Garibaldi or Pregnancy and Power

Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero

Author: Lucy Riall

Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary leader and popular hero, was among the best-known figures of the nineteenth century. This book seeks to examine his life and the making of his cult, to assess its impact, and understand its surprising success.
For thirty years Garibaldi was involved in every combative event in Italy. His greatest moment came in 1860, when he defended a revolution in Sicily and provoked the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy, and the creation of the Italian nation state. It made him a global icon, representing strength, bravery, manliness, saintliness, and a spirit of adventure. Handsome, flamboyant, and sexually attractive, he was worshiped in life and became a cult figure after his death in 1882.
Lucy Riall shows that the emerging cult of Garibaldi was initially conceived by revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the status quo, that it was also the result of a collaborative effort involving writers, artists, actors, and publishers, and that it became genuinely and enduringly popular among a broad public. The book demonstrates that Garibaldi played an integral part in fashioning and promoting himself as a new kind of “charismatic” political hero. It analyzes the way the Garibaldi myth has been harnessed both to legitimize and to challenge national political structures. And it identifies elements of Garibaldi’s political style appropriated by political leaders around the world, including Mussolini and Che Guevara.

Publishers Weekly

With his trademark red cape, full beard and regal bearing, Italian revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi cut a swashbuckling swath through European politics during the mid-19th century. In Riall's (Sicily and the Unification of Italy) exhaustive and sometimes exhausting study of this supremely charismatic man and his tumultuous times, Garibaldi's life and legacy echo through the fascist dictators of the 20th century to the Marxist revolutionaries of the 1970s. Born in Nice in 1807, Garibaldi lived a peripatetic life until he "discovered his true vocation-not as a (failed) merchant sailor nor as a (outlawed) political conspirator, but as a soldier hero" and returned to Italy in 1848, a year of widespread political upheaval in Europe. The Italy that Riall describes is a conflicted place seething with nationalist fervor, waiting for a hero to fan the flames and lead the people to their rightful place among nations. As much a product of behind-the-scenes manipulations as his own desires and ambitions, Garibaldi became that hero. A deeply researched and resourced scholarly text, this is not for the general reader. Riall's extensive use of contemporary primary source material makes for some heavy sledding. Still, for the 19th-century European history buff or the revolutionary hero completist, this is a useful and illuminating read. (June)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

New interesting book: Sports Medicine Essentials or My Personal Path to Wellness

Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America

Author: Rickie Solinger

"Readers will find within this book a deeply researched and fine analysis of reproductive politics spanning 250 years. It definitely should be of interest to legal scholars and law students and also to political and social historians."
—The American Journal of Legal History

"Solinger is impressively optimistic about America's potential not only to evolve into 'a country of reproductive justice,' but also to overcome centuries of the sex, race, and class prejudice that have literally built our society.'
—Bitch

"A concise historical overview. . . . Based primarily on a vast array of well-documented secondary sources, this book is a well-written and useful overview of the politics behind pregnancy in the U.S. . . . Highly recommended."
—Choice

"This succinct, highly readable political and cultural history of a wide range of reproductive issues is a near-perfect primer on the topic."
—Publishers Weekly

"The book is well documented and well written... I expect this book to find a place in many classrooms."
— The Journal of American History

"Rickie Solinger puts today's 'culture wars' over abortion, birth control and sex education into a historical context that is rich, complex and full of surprises. A deeply researched-and highly readable-book that should reach the widest possible audience."
—Katha Pollitt, author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture

"An extraordinary accomplishment. In a courageous exploration of American history, Solinger demonstrates how public supervision of sex and social reproduction haveserved to maintain racial privilege."
—Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

"Pregnancy and Power definitively demolishes the myth that reproductive politics has ever been about women's choice. Rickie Solinger's brilliant and comprehensive analysis shows that, throughout U.S. history, reproductive regulation has served a social agenda that especially disadvantages women of color."
—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

"We must all be grateful to Rickie Solinger for another of her pithy, compelling interpretive histories. Pregnancy and Power offers a thoughtful, lucid overview of reproductive issues throughout U.S. history—an extremely valuable contribution that should be widely read."
—Linda Gordon, author of The Moral Property of Women: Birth Control Politics in America

"Solinger shows how the past is truly prologue as she connects contemporary political struggles over pregnancy and pregnancy limitation to racism and colonialism in the United States"
—Loretta J. Ross, co-author, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice

"Pregnancy and Power embraces far more than the usual perspective."
—MBR: California Bookwatch

[R]eading Rickie Solinger's Pregnancy and Power felt in some ways like taking a medicinal tonic. She provides a vision of what a society dedicated to reproductive justice could be... [Pregnancy and Power] made me think— and for that, I like this book immensely.
—The Women's Review of Books

A sweeping chronicle of women's battles for reproductive freedom throughout American history, Pregnancy and Power explores the many forces—social, racial, economic, and political—that have shaped women's reproductive lives in the United States.

Leading historian Rickie Solinger argues that a woman's control over her body involves much more than the right to choose an abortion. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised breeding schemes, when the U.S. government took Indian children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when doctors pressed Latina women to be sterilized in the 1970s. Tracing the diverse plot lines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the effort to control sex and pregnancy in America over time.

Solinger asks which women have how many children under what circumstances, and shows how reproductive experiences have been encouraged or coerced, rewarded or punished, honored or exploited over the last 250 years. Viewed in this way, the debate over reproductive rights raises questions about access to sex education and prenatal care, about housing laws, about access to citizenship, and about which women lose children to adoption and foster care.

Pregnancy and Power shows that a complete understanding of reproductive politics must take into account the many players shaping public policy-lawmakers, educators, employers, clergy, physicians-as well as the consequences for women who obey and resist these policies. Tracing the diverse plotlines of women's reproductive lives throughout American history, Solinger redefines the idea of reproductive freedom, putting race and class at the center of the struggle to control sex and pregnancy in America.

Publishers Weekly

This succinct, highly readable political and cultural history of a wide range of reproductive issues is a near-perfect primer on the topic. Independent historian Solinger (Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade) writes from a broad, multi-issue, feminist perspective, placing the struggle for reproductive freedom at the center of a variety of political battles. This approach yields unique new insights. Detailing antimiscegenation laws and common assumptions about family life and reproduction in Chinese-American communities, Solinger shows how immigration laws favoring Chinese merchant-class women over poor women "shaped the demographics of Chinatowns around the country." Similarly, she discusses how the relationship between civil rights and reproductive rights in the 1960s gave different cultural meanings to the "fertile body of women of color" in the eyes of the white establishment and within the African-American community. Solinger succeeds in moving the discussion of the social and legal politics of reproduction out of a confining category of "women's issues" and into the broader sphere of U.S. history and national politics, and her study will be helpful to anyone interested in how current debates about abortion, the morning-after pill and sex education were historically formed. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : what is reproductive politics?	1
1	Racializing the nation : from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation, 1776-1865	27
2	Sex in the city : from secrecy to anonymity to privacy, 1870s to 1920s	63
3	No extras : curbing fertility during the Great Depression	103
4	Central planning : managing fertility, race, and rights in postwar America, 1940s to 1960	131
5	The human rights era : the rise of choice, the contours of backlash, 1960-1980	163
6	Revitalizing hierarchies : how the aftermath of Roe v. Wade affected fetuses, teenage girls, prisoners, and ordinary women, 1980 to the present	209