U.S. History
Showing 33–64 of 144 results
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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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Free All Along
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews$26.99Featured in the New Yorker‘s “Page-Turner”
One of Mashable’s “17 books every activist should read in 2019”
“This is an expression not of people who are suddenly freed of something, but people who have been free all along.” —Ralph Ellison, speaking with Robert Penn Warren
A stunning collection of previously unpublished interviews with key figures of the black freedom struggle by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author
In 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the black freedom struggle. He spoke at length with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins, eliciting reflections and frank assessments of race in America and the possibilities for meaningful change. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation.
A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. Astonishingly, the full extent of the interviews remained in the background and were never published. The audiotapes stayed largely unknown until recent years. Free All Along brings to life the vital historic voices of America’s civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals.
A major contribution to our understanding of the struggle for justice and equality, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents that have pressing relevance today.
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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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Tropic of Football
The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL$26.99Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award
“Everything that’s rousing and distressing about block-and-tackle football is encompassed in Tropic of Football. . . illuminating.”
—Newsday
How a tiny Pacific archipelago is producing more players—from Troy Polamalu to Marcus Mariota—for the NFL than anywhere else in the world, by an award-winning sports historianFootball is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots—high school and youth travel program—are withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport.
Jesse Sapolu, Junior Seau, Troy Polamalu, and Marcus Mariota are among the star players to emerge from the Samoan islands, and more of their brethren suit up every season. The very thing that makes them so good at football—their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image—makes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries.
Award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck travels to the South Seas to unravel American Samoa’s complex ties with the United States. He finds an island blighted by obesity, where boys train on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles wearing helmets that should have been discarded long ago, incurring far more neurological damage than their stateside counterparts and haunted by Junior Seau, who committed suicide after a vaunted twenty-year NFL career, unable to live with the demons that resulted from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Tropic of Football is a gripping, bittersweet history of what may be football’s last frontier.
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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 Ghosts of Langley
Into the CIA's Heart of Darkness$28.95 – $28.99“The Ghosts of Langley offers a detail-rich, often relentless litany of CIA scandals and mini-scandals. . . [and a] prayer that the CIA learn from and publicly admit its mistakes, rather than perpetuate them in an atmosphere of denial and impunity.”
—The Washington Post
From the writer Kai Bird calls a “wonderfully accessible historian,” the first major history of the CIA in a decade, published to tie in with the seventieth anniversary of the agency’s founding
During his first visit to Langley, the CIA’s Virginia headquarters, President Donald Trump told those gathered, “I am so behind you . . . there’s nobody I respect more, ” hinting that he was going to put more CIA operations officers into the field so the CIA could smite its enemies ever more forcefully. But while Trump was making these promises, behind the scenes the CIA was still reeling from blowback from the very tactics that Trump touted—including secret overseas prisons and torture—that it had resorted to a decade earlier during President George W. Bush’s war on terror. Under the latest regime it seemed that the CIA was doomed to repeat its past failures rather than put its house in order.The Ghosts of Langley is a provocative and panoramic new history of the Central Intelligence Agency that relates the agency’s current predicament to its founding and earlier years, telling the story of the agency through the eyes of key figures in CIA history, including some of its most troubling covert actions around the world. It reveals how the agency, over seven decades, has resisted government accountability, going rogue in a series of highly questionable ventures that reach their apotheosis with the secret overseas prisons and torture programs of the war on terror.
Drawing on mountains of newly declassified documents, the celebrated historian of national intelligence John Prados throws fresh light on classic agency operations from Poland to Hungary, from Indonesia to Iran-Contra, and from the Bay of Pigs to Guantánamo Bay. The halls of Langley, Prados persuasively argues, echo with the footsteps of past spymasters, to the extent that it resembles a haunted house. Indeed, every day that the militarization of the CIA increases, the agency drifts further away from classic arts of espionage and intelligence analysis—and its original mission, while pushing dangerously beyond accountability.
