American High

Historian Sean Wilentz presents two key insights that together reveal a clearer, much-needed vision of American political history. First, partisanship has almost always been a feature of American history and in fact has made possible the nation's greatest social reforms. There is little to be gained from a "postpartisan" political world. Second, the recent attention to economic inequality has a long history. From the founders' generation to the present, America's egalitarian tradition has appeared and reappeared like an underground river.

Before Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King was identified with Moses, African Americans identified those who challenged racial oppression in America with Samson. In Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon, Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper tell the story of how this biblical character became an icon of African American literature.

High Drama explores rock climbing's transformation from a pursuit of select anti-establishment vagabonds to a sport embraced by competitors of all ages, social classes, and backgrounds. Climbing magazine's John Burgman weaves a multi-layered story of traditionalists and opportunists, grassroots organizers and business-minded developers, free-spirited rebels and rigorously coached athletes. Deeply reported and compellingly told, this is a celebration of climbing and the pivotal figures who made its growth possible....

Think you know Elizabeth Pipko? Guess again. She's been described by many as a rising star in the conservative movement, but how did she get here? And more importantly, did she ever plan to? In Finding My Place, Elizabeth takes us back to the beginning. As the daughter of immigrants and a proud religious Jew, Elizabeth dives into the core of what drives her: the sacrifices of her parents and grandparents and all that they had to endure to make sure that she had the opportunity to live the American dream.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

In 1765, as the Stamp Act riled eastern seaports, frontiersmen clashed with the British Empire over another issue: Indian relations. When British officials launched a diplomatic expedition into the American interior to open trade with the Indian warrior Pontiac, the Black Boys formed to stop it and led an uprising that threatened the future of Britain's empire. Clashing with traders, diplomats, Native warriors, and imperious British officials, the Black Boys evolved into an organized political movement that resisted the Crown years before the Declaration of Independence.

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. The Burden expresses the voices of well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, and former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young Black Detroiter in the south.

A satirical series of reports from a young progressive student to the DNC, outlining ways to undermine the conservative movement and create a progressive nation.

Without Fear tells how, during American history, Black women made human rights theirs: from worldwide travel and public advocacy in the global Black press to their work for the United Nations, they courageously and effectively moved human rights beyond an esoteric concept to an active, organizing principle.

In Chronicles of Ori, her debut book, Harmonia Rosales retells the African myths she has long treasured, crafting an enthralling epic that spans the birth of the universe to the modern world of colonialism and resistance. She writes of the powerful, temperamental deities called the Orishas; of the founding of Yorubaland by the shrewd leader Oduduwa; of the young heroine Eve, born in a time of violence and despair, who would help her people regain their past splendor; and of shimmering serpents and monstrous shadows who stalk the lands of mortals.

It’s 1895 and 13-year-old Rory Mac, a poor, fatherless newsboy for Pulitzer’s New York World, needs a break. He gets one when Hamilton “Ton” Fish, member of the storied Fish family and star athlete at Columbia University, asks him to work his corner for an underground boxing match at McSorley’s Alehouse, setting in motion an unexpected but inspiring friendship.

Royal children no longer desire merely the throne of their kingdom. The prize they seek is a seat on the High Council as a God. The quake of footsteps from the divine shape the fabric of the realm. These All Beings walk among mortals and their children hold the titles of king and queen. When blessed blood is threatened, lines are drawn. Aron Barre II, a newly crowned ruler, is thrusted in the middle of a conflict between the rivaling kingdoms of the Fallows. The political journey he embarks on will change the course of Caldonia forever.

This is not how seventeen-year-old Gil imagined beginning his senior year—on the subway dressed in a tie and khakis headed towards Manhattan instead of his old public school in Brooklyn. Augustin Prep may only be a borough away, but the exclusive private school feels like it's a different world entirely compared to Gil's predominately Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn. If it weren't for the partial scholarship, the school's robotic program and the chance for a better future, Gil wouldn't have even considered going.

When we think of '70s cinema, we think of classics like The Godfather and Taxi Driver...but the riches found in the overlooked B-movies of the time, rolled out wherever they might find an audience, unexpectedly tell an eye-opening story about post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America. Revisiting the films that don't make the Academy Award montages, Charles Taylor finds a treasury many of us have forgotten, movies that in fact "unlock the secrets of the times".

Douglas Brinkley takes us on the incredible journey of the United States - a nation formed from a vast countryside on whose fringes 13 small British colonies fought for their freedom, then established a democratic nation that spanned the continent and went on to become a world power. This book will be treasured by anyone interested in the story of America.

By early 1951, American forces and their UN allies had been driven more than 100 miles down the Korean peninsula by the Chinese. The situation was bleak when Gen. Matthew Ridgway ordered a last stand at the village of Chipyong-ni. There a single regiment (the 23rd Infantry) of fewer than 5,000 U.S. soldiers defeated a Chinese division of 25,000 men in what has been called the Gettysburg of the Korean War.

In this memoir of a lost America, Hal Borland tells the story of his family's migration to eastern Colorado as homesteaders at the turn of the twentieth century. On an unsettled and unwelcoming prairie landscape, the Borlands build a house, plant crops, and eke out a meager existence. While life is difficult—and self-reliance is necessary with no neighbors for miles—the experience brings the family close and binds them closer to the terrible and beautiful natural patterns that govern their lives.

High Tension is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's battle against the "Power Trust", an elaborate Wall Street-controlled web of holding companies, to electrify all of America. Here is the tale of how FDR's efforts brought affordable electricity to all Americans, powered the industrial might that won World War II, and established a model for public-private solutions today in areas such as transportation infrastructure, broadband, and health care.

In Stand Up Straight and Sing!, Jessye Norman recalls in rich detail the strong women who were her role models, from her ancestors to family friends, relatives, and teachers. She hails the importance of her parents in her early learning and experiences in the arts. And she describes coming face-to-face with racism, not just as a child living in the segregated South, but also as an adult out and about in the world.

It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the great San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899 bring devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured, along with thousands of others, to the sugar plantations of Hawaii.