they encourage us to see things in terms of stereotypes. During Black History Month, folks are often focused on the standard heroic figures—many of whom are black men and the women who gain prominence because of their connection with them. And during Women’s History Month, we’re often focused on white women, with the occasional woman of color thrown in to mix things up.

This kind of segmented thinking affects our understanding of history more broadly. White feminists often say that women started speaking out about and against rape in the 1970s—but have a look at the writings of nineteenth-century journalist (and African American woman) Ida B. Wells. Wells documented rapes like that of a white man raping an eight-year-old black girl: “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black,” and in another case, “a white man…inflicted such injuries upon another Afro-American child that she died. He was not punished.” As Wells’ work demonstrates, black women had been speaking out against rape for over a hundred years before white feminist activism took on this issue.

As Danielle McGuire points out in her excellent book At the Dark End of the Street, the familiar understanding of the Civil Rights movement is that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the person who initiated it—but in fact, ass-kicking investigator and activist Rosa Parks was initiating resistance while King was still in high school. She wasn’t an elderly woman who happened to sit on the bus: she was a radical activist who saw what needed to be done, and then kept her mouth shut so that she could become a strategic symbol.

We need the same kinds of sensitivity as McGuire when we’re examining more recent history. In my book Girl Zines, I discuss the ways women of color use zines to offer scathing critiques of their erasure from discussions of feminism, as when Chandra Ray writes in the zine Evolution of a Race Riot,

Many white girls talk about sisterhood.  They really mean:  you’re my sister as long as you don’t confront me on my bigotry.  You’re my sister as long as you know your place.  (Which usually means underneath or behind you, hidden from view or maybe as a token to show how diverse your movement is.)  I don’t give a shit about how many meetings you’ve been to or how many unlearning racism workshops you’ve undergone….Until you stop expecting women of color to conform to the white-girl ideal of feminism, I don’t want anything to do with you.

If we’re going to celebrate Women’s History Month, let’s celebrate a truly diverse, intersectional, complex history, full of identities that don’t fit into the neat narratives we’ve been told.

Alison Piepmeier is the author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009).

Women on the home front:
Debate over work-life balance continues

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—Bernie D. Jones

It has been fifty years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963—and twenty years since the Family Medical Leave Act was signed into law by President Clinton in 1993. Thus, the month of February saw several notable events in the world of work-family balance: those two anniversaries, plus the announcement by Marissa Mayer, a mother and the CEO of Yahoo, Inc., of a new ban against employees working from home. This policy change only reinforced the significance of the two anniversaries.

The Feminine Mystique has been credited with spearheading the modern feminist movement that pushed more women to seek highly paid jobs and professional careers, where before they had been forced by traditional conventions to remain at home. Articulating “the problem that had no name,” Friedan explained that highly educated wives were consumed by the drudgery of housework while their skills remained unused.

Yet, the question remained, once women went into the workplace, either because of personal preference or because of economic necessity, how would they manage their responsibilities at home? The answer came twenty years later in the form of unpaid family medical leave that would become available to working parents, men and women who gained up to twelve months unpaid leave for the birth of a child.

Mayer’s comments are important because they seem to reinforce certain aspects of the women’s rights movement that have always been controversial—not only the traditionalist criticism that mothers belong in the home, but the perceptions of those who argued that elite women were tone-deaf to the experiences of other women not as privileged as they. Mayer took only two weeks off when she gave birth to her son; in addition, she set up a nursery in her office for him. The uproar that followed the announcement was not a surprise. Mayer doesn’t experience work-family challenges because she has the resources to manage a demanding job and raise a child.

Not all working parents are as fortunate as Mayer. Working from home has been a hallmark of work-family balance, because parents crave the flexibility it offers.  Thus, it seemed a betrayal that a female manager with a child of her own would deny this important opportunity to workers under her, all in the name of a misguided sense of efficiency.

Fifty years after The Feminine Mystique and twenty years after passage of the FMLA, questions remain. How is the ability of highly successful women to be in the workplace fulfilled through their abilities to negotiate flexibility? How is the ability of less elite women to work compromised by policies that deny them this? The answers all tie into questions of class and status. The book I edited, Women Who Opt Out, addresses these points and more; the authors, all experts in their fields of work-family balance, address the class-based issues inherent in these discussions. This Women’s History Month is an ideal time to propel these discussions further, as we reflect on the history of our struggles with work-life balance.

