States Rights

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

The mother of Matthew Shepard shares her story about her son's death and the choice she made to become an international gay rights activist.

Revered today for articulating America's founding principles, the first 10 amendments - the Bill of Rights - were in fact a political stratagem executed by James Madison to preserve the Constitution, the federal government, and the latter's authority over the states.

Acclaimed journalist Daniel J. Sharfstein cuts through centuries of myth to deliver this groundbreaking work. Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, three American families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved—how the definitions of black and white changed over time.

In Our Endangered Values, Carter offers a personal consideration of "moral values" as they relate to the important issues of the day. He puts forward a passionate defense of separation of church and state, and a strong warning of where the country is heading as the lines between politics and rigid religious fundamentalism are blurred.

Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution's origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate.

The Words We Live By takes an entertaining and informative look at America's most important historical document, now with discussions on new rulings on hot button issues such as immigration, gay marriage, gun control, and affirmative action. Through entertaining and informative annotations, The Words We Live By offers a new way of looking at the Constitution. It reflects a critical, respectful, and appreciative look at one of history's greatest documents.

Thomas Sowell takes a tough, factual look at whether the civil rights movement has lived up to its hopes or its rhetoric. In the decades since the historic Supreme Court decision on desegregation, who has gained and who has lost? Which of the assumptions behind the civil rights revolution have stood the test of time, and which have proven to be mistaken or even catastrophic to those who were supposed to be helped?

Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying Black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes 19 extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through US history and back to Africa.

In the mid-1960s, Betty and Barney Hill became famous as the first Americans to claim that aliens had taken them aboard a spacecraft against their will. Their story—involving a lonely highway late at night, lost memories, and medical examinations by small gray creatures with large eyes—has become the template for nearly every encounter with aliens in American popular culture since.

So, amid the insidious shoals of Trump, COVID, and race, he plied the cultural currents to answer a question theologian Henri Nouwen so eloquently asked: “To whom do I belong? To God or to the world?” At stake with the answer, Welch believes, is an evangelical faith that has drifted deep into troubled waters - and whose hope lies not in presidents, political parties, or patriotism, but in the One who’s been overlooked amid the rancor and the rage.

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did.

For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.

The powerful, long-repressed classic of Dallas history that examines the violent and suppressed history of race and racism in the city. Written by longtime Dallas political journalist Jim Schutze, formerly of the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Observer and currently columnist at D Magazine, The Accommodation follows the story of Dallas from slavery through the civil rights movement and the city’s desegregation efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s.

In Real Queer America, Samantha Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more.

The top-secret world that the government created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has become so enormous, so unwieldy, and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or exactly how many agencies duplicate work being done elsewhere. Award-winning reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin here uncover the enormous size, shape, mission, and consequences of this invisible universe.

Known as the originator of voluntaryism, Auberon Edward William Molyneux Herbert (18 June 1838 – 5 November 1906) was a British writer, theorist, philosopher, and Member of Parliament from 1870 to 1874. In his essay, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, Herbert examines the question of "What is the proper activity and extent of government?".

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

Scott Coley exposes the inner workings of the religious right’s propaganda—and how Christians can resist it. Good evangelical Christians are Republican. It seems like it’s always been this way. That means the propaganda is working. Scott Coley trains a critical eye on the fusion of evangelicalism and right-wing politics in Ministers of Propaganda.

Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream---a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity.