U.S. History
Showing 1–32 of 116 results
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The Unfinished Business of 1776
Why the American Revolution Never Ended$29.99A clarion call for taking back the American Revolution from the far right, published for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
Who gets to claim the legacy of the American Revolution and the mantle of patriotism that goes along with it? In a sharp, irreverent, deeply informed account of the nation’s founding moment and its enduring legacies, historian Thomas Richards Jr. invites us to see the Revolution not just as a one-time fight for political freedom from Britain but as an ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and social and political independence for all Americans.
A riveting work of narrative history, The Unfinished Business of 1776 shows that the Revolutionary struggle did not end in 1787 when the Constitution was ratified: Across nine dramatic chapters, Richards introduces readers to the vividly drawn characters who kept the Revolution alive for the next century and beyond, including the women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray, the enslaved rebel Gabriel, the economic reformer Solomon Sharp, and the religious visionary Joseph Smith—each pushing for freedoms that extended well beyond the traditional narrative of the Revolution, and each revealing how the unfinished work of 1776 fueled demands for economic, social, and legal equality that lasted well beyond the Revolution itself.
A myth-busting book about the history we think we know, The Unfinished Business of 1776 is the perfect antidote to jingoistic celebrations of America—offering an inclusive vision of our common past.
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The Road Was Full of Thorns
Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War$34.99A radical retelling of the drama of emancipation, from New York Times bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Zoellner is a beautiful writer, a superb reporter, and a deep thinker.” —The New York Times Book Review on The National Road
In the opening days of the Civil War, three enslaved men approached the gates of Fort Monroe, a U.S. military installation in Virginia. In a snap decision, the fort’s commander “confiscated” them as contraband of war.
From then on, wherever the U.S. Army traveled, torrents of runaways rushed to secure their own freedom, a mass movement of 800,000 people—a fifth of the enslaved population of the South—that set the institution of slavery on a path to destruction.
In an engrossing work of narrative history, critically acclaimed historian Tom Zoellner introduces an unforgettable cast of characters whose stories will transform our popular understanding of how slavery ended. The Road Was Full of Thorns shows what emancipation looked and felt like for the people who made the desperate flight across dangerous territory: the taste of mud in the mouth, the terror of the slave patrols, and the fateful crossing into Union lines. Zoellner also reveals how the least powerful Americans changed the politics of war—forcing President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and opening the door to universal Black citizenship.
For readers of The 1619 Project—and anyone interested in the Civil War—The Road Was Full of Thorns is destined to reshape how we think about the story of American freedom.
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The Great White Hoax
Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America$30.99A provocative new history of the forgeries, bogus science, rigged data, and fake news that keep American racism alive
“Anyone interested in the intersection of race, politics, and public lies in America will want to read this book.” —David S. Reynolds, Bancroft Prize–winning cultural historian and author of John Brown, Abolitionist and Walt Whitman’s AmericaFake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Philip Kadish argues, are nothing new. The Great White Hoax, a masterpiece of historical and literary sleuthing, reveals that the era of Fox News and Donald Trump is simply a return to form. We have been here before.
In a book that brilliantly puts our current era into historical context, The Great White Hoax uncovers a centuries-long tradition of white supremacist hoaxes, perpetrated on the American public by a succession of political hucksters and opportunists, all of them willfully using racial frauds as tools for political and social advantage. In the antebellum era, slavery’s defenders used bogus science to “prove” the inferiority of African American people; during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s enemies circulated a sham pamphlet accusing him of promoting a dilution of the white race through “miscegenation” (a racist term invented by the pamphlet’s authors).
From these murky beginnings, author Philip Kadish draws a direct thread to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Madison Grant’s embrace of eugenics (which directly influenced Adolf Hitler), Alabama Governor George Wallace’s race-baiting, and Roger Ailes’s creation of Fox News.
The Great White Hoax reveals white supremacy as today’s real “fake news”—and exposes the cast of villains, past and present, who have kept American racism alive.
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If We Don’t Get It
A People’s History of Ferguson$29.99At a time of renewed activism, the story of the young people who bravely turned a local issue into a national movement for justice, from a professor of Black studies at Amherst who participated in the Ferguson uprising
Stefan M. Bradley was a young professor in Saint Louis University when Black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a local white police officer. Bradley quickly became a key media activist during the protests that ensued, giving on-the-ground interviews to Chris Hayes, CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and others.
In If We Don’t Get It, Bradley, now a named professor of Black studies at Amherst College, shows how Brown’s murder sparked a grassroots movement for democracy, led by Black youth, which transformed the way we talk about race, justice, and policing in the United States.