The Ghosts of Langley will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the next phase of American history—and the CIA’s evolution—as its past informs its future and a president of impulsive character prods the agency toward new scandals and failures.
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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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Shortfall
Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking$26.95The rollicking true story of a 1930s version of Bernie Madoff—and the building and loan crash he helped precipitate—in a wonderful work of narrative nonfiction by the Gustavus Myers book award winnerShortfall opens with a surprise discovery in an attic—boxes filled with letters and documents hidden for more than seventy years—and launches into a fast-paced story that uncovers the dark secrets in Echols’s family—an upside-down version of the building and loan story at the center of Frank Capra’s 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. In a narrative filled with colorful characters and profound insights into the American past, Shortfall is also the essential backstory to more recent financial crises, from the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and 1990s to the subprime collapse of 2008.
Shortfall chronicles the collapse of the building and loan industry during the Great Depression—a story told in microcosm through the firestorm that erupted in one hard-hit American city during the early 1930s. Over a six-month period in 1932, all four of the building and loan associations in Colorado Springs, Colorado, crashed in an awful domino-like fashion, leaving some of the town’s citizens destitute. The largest of these associations was owned by author Alice Echols’s grandfather, Walter Davis, who absconded with millions of dollars in a case that riveted the national media. This book tells the dramatic story of his rise and shocking fall.
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The Hamlet Fire
A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives$26.95
“Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current national politics.”
—The Washington Post
A “gifted writer” (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping gobs of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they got dipped in batter and fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. If a worker complained about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were scarce. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, this factory that had never been inspected burst into flame. Twenty-five people—many of whom were black women with children, living on their own—perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors.
Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to local residents, state officials, and survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.
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Able Archer 83
The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War$31.99In November 1983, Soviet nuclear forces went on high alert. After months nervously watching increasingly assertive NATO military posturing, Soviet intelligence agencies in Western Europe received flash telegrams reporting alarming activity on U.S. bases. In response, the Soviets began planning for a countdown to a nuclear first strike by NATO on Eastern Europe. And then Able Archer 83, a vast NATO war game exercise that modeled a Soviet attack on NATO allies, ended.
What the West didn’t know at the time was that the Soviets thought Operation Able Archer 83 was real and were actively preparing for a surprise missile attack from NATO. This close scrape with Armageddon was largely unknown until last October when the U.S. government released a ninety-four-page presidential analysis of Able Archer that the National Security Archive had spent over a decade trying to declassify. Able Archer 83 is based upon more than a thousand pages of declassified documents that archive staffer Nate Jones has pried loose from several U.S. government agencies and British archives, as well as from formerly classified Soviet Politburo and KGB files, vividly recreating the atmosphere that nearly unleashed nuclear war.
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A People’s History of the American Revolution
How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence$19.95 – $30.00“The best single-volume history of the Revolution I have read.” —Howard Zinn
Upon its initial publication, Ray Raphael’s magisterial A People’s History of the American Revolution was hailed by NPR’s Fresh Air as “relentlessly aggressive and unsentimental.” With impeccable skill, Raphael presented a wide array of fascinating scholarship within a single volume, employing a bottom-up approach that has served as a revelation.
A People’s History of the American Revolution draws upon diaries, personal letters, and other Revolutionary-era treasures, weaving a thrilling “you are there” narrative—“a tapestry that uses individual experiences to illustrate the larger stories”. Raphael shifts the focus away from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fighting (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
This “remarkable perspective on a familiar part of American history” helps us appreciate more fully the incredible diversity of the American Revolution (Kirkus Reviews).
“Through letters, diaries, and other accounts, Raphael shows these individuals—white women and men of the farming and laboring classes, free and enslaved African Americans, Native Americans, loyalists, and religious pacifists—acting for or against the Revolution and enduring a war that compounded the difficulties of everyday life.” —Library Journal
“A tour de force . . . Ray Raphael has probably altered the way in which future historians will see events.” —The Sunday Times -
Right Out of California
The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism$18.99 – $27.95“Olmsted’s vivid, accomplished narrative really belongs to the historiography of the left… as her strong research shows, race and gender prejudice informed or deformed, almost the whole of American social and cultural life in the 1930s and was as common on the left as on the right.”
