American Social History

Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.

Standing Rock Sioux activist, professor, and attorney Vine Deloria, Jr., shares his thoughts about US race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists in a collection of 11 eye-opening essays infused with humor. This "manifesto" provides valuable insights on American Indian history, Native American culture, and context for minority protest movements mobilizing across the country throughout the 60s and 70s. Originally published in 1969, this book remains a timeless classic and is one of the most significant nonfiction works written by a Native American.

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

The American president has come to be the most powerful figure in the world. And back in the 19th century, a great man held that office. William Lee Miller's new book closely examines that great man in that hugely important office: Abraham Lincoln as president.

Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years - a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.

Richard Painter and Peter Golenbock present a clear description of rule of law - arguably the single most important principle underlying our civilization. They also describe the abuses of power that have occurred throughout our nation's history. Beginning in Puritan New England with the infamous Salem Witch Trials, American Nero makes vivid stops at The Red Scare of the 1920s, Japanese-American internment, the McCarthy Era, and, much more recently, President Trump's attempt to violate the First Amendment by banning Muslims from entering the US.

As presidential candidates sling dirt at each other, America desperately needs a few real heroes. Tragically, liberal historians and educators have virtually erased traditional American heroes from history. According to the Left, the Founding Fathers were not noble architects of America but selfish demagogues, and self-made entrepreneurs like Rockefeller were robber barons and corporate polluters.

From its origins in the 1750s, the White-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what White nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.

Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them - including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - came to deem America's constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation.

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and - despite her prosthetic leg - helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order.

Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were, for centuries, at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science.

This memoir written by writer, orator, and former slave Frederick Douglass describes, in gripping detail, the circumstances of his upbringing, his brutal treatment at the hands of slave-owners, and his narrow escape from Maryland to freedom. Written in 1845, this narrative is one of the most famous works of American literature and provided fuel for the abolitionist movement that began in the early 19th century.

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans - an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of Southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed.

The Jeffersonian Republicans examines various events between 1800 and 1823 that helped to shape the United States. The Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and important Supreme Court decisions are among the discussed events.

Roots is a groundbreaking story of history and family that spanned continents and touched generations. One of the most important books and television series ever to appear, Roots galvanized the nation and created an extraordinary political, racial, social, and cultural dialogue that hadn’t been seen since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book sold more than one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll transports listeners back in time to witness the remarkable evolution of the American restaurant chef in the 1970s and 1980s. Andrew Friedman goes inside Chez Panisse and other Bay Area restaurants to show how the politically charged backdrop of Berkeley helped spark this new profession; into the historically underrated community of Los Angeles chefs, including a young Wolfgang Puck; and into the clash of cultures between established French chefs in New York City and the American game changers.

A fast-paced, rollicking, behind-the-scenes account of how the GOP since the 1950s has encouraged and exploited extremism, bigotry, and paranoia to gain power, American Psychosis offers listeners a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.