Bradley conducted over two dozen oral history interviews with young Black protesters. Through the authentic voices of the movement’s participants, Bradley describes the motivation and tensions coursing through the uprising’s early days and weeks, the problems of media representation (and misrepresentation), intergenerational conflict over protest tactics, clashes with the police and politicians, and much more. If We Don’t Get It also explores the new generation of elected officials, including Congresswoman Cori Bush, who emerged from the local movement’s ranks.
A rich story with deep relevance for the protests of our own time, If We Don’t Get It offers a gripping account of how young activists, without previous political experience, succeeded in changing our national political narrative. -
King of the North
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South$30.99A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book
From the New York Times bestselling author, a radical reframing of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.
“Theoharis shows us through penetrating research and sensitive, scholarly insight that Dr. King not only was keenly aware of the history of antiblack racism in the North, but battled it from the very beginning of his career.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.
In this bold retelling, King emerges as a someone who not only led a movement but who showed up for other people’s struggles; a charismatic speaker who also listened and learned; a Black man who experienced police brutality; a minister who lived with and organized alongside the poor; and a husband who—despite his flaws—depended on Coretta Scott King as an intellectual and political guide in the national fight against racism, poverty, and war.
King of the North speaks directly to our struggles over racial inequality today. Just as she restored Rosa Parks’s central place in modern American history, so Theoharis radically expands our understanding of King’s life and work—a vision of justice unfulfilled in the present.
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Labor’s Partisans
Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today$29.99The top American writers on labor provide vital historical context for the current upsurge in union organizing
In 1954, the American labor movement reached its historic height, with one-third of all nonagricultural workers belonging to a union—and much higher percentages in the nation’s key industries. That same year, a group of writers and activists, many with close ties to organized labor, founded Dissent magazine, which quickly became the publishing home for the most important progressive voices on American unions.
Today, at a time of both resurgent union organizing and socialist politics, the need for this rich tradition of ideas is as pressing as ever.
With over twenty-five contributions by some of the nation’s most influential progressive voices, Labor’s Partisans brings to life a history of labor that is of immediate relevance to our own times. Introduced and edited by leading labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti, this essential volume reveals the powerful currents and debates running through the labor movement, from the 1950s to today.
Combining stunning writing, political passion, and deep historical perspective, Labor’s Partisans will be a source of ideas and inspiration for anyone concerned with a more just future for working people. -
The Price They Paid
Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War$29.99A prizewinning historian uncovers one of the earliest instances of reparations in America—ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, paid to slaveholders, not former slaves
“A spectacular achievement of historical research. Forret shows for the first time just how far the American government went to secure reparations.”
—Robert Elder‚ author of Calhoun: American HereticWinner of the Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Nonfiction
In 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas, then part of the British Empire. Shortly afterward, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau, over the outraged objections of the ship’s owners, set the rescued captives free. American slave owners and the companies who insured the liberated human cargo would spend years lobbying for reparations from Great Britain, not for the emancipated slaves, of course, but for the masters deprived of their human property.
In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Frederick Douglass Prize–winner Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet incident—as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the next decade—resulted in the British Crown making reparations payments to a U.S. government that strenuously represented slaveholder interests. Through a story that has never been fully explored, The Price They Paid shows how, unlike their former owners and insurers, neither the survivors of the Comet and other vessels, nor their descendants, have ever received reparations for the price they paid in their lives, labor, and suffering during slavery.
Any accounting of reparations today requires a fuller understanding of how the debts of slavery have been paid, and to whom. The Price They Paid represents a major step forward in that effort.
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Division Street
America$21.99A landmark reissue of Studs Terkel’s classic microcosm of America, with a new foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and co-creator of the Division Street Revisited podcast
“Remarkable. . . . Division Street astonishes, dismays, exhilarates.”
—The New York TimesWhen New Press founder André Schiffrin first published Division Street in 1967, Studs Terkel’s reputation as America’s foremost oral historian was established overnight.
Approaching Chicagoans as emblematic of the nation at large, Terkel set out with his tape recorder and spent a year talking to over seventy people about race, family, education, work, prospects for the future—all topics that remain deeply contentious today. Subjects included a Black woman who attended the 1963 March on Washington, a tool-and-die maker, a baker from Budapest, a closeted gay actor, and a successful but cynical ad man. As Tom Wolfe wrote, Studs was “one of those rare thinkers who is actually willing to go out and talk to the incredible people of this country.”
Most interviewees shared the hope for a good life for their children and the wish for a less divided and more just America, but the real Chicago street referenced in the title takes on a metaphorical meaning as a symbol of the acute social divides of the 1960s—and highlights the continued relevance of Terkel’s work in our polarized times.
