Featured Books

1877

America's Year of Living Violently

Michael A. Bellesiles

A sweeping history that brilliantly recaptures one of the few truly pivotal years in U.S. history, with a flamboyant cast of characters from Billy the Kid to John D. Rockefeller

The Citizen Machine

Governing by Television in 1950s America

Anna McCarthy

The little-known civic mission of early television broadcasting, recounted by a star in Cinema Studies

Framing Innocence

A Mother's Photographs, a Prosecutor's Zeal, and a Small Town's Response

Lynn Powell

The story of how innocent photographs taken by a mother of her child became the heart of a wrenching legal battle—an unforgettable book that “restores the truth of a family's life”  (Sally Mann)

Lift Every Voice

The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement

Patricia Sullivan

Now in paperback: an epic narrative of the struggle against injustice, hailed as "the definitive history of the NAACP" by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Lives We Carry with Us

Profiles of Moral Courage

Robert Coles

Edited by David D. Cooper

A dozen brilliant portraits by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Andrew Greeley described as a “social scientist, humanist, political activist, psychiatrist, minstrel, wandering storytelling, mystic, wise man, poet dissenter"

Losing Our Cool

Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)

Stan Cox

A freewheeling and groundbreaking investigation into how our growing reliance on air conditioning has transformed the planet—and its continuing consequences for us all

The Lost Soul of Higher Education

Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University

Ellen Schrecker

The response to Tenured Radicals and Illiberal Education—a major critique of how political and financial attacks on the academy are undermining our system of higher education

Not Written in Stone

Learning and Unlearning American History Through 200 Years of Textbooks

Kyle Ward

PAPERBACK ORIGINAL: In the great tradition of James R Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, a teaching version of the book that offers a crash course in the “history of history,” and how contemporary prejudices color the way each generation looks at the nation’s past

Say It Loud

Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity

Edited by Catherine Ellis and Stephen Drury Smith

Following the pathbreaking Say it Plain—a book and MP3 set that allows Americans to relive the oratorical highlights of the modern struggle for racial equality and civil rights

Stayin’ Alive

The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

Jefferson Cowie

The tortuous path from Nixon to Reagan—think Archie Bunker, Dog Day Afternoon, and Merle Haggard—in a major new work on the cultural and political history of the 1970s, from a prizewinning historian

The Sylvia Chronicles

30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama

Nicole Hollander

PAPERBACK ORIGINAL: Three decades of questionable American fashions, relationships, and politics - as seen through the eyes of one of our most beloved comic characters.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life

Thomas Geoghegan

The renowned labor lawyer and acclaimed author poses the question of the moment: where are we better off—America or Europe (And why is Germany outcompeting us)

The World According to Monsanto

Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply

Marie-Monique Robin

Winner of the Rachel Carson prize, an explosive exposé of the disturbing practices of the world’s most influential multinational agricultural corporation

The World Has Changed

Conversations with Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd

A stunning illumination of the heart and mind of one of the world’s most celebrated living writers