Fordham Impressions » Political Studies

International Women’s Day

FUPress — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:34:49 +0000

To save 20% on select titles, visit our website:

Lincoln’s Enduring Legacy

FUPress — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:26:06 +0000

Long before Spielberg took on Lincoln, we were publishing books about America’s 16th president—and we continue to do so. From his cabinet’s politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to write about one of our greatest presidents.

Lincoln Revisited is a brilliant gathering of important scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. The Lincoln Forum tackles uncharted territory as well as taking a fresh look at established debates (including those about their own landmark works).

Lincoln and Leadership: Military, Political, and Religious Decision Making offers many fresh perspectives. The book explores Lincoln’s leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian.

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most prominent events in U.S. history. It continues to attract enormous and intense interest from scholars, writers, and armchair historians alike, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation.

The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory offers a close look at the assassination itself and the immediate aftermath, chronicling the pursuit and prosecution of the conspirators–a relentless period that isn’t often well covered. All of the contributors are leading Lincoln scholars, and each essay offers a different perspective on an event that shook a still-fledgling nation.

Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments won the 2009 J. Owen Grundy History Award for its provoking look at what the 200 statues erected in Lincoln’s honor mean to us as Americans. James Percoco, a high school history teacher, embarked on a journey spanning four summers and an entire country, seeking to understand the significance behind Lincoln’s being the single most commemorated American in history. Along the way, he documents each monument’s history and impact in and on its respective community, discovering the human stories behind the immutable stone. Acclaimed author and Civil War historian James M. McPherson says of the book, “This splendid evocation of Lincoln’s image in sculpture combines poetic description, human-interest anecdotes, and incisive analysis. James Percoco shows how the different styles of public art shed light on the changing memories of our greatest president. Each chapter alone is worth the price of this book.”

To find more books on Lincoln, visit our website.

How to Lose a Close Election

FUPress — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:13:13 +0000

A version of this first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent on October 22, 2012.

By Mark Naison, co-author of The Rat That Got Away (Fordham University Press).

Virtually every poll now has President Obama and Mitt Romney embroiled in an extremely close race. The president could very well win this election; but he could also lose. And if he does lose, I will have to go back to something I first started saying nearly three years — namely that turning off the nation’s teachers with educational policies which silence their voice and put them under extreme stress is not only bad for the nation’s schools, it could cripple the president’s re-election efforts.I have worked to get the president to incorporate the nation’s teachers into education policy discussions, and stop requiring schools to ratchet up the number of standardized tests to receive federal funding. I have privately engaged people close to the president in conversation about teachers’ disillusionment, efforts which were totally unsuccessful.The president’s inner circle, from what I could gather, refused to bend on support for Race to the Top and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They were not only convinced that these policies would end up improving the nation’s schools; they felt that the political gains to be made in terms of support from wealthy donors and influential journalists was far greater than any losses that would occur in terms of teacher enthusiasm. They knew the largest teachers unions would support the president no matter what policies he chose to implement.

Now, at crunch time, when it’s too late to change course, I can tell you that this judgment was a severe miscalculation. Not only have the president’s policies failed to narrow testing gaps by race and class, they have contributed to teacher morale in the nation to be the lowest it has been since pollsters began measuring this trait.

But the political consequences may have been even more serious than the educational ones. Most teachers will probably end up voting for the president, but from what I have seen, in both New York and around the nation, they will not be manning phone banks, canvassing in their neighborhoods, traveling to swing states on the weekends and generally giving time, money and energy to assure the president’s election the way they did in 2008.

Many pundits attribute the Obama victory in 2008 to an incredibly strong “ground game” composed of huge numbers of volunteers, as well as paid staff, working to get out the vote in battleground states. Many of those individuals, including me, my wife, and many of my friends, were teachers, professors and school administrators. During this election, I know of few, if any educators putting in that kind of heroic effort, almost entirely because they are feeling betrayed by the president, indeed, by the entire Democratic Party, on educational issues, even though they support the president’s positions on reproductive freedom, gay rights, taxation and medical care.

There is no way of knowing whether the phenomenon I am describing is will be a “game changer” in this election. But based on what I have seen in 2008 and in this campaign, there is a chance it could be. And if it is, the Obama brain trust has no one to blame but themselves.

Mark Naison is co-author of The Rat That Got Away (Fordham University Press). He is professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University in New York and chairman of the department of African and African-American Studies. He is also co-director of the Urban Studies Program, African-American History 20th Century. A version of this first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent.

Interview: Legacy of Bob Drinan

FUPress — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:11:22 +0000

Tim Reidy, the Online Editor for America Magazine, sat down with Ray Schroth, S.J., on Election Day, to discuss his new book, Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress. Here is the interview:

Yesterday was the official pub date for Fr. Ray Schroth’s new biography of Robert F. Drinan, S.J.–the controversial Jesuit priest and congressmen–and NCR has already weighed in with a positive review. As the review notes, the most intriguing question raised by the book is whether Drinan, who served in Congress from 1970 until 1980, had official permission to run for office:

Schroth masterfully lays out the many internal maneuvers that cleared the way for Drinan’s candidacy in the first instance. These involved his immediate Jesuit superior in New England, his two local bishops in Boston and Worcester, Mass., and the Jesuit superior general in Rome. Each successive candidacy seemed to involve more intricate negotiations than the one preceding. To say that the approval for Drinan to run was a gray area seriously understates the case. In fact, whether or not Drinan had the proper authorization became an issue in a number of his re-election campaigns.

Read more on the America Magazine blog, In All Things
Listen to the podcast.

Booklist Review for BOB DRINAN

FUPress — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:48:49 +0000

Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress by Raymond A. Schroth is coming out next month. Here is an *Advanced Review* just in from Booklist:

Pioneering the path of priest-as-politician during a turbulent era on the modern American political and social landscape, Father Robert F. Drinan, S.J., was elected as a U.S. representative from Massachusetts in 1970. Serving in Congress for 10 years, he managed to stir up controversy on both sides of the aisle and among both Catholics and non-Catholics. An uncompromising social advocate, he vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, vocally called for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and, perhaps most startling of all for a Catholic priest of his era, supported abortion rights on legal, rather than moral or spiritual, grounds. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his political views, stances, or methods, there is no doubt that the late Drinan was a dedicated priest and a tireless advocate for the socially disenfranchised. Written by a friend and fellow Jesuit, this intriguing portrait in courage provides an intimate glimpse into the heart and soul of a deeply textured spiritual and political groundbreaker. —Margaret Flanagan

Available November 2010
Read more about the complex and fascinating Bob Drinan.

Terror in Modern Times

FUPress — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:43:54 +0000

On April 19, 1995, a bomb exploded at the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, ending the lives of 168 people. It was the worst terrorist attack in America, until, of course, the attacks on September 11, 2001. In an op-ed piece published yesterday in The New York Times, Bill Clinton ruminated on the aftermath, 15 years later. The former president invokes the kindness of those who helped in relief efforts, the strength of the survivors, and the enduring legacy of the innocents who died that day. He cautions, “Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right all the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.”

In The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror, Marc Redfield examines the cultural impact of terrorism and what it means when such shocking acts of violence saturate our media and society. Redfield astutely blends the philosophy of Jacques Derrida with the modern concepts of “virtual terror” and the “war on terror.”

Forthcoming in August is Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic. Jacques Lezra examines political philosophy in a contemporary climate, musing on questions such as how can social unity be achieved in a divergent culture? If so, does such unity require certain universal laws? What does democracy mean in a culture of globalization, terrorism, and fundamentalism? In contemplating these questions, Lezra gets to the root of what our politics really mean in our modern world.