—The New York Times Book Review
NOW IN PAPERBACK An “arresting” (In These Times) new history of modern American conservatism, uncovering its roots in the turbulent agricultural fields of Depression-era California
In a reassessment of modern conservatism, noted historian Kathryn S. Olmsted reexamines the explosive labor disputes in the agricultural fields of Depression-era California, the cauldron that inspired a generation of artists and writers and triggered the intervention of FDR’s New Deal. Right Out of California, which received a full-page review in the New York Times when it was published in hardcover, tells how this brief moment of upheaval terrified business leaders into rethinking their relationship to American politics—a narrative that pits a ruthless generation of growers against a passionate cast of reformers, writers, and revolutionaries.
At a time when a resurgent immigrant labor movement is making urgent demands on twenty-first-century America—and when a new and virulent strain of right-wing anti-immigrant populism is roiling the political waters—Right Out of California is a fresh and profoundly relevant touchstone for anyone seeking to understand the roots of our current predicament. -
The Spirit of 74
How the American Revolution Began$26.95 – $26.99How ordinary people went from resistance to revolution: “[A] concise, lively narrative . . . the authors expertly build tension.” —Publishers Weekly
Americans know about the Boston Tea Party and “the shot heard ’round the world,” but sixteen months divided these two iconic events, a period that has nearly been lost to history. The Spirit of ’74 fills in this gap in our nation’s founding narrative, showing how in these mislaid months, step by step, real people made a revolution.
After the Tea Party, Parliament not only shut down a port but also revoked the sacred Massachusetts charter. Completely disenfranchised, citizens rose up as a body and cast off British rule everywhere except in Boston, where British forces were stationed. A “Spirit of ’74” initiated the American Revolution, much as the better-known “Spirit of ’76” sparked independence. Redcoats marched on Lexington and Concord to take back a lost province, but they encountered Massachusetts militiamen who had trained for months to protect the revolution they had already made.
The Spirit of ’74 places our founding moment in a rich new historical context, both changing and deepening its meaning for all Americans.
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Constitutional Myths
What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right$17.95 – $26.95Americans on both sides of the aisle love to reference the Constitution as the ultimate source of truth. But which truth? What did the framers really have in mind? In a book that author R.B. Bernstein calls “essential reading,” acclaimed historian Ray Raphael places the Constitution in its historical context, dispensing little-known facts and debunking popular preconceived notions.
For each myth, Raphael first notes the kernel of truth it represents, since most myths have some basis in fact. Then he presents a big “BUT”—the larger context that reveals what the myth distorts. What did the framers see as the true role of government? What did they think of taxes? At the Constitutional Convention, how did they mix principles with politics? Did James Madison really father the Constitution? Did the framers promote a Bill of Rights? Do the so-called Federalist Papers reveal the Constitution’s inner meaning?
An authoritative and entertaining book, which “should appeal equally to armchair historians and professionals in the field” (Booklist), Constitutional Myths reveals what our founding document really says and how we should apply it today. -
Sherman’s Ghosts
Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War$26.95 – $26.99This “thought-provoking” military history considers the influence of General Sherman’s Civil War tactics on American conflicts through the twentieth century (The New York Times).
“To know what war is, one should follow our tracks,” Gen. William T. Sherman once wrote to his wife, describing the devastation left by his armies in Georgia. Sherman’s Ghosts is an investigation of those tracks, as well as those left across the globe by the American military in the 150 years since Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea.”
Sherman’s Ghosts opens with an epic retelling of General Sherman’s fateful decision to terrorize the South’s civilian population in order to break the back of the Confederacy. Acclaimed journalist and historian Matthew Carr exposes how this strategy, which Sherman called “indirect warfare,” became the central preoccupation of war planners in the twentieth century and beyond. He offers a lucid assessment of the impact Sherman’s slash-and-burn policies have had on subsequent wars and military conflicts, including World War II and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and even Iraq and Afghanistan.
