The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child created a legal subject without the possibility for children to exercise any agency in the making of their own identity. What differs between the child-rights identity based on age and a socially constructed identity, and self-identification is that age is a random event free from choice, detached from family context, delinked from any social context and disconnected from one’s self-image.

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.

Many of the unofficial advocates for states-in-waiting were individuals affiliated or identified with the international peace movement. These transnational advocates often found themselves championing independence struggles in states-in-waiting that were situated within newly decolonized postcolonial nation-states. While some within these postcolonial state governments may themselves have relied on these advocates during their own independence struggles, they opposed such advocacy after they won their independence, since it had the potential to undermine their own state sovereignty. The 1963 Friendship March – launched by the World Peace Brigade, a transnational civil society organization set up to find peaceful solutions to global decolonization, exemplified this contradiction. The Friendship March started in New Delhi, India, and intended to cross the Chinese border in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

The most glaring disparity in America’s search for equality has been and continues to be slavery and its legacy. In this chapter, we discuss the history of slavery, its purported elimination at the time of the Civil War and through the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, then its reemergence through Jim Crow laws. The unfortunate reality is that the fight for equality is ever present. John Lewis, the long-serving member of the House of Representatives from Georgia, is emblematic of the importance and continuing nature of that fight. As a young man, he was nearly killed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the March on Selma. He continued to fight for racial equality throughout his life to the point of penning an op-ed published posthumously in the New York Times just days after his death. The federal government played an essential role in trying to advance the fight for racial equality, primarily through cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Markets did not eliminate racial discrimination; they perpetuated and profited from it.

Leonard Bernstein’s career-long involvement with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra intersected with the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and the growth of television. He first conducted the Philharmonic in 1943, at age twenty-five, and his term as music director (1958−69) is remembered as a particularly vibrant period in the orchestra’s history. On taking over that role, Bernstein embarked on an ambitious agenda both for thematic programming, including focuses on American music and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and for public-facing initiatives, such as the televised Young People’s Concerts and touring. In addition, Bernstein used his position to highlight the work of solo performers who were members of minority groups, and he oversaw the orchestra during its period of racial integration.

This textbook looks at the theory of human rights, its historical roots, and goes on to examine several key areas of human rights, including the intersection between human rights and international law, access to treaty-based mechanisms and their practice and case law, international human rights courts and tribunals, including those with a criminal function, justiciability of rights before the courts, civil and political rights, as well as socio-economic rights.

Chapter 8 investigates several aspects of low-road market capitalism across regions of the United States. It tackles Black soldier protest and military discipline, the post-Civil War sale of guns and munitions, and the development of railroads as a physical and economic vehicle for the dispersal of violence in the United States. Labor strikes, the Panic of 1873, and the centrality of the federal governmment to the interests of industrial capitalism are prominent features of this chapter.

Within the framework of the politicization of the personal, this chapter explores the essayistic writing of a loose group of socially conscious actors who belong to the political Left, a capacious category that includes leaders of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New York Intellectuals, the New Left, the environmental movement, and groups with a range of progressive agendas. With a focus on the twentieth century, the wide variety of styles and themes of leftist prose writing is analyzed. The chapter dwells on the contributions of important figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Richard Rorty. As a form of "prose that thinks," the essay has been an excellent site of intellectual reckoning where writers may publicly take strong positions on various political and social issues, expressing these in a highly personal style.

This chapter begins with the origins of "social justice," a term that emerged among Jesuits in the 1840s and ’50s and then infused the Catholic workers’ movements and social teaching of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American essayists and activists have used the essay to persuade readers of the productive overlap of two utopian systems: Christianity and (democratic) socialism. This chapter explores five thinkers – Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Cornel West – who have been particularly prolific essayists, writing fluently and frequently about social justice in the earliest sense of the word. By recalling the earliest context of the term social justice, this chapter adds another dimension to contemporary debates on everything from Black struggle to economic inequality, from climate justice to equitable representation at all levels of government. The essay form allowed the writers studied in this chapter to articulate in a variety of styles, from the lyrical to the vociferous, the pedagogical to the morally urgent, the need for a compassionate understanding of human wretchedness in an industrialized world bent on breaking the worker.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.