American Violence

The first work of long fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright—a tour de force of memory, mystery, death, and life. This searing, extraordinarily evocative narrative opens with a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly...

A breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones' viral video, “How Can We Win.” “So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made...

Jack Swyteck and his family are caught in the crossfire after a deadly school shooting claims twenty casualties—Florida’s fifth mass shooting in as many years—in this provocative and timely thriller from Harper Lee Prize–winner James Grippando that touches on some of the most contentious...

In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death.

Inner-city Black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence; in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences, with young people particularly at risk. The most powerful force counteracting this code and its reign of terror is the strong, loving, decent family, and we meet many heroic figures in the course of this narrative.

Ferguson might be the worst, but it is not the first. Ferguson is just the latest of hundreds of examples of Black mob violence around the country. White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It was written for the deniers: reporters and public officials and others who deny Black mob violence has reached epidemic levels.

“An engrossing, moving, and utterly motivating account of the human stakes of gun violence in America.”—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Education of an Idealist Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy...

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

In Real Americans, Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American.

In 2017, sociologist Ranita Ray stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into her immersion, a disturbed Ray recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care.

1919, the Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow Black citizens. In city after city, Black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed Blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage.

#SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.

Mass violence committed by young people is now an epidemic. The reasons behind this escalating violence and the cultural forces that have impugned a generation is the subject of this important new book. The Spiral Notebook is full of interviews with Generation Z, a group dogged by big pharma and antidepressants and ADHD drugs, by a doomsday/apocalyptic mentality present since birth, and by an entertainment industry that has turned violence into parlor games.

Ersula J. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.

Crime, Drugs, Sex, Violence—Redemption is a true story about a young man in California lost and thrown into a world of drugs, sex, and violence. This is a look back at how he got there. It's a rough ride with rays of light and a chance for self-redemption. Everyone has a story. This is mine. It's an adventure I didn't sign up for, a mental struggle to avoid self-destruction. But it is the path I traveled on the ride of my life.

In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South.

When you feel like you've made too many missteps to go forward, how do you find the strength to carry on? Join Casey Diaz as he tells the remarkable story of God's heart for second chances. The son of El Salvadorian immigrants, Casey Diaz was brought to Los Angeles at the age of two. An abusive...

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.

The real story behind El Salvador's MS-13 gang and how they have perpetuated three generations of conflict and led to scores of migrants seeking a new life in the United States. Born in Los Angeles, the gang MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a civil...

The gripping story of the Ruby Ridge siege, showing how the historic standoff between federal agents and a white-separatist family set the stage for the conspiracy-laced politics of the Trump era. “Vivid, frightening, and fascinating…This book blew me away and opened my eyes.”—Walter...