Search Results

Gun control has stirred intense emotions in the war on crime, even though many controls have only a marginal impact on firearms violence. Laws and their enforcement have been influenced most dramatically by assassinations and mass killings rather than by careful study. The first major modern federal gun regulations were approved by Congress in 1968 after the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations. The National Rifle Association (NRA) worked hard to ease what it considered overly aggressive enforcement, finally succeeding with a 1986 law known as McClure‐Volkmer. The NRA offended many law enforcement leaders in the process. The combination of police support and a federal executive branch and Congress, both controlled by Democrats, helped enact two major gun control measures in 1993 and 1994: the Brady Act, which required a waiting period for handgun purchasers to enable checks of potential buyers’ records, and a ban on assault‐style weapons blamed in the deaths of police officers and others. Yet “copycat” assault weapons were manufactured, blunting the law's impact. Congress failed to enact proposed laws that would require trigger locks on handguns or to regulate gun shows, where firearms were sold with minimal regulation. The NRA argued for more enforcement of existing antigun laws, pointing to a federal program in Richmond, VA, called ‘Project Exile’.

The high crime rates of the early 1990s and a string of sensational crimes from coast to coast set the stage in 1994 for the most extensive and costly federal anticrime bill ever. Bill Clinton had made crime fighting a top priority, particularly after his health care reform bill had faltered. Congress had taken the initiative, led by Democrats Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware and Representative Charles Schumer of New York. The Democrats came up with a way to put $30 billion for anticrime programs into a ‘trust fund’ created by a reduction in the federal bureaucracy. Soon it seemed that Clinton's 100,000 community police officers, a Republican demand for more prisons, and various other programs to combat violence against women and other crime problems all could be funded. Republicans backed off support of big allocations for crime prevention ideas like ‘midnight basketball’ for teens, and the National Rifle Association fought against a proposed ban on assault‐style weapons. The result was a donnybrook that kept Congress in session through most of the summer. Republicans eventually won a series of concessions on funding, although the assault weapon provision survived and the law was passed. In the process, Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was seen as so flawed that the crime law played a significant part in the Republicans’ seizing control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections. Five years later, the crime law's impact on crime rates was uncertain; in fact, crime had begun to fall long before many of its provisions could have had much effect.

This chapter outlines the provisions of the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, which was developed as a statement of ethical principles to provide guidance to physicians and other participants in medical research involving human subjects. Medical research involving human subjects includes research on identifiable human material or identifiable data.

A topic of long-standing discussion in Japan has been how to equitably merge the retirement plans for civil servants and private employees, which in the past have been managed separately. Recent legislation sought to unify social security pension schemes for all employees by extending the coverage of the Japanese Employees’ Pension Insurance Scheme, which covers private employees, to include civil servants as well. The author describes how Japanese social security pension schemes have evolved, the forces driving the merger of these plans, and what future prospects may be.

Retiree benefits for US employees of state and local governments have been traditionally paid via defined benefit (DB) plans, but this arrangement has been neither monolithic nor static. This chapter provides examples of variants on the traditional DB model and presents recent developments in retirement benefits for public employees, focusing on the incorporation of DC plan elements into or alongside DB plan structures.

This chapter traces the prehistory of the SER at the national and international levels, demonstrating its gendered roots. Building on scholarship in women's history illustrating how early attempts to establish minimum conditions of work at the national level centred on ‘protecting women’, it traces the emergence of a parallel emphasis in international labour legislation. The selection of initial subjects for international labour legislation was framed by contestation between and amongst trade unionists, working‐class and liberal feminists, women social reformers, and philanthropists over whether to pursue ‘equal protection’ for men and women or protection for women exclusively. The earliest international labour regulations, devised initially by the International Association for Labour Legislation and developed subsequently by the ILO, nevertheless included sex‐specific regulations on maternity and night work. By cultivating a male breadwinner/female caregiver gender contract, such regulations helped lay the foundation for the SER as a normative model of male employment.

Communists loomed large in the first decade of Britain's post-war folk music revival, and cultural historians have been quick to suspect a central Communist Party cultural policy co-ordinating activity. This chapter revisits the folk revival's communism, unsettling the received narrative. It challenges the usual periodization, which finds the revival's origins in the post-war period, by restoring to view pre-war communist engagements with folksong. It argues that once the revival was underway in the 1950s, the relationship between the Communist Party leadership and individual folk activists such as A. L. Lloyd and Ewen MacColl was more conflicted and removed than the standard narrative implies. At the same time, distinctly communist ideas about social formations, class, and oppositional culture became a co-ordinating common sense for the revival's left flank, taking on a new lease of life in the context of the emerging folk music scene.

The MCA was the product of a division in the holiness movement between traditionalist moderates who remained loyal to the old denominations and radicals who wanted to form new bodies committed to innovative theological currents such as the eminent physical return of Jesus and divine healing. Martin Wells Knapp, editor of God’s Revivalist was the central figure in radical coalition. While holiness moderates in the National Holiness Association (NHA) attempt a two front war against foes that they believe where either dangerous liberals or rank fanatics, Knapp focused his attention the moderates who he believed were hopeless tied to such passing human documents as the Apostles Creed. Early radical centers were God’s Bible School in Cincinnati and the Chicago based ministries of E. L. Harvey and Duke Farson.

This chapter considers the reaction among conservative evangelicals to perceived secularization in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of new moral reform societies and renewed attempts to maintain America’s character as a Christian nation through constitutional amendment, legislation, and invigorated enforcement of Sunday laws. The chapter focuses on the activities of the National Reform Association, which was at the forefront of efforts to amend the Constitution and to pass moral legislation. It concludes with a discussion of a brief revival of the maxim in legal and popular commentary.