Now, over fifty years later, Melissa Harris and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Schmich have created the remarkable Division Street Revisited podcast, coming in January 2025, in which they have found and interviewed descendants of Terkel’s original subjects in seven rich episodes. Schmich’s foreword to the reissue and the extraordinary podcast—along with the new edition of Division Street—together demonstrate Studs Terkel’s prescience and the enduring importance of his work.
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A Plausible Man
The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin$28.99
The remarkable story of the man behind the book that helped spark the Civil War, in a stunning historical detective story
“I love this research.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr., at a Hutchins Center presentation of Susanna Ashton’s findingsIn December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.
A Plausible Man unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jackson’s remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacy—where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.
In the spirit of Tiya Miles’s prizewinning All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught, Susanna Ashton breathes life into a striving and nuanced American character, one unmistakably rooted in the vast sweep of nineteenth-century America. -
Lies My Teacher Told Me – Graphic Version
$27.99INTRODUCTION
SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY WRONG
It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are
not so. —JOSH BILLINGSAmerican history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible
than anything anyone has ever said about it. —JAMES BALDWINConcealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.
—GEN. PETROG. GRIGERNKO, SAMIZDAT LETTER TO A HISTORY JOURNAL, c. 1975 ,USSR
Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.
—JAMES W. LOEWEN
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty- one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even when they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don’t know.
Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner.
Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test.
College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had
significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non- Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.
Outside of school, Americans show great interest in history. Historical
novels, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr, et al.) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho!, Utah!, Nebraska!, Oregon!, Missouri!, and on! and on!) often become bestsellers. The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The series The Civil War attracted new audiences to public television. Movies based on historical incidents or themes are a continuing source of fascination, from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to Dances with Wolves, JFK, and Saving Private Ryan. Not history itself but traditional American history courses turn students off.Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. These same stories show what America has been about and are directly relevant to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.
What has gone wrong?
We begin to get a handle on this question by noting that textbooks dominate
American history courses more than they do any other subject. When I first came across that finding in the educational research literature, I was dumbfounded. I would have guessed almost anything else—plane geometry, for instance. After all, it would be hard for students to interview elderly residents of their community about plane geometry, or to learn about it from library books or old newspaper files or the thousands of photographs and documents at the Library of Congress website. All these resources—and more—are relevant to American history. Yet it is in history classrooms, not geometry, where students spend more time reading from their textbooks, answering the fifty-five boring questions at the end of each chapter, going over those answers aloud, and so on.Between the glossy covers, American history textbooks are full of information— overly full. These books are huge. The specimens in my original collection of a dozen of the most popular textbooks averaged four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. To my astonishment, during the last twelve years they grew even larger. In 2006 I surveyed six new books. (Owing to publisher consolidation, there no longer are twelve.) Three are new editions of “legacy textbooks,” descended from books originally published half a century ago; three are “new new” books. These six new books average 1,150 pages and almost six pounds! I never imagined they would get bigger. I had thought—hoped?—that the profusion of resources on the Web would make it obvious that these behemoths are obsolete. The Web did not exist when the earlier batch of textbooks came into being. In those days, for history textbooks to be huge made some sense: students in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, say, or Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, had few resources in American history other than their textbooks. No longer: today every school that has a phone line is connected to the Web. There students can browse hundreds of thousands of primary sources including newspaper articles, the census, historic photographs, and original documents, as well as secondary interpretations from scholars, citizens, other students, and rascals and liars. No longer is there any need to supply students with nine months’ reading between the covers of one book, written or collected by a single set of authors.
The new books are so huge that they may endanger their readers. Each of the 1,104 pages in The American Journey is wider and taller than any page in the twelve already enormous high school textbooks in my original sample. Surely at 5.6 pounds, Journey is the heaviest book ever assigned to middle- school children in the history of American education. (At more than $84, it may also be the most expensive.) A new nonprofit organization, Backpack Safety America, has formed, spurred by chiropractors and other health care professionals. Its mission is “to reduce the weight of textbooks and backpacks.” In the meantime, pending that accomplishment, chiropractors are visiting schools teaching proper posture and lifting techniques.
Publishers, too, realize that the books look formidably large, so they try to disguise their total page count by creative pagination. Journey, for example, has 1,104 pages but manages to come in under a thousand by using separate numbering for thirty-two pages at the front of the book and seventy-two pages at the end. Students aren’t fooled. They know these are by far the heaviest volumes to lug home, the largest to hold in the lap, and the hardest to get excited about.