Bernie D. Jones is Associate Professor of Law at the Suffolk University Law School and editor of Women Who Opt Out: The Debate over Working Mothers and Work-Family Balance (NYU Press, 2013).

March: The month for Making Women’s Histories

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—Pamela S. Nadell 

How did March become the month for celebrating women’s history?

In the summer of 1979, leaders of forty-three different women’s associations participated in a seminar organized by the pioneering historian Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) at Sarah Lawrence College. For fifteen days, women from organizations like the Girl Scouts and the American Association of University Women lived together and studied American women’s history.

At the end, as they bid one another and their college days goodbye, these women agreed that they would take home a “group project.” Together, they would organize the first “Women’s History Week.” The organizers knew that behind them stood hundreds of thousands of women. If they could harness the power of these collectives, they could press ahead for women’s history programming, and not just at the local level.

A year later, the seminar attendees had won congressional and presidential support for the first national Women’s History Week. Originally timed to coincide with March 8th, International Women’s Day, a date fixed early in the twentieth century for expressing female solidarity, seven years later, Women’s History Week had grown into National Women’s History Month. The rest, as we say, is history.

Since then, March has become the month in the U.S. for displaying women’s histories. My new book, Making Women’s Histories, co-edited with American University Professor Kate Haulman, insists that the teaching and writing of women’s histories was a political project long before Women’s History Month emerged. Just as the feminist movement of the 1960s had propelled women into the professions, so too had it inserted women into the history—just as these women had learned that summer. No matter where or when, the goal of making women’s histories has always been intertwined with the project of advancing women in society.

If all history is politics, then the making of women’s histories, and not only during the month of March, attests to the power of the past to advance women in the present.

Pamela S. Nadell is Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. She is the author of Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and co-editor of Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives and Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (NYU Press, 2013).

California, here they came

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At the end of WWII, the United Nations needed a headquarters… And so began the race to host the United Nations, with over 200 American cities and towns fighting to become the UN’s new home, or the “capital of the world.” 

In Capital of the World (NYU Press, 2013),  award-winning historian and journalist Charlene Mires uncovers this fascinating history of hometown promoters in hot pursuit. We invited Mires to share a few of these stories with us on our blog. Our final entry in the series moves to the West Coast, starting with a telegram that would propel San Francisco into a global competition. (For more stories like this one, visit the author’s blog!)

In the last months of World War II, an unexpected telegram arrived in San Francisco from around the world. “California, here we come,” the Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, wired from Moscow to San Francisco Mayor Roger Lapham, who up to that moment was enjoying a peaceful lunch at his usual club on Nob Hill. Thus began San Francisco’s moment on the world stage as the United Nations’ first Capital of the World – the site of the conference to draft the United Nations Charter – and the quest of San Francisco and other California cities and towns to keep the honor.

Would San Francisco and other world capital hopefuls in the American West benefit from the feeling that the postwar world would be centered more on the Pacific region than the traditional centers for diplomacy in Europe? Or would they lose to perceptions that they were too distant from European capitals?

At a time when prospects for commercial aviation were changing ideas of time and distance, anything seemed possible. Placing the United Nations in New York was far from certain, and San Francisco competed prominently and vigorously among nearly 250 American cities and towns seeking the honor of becoming the Capital of the World. While many Californians aligned with San Francisco’s bid, offers also reached the UN from more than a dozen other California contenders. From the West also came invitations from Denver and Salt Lake City, and suggestions of Grand Coulee, Washington, and the Grand Canyon.

Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations follows the San Francisco boosters and other world capital hopefuls as they competed for the UN’s attention at the end of the Second World War. Reaching across the nation and around the world, from boardrooms to the halls of diplomacy, the book relates the surprising and often comic story of American determination at a pivotal moment in world history. Any town could have dreamt of becoming the Capital of the World, and readers will wonder: what if their dreams had come true?

Charlene Mires is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden. She is also the author of Independence Hall in American Memory and a co-recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Read: Introduction to Ghosts of Jim Crow

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February is drawing to a close, and we’d like to kick off the last few days of Black History Month by featuring the introduction to F. Michael Higginbotham’s forthcoming book, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (NYU Press, March 2013).

