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"Not all 'cool' identities are equally cool. If the socially constructed identity of American Indian is cool, for most people it is cooler to have Indian ancestry than to be Indian."

Using the spontaneous memories of a national sample of Americans in 1985, Schuman and Scott (1989) largely confirmed Mannheim's theory of generational identity by demonstrating that respondents' age structured their recall of important national and world events over the past 50 years. But they did not find the predicted age patterns for whites' recollections of civil rights. I argue that their failure was the consequence of ignoring regional differences in the impact of the Civil Rights movement on whites. Because the South was the target of and the battlefield for civil rights, "civil rights memory" should be greater for southern whites who experienced the movement as mature teenagers or young adults than for their equal-aged peers elsewhere or for southern whites in different age groups. I also hypothesize that this cohort of southern whites should attribute more historical importance to civil rights than do others. Both hypotheses are supported by analysis of the 1993 General Social Survey and Schuman's and Scott's original 1985 data. The theoretical import of the study is that where highly charged events happen shapes consciousness and memory, suggesting that Mannheim's idea of the "social location" of generational identity formation is place-specific, as well as age-dependent.

Colorblind Injustice is an angry, ambitious, and very valuable book. In it,Kousser argues that the Second Reconstruction—that is, the post-1965 edifice of law and institutions securing essential African American and Latino civil rights and effective political voice—has been disastrously undermined, possibly mortally so, by the distorted, ignorant, or malicious (and, ultimately, to Kousser, dangerous) misinterpretations of the history of American race relations and of the meaning of the nation's voting rights laws and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments.The culprits in this tale include, among other members of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and ClarenceThomas; political scientist AbigailThernstrom,who believes that past discrimination against racial minorities never justifies raceconscious remedies; overzealous Republican (and Democratic, though more of the former than the latter) party partisans; and a lot of additional white politicians, officials, and judges ranging in localities from Los Angeles to North Carolina.

This paper attempts to demonstrate two things. First, sociologists interested in the processes governing income attainment and inequality should consider incorporating into socioeconomic achievement models indicators of work experience that correspond to the following life-cycle events: schooling, initialfull- time entry into the labor market, and assumption of current job. The findings presented here suggest that two types of postschooling market experience substantially enhance earnings. Experience acquired during the formal schooling process, however, is of little economic value, a hypothesis underlying both a segment of Mincer's formulation of human capital theory and the conventional techniques employed to estimate postschooling work experience from other variables (e.g., age and schooling). Second, extreme caution must be taken in the conceptualization and measurement of work experience and its specification in earnings models. Conceptual and measurement strategies deemed theoretically incorrect yield estimates of the earnings returns to experience and schooling which are seriously biased.

Scholarly inquiry into collective memory has fostered a host of innovative questions, perspectives, and interpretations about how individuals and communities are both constituted by the past and mobilize it for present-day projects. Race is one of the more important current issues demonstrating how the presence of the past is both potent and sorrowful in the United States. It is therefore critical to examine how memories of racial oppression, conflict, and reconstruction shape race relations. Studies of race relations, however, generally ignore collective memory's role in shaping racial norms and attitudes. This article uses the 1993 General Social Survey to address the silences in the collective memory and race relations literatures by examining how Americans' recollections of the civil rights movement influence their racial attitudes and racial policy preferences. Although we find that Americans' opinions about government programs targeting African Americans are unrelated to civil rights memory, respondents who spontaneously recalled the civil rights struggle and its victories as an especially important historical event generally expressed more racially liberal opinions than did those with different memories. Our findings both support the basic presupposition of collective memory studies—memory matters—and point to a fruitful innovation in the study of racial attitudes.

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture offers a timely, authoritative, and interdisciplinary exploration of issues related to social class in the South from the colonial era to the present. With introductory essays by J. Wayne Flynt and by editors Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis, the volume is a comprehensive, stand-alone reference to this complex subject, which underpins the history of the region and shapes its future. In 58 thematic essays and 103 topical entries, the contributors explore the effects of class on all aspects of life in the South--its role in Indian remova.