American High

The Next Level is a comprehensive guide specifically designed to support young Black men as they transition from high school into adulthood. Drawing on personal experience, author Ammaul Hunt combines real-life stories with practical tools to help listeners build self-awareness, manage finances, pursue meaningful careers, and prioritize health and community connection.

Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned of her mother's death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family's history and her mother's supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of Delgado family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos.

In ways visible and invisible to their fellow recruits and conscripts, the experience of Jews was distinct from that of other soldiers who served in Lincoln's armies. Adam D. Mendelsohn draws for the first time upon the vast database of verified listings of Jewish soldiers serving in the Civil War collected by The Shapell Roster, as well as letters, diaries, and newspapers, to examine the collective experience of Jewish soldiers and to recover their voices and stories.

In A Legacy of Discrimination, leading constitutional scholars Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone trace affirmative action's history and the legal challenges it has faced over the decades. They argue that in order to fully comprehend affirmative action's original intent and impact, we must reacquaint ourselves with the era in which it arose, beginning with the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, 1954's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture.

Jack Duncan is a high school senior whose dream is to play baseball in college and beyond - as far away from Delano as possible. He longs to escape the political turmoil surrounding the labor struggles of the striking fieldworkers that infests his small ag town. Ever since his father, a grape grower, died under suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier, he's had to be the sole emotional support of his mother.

Just before her father's sudden death, Cuban-American artist Veronica Gonzalez is offered her first gallery exhibit, a real chance to break into the art world. Torn between the need to mourn and the pressure to create new artwork, Veronica is propelled into a fever-dream of productivity and grief, amidst memories of her tumultuous relationship with her colorful but infuriating Cuban emigre father, a volatile man of outsize appetites and passions who never stopped longing for his homeland.

They believed they would live forever. So begins Mira Ptacin's haunting account of the women of Camp Etna - an otherworldly community in the woods of Maine that has, since 1876, played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning her narrative in 1848 with two sisters who claimed they could speak to the dead, Ptacin reveals how Spiritualism first blossomed into a national practice during the Civil War, yet continues - even thrives - to this very day.

Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-19th century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations - like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths.

Highlighting forgotten Black and White civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author's own great-grandfather's crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn.

In 1948, Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their other daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her. But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn't remember.

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

In Frontline Bodies, Nicolas Martin-Breteau argues that sports are not—and have never been—purely about entertainment for Black Americans. Instead, beginning in the 1890s during Reconstruction, Black Americans proactively used athletics as a tactic to fight racial oppression. Martin-Breteau considers the work of Edwin B. Henderson, a prominent Black physical educator, civil rights activist, and historian of Black sports.

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

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 Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude.

Meet the Days, Howards, Madisons, and Lees. Four wealthy couples obsessed with keeping up appearances. Pearson, Vonita, Nadalia, and Ryan want the world to believe that they live flawlessly prosperous lives, but behind the custom-made doors of their elaborate mansions lie salacious secrets that are becoming harder to hide. Saving face may be a priority for these wives, but scandal, addiction, financial ruin, and infidelity threaten to reveal their truths to the world - and worst of all, each other.

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997, Don Shula remains the winningest coach of all time with 347 career victories and the only undefeated season in NFL history. But before he became the architect of the Dolphins dynasty, Shula was a hardworking kid selling fish on the banks of Lake Erie. As acclaimed sports biographer Mark Ribowsky shows, Shula met serious resistance at home when he asked to play high school football, but when his parents finally relented, they discovered that their son had an unmatched mind for the game's strategy and a stomach for its brutality.

Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.

Aloft offers a reexamination of the American dream from the inside out. Jerry Battle's favorite diversion is to fly his small plane solo, slipping away for quick flights over his Long Island home or to the coastal towns of New England. Then a family crisis occurs, and Jerry finds he must face his disengagement in his relationships.