State Violence

History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. In his completely revised and expanded edition of In Small Things Forgotten, Deetz has added new sections that more fully acknowledge the presence of women and African Americans in Colonial America.

As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age.

Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire the events of 2020 had clear precursors - and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s strife, America on Fire is also a warning: Rebellions will surely continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class Black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest. As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial - which spanned several months - were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the Black community to public attention.

The murder of George Floyd sparked global outrage. At the center of the conflict and the controversy, Keith Ellison grappled with the means of bringing justice for Floyd and his family. Now, in this riveting account of the Derek Chauvin trial, Ellison takes the listener down the path his prosecutors took, offering different breakthroughs and revelations for a defining, generational moment of racial reckoning and social justice understanding.

Journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung exposes the insidious—and often unseen—connections among domestic abuse, state-based violence, political disenfranchisement, and the carceral state.

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.

Beating Guns provides a provocative look at gun violence in America and offers a clarion call to change our hearts regarding one of the most significant moral issues of our time. Best-selling author, speaker, and activist Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin show why Christians should be concerned about gun violence and how they can be part of the solution.

Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia provides an in-depth historical analysis of hostility in the region from the late 18th to the early 20th century. Editor Bruce E. Stewart discusses aspects of the Appalachian violence culture, examining skirmishes with the native population, conflicts resulting from the region's rapid modernization, and violence as a function of social control. The contributors also address geographical isolation and ethnicity, kinship, gender, class, and race with the purpose of shedding light on an often-stereotyped regional past.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

In the 19th century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between White settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slave-holding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence.

Jesus an anarchist? That doesn't sound like the Jesus preached by the political establishment, mega church pastors, or even most small town ministers. Nevertheless, Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God that makes all other political loyalties inconsequential.

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures.

The story of the birth of India's states is the story of the birth and continuing rebirth of India, the nation. It is a story that everyone in India must know, from young to old. This rigorously researched book lays out the fascinating political and historical circumstances of the birth of India's states and union territories.

From Robin D. G. Kelley, a "leading black historian of the age," Black Bodies Swinging is a fierce, distilled history of the pillage and defiance of Black America.

Pilgrimage is a sacred tradition that has existed around the world for centuries. Every year, more than 100 million devotees from different cultures and faiths embark on journeys to such holy sites as Santiago de Compostela, Mecca, and Banaras. For some, making a pilgrimage is a spiritual act, while for others it is a secular experience of personal restoration. And yet there has never existed a tradition of pilgrimage within the US. Cultural geographer James E. Mills makes a compelling case for the creation of a network of American pilgrimage routes to heal societal divisions....

When New Mexico became part of the United States, the territory contained 295 land grants, the largest of these being the Maxwell Land Grant. The size and boundaries of the grant were disputed, with some believing that much of the land was public domain. Settlers on this land were fought not only by the land grant owners but also by a group of corrupt politicians and lawyers— known as the Santa Fe Ring (most notably Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins)—who tried to use the situation for personal profit and land acquisition.

Here is the most detailed and most engagingly narrated history to date of the legendary two-year facedown and shootout in Lincoln. Until now, New Mexico's late-19th-century Lincoln County War has served primarily as the backdrop for a succession of mythical renderings of Billy the Kid in American popular culture.

In the late 1880s, Pleasant Valley, Arizona, descended into a nightmare of violence, murder, and mayhem. By the time the Pleasant Valley War was over, 18 men were dead, four were wounded, and one was missing, never to be found. Valley of the Guns explores the reasons for the violence that engulfed the settlement, turning neighbors, families, and friends against one another.

In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a "long continued course of aggression and sufferings" between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, "aggression" and "sufferings" are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South.