In riveting accounts of military campaigns and in the words of American soldiers and strategists, Carr finds ample evidence of Sherman’s long shadow. Sherman’s Ghosts is a rare reframing of how we understand our violent history and a call to action for those who hope to change it.
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Remembering Jim Crow
African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South$19.95 – $20.99A timely paperback reissue of the stunning, prize-winning portrait of the Jim Crow South through unique first-person accounts
Praised as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly), this remarkable work of oral history captures the searing experience of the Jim Crow years through first-person interviews carefully collected by researchers at Duke University’s Behind the Veil project. Newly relevant today as Americans reckon with the legacies of slavery and strive for racial equality, Remembering Jim Crow provides vivid, compelling accounts by men and women from all walks of life, who tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression.
“A shivering dose of reality and inspiring stories of everyday resistance” (Library Journal), Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how Black Southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. Collectively, these narratives illuminate individual and community survival and tell a powerful story of the American past that is crucial for us to remember as we grapple with Jim Crow’s legacies in the present.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus
What Your History Books Got Wrong$44.99Some myths don’t die, and lies are still being told about Christopher Columbus: that he “discovered” the Americas (not only was the land familiar to native inhabitants, but it had also been visited before by Europeans), that the land was sparsely populated by native people (there were fourteen million inhabitants in 1492), that those people were primitive (Europeans learned a lot and gained technology and agricultural skill from Native Americans), and that they submitted to Columbus’s “God-like” authority (they submitted to the deadly smallpox and bubonic plague that Columbus’s crew imported from Europe).Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus disproves the myths about Columbus still enshrined in American textbooks with quotations from primary source material that sets the record straight. The poster and accompanying 48–;page paperback book sum up the mistellings—and reveal the real story—in a graphically appealing and accessible format that shows the degree to which textbooks have “lied” by knowingly substituting crowd-pleasing myths for grim and gruesome historical evidence.
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Founding Myths
Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past$18.99 – $21.99The tenth-anniversary edition of the book that showed “why we must move past historical nonsense so that a truer, more democratic national record can emerge” (School Library Journal)
Originally published to universal acclaim, award-winning historian Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths has since established itself as a landmark of historical myth-busting. With Raphael’s trademark wit and flair, Founding Myths exposed the errors and inventions in America’s most cherished tales, from Paul Revere’s famous ride to Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech. For the thousands who have been captivated by Raphael’s eye-opening accounts, history has never been the same.
In this revised tenth-anniversary edition, Raphael revisits the original myths and further explores their evolution over time, uncovering new stories and peeling back new layers of misinformation. This new edition also examines the highly politicized debates over America’s past, as well as how our approach to history in school reinforces rather than corrects historical mistakes.
A book that “explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation” (National Public Radio), this revised edition of Founding Myths will be a welcome resource for anyone seeking to separate historical fact from fiction.
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Killing Machine
The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare$26.95With Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, many believed the United States had entered a new era: Obama came into office with high expectations that he would end the war in Iraq and initiate a new foreign policy that would reestablish American values and the United States’ leadership role in the world.In this shattering new assessment, historian Lloyd C. Gardner argues that, despite cosmetic changes, Obama has simply built on the expanding power base of presidential power that reaches back across decades and through multiple administrations.
The new president ended the “enhanced interrogation” policy of the Bush administration but did not abandon the concept of preemption. Obama withdrew from Iraq but has institutionalized drone warfare—including the White House’s central role in selecting targets. What has come into view, Gardner argues, is the new face of American presidential power: high–tech, secretive, global, and lethal.
Killing Machine skillfully narrates the drawdown in Iraq, the counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the rise of the use of drones, and targeted assassinations from al-Awlaki to Bin Laden—drawing from the words of key players in these actions as well as their major public critics. With unparalleled historical perspective, Gardner’s book is the new touchstone for understanding not only the Obama administration but the American presidency itself.
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The Cultural Cold War
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters$21.99 – $29.95During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not.
