Class Politics

A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the 20th century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised, his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.

Filled with the wit and observational prowess that shaped Stanley Fish's acclaimed best seller, How to Write a Sentence, Winning Arguments guides listeners through the "greatest hits" of rhetoric. In this clever and engaging guide, Fish offers insight and outlines the crucial keys you need to win any debate, anywhere, anytime - drawn from landmark legal cases, politics, his own career, and even popular film and television.

Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans questioned the fundamental tenets of capitalism and expressed openness to a socialist alternative. We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism-American Style offers a road map to making this alternative a reality, giving listeners a practical vision of a future that is more democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger offers the first humane, journalistic expose of an American tragedy: modern-day debtor's prisons and how they've destroyed the lives of poor Americans.

Have you ever fantasized about being ridiculously wealthy? Probably. Striking it rich is among the most resilient of American fantasies, surviving war and peace, expansions and recessions, economic meltdowns and global pandemics. What is it actually like to be blessed with riches in an era of plagues, political rancor, and near-Dickensian economic differences? Does the experience differ depending on whether the money is earned or unearned, where it comes from, and whether you are male or female, white or Black? These are all questions that Jackpot sets out to explore.

This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain’t No Makin’ It Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the "Brothers" and the "Hallway Hangers". Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved listeners and challenged ethnic stereotypes.

Emmy Award-nominated journalist David Montero follows the trail of the massive wealth amassed by Northern corporations throughout America’s history of enslavement. It has long been maintained by many that the North wasn’t complicit in the horrors of slavery. The truth, however, is that large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery; that they saw their fortunes rise dramatically from their involvement in the business of enslavement; and that white business leaders and their surrounding communities created enormous wealth from the enslavement and abuse of Black bodies.

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early 20th century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them.

Health insurance, student loan debt, retirement savings, child care, work-life balance, access to home ownership - these are the issues driving America's current political debates. And they are all linked, as this brilliant and timely book reveals, by a single question: should we allow the free market to determine our lives? In the tradition of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, noted economic commentator Mike Konczal answers this question with a resounding no. Freedom from the Market blends passionate political argument and a bold new take on American history....

This exciting book helps educators translate the concept of equity into the context of pedagogy in the K-12 classroom. Providing a practice-oriented framework for understanding what equity entails for both teachers and learners, this book clarifies the theoretical context for equity and shares rich teaching strategies across a range of content areas and age groups.

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control.

The way we frame our questions shapes the way we see solutions. This book does what appears to be a no-brainer task, but one that is missing and important: it asks listeners to pose questions in different ways, to shift the vantage point from which they view 'common sense,' and in so doing, to see themselves as part of problems and potential solutions. This is a book about how seeing poverty entails confronting inequality. It is about how acknowledging poverty and inequality leads to uncomfortable revelations about our society and ourselves.

This book is another important contribution by Halbrook to the scholarship concerning the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment’s right to bear and carry arms.

The story of the Boston Massacre - when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death - is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished.

With accessible strategies grounded in trauma-informed education and positive psychology, this audiobook equips teachers to support all students, particularly the most vulnerable. It will help them to build their resilience, increase their motivation and engagement, and fulfil their full learning potential within the classroom. Based on the successful Berry Street education strategies pioneered by the authors and includes comprehensive case studies, learning points and opportunities for self-reflection, fully supporting teachers to implement these strategies within the classroom.

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions were embedded in tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members and their families and neighbors. Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats.

Many Americans, holding fast to the American Dream and the promise of equal opportunity, claim that social class doesn't matter. Yet the ways we talk and dress, our interactions with authority figures, the degree of trust we place in strangers, our religious beliefs, our achievements, our senses of morality and of ourselves all are marked by social class, a powerful factor affecting every domain of life.

It used to be pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, wore gray, and went to church. The bohemians were artists and intellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s; the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.