American Sociology

The clash of armies in the American Civil War left hundreds of thousands of men dead, wounded, or permanently damaged. Skirmishes and battles could result in casualty numbers as low as one or two and as high as 10s of thousands. The carnage of the battlefield left a lasting impression on those who experienced or viewed it, but in most cases the armies quickly moved on to meet again at another time and place. When the dust settled and the living armies moved on, what happened to the dead left behind?

The Forgotten First chronicles the lives of four incredible men, the racism they experienced as Black players entering a segregated sport, the burden of expectation they carried, and their many achievements, which would go on to affect football for generations to come.

Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of individual Black men and women as a lens to explore the role they have played in creating American institutions of power and wealth—in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and many other fields—while not being allowed to fully participate or share in the rewards. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets.

In his brilliant new memoir, Pat Nevin takes us on a journey to the less glamorous side of football. From Tranmere to Kilmarnock, he plays some of the best football he's ever played. Then, in an unprecedented twist of fate, finds himself both player and Chief Executive of Scottish First Division club Motherwell.

Social scientists have long argued over the links between crime and place. The authors of Communities and Crime provide an intellectual history that traces how varying images of community have evolved over time and influenced criminological thinking and criminal justice policy.

Football 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. But 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.

The loamy black "muck" that surrounds Belle Glade, Florida once built an empire for Big Sugar and provided much of the nation's vegetables, often on the backs of roving, destitute migrants. Many of these were children who honed their skills along the field rows and started one of the most legendary football programs in America. Belle Glade's high school team, the Glades Central Raiders, has sent an extraordinary number of players to the National Football League - 27 since 1985, with five of those drafted in the first round.

A seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African American literature. Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology.

Like so many American factory towns, Lewiston, Maine, thrived until its mill jobs disappeared and the young began leaving. But then the story unexpectedly veered: over the course of fifteen years, the city became home to thousands of African immigrants and, along the way, turned into one of the most Muslim towns in the US. Now about 6,000 of Lewiston's 36,000 inhabitants are refugees and asylum seekers, many of them Somali. Cynthia Anderson tells the story of this fractious yet resilient city.

From Major League Baseball's inception in the 1880s through World War II, team owners enjoyed monopolistic control of the industry. Despite the players' desire to form a viable union, every attempt to do so failed. In the mid-1960s, star players Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale staged a joint holdout for multiyear contracts and much higher salaries. Their holdout quickly drew support from the public; for the first time, owners realized they could ill afford to alienate fans, their primary source of revenue.

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

In the works for more than twenty years, Interstate 69 has been both eagerly anticipated as an economic godsend and the center of a firestorm of protests by local environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, anarchists, and others who question both the wisdom of building more highways and the merits of globalization. Part history, part travelogue, Interstate 69 chronicles the last great highway project in America, introducing the people who have worked tirelessly to build it or stop it from being built, and the many places it would change forever.

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

During the 1980s, Black athletes and other athletes of color broadened the popularity and profitability of major college televised sports by infusing games with a "Black style" of play. At a moment ripe for a revolution in men's college basketball and football, clashes between "good guy" white protagonists and bombastic "bad boy" Black antagonists attracted new fans and spectators. And no two teams in the 1980s welcomed the enemy's role more than Georgetown Hoya basketball and Miami Hurricane football. The Hoyas and the 'Canes made the bad-boy image look good. Pop culture took notice.

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo - a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century - uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.

One in eight Americans struggles with hunger, and more than 13 million children live in food-insecure homes. As Christians we are called to address the suffering of the hungry and poor: "For I was hungry, and you gave me food..." (Matthew 25:35). However, the problems of hunger and poverty are too large and too complex for any one of us to resolve individually. I Was Hungry offers not only an assessment of the current crisis but also a strategy for addressing it. Jeremy Everett, a noted advocate for the hungry and poor, calls Christians to work across ideological divides....

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.

This book chronicles the long and tortured history of the NCAA's attempt to maintain the myth of amateurism and the student-athlete, along with the attendant fiction that the players academic achievement is the top priority of Division-I athletic programs. It is an indictment of the current system, making the case that big-time college sports cannot continue its connection to universities without undermining the mission of higher education. It concludes with bold proposals to separate big-time college sports from the university, transforming them into on-campus business operations.

Football teams create playbooks, in which they draw up the plays they will use on the field. Playbooks are how teams work and why they win. This book is about a different kind of playbook: The one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused of sexual assault. It’s a deep dive into how different institutions - the NCAA, athletic departments, universities, the media - run the same plays over and over again when these stories break.

Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago's most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.