The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee originated as an ad hoc committee and evolved to a broad-based movement for legal justice on behalf of seventeen youth convicted of murder and assault charges in connection with the Sleepy Lagoon case in Los Angeles in January 1943. This essay chronicles the multidimensional organizing to shift public opinion in…

This article unravels the political, public, and private discourse shadowing Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern U.S. The author illustrates how the dominant discourse with regard to immigration in the U.S. has led to the dehumanization of migrant people significantly impacting what occurs in their daily lives and directly influencing the…

Recently, it has been argued that "anti-smacking" campaigns have been so successful that "explicit pro-smackers" are now thin on the ground. Yet the use of physical chastisement remains widespread. One response to this contradiction is to focus less on parents and more on children's rights. In this article, however, the authors…

This article focuses on the specialized academies in math and science, aimed at serving students for whom even a rigorous high school lineup of college-preparatory and honors courses is not enough. Math and science academies have been a fixture in states and school districts for decades, but they are drawing renewed interest as educators and…

The growing amount of activity by pressure groups, as well as professional statements like those of the American Library Association and the American Association of Library Teachers, reflect an increased concern with legal, quasi-legal or extra-legal censorship. The National Organization for Decent Literature, a Catholic-Church sponsored…

The Human Services Policy Center of Washington undertook a study of communication strategies for protecting children because of the perception among many leading child protection professionals that a distorted pattern of media coverage is driving child protection policies toward responding to the small proportion of atypical cases which the media…

A return to excellence and ethics can end the bashing of the press and earn it respect. H. L. Mencken was an outstanding press-basher. One problem he identified is that journalists see themselves as professionals, when they are no more than "hired hands" unable to control admission to the craft. A solution Mencken offered was to improve…

While the founders of the penny press did not set out to establish a truer form of journalism, they did popularize both low prices for newspapers and newspaper economics based on sales instead of political party backing. The history of "The Sun,""The Herald," and "The Tribune" disprove the idea (advanced by journalism…

This document discusses the treatment of Arabs in the western media. The main portion concentrates on the image of Arabs presented in American novels. Because television and films present visual images that communicate a powerful message in a matter of seconds, stereotyping appears as a shorthand form of communication and is, to a certain extent,…

This document addresses the negative image of Arabs among the U.S. public. While formal education has created many of the misconceptions about Arabs that abound in the west, many of the misconceptions come from the informal education of popular culture. The western image of the Arab is possibly more interesting than the reality of Arab culture.…

This book presents a series of personal essays in which the author analyzes and dramatizes the significance of subordination in academic life. Academic life is examined in terms of issues (such as sexual harassment) and structures (such as the figure of the dissertation director) but especially in terms of texts. The book looks at the stream of…

A study examined the concept of the "hero" in a qualitative manner. It aimed to synthesize the subjects' personal definitions of the concept in a "consensus" definition and to compare and contrast stated heroes/heroines across generational lines for notable trends or patterns. Subjects, 80 persons (40 males and 40 females) who…

This document contains a variety of information sheets developed from a survey completed on behalf of the Family Research Council to explore the family attitudes of American adults (N=1,100). The top 10 findings from the 1993 Family Issues Survey are enumerated on a summary sheet. Following this summary, each of the top 10 findings is discussed…

Because the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) decision to deregulate commercial radio has created great controversy over what constitutes "public interest" in broadcast deregulation, this paper provides a brief historical analysis of the bases for defining the public interest standard in broadcast regulation and examines the use…

The author addresses the problem of the public's attitude toward the issues of educational finance and relates it to the attitude on government spending a a whole. From the results of tax and expenditure limitations on ballot measures in 1978 and 1979, he observes that there is no national movement to copy California's Proposition 13. Polls taken…