Books published by University Press of Kansas

On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County, in a 6-to-3 decision with a majority opinion authored by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. The decision was a surprise to many, if not most, observers, but as Jason Pierceson explores in this work, it was not completely unanticipated. The decision was grounded in a recent but well-developed shift in federal jurisprudence on the question of LGBTQ+ rights that occurred around 2000, with gender identity claims faring better in federal court after decades of skepticism. The most important precedent for these cases was a 1989 Supreme Court case that did not deal directly with LGBTQ+ rights: Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins.The court ruled in Price Waterhouse that sex stereotyping is a form of discrimination under Title VII, a provision that prohibits discrimination in employment based upon sex. Ann Hopkins was a cisgender, heterosexual woman who was denied a promotion at her accounting firm for being too masculine. At the time of the decision, and in the wake of the devastating decision for the LGBTQ+ movement in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the case was not viewed as creating a strong precedential foundation for LGBTQ+ rights claims, especially claims based upon sexual orientation. Even in the context of gender identity, the connection was not made to the emerging movement for transgender rights until a decade later. In the 2000s, however, federal courts were consistently applying the case to protect transgender individuals.While not the result of coordinated litigation, nor initially connected to the LGBTQ+ rights movement, Price Waterhouse has been one of the most important and powerful precedents in recent years outside of the marriage equality cases. Before Bostock tells the story of how this accidental precedent evolved into such a crucial case for contemporary LGBTQ+ rights.Pierceson examines the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision of Bostock v. Clayton County through the legal path created by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the interpretation of the word sex over time. Focusing on history, courageous LGBTQ+ plaintiffs, and the careful work of legal activists, Before Bostock illustrates how the courts can expand LGBTQ+ rights when legislators are more resistant, and it adds to our understanding about contemporary judicial policymaking in the context of statutory interpretation.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a roadmap for how to achieve this lofty goalit only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path toward the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the NAACP Legal Defense organization and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967).Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a case to desegregate a single school district in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for ending state-imposed racial segregation of the schools in the Deep South. Author Brian Landsberg began his career as a young attorney working for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1964, the year after the lawsuit that would lead to the Lee decision was filed.As someone personally involved in the legal struggle for civil rights, Landsberg writes with first-hand knowledge of the case. His carefully researched study of this important case argues that private plaintiffs, the executive branch, the federal courts, and eventually Congress each played important roles in transforming the South from the most segregated to the least segregated region of the United States. The Lee case played a central role in dismantling Alabamas official racial caste system, and the decision became the model both for other statewide school desegregation cases and for cases challenging conditions in prisons and institutions for mentally ill people. Revolution by Law gives readers a deep understanding of the methods used by the federal government to desegregate the schools of the Deep South.

Afghanistan: A Military History from the Ancient Empires to the Great Game covers the military history of a region encompassing Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, and West Asia, over some 2,500 years. This is the first comprehensive study in any language published on the millennia-long competition for domination and influence in one of the key regions of the Eurasian continent.Jalalis work covers some of the most important events and figures in world military history, including the armies commanded by Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, the Muslim conquerors, Chinggis Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur. Afghanistan was the site of their campaigns and the numerous military conquests that facilitated exchange of military culture and technology that influenced military developments far beyond the region. An enduring theme throughout Afghanistan is the strong influence of the geography and the often extreme nature of the local terrain. Invaders mostly failed because the locals outmaneuvered them in an unforgiving environment. Important segments include Alexander the Great, remembered to this day as a great victor, though not a grand builder; the rise of Islam in the early seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula and the monumental and enduring shift in the social and political map of the world brought by its conquering armies; the medieval Islamic era, when the constant rise and fall of ruling dynasties and the prevalence of an unstable security environment reinforced localism in political, social, and military life; the centuries-long impact of the destruction caused by Chinggis Khan’s thirteenth century; early eighteenth century, when the Afghans achieved a remarkable military victory with extremely limited means leading to the downfall of the Persian Safavid dynasty; and the Battle of Panipat (1761), where Afghan Emperor Ahmad Shah Abdali decisively routed the Hindu confederacy under Maratha leadership, widely considered as one of the decisive battles of the world. It was in this period when the Afghans founded their modern state and a vast empire under Ahmad Shah Durrani, which shaped the environment for the arrival of the European powers and the Great Game.

Physical training in the US Army has a surprisingly short history. Bodies for Battle by Garrett Gatzemeyer is the first in-depth analysis of the US Armys particular set of practices and values, known as its physical culture, that emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to tactical challenges and widespread anxieties over diminishing masculinity. The US Armys physical culture assumed a unity of mind and body; learning a physical act was not just physical but also mental and social. Physical training and exercise could therefore develop the whole individual, even societies. Bodies for Battle is a study of how the US Army developed modern, scientific training methods in response to concerns about entering a competitive imperial world where embodied nations battled for survival in a Social Darwinist framework. This book connects social and cultural worries about American masculinity and manliness with military developments (strategic, tactical, technological) in the early twentieth century, and it links trends in the United States and the US Army with larger trans-Atlantic trends.Bodies for Battle presents new perspectives on US civil-military relations, army officers unease with citizen armies, and the implications of compulsory military service. Gatzemeyer offers a deeply informed historical understanding of physical training practices in the US Army, the reasons why soldiers exercise the way they do, and the influence of physical cultures evolution on present-day reform efforts. Between the 1880s and the 1950s, the armys set of practices and values matured through interactions between combat experience, developments in the field of physical education, institutional outsiders, application beyond the military, and popular culture. A persistent tension between discipline and group averages on one hand and maximizing the individual warriors abilities on the other manifested early and continues to this day. Bodies for Battle also builds on earlier studies on sport in the US military by highlighting historical divergences between athletics and disciplinary and combat readiness impulses. Additionally, Bodies for Battle analyzes applications of the armys physical culture to wider society in an effort to prehabilitate citizens for service.

