Book Description
Originally published in 1988, Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries is an engaging and artfully illustrated history of an enigmatic assemblage of canyons and mesas tucked into the southwestern corner of Colorado. Duane A. Smith recounts the dramatic 1888 "discovery" of the cliff dwellings and other Anasazi ruins and the ensuing twenty-year campaign to preserve them. Smith also details the resulting creation of a national park in 1906 and assesses the impact of more recent developments—railroads and highways, air pollution, and the growing significance of tourism—on the park's financial and ecological vitality. This revised and completely redesigned edition includes more than 50 illustrations and will be enjoyed by readers interested in environmental, Western, and Colorado history. ... Read more

Book Description
A leading theorist in urban politics, Clarence Stone redefined the field with his prize-winning book Regime Politics and is now acknowledged as the father of "regime analysis." Over the course of four decades, he has examined political power and leadership, race and politics, and the politics of social reform in urban settings through writings that have critiqued, debated, and recast large questions about democracy and inequality.

This book collects ten classic articles and essays by Stone to create a succinct reader in urban politics. It encompasses theoretical work on urban political power; examinations of political leadership in community politics; considerations of race, class, and political power in Atlanta; and writings on the politics of social reform and urban regeneration. These pieces provide a model for integrating empiricism with theory, offer Stone's own reflections on his theory, and demonstrate the evolution of his thought.

The volume also features three new pieces. The editors' introduction provides an insightful assessment of the place of urban politics in political science and an overview of Stone's contributions to the field. Stone himself provides a brand new essay that paints a vision for a new urban agenda, using the regime concept as a base on which to build for the future. And Jennifer Hochschild's concluding chapter assesses Stone's work and lays out alternative perspectives, locating his scholarship within political science and pointing out its many strengths as well as some of its omissions.

This collection reminds those interested in discourse about democracy, representation, inequality, justice, and power of the advantages that studying cities can bring to these important issues. It also serves to redirect urbanists to important foundational aspects of the urban regime framework and will stand as the legacy of the most influential theorist in his field.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more

Book Description
As an avenue for progressive politics in a nation stillskeptical of change, community organizing today faces significantchallenges. This book assesses that activity within the context ofpolitical, cultural, social, and economic changes in cities--from World WarII to the present--to show how community-based organizations haveresponded.

Transforming the City is the first book to examine the current stateof community organizing in American cities, analyzing its place incontemporary progressive politics and assessing whether it has changed inresponse to changes in the political economy. Leading urban scholars--PeterDreier, Robert Fisher, Clarence N. Stone, Dennis Shirley, and others--havebeen drawn from a wide range of disciplines to offer original commentarieson the strengths and limitations of community organizing, a form ofpolitical and civic engagement that is too often overlooked by those whobemoan the decline in social capital.

While embracing mobilization as a way to cope with the problems afflictinginner cities, these essays acknowledge the challenges inherent inglobalization, de-industrialization, the demise of ward-based politics, andthe values that shape contemporary American culture. They argue that largerchanges in the political economy have reshaped the local ecology of civicengagement, thereby impacting the focus, orientation, and effectiveness ofcommunity organizing.

The book features case studies from Chicago to New Orleans to El Paso, andcovers community organizations from many of the organizing networks andmodels, such as ACORN, IAF, PICO, and DART. These cases address key policyareas such as education and housing, and the role of race in these issuesand in organizing in general. By the actual practice of this form ofdemocratic politics, they also show the potential of community organizingfor addressing concerns about Americans' disengagement from civic andpolitical life.

Whether pursuing longstanding problems about housing or more recent issuessuch as wages paid by big-box retailers, community organizing continues tohave an important role to play as part of a broader progressive movement.As America decides what kind of society it wants to be, these insightfularticles illuminate those larger trends in the local ecology that areforcing organizers to alter their strategies, operations, and visions forthe future.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policyseries. ... Read more

Product Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kansas City Star was a trust-busting newspaper acclaimed for its progressive spirit; fifty years later it was a busted trust, targeted in the most important antitrust action ever brought against an American daily. Haskell takes readers into the Star s city room and executive offices and tells the story of the three men with contrasting personalities and agendas who shaped the paper: William Rockhill Nelson, among the last of the greatpersonaleditors from journalism s golden age; the scholarly Henry J. Haskell, who led the Star to its peak of influence in the 1930s and40s; and Roy A. Roberts, who went on to combine the roles of newspaper publisher and political kingmaker. Haskell recounts such milestones as the Star s role in the City Beautiful movement that helped transform America s urban centers, the nation s entry into two global wars, a bold but ill-starred experiment in employee ownership, and the paper s battle with Boss Pendergast s legendary political machine. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A wonderfully well-written history
Though BOSS-BUSTERS is a first-rate piece of scholarship, the most striking aspect of the book is the quality of the writing. The story of Kansas City and its Star is told by Harry Haskell in a supremely readable prose style that allows the fascinating characters who are the actors in this drama to live in the imagination of the reader. Kansas City in the 1880s was a town with dirt streets and an outlaw mentality; from this mean beginning arose the City Beautiful, a great and influential newspaper, and a host of individuals whose lives altered the course of the twentieth century. Though sympathetic, Harry Haskell's portrait of his grandfather, Henry J. Haskell (the Pulitzer-prize winning editor of the Star), is informed by a remarkable objectivity. BOSS-BUSTERS is a splendid piece of writing on political and social history, the history of journalism and, ultimately, on the human character.

