Land America

From drugstores in Sydney, Iowa, to skeet shooting in rural Illinois, to the mega churches of Minneapolis, Lenz set out to discover the changing forces of faith and tradition in God's country. Part journalism, part memoir, God Land is a journey into the heart of a deeply divided America. Lenz visits places of worship across the heartland and speaks to the everyday people who often struggle to keep their churches afloat and to cope in a land of instability.

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

When Rachel Meyer, a 30-something foodie from New York, agrees to move to Mumbai with her Indian-born husband, Dhruv, she knows some culture shock is inevitable. Blessed with a curious mind and an independent spirit, Rachel is determined to learn her way around the hot, noisy, seemingly infinite metropolis she now calls home. But the expat American’s sense of adventure is sorely tested when her mother-in-law, Swati, suddenly arrives from Kolkata - 1,000 miles away - alone, with an even more shocking announcement: She’s left her husband of more than 40 years and moving in with them.

Acclaimed archeologist and historian Karolyn Smardz Frost painstakingly resurrects Thornton and Lucie Blackburn's perilous 1830s journey from Kentucky slavery to Canadian freedom.

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start.

The phrase "land of the free" is often associated with the United States, a reflection of the country's historical narrative and the values enshrined in its founding documents, such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These documents lay the groundwork for a society that values individual liberties, democratic governance, and the rule of law.

We have a glut of text and trade books on American history. But what we don’t have is a compact, inexpensive, and authoritative book that will offer to American citizens a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their own country. Such an account can shape and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and, by making them understand that land’s roots, and share in its memories, equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society.

When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our times—from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation’s uniquely disastrous health care system—and narrates Deaton’s own account of his experiences as a naturalized US citizen and academic economist.

In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. We Are Each Other’s Harvest elevates the voices and stories of Black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.

From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times best-selling author of This Will Be My Undoing - a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with” - comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her Northern and Southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.

More than 50 years ago, an assassin's bullet robbed us of one of the most eloquent voices for 20th-century human rights and justice. Drawing on a new generation of scholarship about the civil rights era, To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of King as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class, and his call for "nonviolent resistance" to all forms of oppression, including economic injustice.

In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.

Seduced by the government’s offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century. Raban’s stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader’s dream strips away the myth—while preserving the romance—that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

The settlement of North America was the beginning of a new era in human history. The oppressive laws, habits, and customs of the Old World no longer held such power over those who had made the treacherous journey across the Atlantic. No reigning monarch or dictatorial power ever stepped onto the ground of North America. Yet, despite this, the men and women of the 13 colonies of North America were still not free until they threw off the shackles of England's government and asserted their own rights.

Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on elements of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth - a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world.

In the 1930s, Chief William Berens shared with anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell a remarkable history of his life, as well as many personal and dream experiences that held special significance for him. Most of this material has never been published. Because the elderly chief wanted his visitor to understand the Ojibwe world, and because Hallowell was deeply interested in his subject matter and was such a good listener, Berens freely related his dreams and other stories about encounters with powerful beings.

Throughout the stories here is information on how places, cities, and states got their names. However, questions arise because Native American tribes of the day didn’t yet have a written alphabet, and none of those came along until Sequoyah invented one in 1821, one that was actually more of a syllabary with symbols that stood for consonant/vowel sequences and could make words, basically just a writing system.

Chicago may be the city of broad shoulders, but its political law is "Pay to Play." Money changes hands in the middle of the night, and by morning, buildings and parks are replaced by billion-dollar projects. Chicago PI V. I. Warshawski gets pulled into one of these clandestine deals through her impetuous goddaughter, Bernie Fouchard. Bernie tries to rescue Lydia Zamir, a famed singer-songwriter now living on the streets; Zamir’s life fell apart when her lover was murdered next to her in a mass shooting at an outdoor concert.

With his Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World, John McPhee explores not only the richly varied surface of the United States, but the geological wonders hidden deep beneath our feet. In this final book of the series, he embarks on a fascinating journey across the basement of the continent - the land masses forming Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and thereabouts - with a professor and geochronologist acting as a guide.

Brinkley traces FDR's love for the natural world from his youth exploring the Hudson River Valley and bird-watching. As America's president from 1933 to 1945, Roosevelt - a consummate political strategist - established hundreds of federal migratory bird refuges and spearheaded the modern endangered species movement. He brilliantly positioned his conservation goals as economic policy to combat the severe unemployment of the Great Depression.