In The Green Years, 1964"e;1976, Gregg Coodley and David Sarasohn offer the first comprehensive history of the period when the US created the legislative, legal, and administrative structures for environmental protection that are still in place over fifty years later. Coodley and Sarasohn tell a dramatic story of cultural change, grassroots activism, and political leadership that led to the passage of a host of laws attacking pollution under President Johnson. At the same time, with Stewart Udall as secretary of the interior, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and other land-protection measures were passed and the department shifted its focus from western resource development to broader national conservation issues. The magnitude of what was accomplished was without precedent, even under conservation-minded presidents like the two Roosevelts. The fast-paced story the authors tell is not only about the Democratic Party; in this era there was still a vital Republican conservation tradition. In the 1960s, Republicans were chronologically as close to Teddy Roosevelt as to Donald Trump. In both the House and Senate and in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Republicans played vital roles. It was President Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law the 1970 Clean Air Act, revisions in 1972 to the Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Under Nixon, actions were taken to protect the oceans, forests, coastal zones, and grasslands while regulating chemicals, pesticides, and garbage.The authors analyze the full range of transformations during the Green Years, from the creation of entirely new pollution-control industries to backpacking becoming mass recreation to how revelations about chemical exposure spurred the natural food movement. And not least, the tectonic shift in the political landscape of the United States with the western states becoming Republican bastions and centers of ongoing backlash against the federal government. The Green Years, 1964"e;1976, is the story of environmental progress in the midst of war and civil unrest, and of the lessons we can learn for our future.

Arming the Irish Revolution is an in-depth investigation of the successes and failures of the militant Irish republican efforts to arm themselves. W. H. Kautts comprehensive account of Irish Republican Army (IRA) arms acquisition begins with its predecessorsthe Irish Volunteers and the National Volunteersand, counterintuitively, with their rivals, the pro-union Ulster Volunteer Force. After the 1916 Rising, Kautt details the functioning of the Quartermaster General Department of the Irish Volunteer General Headquarters in Dublin and basic arms acquisition in the early days of 1918 to 1919. He then closely examines rebel efforts at weapons and ammunition manufacturing and bombmaking and reveals that the ingenuity and resources poured into manufacturing were never able to become a primary source of weapons and ammunition. As the conflict grew in intensity and expanded, the rebels encountered increasing difficulty in obtaining and maintaining supplies of weapons and ammunition since modern weapons in a protracted conflict used more ammunition than previous generations of weapons and their complexity meant that the weapons could not be clandestinely produced within Ireland. Thus, as the rebels conducted campaigns that became difficult to combat, their greatest limiting factor was that most of their weapons and ammunition had to be imported.Arming the Irish Revolution is the first work of research and analysis to explore in detail the Irish work inside Britain to establish arms centers and to conduct arms operations and trafficking. It also examines the full extent of the overseas or foreign arms trade and the arms operations of the War of Independence, including the continuance into the truce and treaty eras and up to the outbreak of the Civil War (1922"e;1923)all of which reveals how the rebel leaders ran complex, maturing, and capable smuggling and manufacturing enterprises worldwide under the noses of the police, customs, intelligence, and the military for years without getting caught. Quite apart from the battlefield these groups and their activities led to political consequences, playing no small part in producing what were real concessions from Lloyd Georges government. In the last chapter Kautt offers observations and conclusions about overall successes and failures that establishes Arming the Irish Revolution as a landmark study of insurgent or revolutionary arms acquisition in both Irish and military history.

Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. This is Daldorph's record of teaching at the jail for the two decades between 2001 and 2020, showing how the lives of everyone involved in the class benefited from what happened every Thursday afternoon.

The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixons senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Pricea member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefellers campaignsjoined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Eisenhower.Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixons political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics.The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixons surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and childrens food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums.The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.

Postwar Journeys: American and Vietnamese Transnational Peace Efforts since 1975 tells the story of the dynamic roles played by ordinary American and Vietnamese citizens in their postwar quest for peacean effort to transform their lives and their societies. Hang Thi Thu Le-Tormala deepens our understanding of the Vietnam War and its aftermath by taking a closer look at postwar Vietnam and offering a fresh analysis of the effects of the war and what postwar reconstruction meant for ordinary citizens. This thoughtful exploration of US-Vietnam postwar relations through the work of US and Vietnamese civilians expands diplomatic history beyond its rigid conventional emphasis on national interests and political calculations as well as highlights the possibilities of transforming traumatic experiences or hostile attitudes into positive social change. Le-Tormalas research reveals a wealth of boundary-crossing interactions between US and Vietnamese citizens, even during the times of extremely restricted diplomatic relations between the two nation-states. She brings to center stage citizens efforts to solve postwar individual and social problems and bridges a gap in the scholarship on the US-Vietnam relations. Peace efforts are defined in their broadest sense, ranging from searching for missing family members or friends, helping people overcome the ordeals resulting from the war, and meeting or working with former opponents for the betterment of their societies.Le-Tormalas research reveals how ordinary US and Vietnamese citizens were active historical actors who vigorously developed cultural ties and promoted mutual understanding in imaginative ways, even and especially during periods of governmental hostility. Through nonprofit organizations as well as cultural and academic exchange programs, trailblazers from diverse backgrounds promoted mutual understanding and acted as catalytic forces between the two governments. Postwar Journeys presents the powerful stories of love and compassion among former adversaries; their shared experiences of a brutal war and desire for peace connected strangers, even opponents, of two different worlds, laying the groundwork for US-Vietnam diplomatic normalization.