States Rights

On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city’s history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands.

During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president—the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate—but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium.

An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime US congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America.

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.

Since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich, and solely pro-Republican? And since when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity mean you had to put faith in God aside?

In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the US Military in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, DC. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny - like gay men and women for generations - was promptly dismissed from the military. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back.

Today’s right-wing Evangelical Christianity stands as the very antithesis of the message of Jesus Christ. In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers.

On November 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was murdered in front of hundreds of onlookers. For 50 years, the events of that day have been the subject of heated debate. The commission tasked with investigating the assassination published its findings the following year - Oswald had acted alone - but the report did little to quell conspiracy theorists.

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

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage details the impact of the blinding of Sergeant Woodard on the racial awakening of President Truman and Judge Waring and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America’s civil rights history.

Through oral histories and original interviews with surviving family members, Dan Goldberg brings 13 forgotten heroes away from the margins of history and into the spotlight. He reveals the opposition these men faced: the racist pseudoscience, the regular condescension, the repeated epithets, the verbal abuse, and even violence. Despite these immense challenges, the Golden Thirteen persisted—understanding the power of integration, the opportunities for black Americans if they succeeded, and the consequences if they failed.

There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: With righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The problem is this story simply isn’t true.

In this well-rounded, deeply investigated biography, the first full look at the vice president, two award-winning journalists unmask the real Mike Pence. In this landmark biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. As The Shadow President reveals, Mike Pence is the most important and powerful Christian right politician America has ever seen.

Most kids of color grow up talking about racism. They have “The Talk” with their families - the honest talk about survival in a racist world. But White kids don’t. They’re barely spoken to about race at all - and that needs to change. Because not talking about racism doesn’t make it go away. Not talking about White privilege doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The Other Talk begins this much-needed conversation for White kids.

The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy.

In Our Endangered Values, Carter offers a personal consideration of "moral values" as they relate to the important issues of the day. He puts forward a passionate defense of separation of church and state, and a strong warning of where the country is heading as the lines between politics and rigid religious fundamentalism are blurred.

An accurate picture of the LGBTQ rights movement's achievements is incomplete without this surprising history of how corporate America joined the cause. At a time when the LGBTQ movement is facing considerable political backlash, The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism and provides insights into the future legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.

Though they may seem to be dividing the country irreparably, today's heated cultural and political battles between right and left, progressives and the Tea Party, religious and secular are far from unprecedented. In this engaging and important work, Stephen Prothero reframes the current debate, viewing it as the latest in a number of flashpoints that have shaped our national identity.

A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history - the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the 19th century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex.