American High

This unique and informative book provides well-documented but little-known facts that will give listeners a deeper understanding of the cultural experience of Asians in America. Michael Soon Lee powerfully reveals how he overcame prejudice and discrimination to achieve success despite these obstacles.

In Frontline Bodies, Nicolas Martin-Breteau argues that sports are not—and have never been—purely about entertainment for Black Americans. Instead, beginning in the 1890s during Reconstruction, Black Americans proactively used athletics as a tactic to fight racial oppression. Martin-Breteau considers the work of Edwin B. Henderson, a prominent Black physical educator, civil rights activist, and historian of Black sports.

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

James Longstreet's countermarch and Samuel Johnston's morning reconnaissance are two of the most enigmatic events of the Battle of Gettysburg. Both have been viewed as major factors in the Confederacy's loss of the battle and, in turn, the war. Yet much of it lies shrouded in mystery. Recognizing the multitude of factors that affect human memory, In the Shadow of the Round Tops explores how the individual soldiers experienced, remembered, and wrote about the battle, and how those memories have created a cloud over James Longstreet's countermarch and Samuel Johnston's reconnaissance.

Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration. Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy.

In late December 1776, the American War of Independence appeared to be on its last legs. General George Washington's continental forces had been reduced to a shadow of their former strength, and the British Army had chased them across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. Desperate times call for desperate measures, however, and George Washington responded to this crisis with astonishing audacity. On Christmas night 1776, he recrossed the Delaware as a nor'easter churned up the coast, burying his small detachment under howling sheets of snow and ice.

Between World War II and 1980, tens of thousands of Black people moved to Boston from the South as part of the Great Migration, one of the most consequential mass movements of people in American history. Black migration from the South transformed the city, as it did urban areas across the country. North to Boston is the first book to examine that important subject. Blake Gumprecht traces the history of this migration and explores its impacts in greater depth through the lives of ten individuals, each the subject of one chapter.

Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, Jesse McCarthy contends, "something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of Black art making". Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones.

In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed 55 whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel.

When Trump's first Deputy National Security Advisor left Washington, she disappeared from sight. Now former government official and political commentator KT McFarland returns with tenacity, resolve, and the truth about the Trump Administration and those seeking to destroy it. For decades, KT McFarland has been one of the country's most prominent conservative foreign policy experts. She was part of the Trump Revolution from the beginning. As Trump's first Deputy National Security Advisor, she had a seat at the table for everything.

Just before her father's sudden death, Cuban-American artist Veronica Gonzalez is offered her first gallery exhibit, a real chance to break into the art world. Torn between the need to mourn and the pressure to create new artwork, Veronica is propelled into a fever-dream of productivity and grief, amidst memories of her tumultuous relationship with her colorful but infuriating Cuban emigre father, a volatile man of outsize appetites and passions who never stopped longing for his homeland.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

The Land of Flickering Lights is a unique contribution to American political writing at this or any other time. Democratic Senator Michael Bennet from Colorado lifts a veil on Congress to reveal, in his words, "through a series of actual stories - about the people, the politics, the motives, the money, the hypocrisy, the stakes, the outcome - the pathological culture of the capitol and the consequences for us all."

Meet the Days, Howards, Madisons, and Lees. Four wealthy couples obsessed with keeping up appearances. Pearson, Vonita, Nadalia, and Ryan want the world to believe that they live flawlessly prosperous lives, but behind the custom-made doors of their elaborate mansions lie salacious secrets that are becoming harder to hide. Saving face may be a priority for these wives, but scandal, addiction, financial ruin, and infidelity threaten to reveal their truths to the world - and worst of all, each other.

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.

The National Book Award finalist for Refund returns with a new collection of stories that boldly examines the changes in American culture over the last two years through the increasing presence of violence, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the emotional costs of living under constant threat. In the title story, the competition between two middle school cellists is affected by a shooting at their school, and it is only years later that they realize how the intrusion of violence affected the course of their lives.

Max Pzoras is the poster child for the American dream. The child of Greek immigrants who grew up in a dangerous New York housing project, he triumphed over his upbringing and became a successful Wall Street analyst. Yet on the frigid December night that his mother dies of cancer and he's involved in a violent street scuffle, Max begins to confront the nagging questions he has about life. He begins his search for answers by impulsively traveling to India, first to the foothills of the Himalayas and then to an ashram in the drought-stricken south.

Samrat Upadhyay's thrilling new collection brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali-Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay's brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

James Page spent the majority of his life enslaved - during which time he experienced the death of his free father, witnessed his mother and brother being sold on the auction block, and was forcibly moved 700 miles south from Richmond, Virginia, to Tallahassee, Florida, by his enslaver, John Parkhill. Page would go on to become Parkhill's chief aide on his plantation and, unusually, a religious leader who was widely respected by enslaved men and women as well as by white clergy, educators, and politicians.