Class Politics

In 2016, writer and filmmaker Ben Howe found himself disillusioned with the religious movement he’d always called home. In the pursuit of electoral victory, many American evangelicals embraced moral relativism and toxic partisanship. Whatever happened to the Moral Majority, who headed to Washington in the ’80s to plant the flag of Christian values? Where were the Christian leaders that emerged from that movement and led the charge against Bill Clinton for his deception and unfaithfulness?

Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people pack their bags to study or volunteer abroad. Well-intentioned and curious Westerners travel to low-income countries to learn about people and cultures different from their own. In Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, storyteller Anu Taranath unpacks our baggage about who we are, where we come from, and how much we have. She takes us on a journey through personal travel stories and thought-provoking questions, providing us with tools to grapple with our discomfort and navigate differences with accountability and connection.

In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of employees. With detailed research and concise language, Leopold explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains.

Mary Prince's 1831 book is one of the earliest narratives that revealed the ugly facts about slavery in the West Indies. The book begins with a brief description of her childhood, before recounting her adult experiences as a slave. Her strong spirit enabled her to survive and to take up the abolitionist cause.

Nick McDonell grew up on New York City’s Upper East Side, a neighborhood defined by its wealth and influence. As a child, McDonell enjoyed everything that rarefied world entailed—sailing lessons in the Hamptons, school galas at the Met, and holiday trips on private jets. But as an adult, he left it behind to become a foreign correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Quiet Street, McDonell returns to the sidewalks of his youth, exhuming with bracing honesty his upbringing and those of his affluent peers.

Naming names, along with grades and test scores, Golden lays bare a corrupt system in which middle-class and working-class whites and Asian Ameri­cans are routinely passed over in favor of wealthy white students with lesser credentials - children of alumni, big donors, and celebrities. The Price of Admission is a must-listen - for parents and students with a personal stake in college admissions but also for those disturbed by the growing divide between ordinary and privileged Americans.

“Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever.

For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants, and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defense Industry. These "agents of inequality" are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01 percent.

The author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit - a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city's past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation's fabric.

In this capstone work, Michèle Lamont unpacks the power of recognition—rendering others as visible and valued—by drawing on nearly forty years of research and new interviews with young adults and cultural icons—from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay.

Since the financial crash of 2008, the cooperative movement has been coming back with renewed vigor. Everything for Everyone chronicles this economic and social revolution. Cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.

A graphic and biting polemic that still holds a fierce political relevance and impact despite being written over half a century ago. First published in 1937 it charts George Orwell's observations of working-class life during the 1930s in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. His depictions of social injustice and rising unemployment, the dangerous working conditions in the mines amid general squalor and hunger also bring together many of the ideas explored in his later works and novels.

In Filthy Rich Politicians, Lewis embarks on an investigative deep dive into the ridiculous state of modern American democracy—a system where the rich get elected and the elected get rich. One of the brightest conservative writers of his generation, Lewis doesn’t just complain: he articulates how Americans can achieve accountability from their elected leaders through radically commonsense reforms. But many of these ruling-class elites have a vested financial interest in rejecting the reforms so desperately needed to rebuild Americans’ trust in the institutions that once made our nation great.

We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away? Cormac Russell and John McKnight offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures.

It is an irony of our age that a man who rarely reads has unleashed an onslaught of books about his tenure and his time. Dissections of the white working class. Manifestos of political resistance. Works on identity, gender, and migration. Memoirs on race and protest. Revelations of White House mayhem. Warnings over the future of conservatism, progressivism, and of American democracy itself.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and the persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

In this book, labor lawyer, former chair of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, and MacArthur "genius" Sara Horowitz brings us a solution to the current crisis of work that’s rooted in the best of American traditions, which she calls mutualism. Horowitz shows how the future of our economic safety net rests on this approach and demonstrates how mutualist organizations have helped us solve common problems in the past and are now quietly driving rural and urban economies alike all over the world.

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.

Being a teacher can be one of the most rewarding professions but also one of the most frustrating. Many teachers feel very prepared to instruct students in their chosen subjects but don't have quite as much training in managing classroom discipline - yet experienced educators know that if challenging behavior goes unchecked, the entire year can be disrupted. 1-2-3 Magic in the Classroom shows teachers how to establish and maintain good discipline habits in their classrooms through an easy-to-understand program that you'll swear "works like magic".

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.