In Ghosts of Jim Crow, Higginbotham persuasively challenges the notion that we’re living in a post-racial America—and offers prescriptions to heal our country’s racial inequality. But don’t just take it from us. According to Publishers Weekly, Higginbotham “contributes an indispensable perspective on an enduring ‘racial paradigm’ in contemporary American society, while insisting, with concrete proposals, that true racial equality remains within reach.” Start reading below.

Introduction to Ghosts of Jim Crow by F. Michael Higginbotham

Center of the nation, center of the world

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At the end of WWII, the United Nations needed a headquarters… And so began the race to host the United Nations, with over 200 American cities and towns fighting to become the UN’s new home, or the “capital of the world.” 

In Capital of the World (NYU Press, 2013),  award-winning historian and journalist Charlene Mires uncovers this fascinating history of hometown promoters in hot pursuit. We invited Mires to share a few stories with us on our blog leading up to the book’s publication. Focusing on Chicago and the Midwest, this entry is the third in our series.

Chicago had much to boast about by the end of the Second World War. Less than 75 years after the Great Fire, the city had rebounded into a metropolis. Think of it: Host city to two world’s fairs, in 1893 and 1933. The crossroads of the nation’s railroads, moving people and commerce from East to West. A city of skyscrapers, and a destination for immigrants. During the war, it was even called one of the nation’s “arsenals of democracy.”

What more could one desire in a potential Capital of the World?

Without hesitation, in 1945 Chicago leapt into the spontaneous and spirited competition among American cities and towns to become the headquarters location for the new United Nations. Despite tendencies toward isolationism still embraced by the Chicago Tribune, Chicago and other Midwest contenders entered the fray among more than 250 cities and towns making pitches to become the Capital of the World.  How about one of the state parks in Indiana? Or Chicago’s rival in railroads and commerce, St. Louis? Why not the Black Hills of South Dakota? Or the “Queen City,” Cincinnati? These were among the world capital hopefuls who pursued the prize with such gusto that they sent teams of boosters to London – uninvited – to make personal pitches to the UN.

The UN’s choice of New York was far from certain, and all options seemed open as the world transitioned from war to peace. Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations tells the surprising, entertaining, and revealing stories of Americans who were determined to make a new place for themselves on the map of the postwar world.

Charlene Mires is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden. She is also the author of Independence Hall in American Memory and a co-recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Black History Month: “Wrong Complexion for Protection” when disasters strike

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—Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright

In thinking about Black History Month and the great strides that have been made in the arenas of civil rights and racial equality, an immense body of work about the glaring racial disparities in employment, education, income and wealth, housing and health care comes to mind. However, far less has been written or publicized about the glaring inequities that exist in government response to natural and human-induced disasters. Decades before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast, millions of African Americans learned the hard way that waiting for the government can be hazardous to their health and health of their community.

In Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Westview Press, 2009), we documented that racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed Katrina exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs.

We expanded this analysis and focus in The Wrong Complexion for Protection (NYU Press, 2012), a book that places the government response to natural and man-made disasters in historical context over the past eight decades—from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.  Here, we compare and contrast how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, bioterrorism threats, and natural and human-induced disasters that disproportionately affect African Americans.

Our analysis chronicles history lessons not learned, government failures, and inadequate and inequitable government response to natural and human-induced disasters and emergencies.  Our goal is to shed new light on issues of health equity, environmental and climate justice, spatial and racial vulnerability, and the government’s role in providing equal protection under the law for all Americans, without regard to race, color, national origin, or income.

Too often, African Americans have experienced slow, unequal or no response from various local, state, and federal government agencies on a range of emergencies.  This scenario has often been the rule—not the exception—as in the case of the USDA and the discriminatory treatment of black farmers and the slow and inept response by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect black landowners in Dickson, Tennessee, tagged the “poster child” for environmental racism.

The simple but urgent message of this book is equity, justice and fairness. Centuries of black exploitation, experimentation, drug testing, and forced surgeries have engendered mistrust of government, medical establishment, and biomedical research. Fairness is essential to building trust and reaching any meaningful solution to natural and human-induced disasters and for achieving sustainability and homeland security.  Fairness matters. It matters how we design and plan strategies for addressing public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents and spills, earthquakes, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, tornados, droughts, heat waves, and bioterrorism threats. Making disaster response equitable is a matter of civil and human rights, and in the spirit of Black History Month, we must strive for equality in the sectors which have historically excluded or otherwise exploited African Americans.

Robert D. Bullard (Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston) and Beverly Wright (founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University, New Orleans) co-authored The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African Americans (NYU Press, 2012).

From World War II to the World Stage (or maybe not)

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At the end of WWII, the United Nations needed a headquarters… And so began the race to host the United Nations, with over 200 American cities and towns fighting to become the UN’s new home, or the “capital of the world.” 

In Capital of the World (NYU Press, 2013),  award-winning historian and journalist Charlene Mires uncovers this fascinating history of hometown promoters in hot pursuit. We invited Mires to share a few stories with us on our blog leading up to the book’s publication. This entry, relating the South’s role in the race for the UN, is the second in our series.

At Christmastime in 1945, the world was in motion.  On ships tossing in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and on packed trains from city to city, troops headed home for the first holiday season after the Second World War.  As American sons and daughters set their sights on cherished hometowns, the parents and neighbors they left behind awakened to new opportunities.

For example, what if the old hometown could become the Capital of the World?

In every region – South, North, East, and West – the idea took hold that some lucky community might be selected as the headquarters site for the new United Nations.  In nearly 250 locations across the United States, civic boosters found a multitude of reasons to try for the prize.  In Virginia, for example, Charlottesville called attention to its distinction as the home of Thomas Jefferson.  Fredericksburg pointed to the inspirational boyhood home of George Washington. Portsmouth proclaimed itself “the South’s City of the Future.”  The tiny crossroads of Uno seemed “typographically perfect,” according to the Associated Press. Elsewhere in the South, Miami and New Orleans angled against other cities to become the Capital of the World.

But would the South’s aspirations be welcomed by the United Nations?  The fate of the southern contenders is one tale among many in the surprising and far-from-certain story of how the United Nations came to place its headquarters in New York City. At the end of the Second World War, when plans for commercial aviation were just taking off, it seemed that any location might be imagined as a potential center and Capital of the World.

In this light, just imagine the surprise that awaited boosters from Newport News, Virginia, who spent Christmastime in 1945 traveling from the United States to London, against the holiday tide. They were taking a gamble that UN diplomats there would hear their pitch to place the UN near Colonial Williamsburg. But by the time they arrived, all bets were off for the South. Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations explains why as it follows the adventures and antics of American civic boosters as they pursued the prize of becoming the Capital of the World. Their experiences capture the essence of American determination at a pivotal moment in world history, in the transition from war to peace.

Charlene Mires is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden. She is also the author of Independence Hall in American Memory and a co-recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

How did NYC land the UN?

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At the end of WWII, the United Nations needed a headquarters… And so began the race to host the United Nations, with over 200 American cities and towns fighting to become the UN’s new home, or the “capital of the world.” 

In Capital of the World (NYU Press, 2013),  award-winning historian and journalist Charlene Mires uncovers this fascinating history of hometown promoters in hot pursuit. We invited Mires to share a few stories with us on our blog leading up to the book’s publication. First up: one for you, New York.

At the end of World War II, everything was up for grabs – even the prize of becoming the host city for the United Nations. It was by no means a sure thing that the new peacekeeping organization would settle in New York. In fact, a city was just about the last place that diplomats wanted to be (think of the traffic!).

Capital of the World follows the adventures and antics of civic boosters from New York and nearly 250 other cities and towns and as they competed for the honor of becoming the site for the United Nations headquarters. Offers poured in to the UN from large cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, but also from such seemingly out-of-the-way places as the Black Hills of South Dakota. In the spirit of Broadway musicals of the time – think of “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” from Annie Get Your Gun (1946) – New Yorkers had to out-maneuver determined rivals as well as the reluctance of the world’s most powerful diplomats.  How did they do it?

  • The UN helped by igniting protests when it first selected a site in Greenwich, Connecticut – one of the few places in the United States that wanted nothing to do with becoming the Capital of the World.
  • The President of the Bronx lured the UN Security Council to Hunter College, sure that history would remember the Bronx as the first Capital of the World.
  • The powerful Parks Commissioner Robert Moses succeeded in planting the UN General Assembly at Flushing Meadows in Queens, site of the 1939-40 world’s fair, and the UN Secretariat at Lake Success on Long Island.
  • At the last possible moment, when it seemed that the UN would flee from congested, troublesome New York to Philadelphia, Nelson Rockefeller came to the rescue with a deal for the prime real estate where the United Nations headquarters stands today.

There is much more to the story. Capital of the World reaches across the nation and around the world to capture a pivotal moment in world history, when it seemed that everyone, everywhere could imagine their own home towns as the Capital of the World. The story is especially timely for New Yorkers as the United Nations moves toward completing renovations of its landmark headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. For a city that takes pride in being the Capital of the World, this book provides an overlooked history of one of New York City’s greatest landmarks.

Charlene Mires is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden. She is also the author of Independence Hall in American Memory and a co-recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Capital of the World sweeps pre-pub reviews!

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We are thrilled to highlight that Capital of the World received wonderful reviews in the following pre-pubs: Booklist, Kirkus and now, Library Journal! Check them out below.

Also, we invite you to review the book via NetGalley, read the introduction, or watch Charlene Mires talk about the race to host the United Nations on our YouTube channel!

Booklist: “Polls have repeatedly indicated that many New Yorkers wouldn’t mind if the UN left their city lock, stock, and barrel, taking its bureaucracy and parking-violating diplomats along.  The irony is not lost on Mires, for, as she reveals in her surprising and often amusing work, New York ‘won’ the privilege to host the UN after a furious, sometimes sad, and sometimes comical competition with other cities and locales.  Some of the competitors were seriously considered, including San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and even an Ontario Island near Niagara Falls. Others, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, never had a chance.  Mires shows how the competition was triggered by a combination of municipal pride, boosterism, and an eagerness to reap the financial rewards that were expected to accrue to the host city.  Mires also captures the pervading sense of optimism amongst the claimants after the horrors of WWII.  This is a very readable, entertaining account that is aimed at a general audience.”

Kirkus: “Mires (History/Rutgers Univ., Camden; Independence Hall in American Memory, 2002) delivers an amusing account of the intense, if not world-shaking competition for the U.N. headquarters.

When the first serious discussions began in 1944, diplomats paid little attention to locating the headquarters, although most inclined toward America (including the Soviet Union, anxious to keep it far away). Today, few consider the U.N. the enforcer of world peace, but that was a common hope as World War II drew to a close. As such, boosters envisioned their city as the ‘Capital of the World,’ which would also enjoy the economic benefits of hosting a large institution and its staff. A scattering of enthusiasts buttonholed delegates at the spring 1945 San Francisco conference that wrote the U.N. charter, but an avalanche descended on London six months later to lobby diplomats engaged in nailing down its organization. Mires devotes most of the book to unsuccessful candidates ranging from Chicago and Philadelphia to Niagara Falls, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Tuskahoma, Okla., which deluged officials with sales pitches, posters, brochures, photo albums and futuristic architectural drawings. New York remained aloof from the hard sell but took for granted that any great international organization belonged there. It helped that powerful figures such as Robert Moses and Nelson Rockefeller took an interest and even more that Nelson’s father donated land along the East River now occupied by the U.N. buildings.

Although little was at stake and everyone knows the outcome, Mires works hard and mostly successfully to hold her readers’ interest in the energetic, often-quaint public-relation antics of the 1940s.”

Library Journal: “Mires (history, Rutgers Univ.-Camden), corecipient of the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, investigates a largely unexamined aspect of the birth of the United Nations: the attempt by many U.S. cities during the closing days of World War II to persuade it to base its headquarters in their respective communities. Mires has tracked down elusive archival sources and forgotten newspaper accounts, uncovering a fascinating chronicle involving countless American politicians, foreign diplomats, and community promoters who participated in the feverish lobbying campaign that at times resembled an Atlantic City beauty contest. After numerous site inspections and unending deliberations, the prize was finally awarded to New York City in late 1946, largely owing to the $8.5 million gift of the Rockefeller family allowing the United Nations to build its “workshop of peace” on the Manhattan site overlooking the East River where it resides to this day.

