Roots Social Science

The southern Appalachians are rich in folk magic and witchery. This book explores the region's customs and traditions for magical healing, luck, prosperity, and more. Author Byron Ballard - known as the village witch of Asheville, North Carolina - teaches you about the old ways and why they work, from dowsing to communicating with spirits.

Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America's moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation's racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early anti-drug laws in the United States arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how United States drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity.

In the tradition of Daniel Boorstin, the co-founder of Omni delivers an original work of history that demonstrates why modern science rests on a foundation built by ancient and medieval non-European societies. "If you think that modern science is rooted in the golden age of Greece, you owe it to yourself to [hear this] book," says Library Journal.

Jessica Carew Kraft, an urban wife and mom of two, was rooted in the modern world, complete with a high-powered career in tech and the sneaking suspicion that her lifestyle was preventing her and her family from truly thriving. Determined to find a better way, Jessica quit her job and set out to learn about "rewilding" from people who reject the comforts and convenience of civilization by using ancient tools and skills to survive. Along the way, she found an entire community walking the path back from our technology-focused, anxiety-ridden way of life to a simpler, more human experience.

Western culture hates the fact that we have bodies-from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture.

The fundamental drive to answer these questions is at the heart of Finding Your Roots, the companion book to the hit PBS documentary series. As Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. shows us, the tools ofcutting-edge genomics and deep genealogical research now allow us to learn more about our roots, looking further back in time than ever before. Gates' investigations take on the personal and genealogical histories of more than twenty luminaries.

Written with wit and narrative force, Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels is an enriching excursion into the world of folk medicine. The award-winning team of Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein provide a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of medical traditions. In addition to the honey, mud, and maggots used in wound therapy, the Root-Bernsteins unearth cures that range from ancient Egypt to the rain forests of contemporary Latin America.

Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians expressed pervasive anxiety about Jews as equal members of society, and, with European expansion in the early modern period, that anxiety extended to people of color. This troubling legacy still haunts us today. Christian Supremacy demonstrates how theological and legal frameworks created by the church centuries ago laid the seeds of antisemitism and anti-Black racism and reveals why Christian identity lies at the heart of the world’s violent white supremacy movements.

Karl Marx, coauthor of the revolutionary text The Communist Manifesto, grew up in a Christian family, and his early writings showed belief in a Christian worldview. Yet in his adulthood, Marx embraced a deep personal rebellion against God and all Christian values. In Karl Marx and the Satanic Roots of Communism, Richard Wurmbrand explores the development of Marx’s antireligious perspective that led to the philosophical foundations of communism.

There was a time when Israel could do no wrong in America's eyes. That time is long past, and justly so - no nation is absolutely perfect, particularly not one that is engaged in a conflict as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the myth of the perfect Israel has been supplanted by a far more deleterious myth: the myth of the evil Israel. This new myth has so pervaded contemporary culture that the history of Israel - as well documented as it is - has been recast and retold to fit a false narrative of Israel as violent occupier.

This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book includes a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence.

Is privilege real or imagined? It's clear that issues of race and equality have come to the forefront in our nation's consciousness. Every week yet another incident involving racial tension splashes across headlines and dominates our news feeds. But it's not easy to unpack the origins of these tensions, and perhaps we wonder whether any of these issues really has anything to do with us. Ken Wytsma, founder of The Justice Conference, understands these questions.

In Far-Right Vanguard, John Huntington shows how, for almost a century, the far right has forced so-called "respectable" conservatives to grapple with their concerns, thereby intensifying right-wing thought and forecasting the trajectory of American politics. Ultraconservatives of the 20th century were the vanguard of modern conservatism as it exists in the Republican Party of today.

In July 2012, aged 30, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery and felt for the first time that her body matched the person she felt she had been since childhood. Through university and then in a series of dead end clerical jobs, Jacques felt out of place with her surroundings, and with who she really was. Living in Brighton, trying to launch a career as a writer, she navigates the hostilities and misunderstandings of growing up in a time when the mainstream media - and even feminism - fail to acknowledge transgender identity.

In the last five years, eight states have legalized recreational marijuana. To many, continued progress seems certain. But pot was on a similar trajectory 40 years ago, only to encounter a fierce backlash. In Grass Roots, historian Emily Dufton tells the remarkable story of marijuana's crooked path from acceptance to demonization and back again and of the thousands of grassroots activists who made changing marijuana laws their life's work.

Why We Hate tackles a pressing issue of both longstanding interest and fresh relevance: why a social species like Homo sapiens should nevertheless be so hateful to itself. We go to war and are prejudiced against our fellow human beings. We discriminate on the basis of nationality, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Why are humans at once so social and so hateful to each other? In this book, Michael Ruse looks at scientific understandings of human hatred, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead.

Ewan Forbes was born to a wealthy, landowning family, holders of a baronetcy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1912. Assigned female at birth, his true identity was nevertheless clear even in childhood - and so, with the support of his mother, he was taken to European specialists and eventually treated with early preparations of synthetic testosterone. Socially obliged to present himself as a girl in public until his official coming out to the Queen, Ewan lived a quiet life as a husband, doctor, and a pillar of the local community.

Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the US.

Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, Black feminism, visual culture, film studies and political economy to explore the history of Black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.