The Not Quite States Of America Dispatches From The Territories And Other Far Flung Outposts Of The Usa

“To truly understand the United States, one must understand The Not-Quite States of America.” —Mark Stein, best-selling author of How the States Got Their Shapes Everyone knows that America is 50 states and… some other stuff. The U.S. territories—American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—and their 4 million people are little known and often forgotten, so Doug Mack set out on a 30,000-mile journey to learn about them. How did they come to be part of the United States? What are they like today? And why aren’t they states? Deeply researched and richly reported, The Not-Quite States of America is an entertaining and unprecedented account of the territories’ crucial yet overlooked place in the American story.

While great strides have been made since the Founding years, the United States continues to suffer from a high degree of political inequality. Some citizens have a louder voice in their democracy than others. Both the malapportioned Senate and Electoral College overrepresent Americans in small states, while gerrymandered districts poorly convert votes into power in the House of Representatives. More than four million Americans living in Washington, D.C., and the territories lack representation in Congress, while citizens everywhere face unnecessary burdens to cast ballots. Biased media and questionable political funding render it difficult to hold elected officials accountable. This book explores these formidable problems and identifies the path to securing a fairer, more representative political system. Sourcing solutions directly from the Constitution, chapters outline the tools that could limit malapportionment, expand voting rights, control the influence of big donors and more. Achieving these reforms, however, requires an engaged citizenry that demands change from those in power.

Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook on CasebookConnect, including: lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities, plus an outline tool and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes. Learn more about Connected eBooks. The right to keep and bear arms evokes great controversy. To some, it is a bulwark against tyranny and criminal violence; to others, it is an anachronism and serious danger. Firearms Law and the Second Amendment is the leading casebook and scholarly treatise on arms law. It provides a comprehensive domestic and international treatment of the history of arms law. In-depth coverage of modern federal and state laws and litigation prepare students to be practice-ready for firearms cases. The book covers legal history from ninth-century England through the United States in 2021. It examines arms laws and culture in broad social context, ranging from racial issues to technological advances. Seven online chapters cover arms laws in global historical context, from Confucian times to the present. The online chapters also discuss arms law and policy relating to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other statuses and how firearms and ammunition work. New to the Third Edition: Important cases and new regulatory issues since the 2017 second edition, including public carry, limits on in-home possession, bans on types of arms, non-firearm arms (like knives or sprays), Red Flag laws, and restoration of firearms rights Expanded social science and criminological data about firearms ownership and crimes Deeper coverage of state arms control laws and constitutional provisions Extended analysis of how Native American firearm policies and skills shaped interactions with European-Americans, provided the tools for three centuries of resistance, and became a foundation of American arms culture The latest research on English legal history, which is essential to modern cases on the right to bear arms Professors, students, and practicing lawyers will benefit from: Practical advice and resource guides for lawyers, like early career prosecutors or defenders, who will soon practice firearms law Five chapters on the diverse approaches of lower courts in applying the Supreme Court precedents in Heller and McDonald to contemporary laws Historical sources that shaped, and continue to influence, the right to arms

An ambitious history of flags, stamps, and currency—and the role they played in US imperialism. In Imperial Material, Alvita Akiboh reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. These symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the empire with which they have been entangled. Akiboh shows how such items became objects of local power, their original intent transmogrified. For even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the imperial United States, whose presence announced itself on every bit of currency, every stamp, and the local flag.

This multivolume encyclopedia surveys America's long and troubled history of political violence from the colonial era to the present, with a particular emphasis on factors driving political violence and intimidation in the United States in the 21st century. Americans like to think of their nation as one grounded in high-minded democratic ideals and peaceful transitions of power. In reality, though, American politics has been heavily laced with expressions of violence and intimidation since the nation's very inception, which saw a campaign of violent rebellion against British rule. Since then, America has endured the deaths of four presidents from assassination; a four-year civil war; racist attacks on civil rights activists and ordinary citizens; deadly clashes between protesting citizens and law enforcement; sustained campaigns of violence against marginalized populations seeking greater political or economic equality; politically motivated mass shootings; and, on January 6, 2021, the shocking spectacle of a politically motivated mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. How and why did these events transpire? What were the root causes? What factors are driving political violence and intimidation in America today? And are there changes that we could make to our country's political discourse that would reduce such outbreaks of bloodshed? This authoritative multivolume encyclopedia provides answers to all these questions and more.

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

For the past three decades, many history professors have allowed their biases to distort the way America’s past is taught. These intellectuals have searched for instances of racism, sexism, and bigotry in our history while downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of “dead white men.” As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington; more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II than about D-Day or Iwo Jima; more on the dangers we faced from Joseph McCarthy than those we faced from Josef Stalin. A Patriot’s History of the United States corrects those doctrinaire biases. In this groundbreaking book, America’s discovery, founding, and development are reexamined with an appreciation for the elements of public virtue, personal liberty, and private property that make this nation uniquely successful. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s true and proud history.