Justice History

Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. E

It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?

Distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

From nineteenth-century abolitionism to Black Lives Matter today, progressive social movements have been at the forefront of social change. Yet it is seldom recognized that such movements have not only engaged in political action but also posed crucial philosophical questions about the meaning of justice and about how the demands of justice can be met. Michele Moody-Adams argues that anyone who is concerned with the theory or the practice of justice—or both—must ask what can be learned from social movements.

From cultural appropriation and sustainability to diversity, inclusion, and venture capitalism, Psychedelic Justice: Toward a Diverse and Equitable Psychedelic Culture examines the history of psychedelics, celebrates its present moment, and contemplates how advocates and policymakers can shape the future integration of psychedelics into general society.

In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched. That remains an undisputed fact of the case that ignited a flame within the Civil Rights Movement that has yet to be extinguished. Yet the rest of the details surrounding the event remain distorted by time and too many tellings. What does justice mean in the resolution of a cold case spanning nearly seven decades?

Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying Black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes 19 extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through US history and back to Africa.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Fans have begun to realize that the athletes involved in the two biggest college sports, men's basketball and football, are little more than indentured servants. Millions of teenagers accept scholarships to chase their dreams of fame and fortune - at the price of absolute submission to the whims of an organization that puts their interests dead last.

It's 1963, and Detroit is on top of the world. The city's leaders are among the most visionary in America. It was the American auto makers' best year; the revolution in music and politics was underway. Walter Reuther's UAW had helped lift the middle class. Once in a Great City shows that the shadows of collapse were evident even then. Yet so much of what Detroit gave America lasts.

The Awakening of Malcolm X is a powerful narrative account of the activist's adolescent years in jail, written by his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz along with 2019 Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe award-winning author, Tiffany D. Jackson.

New York Times best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations - denunciations by the press, rejection from the president, dismissal by the country's Black middle class and militants, assaults on his character, ideology, and political tactics, to name a few - all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty, and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

Zack Brewer faces a choice. It can prevent the next war. But it will cost the life of the person he loves the most.

JAG Officer Zack Brewer's prosecution of three terrorists posing as Navy chaplains was called the "court martial of the century" by the press. Now, with the limelight behind him, all Zack wants to do is forget. But the radical Islamic organization behind the chaplains has a long memory - and a thirst for revenge.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet.

As the U.S. Navy searches for weapons-grade plutonium that has been smuggled by terrorists out of Russia, a submarine mishap in the Black Sea brings the United States and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. It is a race against the clock, with Russian missiles activated and programmed for American cities.

From acclaimed legal historian, author of a biography of Louis Brandeis and Dissent and the Supreme Court a history of affirmative action from its beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to the first use of the term in 1935 with the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) to 1961 and John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, mandating that federal contractors take "affirmative action" to ensure that there be no discrimination by "race, creed, color, or national origin" down to today’s American society.

A significant element of the justice system is dedicated to finding those on the run, and the most-wanted posters and true-crime television shows have made fugitives seemingly ubiquitous figures of fear and fascination for the public. In On the Lam, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella trace the history of fugitives in the United States by looking at the characters - real and fictional - who have played the roles of the hunter and the hunted. They also examine the origins of the bail system and other legal tools, such as most-wanted programs, that are designed to guard against flight.

In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating a portrait which expands beyond documentation into a private realm where truth meets metaphor.

Y en a marre ! Marre de ces équipes de la hargne, de la rogne et de la grogne contre Napoléon ! Le coup de gueule d'un historien en colère. Exaspéré par les polémiques qui surgissent à tout bout de champ sur Napoléon, relatives particulièrement à l'esclavage, au patriarcat, à sa dictature ou aux guerres que l'empereur a menées, Thierry Lentz y répond dans cet essai argumenté, au ton vif et personnel.

The Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times presents a richly detailed, news-breaking, and conversation-changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death - using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital.