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The phrase'organized crime'calls to mind images from The Godfather, yet organized crime today takes on far more varied forms and guises. This volume explores the pervasiveness of organized crime, examines its history and chronology from La Cosa Nostra to Colombian drug cartels and Jamaican posses, and covers nontraditional organizations such as the Hell's Angels and the Pagans.

How did an African-American man born in a ghetto in 1879 rise to such religious prominence that his followers addressed letters to him simply'God, Harlem U.S.A.'?Using hitherto unknown materials, Jill Watts portrays the life and career of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing religious leaders, Father Divine. Starting as an itinerant preacher, Father Divine built an unprecedented movement that by the 1930s had attracted followers across the nation and around the world. As his ministry grew, so did the controversy surrounding his enormous wealth, flamboyant style, and committed'angels'—black and white, rich and poor alike.Here for the first time a full account of Father Divine's childhood and early years challenges previous contentions that he was born into a sharecropping family in the deep South. While earlier biographers have concentrated on Father Divine's social and economic programs, Watts focuses on his theology, which gives new meaning to secular activities that often appeared contradictory. Although much has been written about Father Divine, God, Harlem U.S.A. finally provides a balanced and intimate account of his life's work.

The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems – both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.

This original and insightful study explores the points at which theater and propaganda meet. Defining propaganda as a form of'activated ideology,'George H. Szanto discusses the distortion of information that occurs in dramatic literature in its stage, film, and television forms. Szanto analyzes the nature of'integration propaganda,'which is designed to render the audience passive and to encourage the acceptance of the status quo, as opposed to'agitation propaganda,'which aims to inspire the audience to action. In Szanto's view, most popular western theater is saturated, though usually not intentionally, with integration propaganda. The overall purpose of Theater and Propaganda is twofold: to analyze the nature of integration propaganda so that it becomes visible to western readers as a tool of the dominant class in society, and to examine the manner by which unself-conscious propagandistic methods have saturated dramatic presentation. In discussing the importance of propaganda within and between technological states, the author examines the seminal work of Jacques Ellul. In this chapter he analyzes the function of integration propaganda in a relatively stable society. The following chapter defines and analyzes three theaters (in the sense of performance) of propaganda: the theater of agitation propaganda, of integration propaganda, and of dialectical propaganda. In this section he uses examples from a variety of plays, movies, and television commercials. In succeeding chapters Szanto discusses the role of integration propaganda in the medieval Wakefield mystery plays and the plays of Samuel Beckett. The appendix,'Contradiction and Demystification,'provides a general model that suggests ways of breaking down and overcoming the propagandistic intentions of an artwork and discusses theater's possible role in this breakdown.

First published in 1984. This volume presents original insights and valuable information to anyone interested in the history of education, parent-child relations and child rearing. The author appraises Freud's contribution to the psychoanalytic exploration of psychotic illness in his work of The Schreber Case.