American Social History

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was America's first showdown with Islamic fundamentalism, a confrontation at the forefront of American policy to this day. It was also a powerful dramatic story that captivated the American people, launched yellow-ribbon campaigns, made celebrities of the hostage's families, and crippled the reelection campaign of President Jimmy Carter.

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.

J.A., Roger's novel, first published in 1917 is a polemic against the ignorance behind racism. The plot is based around a debate between a Pullman porter and a racist politician. The author deals with racism and bigotry in an exemplary way.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.

In light of the intertwining logics of military competition and economic interdependence at play in US-China relations, Trading with the Enemy examines how the United States has balanced its potentially conflicting national security and economic interests in its relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC). To do so, Hugo Meijer investigates a strategically sensitive yet under-explored facet of US-China relations: the making of American export control policy on military-related technology transfers to China since 1979.

Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States - one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans.

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.

As the ongoing Flint water crisis marks its tenth anniversary, Chariton reveals shocking new evidence of the major government cover-up that resulted in the poisoning of Flint—and shatters what you think you know about what caused the water crisis.

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy remains up for debate. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile.

When Bronwen Dickey brought her new dog home, she saw no traces of the infamous viciousness in her affectionate, timid pit bull. Which made her wonder: How had the breed - beloved by Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and TV's Little Rascals - come to be known as a brutal fighter? Her search for answers takes her from 19th-century New York City dogfighting pits - the cruelty of which drew the attention of the recently formed ASPCA - to early 20th-century movie sets where pit bulls cavorted with Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton.

This sweeping survey of Black history shows how Black humanity has been erased and how its recovery can save the humanity of us all. Using history as a foundation, The Humanity Archive uses storytelling techniques to make history come alive and uncover the truth behind America's whitewashed history. The Humanity Archive focuses on the overlooked narratives in the pages of the past. Challenging dominant perspectives, author Jermaine Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories.

Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations. Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez present and discuss 28 powerful excerpted passages from Indigenous leaders, including Mourning Dove, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Winona LaDuke, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet.

In 1972, during the Black Power Movement, iconoclast Dick Gregory challenged one of the foundations of America itself - its history, which had been written almost exclusively from the white male perspective. In No More Lies, this true trailblazer gave voice to African Americans, speaking their truth about the past and race relations in the United States. No More Lies offers this incomparable satirist’s intellectual, conspiratorial, and humorous spin on the facts.

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous Black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent White mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death.

Fifteen Cents on the Dollar follows the lives of four Black Millennial professionals and a banking company founded with the stated mission of closing the Black-white wealth gap. That company, known as Greenwood, a reference to the historic Black Wall Street district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, generated immense excitement and hope among people looking for new ways of business that might lead to greater equity. But the twists and turns of Greenwood’s journey also raise tough questions about what equality really means.

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".