Editors also realize how daunting these books appear to the poor children who must read them, so they provide elaborate introductions and enticements, beginning with the table of contents. For The Americans, for example, a 1,358- page textbook from McDougal Littell weighing in at almost seven pounds, the table of contents runs twenty-two pages. It is profusely illustrated and has little colored banners with titles like “Geography Spotlight,” “Daily Life,” and “Historical Spotlight.” Right after it comes a three-page layout, “Themes in History” and “Themes in Geography.” Then come hints on how to read the complex, disjointed thirty- to forty-page chapters. “Each chapter begins with a two-page chapter opener,” it says. “Study the chapter opener to help you get ready to read.”
“Oh, no,” groan students. “Nothing good will come of this.” They know that no one has to tell them how to get ready to read a Harry Potter book or any other book that is readable. Something different is going on here.
Unfortunately, having a still bigger book only spurs conscientious teachers to spend even more time making sure students read it and deal with its hundreds of minute questions and tasks. This makes history courses even more boring. Publishers then try to make their books more interesting by inserting various special aids to give them eye appeal. But these gimmicks have just the opposite effect. Many are completely useless, except to the marketing department. Consider the little colored banners in the table of contents of The Americans. No student would ever need to have a list of the “Geography Spotlights” in this book. One spotlight happens to be “The Panama Canal,” but the student seeking information on the canal would find it by looking in the index in the back, not by surmising that it might be a Geography Spotlight, then finding that list within the twenty- two pages of contents in the front, and then scanning it to see if Panama Canal appears. The only possible use for these bannered lists is for the sales rep to point to when trying to get a school district to adopt the book.
The books are huge so that no publisher will lose an adoption because a book has left out a detail of concern to a particular geographical area or group. Textbook authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every U.S. president, even William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. The Americans, to take one example, highlights 840 “Main Ideas Within Its Main Text.” In addition, the text contains 310 “Skill Builders,” 890 “Terms and Names,” 466 “Critical Thinking” questions, and still other projects within its chapters. And that’s not counting the hundreds of terms and questions in the two- page reviews that follow each chapter. At year’s end, no student can remember 840 main ideas, not to mention 890 terms and countless other factoids. So students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test on that chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder so many high school graduates cannot remember in which century the Civil War was fought!
Students are right: the books are boring. The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out fine in the end. “Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges,” in the words of one textbook. Most authors of history textbooks don’t even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as “mumbling lecturer.” No wonder students lose interest.
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Blackbirds Singing
Inspiring Black Women’s Speeches from the Civil War to the Twenty-first Century$25.99 – $27.99An uplifting collection of speeches by Black women, curated by the civil and human rights activist, scholar, and author
When Mary Ann Shadd Cary—the first Black woman publisher in North America—declared, “break every yoke . . . let the oppressed go free” to congregants in Chatham, Canada, in 1858, she joined a tradition of African American women speaking for their own liberation. Drawing from a rich archive of political speeches, acclaimed activist and author Janet Dewart Bell, the author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, explores this tradition in Blackbirds Singing.
Gathering an array of recognized names as well as new discoveries, Bell curates two centuries of stirring public addresses by Black women, from Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker to Barbara Lee and Barbara Jordan. These magnificent speakers explore ethics, morality, courage, authenticity, and leadership, highlighting Black women speaking truth to power in service of freedom and justice.With an expansive historical lens, Blackbirds Singing celebrates the tradition of Black women’s political speech and labor, allowing the voices and powerful visions of African American women to speak across generations building power for the world.
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American Purgatory
Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration$28.99A groundbreaking look at how America exported mass incarceration around the globe, from a rising young historian
“American Purgatory will forever change how we understand the rise of mass incarceration. It will forever change how we understand this country.” —Clint Smith, bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
In this explosive new book, historian Benjamin Weber reveals how the story of American prisons is inextricably linked to the expansion of American power around the globe.
A vivid work of hidden history that spans the wars to subjugate Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the conquest of the western territories, and the creation of an American empire in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American Purgatory reveals how “prison imperialism”—the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations—is written into our national DNA, extending through to our modern era of mass incarceration. Weber also uncovers a surprisingly rich history of prison resistance, from the Seminole Chief Osceola to Assata Shakur—one that invites us to rethink the scope of America’s long freedom struggle.
Weber’s brilliantly documented text is supplemented by original maps highlighting the global geography of prison imperialism, as well as illustrations of key figures in this history by the celebrated artist Ayo Scott. For readers of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration—at home and abroad—as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons. -
When the Smoke Cleared
The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital$28.99Echoing James Forman Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own, a riveting story of race, civil rights, and rebellion in Washington, DC
In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement—than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation’s capital was shaken to its foundations.
When the Smoke Cleared tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers’s revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC’s reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state.
A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences—revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.
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An Unplanned Life
A Memoir$27.99 – $28.99A major autobiography of a remarkable life that broke down racial barriers, transformed institutions, and energized the struggle for justice, by the former president of the Ford Foundation
“Frank has that quality of honesty and authenticity and people trusted him . . . and because very disparate people trusted him, he could bring them together across their differences.”
—Gloria SteinemFranklin Thomas was one of the most influential people of our time. As former president of the Ford Foundation (the first African American to hold this position), former president of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (the first community development organization of its kind), member of countless corporate boards, and a key player in facilitating the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, Thomas shaped public policy, philanthropy, and the movement for human rights for over half a century.
An Unplanned Life offers an insider’s account of some of the most crucial transformations of the contemporary era: efforts to rebuild America’s cities, struggles to reform philanthropy, and the quest to establish a global order based on human rights and racial equity. As a story of firsts, Franklin’s memoir also chronicles a formative era, when a generation of African Americans first broke through into the halls of power, navigating complicated and sometimes treacherous cultural and political currents.
Much of Franklin Thomas’s life was marked by his desire to stay out of the spotlight, and to let his accomplishments speak for themselves. Now, in An Unplanned Life, we have Thomas’s full story, in all of its nuance, drama, and richly narrated detail.
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Demolition Agenda
The Dismantling of American Government . . . And How We Can Stop It$18.99 – $27.99A sweeping account of the first Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of the national agencies that protect our health, safety, and climate—and the progressive and equitable political future that is possible when we put people over power and greed
“The sort of book that journalists, activists, and historians may want to keep on their shelves—forever.”
—Forbes MagazineNow revised with a new preface and final chapter on what to expect from the current administration and how we can secure a thriving collective future—both socially and economically
In the wake of a return to Trump-era governance, Demolition Agenda is more urgent than ever, revealing the ministration’s destruction of our government institutions—exposing Americans to greater risks while empowering corporate interests.
Thomas O. McGarity, author, legal scholar, and former president of Center for Progressive Reform, profiles the toxic leaders and intricate strategies that the Trump administration employed to rid the government of protective policies and institutions—harming the health of a nation and accelerating climate change and economic turmoil. Including:
- Scott Pruitt’s corruption scandal at the EPA
- Elaine Chao’s weakening of transportation safety measures
- Ryan Zinke’s stint as secretary of the interior before he faced eighteen federal inquiries and was fired
- And the actions and impacts of other controversial figures such as Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Sonny Perdue, and Andrew Puzder
While chronicling these abuses of power that defined the first Trump administration, McGarity also provides precise clarity on what we can continue to expect from the rest of his current term, what further harm can be done, and what this means for the future of our nation.
While harrowing at times, Demolition Agenda ends hopefully, with a new chapter that provides a road map for future progressive politicians to reinstate a safe, healthy, and equitable society for all Americans—and most importantly, regain their trust.
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Slaves for Peanuts
A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History$18.99 – $38.00Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship
Winner, Harriet Tubman PrizeA stunning work of popular history—the story of how a crop transformed the history of slavery
“A complex story crossing time and oceans” (National Public Radio), Jori Lewis’s prizewinning Slaves for Peanuts deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. “With elegant prose and engaging details” (National Book Award–winner Imani Perry), Lewis reveals how demand for peanut oil in Europe ensured that slavery in Africa would persist well into the twentieth century, long after the European powers had officially banned it in the territories they controlled.
“This informative and compassionate account unearths a little-known chapter in the history of slavery and European imperialism” (Publishers Weekly), recreating a world on the coast of Africa that is breathtakingly real and unlike anything modern readers have experienced. Slaves for Peanuts is “told in rich detail through the eyes of West African men and women” (Civil Eats)—from an African-born French missionary harboring runaway slaves, to the leader of a Wolof state navigating the politics of French imperialism—who challenge our most basic assumptions of the motives and people who supported human bondage.
At a time when Americans are grappling with the enduring consequences of slavery, here is a new and revealing chapter in its global history.
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To Poison a Nation
The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America$27.99An explosive, long-forgotten story of police violence that exposes the historical roots of today’s criminal justice crisis
“A deeply researched and propulsively written story of corrupt governance, police brutality, Black resistance, and violent white reaction in turn-of-the-century New Orleans that holds up a dark mirror to our own times.”—Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams
On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city’s history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands.
Building outwards from these dramatic events, To Poison a Nation connects one city’s troubled past to the modern crisis of white supremacy and police brutality. Historian Andrew Baker immerses readers in a boisterous world of disgruntled laborers, crooked machine bosses, scheming businessmen, and the black radical who tossed a flaming torch into the powder keg. Baker recreates a city that was home to the nation’s largest African American community, a place where racial antagonism was hardly a foregone conclusion—but which ultimately became the crucible of a novel form of racialized violence: modern policing.
A major new work of history, To Poison a Nation reveals disturbing connections between the Jim Crow past and police violence in our own times.
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Murder in the Garment District
The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States$26.99The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day
In 1949, in New York City’s crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation’s dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions.
Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news.
Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people’s lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.
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The Lost Education of Horace Tate
Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools$24.99 – $32.99The harrowing account of the black Southern educators who “bravely pressed on for justice in schools” (The New York Review of Books) even as the bright lodestar of desegregation faded
This “well-told and inspiring” story (Publishers Weekly, starred review) is the monumental product of Lillian Smith Book Award–winning author Vanessa Siddle Walker’s two-decade investigation into the clandestine travels and meetings—with other educators, Dr. King, Georgia politicians, and even U.S. presidents—of one Dr. Horace Tate, a former Georgia school teacher, principal, and state senator. In a sweeping work “that reads like a companion piece to ‘Hidden Figures,'” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), post-Brown generations will encounter invaluable lessons for today from the educators behind countless historical battles—in courtrooms, schools, and communities—for the quality education of black children.
For two years, an aging Tate told Siddle Walker fascinating stories about a lifetime advocating for racial justice in schools. On his deathbed, he asked her return to his office in Atlanta, where upon his passing she discovered an attic filled with a massive archive documenting the underground actors and covert strategies behind the most significant era of the fight for educational justice. Until now, the courageous tale of how black Americans in the South won so much and subsequently fell so far has been incomplete. The Lost Education of Horace Tate is “a powerful reminder of the link between educators and the struggle for equality and justice in American history” (The Wall Street Journal).
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Lies Across America
What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong$19.99 – $27.99A fully updated and revised edition of the book USA Today called “jim-dandy pop history,” by the bestselling, American Book Award–winning author
“The most definitive and expansive work on the Lost Cause and the movement to whitewash history.”
—Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New OrleansFrom the author of the national bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, a completely updated—and more timely than ever—version of the myth-busting history book that focuses on the inaccuracies, myths, and lies on monuments, statues, national landmarks, and historical sites all across America.
In Lies Across America, James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning Lies My Teacher Told Me, of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. This is a one-of-a-kind examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. New changes and updates include:
• a town in Louisiana that was the site of a major but now-forgotten enslaved persons’ uprising
• a totally revised tour of the memory and intentional forgetting of slavery and the Civil War in Richmond, Virginia
• the hideout of a gang in Delaware that made money by kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery
Entertaining and enlightening, Lies Across America also has a serious role to play in contemporary debates about white supremacy and Confederate memorials.
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Truth Has a Power of Its Own
Conversations About A People’s History$16.99 – $24.99American history told from the bottom up by Howard Zinn himself—and the perfect all-ages introduction to his eye-opening viewpoint, published on Zinn’s hundredth birthday
Truth Has a Power of Its Own is an engrossing collection of conversations with the late Howard Zinn and “an eloquently hopeful introduction for those who haven’t yet encountered Zinn’s work” (Booklist). Here is an unvarnished, yet ultimately optimistic, tour of American history—told by someone who was often an active participant in it.Viewed through the lens of Zinn’s own life as a soldier, historian, and activist and using his paradigm-shifting A People’s History of the United States as a point of departure, these conversations explore the American Revolution, the Civil War, the labor battles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. imperialism from the Indian Wars to the War on Terrorism, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the fight for equality and immigrant rights—all from an unapologetically radical standpoint. Longtime admirers and a new generation of readers alike will be fascinated to learn about Zinn’s thought processes, rationale, motivations, and approach to his now-iconic historical work.
Zinn’s humane (and often humorous) voice—along with his keen moral vision—shine through every one of these lively and thought-provoking conversations. Battles over the telling of our history still rage across the country, and there’s no better person to tell it than Howard Zinn.
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Presidential Misconduct
From George Washington to Today$29.99Named a best book of the year by The Economist and Foreign Affairs
“A whole book devoted exclusively to the misconduct of American presidents and their responses to charges of misconduct is without precedent.” —from the introduction to the 1974 edition by C. Vann Woodward, Pulitzer Prize–winning Yale historian
The historic 1974 report for the House Committee on the Judiciary, updated for today by leading presidential historians
In May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington’s administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon’s misdeeds could be measured.
What the report found was that, with the exception of William Henry Harrison (who served less than a month), every American president has been accused of misconduct: James Buchanan was charged with rigging the election of 1856; Ulysses S. Grant was reprimanded for not firing his corrupt staffer, Orville Babcock, in the “Whiskey Ring” bribery scandal; and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration faced repeated charges of malfeasance in the Works Progress Administration.
Now, as another president and his subordinates face an array of charges on a wide range of legal and constitutional offenses, a group of presidential historians has come together under the leadership of James M. Banner, Jr.—one of the historians who contributed to the original report—to bring the 1974 account up to date through Barack Obama’s presidency. Based on current scholarship, this new material covers such well-known episodes as Nixon’s Watergate crisis, Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, Clinton’s impeachment, and George W. Bush’s connection to the exposure of intelligence secrets. But oft-forgotten events also take the stage: Carter’s troubles with advisor Bert Lance, Reagan’s savings and loan crisis, George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and Obama’s Solyndra loan controversy.
The only comprehensive study of American presidents’ misconduct and the ways in which chief executives and members of their official families have responded to the charges brought against them, this new edition is designed to serve the same purpose as the original 1974 report: to provide the historical context and metric against which the actions of the current administration may be assessed.
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Night in the American Village
Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa$24.99 – $37.00“A lively encounter with identity and American military history in Okinawa. Night in the American Village is by turns intellectual, hip, and sexy. I admire it for its ferocity, style, and vigor. A wonderful book.”
—Anthony Swofford, author of JarheadA beautifully written examination of the complex relationship between the women living near the U.S. bases in Okinawa and the servicemen who are stationed there
At the southern end of the Japanese archipelago lies Okinawa, host to a vast complex of U.S. military bases. A legacy of World War II, these bases have been a fraught issue in Japan for decades—with tensions exacerbated by the often volatile relationship between islanders and the military, especially after the brutal rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three servicemen in the 1990s.
But the situation is more complex than it seems. In Night in the American Village, journalist Akemi Johnson takes readers deep into the “border towns” surrounding the bases—a world where cultural and political fault lines compel individuals, both Japanese and American, to continually renegotiate their own identities. Focusing on the women there, she follows the complex fallout of the murder of an Okinawan woman by an ex–U.S. serviceman in 2016 and speaks to protesters, to women who date and marry American men and groups that help them when problems arise, and to Okinawans whose family members survived World War II.
Thought-provoking and timely, Night in the American Village is a vivid look at the enduring wounds of U.S.-Japanese history and the cultural and sexual politics of the American military empire.
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North of Havana
The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five$26.99From one of America’s leading legal minds, a riveting look at the U.S.-Cuban relationship seen through the lens of a nearly impossible case
During his distinguished career, Martin Garbus has established himself as a well-known trial lawyer representing the likes of Daniel Ellsberg and Leonard Peltier. But there is no story Garbus wants to tell more than that of his most challenging case: representing five Cuban spies marooned in the U.S. prison system and his efforts to get them out.
North of Havana tells the story of a spy ring sent by Cuba in the early 1990s to infiltrate anti-Communist extremists in Miami. Erroneously charged by the U.S. government in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two planes circulating anti-Castro leaflets over Havana, the spies—in the absence of evidence—were convicted in 2000 of conspiracy to commit espionage and murder. Caught up in the sweep of history, the Cuban Five, as they became known, played a central role over the next decade in the recent thaw in Cuban-American relations.
Set in Miami and Havana, North of Havana is a mesmerizing tale of international intrigue, espionage, and political gamesmanship that continues to play a shaping role in American foreign policy and presidential elections. In the process, the books shows how the justice system can be, and is, subverted for political purposes and gives readers insight into one of the most fascinating legal cases of our times.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition
Everything American History Textbooks Get Wrong$19.19 – $19.99Now adapted for young readers ages 12 through 18, the national bestseller that makes real American history come alive in all of its conflict, drama, and complexity
Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the most important—and successful—history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. Now Rebecca Stefoff, the acclaimed nonfiction children’s writer who adapted Howard Zinn’s bestseller A People’s History of the United States for young readers, makes Loewen’s beloved work available to younger students.
Essential reading in our age of fake news and slippery, sloppy history, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition cuts through the mindless optimism and outright lies found in most textbooks that are often not even really written by their “authors.” Loewen is, as historian Carol Kammen has said, the history teacher we all should have had. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and then covering characters and events as diverse as the first Thanksgiving, Helen Keller, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen’s lively, provocative telling of American history is a “counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past” (The Nation).
This streamlined young readers’ edition is rich in vivid details and quotations from primary sources that poke holes in the textbook versions of history and help students develop a deeper understanding of our world. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition brings this classic text to a new generation of readers (and their parents and teachers) who will welcome and value its honesty, its humor, and its integrity.
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Denmark Vesey’s Garden
Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy$19.99 – $28.99One of Janet Maslin’s Favorite Books of 2018, The New York Times
One of John Warner’s Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago Tribune
Named one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor
“A fascinating and important new historical study.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.”
—Civil War Times
The stunning, groundbreaking account of “the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin” (Providence Journal)Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.
As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, “Kytle and Roberts’s combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston’s history and empathy with its inhabitants’ past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called “a stunning contribution, ” Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.
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The Savage Frontier
The Pyrenees in History and the Imagination$27.99A sweeping historical travelogue of the contentious border of France and Spain, in the great tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Jan Morris
With the Catalonia crisis making international headlines, the unique cultural and geographic region bordering Spain and France has once again moved to the center of the world’s attention. In The Savage Frontier, acclaimed author and journalist Matthew Carr uncovers the fascinating, multilayered story of the Pyrenees region—at once a forbidding, mountainous frontier zone of stunning beauty, home to a unique culture, and a site of sharp conflict between nations and empires.
Carr follows the routes taken by monks, soldiers, poets, pilgrims, and refugees. He examines the people and events that have shaped the Pyrenees across the centuries, with a cast of characters including Napoleon, Hannibal, and Charlemagne; the eccentric British climber Henry Russell; Francisco Sabaté Llopart, the Catalan anarchist who waged a lone war against the Franco regime across the Pyrenees for years after the civil war; Camino de Santiago pilgrims; and the cellist Pablo Casals, who spent twenty-three years in exile only a few miles from the Spanish border to show his disgust and disapproval of the Spanish regime.
The Savage Frontier is a book that will spark a new awareness and appreciation of one of the most haunting, magical, and dramatic landscapes on earth.
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A History of America in Ten Strikes
$17.99 – $28.99Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times
An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America
“A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam ChomskyPowerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers’ strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment.
For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past.
In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers’ struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up.
Strikes include:
Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40)
Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65)
The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886)
The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902)
The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912)
The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937)
The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946)
Lordstown (Ohio, 1972)
Air Traffic Controllers (1981)
Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)
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Sundown Towns
A Hidden Dimension of American Racism$22.99 – $49.00“Powerful and important . . . an instant classic.”
—The Washington Post Book WorldThe award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author
In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren’t welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.
Written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.
In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face “second-generation sundown town issues,” such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.
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Enemies in Love
A German POW, a Black Nurse, and an Unlikely Romance$25.99 – $28.99A “New & Noteworthy” selection of The New York Times Book Review
“Alexis Clark illuminates a whole corner of unknown World War II history.”
—Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
“[A]n irresistible human story. . . . Clark’s voice is engaging, and her tale universal.”
—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
A true and deeply moving narrative of forbidden love during World War II and a shocking, hidden history of race on the home frontThis is a love story like no other: Elinor Powell was an African American nurse in the U.S. military during World War II; Frederick Albert was a soldier in Hitler’s army, captured by the Allies and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Arizona desert. Like most other black nurses, Elinor pulled a second-class assignment, in a dusty, sun-baked—and segregated—Western town. The army figured that the risk of fraternization between black nurses and white German POWs was almost nil.
Brought together by unlikely circumstances in a racist world, Elinor and Frederick should have been bitter enemies; but instead, at the height of World War II, they fell in love. Their dramatic story was unearthed by journalist Alexis Clark, who through years of interviews and historical research has pieced together an astounding narrative of race and true love in the cauldron of war.
Based on a New York Times story by Clark that drew national attention, Enemies in Love paints a tableau of dreams deferred and of love struggling to survive, twenty-five years before the Supreme Court’s Loving decision legalizing mixed-race marriage—revealing the surprising possibilities for human connection during one of history’s most violent conflicts.
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Lighting the Fires of Freedom
African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement$17.99 – $25.99Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
Recommended by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Book Riot and AutostraddleNominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, a groundbreaking collection of profiles of African American women leaders in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights
During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. Beyond Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, most Americans would be hard-pressed to name other leaders at the community, local, and national levels.
In Lighting the Fires of Freedom Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women’s all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that are vital and relevant today.
A vital document for understanding the Civil Rights Movement, Lighting the Fires of Freedom is an enduring testament to the vitality of women’s leadership during one of the most dramatic periods of American history.
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The Dawn of Detroit
A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits$18.99 – $27.95Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Winner of the American Book Award
Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award
Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize
Winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction)Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize
Finalist for the Cundill History PrizeA New York Times Editor’s Choice selection
“If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.”
—New York Times Book Review“[Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.”
—Washington Post“[Tiya Miles] is among the best when it comes to blending artful storytelling with an unwavering sense of social justice.”
—Martha S. Jones in The Chronicle of Higher Education“A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.”
—Publisher Weekly (starred)“A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.”
—Kirkus ReviewsFrom the MacArthur genius grant winner, a beautifully written and revelatory look at the slave origins of a major northern American city
Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city: Detroit.
In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.
A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery’s American legacy.
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