White America

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans - an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of Southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed.

The size and stability of the American middle class were once the envy of the world. But changes unleashed in the 1960s pitted Americans against one another politically in new and destructive ways. These battles continued to rage from that day to now, while everyone has fallen behind economically except the wealthy. Right-wing culture warriors blamed the decline on the moral shortcomings of "other" Americans - black people, feminists, gays, immigrants, union members - to court a fearful white working- and middle-class base with ever more bitter "us vs. them" politics.

This riveting exposé details how a small team of auditors and investigators, led by the youngest State Auditor in the country, uncovered a brazen scheme where the powerful stole millions in welfare funds from the poor in a sprawling conspiracy that stretched from Mississippi to Malibu.

November 10, 1898, is a day that North Carolina will quietly remember forever. By sunset of that very day, a confirmed 60 people had been massacred, and white supremacists had overthrown the local Black government (elected only two days prior) in a violent and deadly coup d’état. The United States of America may have seen vast amounts of violence, a lot of which had been on its soil, but this massacre was unique - this was the only coup to ever occur on American soil.

Our region is experiencing a momentous transition. The US-led order is fading, and China has become ever more powerful. Today the question we face is not whether we fancy living in an Asia in which power is shared between the United States and China. It is how we feel about living in an Asia in which America no longer plays any significant strategic role. In this controversial and gripping essay, Hugh White looks at what has happened to the US globally.

It’s no secret that our country has a serious problem when it comes to wealth inequality–and systemic racism and patriarchy have only exacerbated the advantages of wealthy white men. Over the past three decades, America’s richest white men have only become richer, while those suffering in poverty have only gotten poorer. The divide may seem too great to bridge, but Rich White Men exposes the hidden and insidious ways that white male elites inherit, increase, and preserve their status—and, in this book, we get clear on how to uproot their monopoly on power.

A major new history of the fight for racial equality in America, arguing that fear of Black sexuality has undergirded white supremacy from the start.

The history of the ubiquitous pine tree is wrapped up with the history of early America - and in the hands of a gifted storyteller becomes a compelling listen, almost an adventure story.

Examinando retórica, normas políticas, literatura popular y las teorías científicas a lo largo de 400 años, Nacny Isenberg rechaza las suposiciones sobre la sociedad libre de clases de Estados Unidos, donde la libertad y el trabajo duro te garantizan una verdadera movilidad social. Los blancos pobres miserables y sin tierra han existido desde la época del primer asentamiento colonial británico hasta los actuales "hillbillies".

If you think of our 34th president as little more than the babysitter-in-chief during the prosperous fifties, think again. Dwight Eisenhower was bequeathed an atomic bomb and was the first American president not to use it. He ground down Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism until both became, as he said, "McCarthywasm".

Since the New Deal in the 1930s, there have been two eras in our political history: the liberal era, stretching up to the 1970s, followed by the neoliberal era of privatization and austerity ever since. In each period, the dominant ideology was so strong that it united even partisan opponents. But the neoliberal era is collapsing, and the central question of our time is what comes next. As acclaimed legal scholar and policy expert Ganesh Sitaraman argues, two political visions now contend for the future.

With an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, the United States Marine Corps - the last all-white branch of the U.S. military - was forced to begin recruiting and enlisting African Americans. The first black recruits received basic training at the segregated Camp Montford Point, adjacent to Camp Lejeune, near Jacksonville, North Carolina.

David Henry White, a free Black teenage sailor from Lewes, Delaware, was kidnapped by Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate raider Alabama on October 9, 1862, from the Philadelphia-based packet ship Tonawanda. In a best-selling postwar memoir, Semmes falsely described White as a contented slave who remained loyal to the Confederacy. In Kidnapped at Sea, archaeologist Andrew Sillen uses a forensic approach to describe White’s enslavement and demise and illustrates how White’s actual life belies the Lost Cause narrative his captors sought to construct.

Simon Majumdar is probably not your typical idea of an immigrant. As he says, "I'm well rested, not particularly poor, and the only time I ever encounter 'huddled masses' is in line at Costco." But immigrate he did, and thanks to a Homeland Security agent who asked if he planned to make it official, the journey chronicled in Fed, White, and Blue was born. In it, Simon sets off on a trek across the United States to find out what it really means to become an American, using what he knows best: food.

Lloyd Constantine began his career in legal services, representing impoverished clients in civil rights and constitutional cases. Decades later, he would make headlines for representing retailers and consumers against a cartel that undermined one of the fundamental tenets of commerce in America: competition. A man who thrives on competition himself, Constantine now gives us the insider's story on the biggest antitrust lawsuit in history - a case that pitted his small firm against financial-industry giants Visa and MasterCard, along with Clifford-Chance, the largest law firm in the world.

Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans - including most history teachers - think the Confederate States seceded for "states' rights". The 150th anniversary of secession and Civil War provides a moment for all Americans to hear these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and coeditor Edward H. Sebesta to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.

When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him "clean and articulate", he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

Joe Mitchell was born in North Idaho in 1963 and lived on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation for 18 years. The humor in the stories may make you willing to learn a little history, and think about life on the rez in a new way.

When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary's skin was so light that she "passed" as White, and this fact would make her the key to his White audience's sympathy.