States Rights

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.

In Bloody Tuesday, John Giggie powerfully recovers one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement and its role in the reckoning with America's ongoing struggle for racial justice.

A traveller's observations and impressions of the United States and its people since the sixties including views and perspectives of Americans on how they see themselves and their country.

You need to work to live. That’s the truth for most people, and plenty of people in power have been abusing that truth for centuries. Long before the first labor unions were formed, workers still knew what exploitation looked like. It looked like the enslavement of Black people. It looked like generations of children dying in dangerous jobs. It looked like wealthy people hiring private militaries to attack their employees. But workers have always found a way to fight back.

Originally published in 2000, The Right to Vote was widely hailed as a magisterial account of the evolution of suffrage from the American Revolution to the end of the 20th century. In this revised and updated edition, Keyssar carries the story forward, from the disputed presidential contest of 2000 through the 2008 campaign and the election of Barack Obama. The Right to Vote is a sweeping reinterpretation of American political history as well as a meditation on the meaning of democracy in contemporary American life.

This is the vibrant story of George, Garrett, Rall, and Rasul - four children raised by Nanny, their fiercely devoted grandmother. The boys hold one another close through early brushes with racism, memorable experiences at the family barbershop, and first loves and losses. And with Nanny at their center, they are never broken. George M. Johnson capture the unique experience of growing up as a Black boy in America, and their rich family stories are interspersed with touching letters from the grandchildren to their beloved matriarch.

In 1765, 11 years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur'an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America.

For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing, as in the Cuban missile crisis, to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Now the Bush administration is intensifying this process, driving us toward the final frontiers of imperial control, toward a choice between the prerogatives of power and a livable Earth.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a landmark document in the history of human rights, and Eleanor Roosevelt played a significant role in its development. The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris. It was drafted by representatives from different legal and cultural backgrounds, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

New York Times best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations - denunciations by the press, rejection from the president, dismissal by the country's Black middle class and militants, assaults on his character, ideology, and political tactics, to name a few - all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty, and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span - a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and Whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X...each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.

Adam Russell Taylor reimagines a contemporary version of the beloved community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the beloved community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive.

First published in 1961, John Hope Franklin’s revelatory study of the Reconstruction Era is a landmark work of history, exploring the role of former slaves and dispelling longstanding popular myths about corruption and Radical rule. Looking past dubious scholarship that had previously dominated the narrative, Franklin combines astute insight and careful research to provide an accurate, comprehensive portrait of the era.

Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage details the impact of the blinding of Sergeant Woodard on the racial awakening of President Truman and Judge Waring and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America’s civil rights history.

On a New Orleans morning in 1900, a young Black man named Robert Charles dared to fight back after an unprovoked assault by three white officers. The officers had first approached Charles on the grounds that he looked “suspicious” in a predominantly white neighborhood, and began to attack him after he stood up. After shots were fired, Charles fled on foot, and legal sanction was granted to anyone who sought to kill the “desperado” (as the white newspapers of the time quickly labeled him). In the days that followed, riotous mobs overtook New Orleans.

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.

One of the most notorious crimes during the Civil Rights Movement was the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi in June 1964. Occurring less than two weeks before the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the young volunteers were killed because they had come south to help register blacks to vote, a right they had been unfairly denied for over half a century thanks to Jim Crow. The shocking nature of the crimes galvanized people and helped bring about the kinds of changes the murderers sought to prevent.

The existing United States Constitution has over time developed so many loopholes that were never imagined or conceived of by the Founders of this republic. This has happened through the history of gradual Left-leaning legal precedent and by erosive abuse over time. All political parties, the press, and unelected bureaucrats are responsible for this deliberate development. This new constitution will repair the damage that has been done to the republic by introducing more exacting restrictions on the federal government. It will also grant more rights to the states and the citizens thereof. ...

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.