American Sociology

Shawn Harrington returned to Marshall High School as an assistant coach years after appearing as a player in the iconic basketball documentary film Hoop Dreams. In January of 2014, Marshall's struggling team was about to improve after the addition of a charismatic but troubled player. Everything changed, however, when two young men opened fired on Harrington's car as he drove his daughter to school. Harrington was struck and paralyzed. The mistaken-identity shooting was followed by a series of events that had a devastating impact on Harrington and Marshall's basketball family.

Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its men. Football teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. But football celebrates violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. But football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football inspires confidence and direction. But football instills cockiness, a false sense of superiority.

As gentrification encroaches on historic Harlem, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award recipient Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of its storied legacy. Drawing on Harlem’s history and her own observations, Rhodes-Pitts introduces a variety of observers who shared a common hope that Harlem would become the ground from which Blacks fully entered America’s democracy.

When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism.

The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black America has shattered.

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with Black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the Black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of Black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between White progressives, business interests, and Black Atlantans. But Atlanta's political leadership has consistently mishandled the Black poor.

Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today's youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. In Hyper Education, Pawan Dhingra uncovers the growing world of high-achievement education and the after-school learning centers, spelling bees, and math competitions that it has spawned.

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of Black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half men, half heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

Since Donald Trump's first day in office, a large and energetic grassroots "Resistance" has taken to the streets to protest his administration's plans for the United States. American Resistance traces activists from the streets back to the communities and congressional districts around the country where they live, work, and vote. Using innovative survey data and interviews with key players, Dana R. Fisher analyzes how Resistance groups have channeled outrage into activism, using distributed organizing to make activism possible by anyone from anywhere.

In The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler tell the story of 19th-century Brooklyn's domination by upper- and middle-class Protestants with roots in Puritan New England. This lively history describes the unraveling of the control they wielded as more ethnically diverse groups moved into the "City of Churches" during the 20th century.

Though today it can seem as if all American culture comes out of New York and Los Angeles, much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America’s central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory.

In Moving Up, Moving Out, Will Cooley discusses the damage racism and discrimination have exacted on black Chicagoans in the 20th century, while accentuating the resilience of upwardly mobile African Americans. Cooley examines how class differences created fissures in the black community and produced quandaries for black Chicagoans interested in racial welfare. While black Chicagoans engaged in collective struggles, they also used individualistic means to secure the American Dream.

The critically lauded author of The Beast Side and The Cook Up returns with an existential look at life in low-income Black communities, while also offering a new framework for how we can improve the conversations occurring about them.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

Award-winning journalist Vicki Mayk raises a critical question for football players and their communities: Does loving a sport justify risking your life? This is the insightful and deeply human story of Owen Thomas - a star football player at Penn, who took his own life when he was 21, the result of the pain and anguish caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

The extraordinary story of how Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and Joe Namath, his star quarterback at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to victory and transformed football into a truly national pastime. During the bloodiest years of the civil rights movement, Bear Bryant and Joe Namath - two of the most iconic and controversial figures in American sports - changed the game of college football forever.

Royal, Nebraska, population eighty-one - where the church, high school, and post office each stand abandoned, monuments to a Great Plains town that never flourished. But for nearly twenty years, they had a zoo, seven acres that rose from local peculiarity to key tourist attraction to devastating tragedy. And it all began with one man’s outsize vision. When Dick Haskin’s plans to assist primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda were cut short by her murder, Dick’s devotion to primates didn’t die with her. He returned to his hometown with Reuben, an adolescent chimp.

The 2008 financial crisis crystallized for people around the country the fact that something was wrong. Americans had already been losing faith in elites who had failed to protect them from crisis after crisis and disaster after disaster. After the collapse, we expected someone to have a solution but were inevitably disappointed. Instead, we got high and rising unemployment, foreclosures spiraling out of control, and, as the protest chant went, "banks got bailed out, we got sold out."

Unequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today. While other economic historians base their accounts on American wealth, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson focus instead on income - and the result is a bold reassessment of the American economic experience.

Burning. Shooting. Stabbing. Sometimes the cause is unknown. Sometimes it begins as the result of an injury. Whatever form it takes, chronic pain often resists treatment. In this audiobook, we examine the latest advances in understanding the pathology of chronic pain and the efforts to find better, non-opioid treatment options, including electrical stimulation of nerves, venom from spiders and other creatures, and psychological interventions including virtual-reality therapy and acupuncture.