Extraordinary Journey
Haskell's meticulously researched account of the history of The Kansas City Star is a brilliant journey through history. Not only does this work describe the political and social passions and conflicts of America from the late 19th century to the present, it sheds light upon the humanity and foibles of such players as Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and numerous civic and national figures. It shows how the powerful forces of a newspaper and its founder, William Rockhill Nelson, could alter the course of a young city's growth, as well as influence an entire nation. Haskell is to be commended for this very readable, scholarly addition to American social, political, and economic history.

Haskell's readable tribute
First and foremost this is afirst -rate read that is meticulously researched. A recall of the days when KANSAS CITYand ITS STAR were a vibrant center of the United States and print journalism not only reported the news but often made it. A time before corporate media andnewspaper chains were the name of the game in one newspaper towns, when bright energetic men with little money and brash bravado could set up shop and produce a paper and maybe make a lotta money.One such man was William Rockhill Nelson . This is his story and how he done it pushing the boosterism that both endorsed and transformed the booming cowtown on the bend of the Missouri River into the CITY BEAUTIFUL. He also became a big-time player on the national scene . Fun to readas he plays politicsloving the intrigue and being buddy-buddy with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt. And he made more than a pot of money. Well thosenot so halcyon days am gone. Print journalism is on the run.The Kansas City Star is part of the McClatchy Company which if you hafta be part of a chain is, I suppose, as good as it can get.Nelson's real legacy is the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art built on the grounds of his estate and housing a major collection of Chinese art.

Title Undersells Book
Comments written by:
Dr. E. Grey Dimond
Kansas City, Missouri
December 10, 2007

This is an excellent book for someone who has been deep enough into Kansas City to have a "feel" for its politics, its Establishment, the dynamics of this town at the river's bend.Here is where the Missouri River suddenly turns east, crosses the width of the State, to reach the Mississippi River at St. Louis.To fully be "filled in" on these basics of this community, the recent book about the Establishment of Kansas City should be, would be, the right beginning.Even then, one should have lived here, read its newspaper the Kansas City Star, and participated, even marginally, in the who's who--what makes it tick arena.I speak not of myself but of the author.Haskell is the grandson of one of the do-ers, leaders that shaped the newspaper and the community and for several years was on the Star's staff.

As a comment not needed but meant as a compliment: the title under-sells the book.Perhaps it will help sales but Haskell has produced so much more than this 'reach for eye-catching' label suggests. This is a book about the life of the Kansas City Star from its founding to that point that it sold its ownership away to distant buyers who never knew the town, who lost the boldness, activism, guts that made the paper and certainly helped make the city.I have lived here in both eras and each day's newspaper is a reminder of the loss.

The book is the story of William Rockhill Nelson, J.C. Nichols, Tom
Pendergast, Senator Reed (Nelly Don's husband), Roy Roberts, Henry J. Haskell and the Kansas City of the 1980s through the FDR era.For me, it is a reminder of efforts, good and bad, of the founders of local fortunes to secure it for their heirs: comparing Nelson to Nichols to Joyce Hall.

A must read
Kansas City was known as a "cow town" in Canada.By delving into the history of Kansas City and the impressive dominance and power of its newspaper, The Kansas City Star,Mr. Haskell's easily read book has shown me that this Mid-Western city was anything but a lowly "cow town."It was involved with highly important events at home, as well as abroad.Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Katharine Wright (sister of Orville and Wilbur Wright), Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman are well-known names associated with Kansas City.However, William Rockhill Nelson, Roy Roberts and Henry Joseph Haskell were vastly influential socially and politically throughout many sectors of the United States.There is a wealth of fascinating information in Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds that will appeal to the general public. ... Read more

Book Description
It is difficult to ignore the fact that, even as the United States becomes much more racially and ethnically diverse, our neighborhoods remain largely segregated. The 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1977 Community Reinvestment Act promised to end discrimination, yet for millions of Americans housing options remain far removed from the American Dream. Why do most neighborhoods in American cities continue to be racially divided?

The problem, suggests Mara Sidney, lies with the policies themselves. She contends that to understand why discrimination persists, we need to understand the political challenges faced by advocacy groups who implement them. In Unfair Housing she offers a new explanation for the persistent color lines in our cities by showing how weak national policy has silenced and splintered grassroots activists.

Sidney explains how political compromise among national lawmakers with divergent interests resulted in housing legislation that influenced how community activists defined discrimination, what actions they took, and which political relationships they cultivated. As a result, local governments became less likely to include housing discrimination on their agendas, existing laws went unenforced, and racial segregation continued.

A former undercover investigator for a fair housing advocacy group, Sidney takes readers into the neighborhoods of Minneapolis and Denver to show how federal housing policy actually works. She examines how these laws played out in these cities and reveals how they eroded activists' capability to force more sweeping reform in housing policy.

Sidney also shows how activist groups can cultivate community resources to overcome these difficulties, looking across levels of government to analyze how national policies interact with local politics. In the first book to apply policy design theories of Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram to an empirical case, Sidney illuminates overlooked impacts of fair housing and community reinvestment policies and extends their theories to the study of local politics and nonprofit organizations.

Sidney argues forcefully that under-standing the link between national policy and local groups sheds light on our failure to reduce discrimination and segregation. As battles over fair housing continue, her book helps us understand the shape of the battlefield and the prospects for victory.

This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series. ... Read more