VERDICT: While plenty of books address the creation of the United Nations, Mires provides an important supplement showing how the idealistic search to establish the physical presence of the fledgling organization gave way to the cold realities of the marketplace. Recommended for readers of 20th-century American history, students of urban history, and scholars of post World War II diplomacy.”

+ Be on the look out for the Capital of the World blog tour in March (our first ever!)…

Waiting for democracy

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—Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Last November, thousands of citizens waited for hours outside polling places to cast their ballots in the presidential election. When asked why they were willing to wait, most answered in the emphatic language of democratic pride. It is our duty. It is our right. It is our calling as citizens. We are proud to.

Every day in courthouses across America, there are other lines of waiting citizens—lines for jury duty. There are lines to get into the courthouse, lines to check in, lines before you head to the courtroom for jury selection. Yet, if you ask those jurors why they were willing to wait, the language is less emphatic, less proud.

Why do we think of voting as something more connected to our democratic identity?  Why of the twin political rights of voting and jury service—the two markers of full political citizenship—do we value the right to vote more? The answer is that we misunderstand the value and values of jury service to democracy.

Why Jury Duty Matters sets out to reframe the debate by showing the importance of jury service to our democracy. To understand the value of jury service you need to understand its history, its constitutional connection, and its personal relevance to citizenship.

First, the history of the jury is the history of America. The right to a jury trial came over on the first boats to America. Jury protections can be found in the charters that founded the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies. Juries were instituted in the constitutions of each of the Thirteen Colonies and each of the new States. In fact, the denial of the right to a jury trial made it into the Declaration of Independence as one of the grievances of the colonists, helping to spark the Revolutionary War. Not surprisingly then, the right to a criminal jury trial is the only right that makes an appearance in both the original text of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights—under Article III and the Sixth Amendment, respectively. Further, you also have the Seventh Amendment’s right to a civil jury and the Fifth Amendment’s right to a Grand Jury.

Then, as America democratized and diversified, the jury was central to the battle for equality. The civil rights movement in the South began by challenging exclusions from jury service. The right to serve as a juror was a badge of citizenship—symbolizing equality. The women’s suffrage movement (both before and well after the Nineteenth Amendment) also involved a particular emphasis on the right to serve as jurors. Equality meant voting and having the right to jury service. Today, paralleling the progress of the various civil rights movements, jurors represent a fair cross section of society, a living symbol of equality in law.

This constitutional history is real, yet most people do not appreciate it when it comes to jury service. Jury duty is the one time where constitutional history and constitutional theory become immediately relevant, because you—the citizen—are a constitutional actor. We—the people—must act, and Why Jury Duty Matters explores why you should accept the call as a constitutional actor.

Second, the jury is a teaching moment where constitutional values come alive in practice. Participation, deliberation, fairness, equality, accountability, liberty, dissent, and the common good—these are constitutional values, and they are embedded in jury service. While voting is one form of participation, jury service is an even more fundamental contribution. It requires working through those other principles, applying due process rules to achieve fairness, deliberating with others, dissenting with tolerance, and practicing equality in a microcosm of one-person, one-vote democracy in the jury room.

These values are also values that we see in other areas of our democratic practice. But in jury service the lessons are longer, the questions deeper, and the practice harder. It is for that reason that Alexis de Tocqueville likened juries to free public schools, always open to teach the civic skills of democracy.

Finally, jury service is personally meaningful. It is the one day that you are required to act like a constitutional citizen. The argument in this book is that you should treat that jury summons like a constitutional invitation. You get to experience it for a day, or more, and hopefully learn a thing or two about your country and the Constitution.

Jury duty is Constitution duty. It is a way for citizens, ordinary folks, to connect to the constitutional principles that guide this nation. Most people see jury duty as a service they do for the court system or for the defendant or parties. But in truth, jury duty is also for the citizen. Jury duty provides constitutional lessons necessary for democracy.

So the next time you are waiting on jury duty, remember you are waiting for democracy. It is just as important as your vote.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia. He is co-author of Youth Justice in America and author of Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action.