Civil Liberties

The religious right taught America to misread the Bible. Christians have misused Scripture to consolidate power, stoke fears, and defend against enemies. But people who have been hurt by the attacks of Christian nationalism can help us rediscover God's vision for faith in public life. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove explores how religious culture wars have misrepresented Christianity at the expense of the poor, and how listening to marginalized communities can help us hear God's call to love and justice in the world.

For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.

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.

Well-known resistance author Claire Wolfe (The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook and the Hardyville Tales) has teamed up with counterintelligence analyst and liberty activist Kit Perez to pen a beginning "how-to" for those who are ready to do more than complain on social media. You'll learn about how to get properly set up, ideas for action ranging from easy to dangerous (but never violent or harmful), and how to find and collaborate with like-minded folks in a way that will help keep you safe and out of jail while still getting stuff done.

No Human Is Illegal is a powerful document of one lawyer's fight for those seeking a better life in America against its ever-tightening borders. For author Mulligan Sepúlveda, the son and husband of Spanish-speaking immigrants, the battle for immigration reform is personal. Mulligan Sepúlveda discusses visiting border detention centers, defending undocumented immigrants in court, and taking his services to JFK to represent people being turned away at the gates during Trump's infamous travel ban.

Not only can gun rights and rules coexist, but they have throughout American history. Guns Across America reveals the long-hidden truth: that gun regulations are in fact as American as apple pie.

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong. Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of US immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out.

Following the fatal shooting in broad daylight of unarmed African American Michael Brown by a white cop in August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, became the scene of protests that pitted law enforcement against locals and Black Lives matter activists. The media firestorm has not waned, and, in fact, has grown stronger in light of all the recent violence by and against police officers nationwide. According to Ferguson's former police chief Tom Jackson, the uninformed media actually fans the flames of unrest and exploits the situation.

Learn about the bomb blast that rocked the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, killing four young girls.

Pay attention, people of faith. Dark clouds are gathering. The winds of intolerance are blowing. There’s a great storm approaching. American Christians are facing uncertain times. Our nation’s values are under assault. Religious liberty has been undermined. We live in a day when right is now wrong and wrong is now right. The vicious left-wing attack against the recent traditional marriage stance of Chick-fil-A should serve as a wake-up call to people of faith. It’s not about a chicken sandwich. It’s about religious liberty. It’s about free speech. It’s about the future of our nation.

Many Americans reference the Bill of Rights, a document that represents many of the freedoms that define the United States. Who doesn’t know about the First Amendment’s freedom of religion or Second Amendment’s right to bear arms? In this succinct volume, Akhil Reed Amar and Les Adams offer a wealth of knowledge about the Bill of Rights that goes beyond a basic understanding.The Bill of Rights Primer is an authoritative guide to all American freedoms. Uncluttered and well-organized, this audiobook is perfect for those who want to study up on the Bill of Rights without needing a law degree to do so.

This revelatory memoir by the mother of Michael Brown, the African American teenager killed by the police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, sheds light on one of the landmark events in recent history. Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil is a portrait of our time, an urgent call to action, and a moving testament to the undying bond between mothers and sons.

Religious liberty is under attack in America. Your freedom to believe may not last much longer. To all those who say they don't care about the culture war, Erick Erickson has only one response: "The Left will not let you stay on the sidelines. You will be made to care." Now the former editor in chief of RedState.com joins with Christian author Bill Blankschaen to expose the war in America on Christians and all people of faith who refuse to bow to the worst kind of religion - secularism - one intent on systematically imposing its agenda and frightening doubters into silence.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs.

The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights.

Hubert Humphrey was one of the great liberal leaders of postwar American politics, yet because he never made it to the Oval Office, he has been largely overlooked by biographers. Historian Arnold A. Offner has explored vast troves of archival records to recapture Humphrey's life, giving us previously unknown details of the vice president's fractious relationship with Lyndon Johnson, showing how Johnson colluded with Richard Nixon to deny Humphrey the presidency, and describing the most neglected aspect of Humphrey's career.

Times of great change did not occur by man's desire for change, but through protest and persistence. Across the globe, it seems we are in an era of protest and drive. Not since the '60s have we seen political divides and awareness of this magnitude, and it is shaping all aspects of our day to day life. While some feel lost in despair and fear, we can look to the past and rise up ourselves. Protest changes the world like nothing else has to date. What change do you want to fight for?

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.

In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O'Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O'Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police