Books by "Christopher James Griffith"
6 books found
Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans "down" meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching. Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' extralegal violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts. Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism. "Delivers what no other study has yet attempted. . . . Waldrep's book is one of the first systematically to use local trial data to explore questions of society and culture." -- Vernon Burton, author of "A Gentleman and an Officer": A Social and Military History of James B. Griffin's Civil War
At a time when nearly all political actors and observers—despite the nature of their normative commitments—morally appeal to the language of democracy, the particular signification of the term has become obscured. Hobbes and the Democratic Imaginary argues that critical engagement with various elements of the work of Hobbes, a notorious critic of democracy, can deepen our understanding of the problems, stakes, and ethics of democratic life. Firstly, Hobbes's descriptive anatomy of democratic sovereignty reveals what is essential to the institution of this form of government, in the face of the conceptual confusion that characterizes the contemporary deployment of democratic terminology. Secondly, Hobbes's critique of the mechanics of democracy points toward certain fundamental political risks that are internal to its mode of operation. And thirdly, contrary to Hobbes's own intentions, Christopher Holman shows how the selective redeployment of certain Hobbesian categories could help construct a normative ground in which democracy is the ethical choice in relation to other sovereign forms.
The Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was the longest war waged by British and Commonwealth forces in the twentieth century. Fought against communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya, this undeclared 'war without a name' had a powerful and covert influence on American strategy in Vietnam. Many military historians still consider the Emergency an exemplary, even inspiring, counterinsurgency conflict. Massacre in Malaya draws on recently released files from British archives, as well as eyewitness accounts from both the government forces and communist fighters, to challenge this view. It focuses on the notorious 'Batang Kali Massacre' – known as 'Britain's My Lai' – that took place in December, 1948, and reveals that British tactics in Malaya were more ruthless than many historians concede. Counterinsurgency in Malaya, as in Kenya during the same period, depended on massive resettlement programmes and ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate aerial bombing and ruthless exploitation of aboriginal peoples, the Orang Asli. The Emergency was a discriminatory war. In Malaya, the British built a brutal and pervasive security state – and bequeathed it to modern Malaysia. The 'Malayan Emergency' was a bitterly fought war that still haunts the present.