Synopsis: The chapter describes Chinese nationalism's confrontation with missions, and how Marxist revolution continued that confrontation, culminating in Mao's New China. The chapter examines the Cultural Revolution, the Protestant Three‐Self movement, the Catholic Patriotic Association, and the phenomenon of registered and unregistered churches to account for the religious ferment in post‐Maoist China. China's Marxist revolution found resonance among progressive Western voices who called for appeasement and accommodation. The chapter describes the ordination of Florence Lei as lightening rod for debate about women's role in church and society, and the ensuing controversy at the 1948 Lambeth Conference. Catholic and Protestant fortunes revived after the thaw in 1986, and the chapter discusses the role of charismatic groups and the Catholic renewal in China's global role. The chapter concludes with a look at religion as a dimension of civil society, and the importance of the growing Chinese diaspora.

This chapter focuses on the early history of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA). It details the decision to change the name of MVHA to the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in 1964 and the OAH's efforts to become a modern and democratic learned society during the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter presents an introduction to Part IV of the book. In this part, the book moves away from research and editing to teaching. It calls attention to what has been seen as a serious shortcoming over much of the first century of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians: their neglect of the quality of history teaching in schools. It notes recent efforts to strengthen contact and cooperation among history educators of different levels.

This chapter explores the “clash of values” between academic and public historians. It defines the similarities and differences between them and the reasons for the formation of separate organizations for public historians and suggests that the American Historical Association responded more positively to the challenge from public historians than the Organization of American Historians has until recently.

In this chapter, Carl Degler, former president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), recalls the differences between the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and the OAH, including the great difference in the size of the annual meetings, and plots some of the organizational and intellectual changes, such as the establishment of the program of Distinguished Lecturers.

Between 1963 and 1965, the imminent demise of the bracero program and the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement created new organizing opportunities and new resources for farm worker organizers. As the farm labor market grew unsettled, the arena of contention shifted from Washington to California and from legislative committees to the fields. Both the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and the Farm Workers Association (FWA) found they had to respond to these new conditions. In early 1965, both groups were drawn reluctantly into strikes. The difference was that the FWA leaders had the strategic capacity to learn from this experience in ways that the AWOC leadership did not. The FWA leaders actually enhanced their strategic capacity by expanding and diversifying their team. This development set the stage for the radically different ways the two groups would conduct the Delano grape strike beginning in September 1965.

On September 8, 1965, 800 Filipino workers organized by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) struck ten Delano grape growers, demanding a wage of $1.40 an hour plus 25 cents per box. Two weeks later, on September 20, at least as many Mexican workers, organized by the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), struck an additional ten growers. By the time the rains brought the table grape harvest to an end in November, thirty-two growers had been struck, over 5,000 workers had indicated support for one of the two unions, and a movement began to emerge, intended to achieve the revolution in agriculture. Leaders of both the NFWA and AWOC made tactical choices about how to deal with a grape strike that neither had planned, but they drew upon different strategic capacities. AWOC organizers, operating within a strategic frame focused on local labor markets, targeted the hardcore of the table grape industry, counting on their members' skill and solidarity to provide sufficient leverage to get wages raised. Initially, the NFWA targeted growers based on where its constituency happened to work. However, a more specific target emerged as the experimental process of probing, pushing, and trying a little of this and a little of that continued.

Even as the breakthrough with Schenley yielded a host of new opportunities for the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), it called forth a powerful counterattack from the other Delano growers, which threatened the union's very survival. The attack challenged the NFWA leaders to quickly master a whole new level of strategic complexity; they needed to consolidate their past gains, even while carrying the fight forward. At the same time, they were competing with another union and battling growers on a far greater scale. The NFWA proved to be up to the task because it had developed the strategic capacity to respond quickly and creatively, expanding the size, scope, and diversity of its operations to enhance its strategic capacity still further. As a result, the NFWA improbably won the first union representation election held among farm workers and delivered the first setback to the alliance between the Teamsters union and California agribusiness, an alliance that was originally forged in the 1930s.

When the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) affiliated with the AFL-CIO to become the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), ethnic leaders, radical organizers, and the AFL found themselves on the same team for the first time in California history. Employer reaction to the DiGiorgio victory put the alliance to the test immediately. One consequence of the victory was that it inspired wine grape workers at Perelli–Minetti vineyards near Delano to join the strike. The Teamsters intervened by providing strike breakers, claiming to represent them, and signing a contract behind the UFWOC picket lines. Recognizing that they would become a Teamster “hunting dog,” driving one ranch after another into the Teamsters' sights if they didn't fight back, UFWOC launched a boycott of the company's wines despite the fact that the existence of a Teamster contract could inhibit labor support. By May 1967, it became clear to Perelli–Minetti and the other growers that a Teamster contract could not protect them from a UFWOC boycott. The Teamsters realized that without employer cooperation they could offer UFWOC little competition in the fields. All sides went to mediation, UFWOC suspended the boycott, the Teamsters withdrew from the fight, and Perelli–Minetti transferred the contract to UFWOC. How did affiliation with the AFL-CIO, despite the traditional labor movement's history of failure in the fields, enhance the NFWA's strategic capacity? Why couldn't the Teamsters devise a more effective strategy after their “responsible union” approach failed? When the Teamsters tried to learn from UFWOC by mimicking its tactics, why didn't it work? And how could the new union expand the scope and scale of its operations to be able to consolidate its success, fend off new challenges, and launch new initiatives? The answers can be found again, although at a whole new level, in the capacity to generate effective strategy.