Called “the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967” by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is “a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period” (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today. -
A People’s Art History of the United States
250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements$21.99 – $35.00Inspired by the pathbreaking work of Howard Zinn, A People’s Art History of the United States is propelled by a democratic vision of art, showing that art doesn’t just belong within the confines of museums and archives. In fact, art is created every day in the street and all around us, and everyone deserves to be a part of it.Called “important” by renowned art critic Lucy Lippard, A People’s Art History of the United States introduces us to key works of American radical art alongside dramatic retellings of the histories that inspired them. Richly illustrated with more than two hundred black-and-white images, this book by acclaimed artist and author Nicolas Lampert is the go-to resource for everyone who wants to know what activist art can and does do for our society.
Spanning the abolitionist movement, early labor movements, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and up to the present antiglobalization movement and beyond, A People’s Art History of the United States is a wonderful read as well as a brilliant toolkit for today’s artists and activists to adapt past tactics to the present, utilizing art and media as a form of civil disobedience.
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Hearts and Minds
A People's History of Counterinsurgency$18.95The first book of its kind, Hearts and Minds is a scathing response to the grand narrative of U.S. counterinsurgency, in which warfare is defined not by military might alone but by winning the “hearts and minds” of civilians. Dormant as a tactic since the days of the Vietnam War, in 2006 the U.S. Army drafted a new field manual heralding the resurrection of counterinsurgency as a primary military engagement strategy; counterinsurgency campaigns followed in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that counterinsurgency had utterly failed to account for the actual lived experiences of the people whose hearts and minds America had sought to win.
Drawing on leading thinkers in the field and using key examples from Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Hearts and Minds brings a long-overdue focus on the many civilians caught up in these conflicts. Both urgent and timely, this important book challenges the idea of a neat divide between insurgents and the populations from which they emerge—and should be required reading for anyone engaged in the most important contemporary debates over U.S. military policy.
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Behind the Shock Machine
The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments$26.95When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961, none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide sensation that the published results would cause. Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even suffering a life-threatening heart condition, simply because an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy and fascination more than fifty years later.
In Behind the Shock Machine, psychologist and author Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of this controversial experiment and its startling repercussions. Interviewing the original participants—many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did—and delving deep into Milgram’s personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.
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Wrong Turn
Americas Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency$24.95 – $24.99A searing indictment of US strategy in Afghanistan from a distinguished military leader and West Point military historian—“A remarkable book” (National Review).
In 2008, Col. Gian Gentile exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals with an article titled “Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army’s Conventional Capabilities,” that appeared in World Politics Review. While the years of US strategy in Afghanistan had been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts began to question the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States’ limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda.
Drawing both on the author’s experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile’s views of the failures of COIN, as well as a trenchant reevaluation of US operations in Afghanistan.
“Gentile is convinced that Obama’s ‘surge’ in Afghanistan can’t work. . . . And, if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around soon, the Democrats . . . who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare . . . may find themselves wondering whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.” —The New Republic -
A People’s History of the U.S. Military
Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan$19.95 – $29.95Military service can shatter or give meaning to lives–it is rarely a neutral encounter—and it has resulted in a rich outpouring of personal testimony from the men and women who have literally placed their lives on the line. “A ‘real’ love letter to our military [that] will prove enlightening, even galvanizing” (Dissent), A People’s History of the U.S. Military tells the captivating narratives of common soldiers, sampled from over three centuries of letters, diaries, and memoirs as well as audio recordings, films, and blogs. The often dramatic, sometimes very raw, and always richly textured first–person accounts collected in this book cover a wide range of perspectives, from ardent patriots to disillusioned cynics, barely literate farm boys to urbane college graduates, scions of founding families to recent immigrants, and women disguising themselves as men in order to serve their country to African Americans fighting for their freedom through military service.Praised as “compact and complete” (Booklist), “an excellent educational tool” (Publishers Weekly), and “a useful, unsettling, bottom–up history of America’s wars that emphasizes the soldiers’ mistreatment, suffering, and injustice” (Kirkus Reviews), A People’s History of the U.S. Military has already become a major new touchstone for our understanding of American military service.
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The Indispensable Zinn
The Essential Writings of the "People's Historian"$19.95 – $19.99A “well-chosen anthology of the radical historian’s prodigious output,” from A People’s History of the United States and lesser known sources (Kirkus Reviews).
When Howard Zinn died in early 2010, millions of Americans mourned the loss of one of the nation’s foremost intellectual and political guides; a historian, activist, and truth-teller who, in the words of the New York Times’s Bob Herbert, “peel[ed] back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long.”
A collection designed to highlight Zinn’s essential writings, The Indispensable Zinn includes excerpts from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States; his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train; his inspiring writings on the civil rights movement, and the full text of his celebrated play, Marx in Soho. Noted historian and activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy provides essential historical and biographical context for each selection.
With a foreword by Noam Chomsky and an afterword from Zinn’s former Spellman College student and longtime friend, Alice Walker, The Indispensable Zinn is both a fitting tribute to the legacy of a man whose “work changed the way millions of people saw the past,” and a powerful and accessible introduction for anyone coming to Zinn’s essential body of work for the first time (Noam Chomsky). -
Studs Terkel’s Chicago
$19.99 – $30.00In a blend of history, memoir, and photography, the Pulitzer Prize winner paints a vivid portrait of this extraordinary American city.
Chicago was home to the country’s first skyscraper (a ten-story building built in 1884), and marks the start of the famed Route 66. It is also the birthplace of the remote control (Zenith) and the car radio (Motorola), and the first major American city to elect a woman (Jane Byrne) and then an African American man (Harold Washington) as mayor.
Its literary and journalistic history is just as dazzling, and includes Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and Sara Paretsky. From Al Capone to the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Chicago, in the words of Studs Terkel, “has—as they used to whisper of the town’s fast woman—a reputation.”
Chicago was also home to Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning oral historian, who moved to Chicago in 1922 as an eight-year-old and who would make it his home until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. This book is a splendid evocation of Studs Terkel’s hometown in all its glory—and all its imperfection. -
Stayin’ Alive
The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class$23.95 – $28.00Winner of the 2011 Merle Curti award, an epic account that recasts the 1970s as the key turning point in modern U.S. history, from the renowned historian
A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin’ Alive is prizewinning historian Jefferson Cowie’s remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book—part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and television lore—Cowie, with “an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America’s fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.
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A People’s History of World War II
The Worlds Most Destructive Conflict, As Told By the People Who Lived Through It$18.95The most destructive war in human history, World War II continues to generate an astonishingly rich trove of historical material, writings, and first-person recollections, which are essential to any appreciation of this most pivotal of historical events.
A People’s History of World War II brings the full range of human experience during World War II to life through some of the most vivid accounts and images available anywhere. This concise and accessible volume includes first-person interviews by Studs Terkel; rare archival photographs from the Office of War Information collection; propaganda comics from Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss); narratives of wartime experiences from writers including historian Howard Zinn, civil rights activist Robert L. Carter, and celebrated French author Marguerite Duras; and selections from the writings of some of the world’s leading historians of the war, including John Dower, Philippe Burrin, David Wyman, and Eric Hobsbawm. -
After the Fall
New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years that Followed$26.95 – $26.99New Yorkers remember 9/11 in this landmark volume of oral history commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks—A “staggering book of living memory” (Booklist, starred review).
Within days of September 11, 2001, Columbia’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to collect the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. With follow-up interviews spanning years, the project produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities in New York City.
After the Fall presents a selection of these fascinating testimonies, with heartbreaking and enlightening stories from a broad range of New Yorkers. The interviews include first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants, and others who were interviewed numerous times since the 2001 attacks. The result is a remarkable time-lapse account of the city as it changed in the wake of 9/11, one that will resonate powerfully with New Yorkers and millions of others who continue to feel the impact of the most damaging foreign attack to ever occur inside the United States.
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