American Higher

Award-winning author John Ferling is a leading authority on the American Revolution. His entertaining and enlightening histories have greatly improved our understanding of early America and the Founding Fathers. Now Ferling opens a window to the past and explores the contentious presidential election of 1800.

For several years, campuses and sports teams across the country have been plagued with accusations of sexual violence, and they've been criticized for how they responded to the students involved. In Violated, two ESPN investigative reporters provide listeners with a shocking narrative of sexual crimes committed against women and a university's culture that kept them quiet.

In the spring of 2013, a study showed that despite huge economic problems, 27 states were awarding their highest salaries to college football coaches. College football has doubled in size in the last decade thanks to generous tax breaks, lavish TV deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. In one recent year, the 10 biggest programs took in $800 million from football, with profit margins far surpassing those of Fortune 500 companies.

From Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine, Blackballed is an explosive and controversial book that rips the veil off America's hidden secret: America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them hostile spaces for African American students. Blackballed exposes the white fraternity and sorority system, with traditions of racist parties and songs and assaults on black students; and the universities themselves, who name campus buildings after racist men and women.

It's a scandal that began in a place called Happy Valley. But it's not as happy as it once was, as the child-sex-abuse charges against a longtime coach and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the allegations have rocked America and Division 1 college sports. In Game Over, journalists Bill Moushey and Bob Dvorchak investigate claims of a startling cover-up within the Penn State hierarchy that attempted to protect its football legacy, quite possibly at the expense of disenfranchised children.

Colleges provide over $12 billion in financial aid and scholarships annually. Of this, $2.7 billion is awarded each year for athletic scholarships. Only six percent of high school athletes compete for that $2.7 billion. Score College Scholarships is produced from the perspective of a college applicant, who received multiple offers and earned six scholarships. With the help of this book, student-athletes, and their parents will learn the most effective strategies to get noticed by college coaches, balance academic and athletic considerations, and choose the "best fit" school.

In American Literature, all main periods are covered, from colonial times to the present movement toward cultural diversity. Also covered are key themes and personalities, with emphasis on major figures, including Ben Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Alice Walker, and many more.

Latinos are already the largest minority group in the United States, and experts estimate that by 2050, one out of three Americans will identify as Latino. Though their population and influence are steadily rising, stereotypes and misconceptions about Latinos remain, from the assumption that they refuse to learn English to questions of just how "American" they actually are.

After fighting a protracted legal battle, James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962 as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. The riot that followed his arrival on campus seriously wounded scores of U.S. marshals and killed two civilians; more casualties than any other clash of the civil rights era. To restore order, the Kennedy administration dispatched thousands of soldiers to Oxford. In The Price of Defiance, Charles Eagles shows that the stunning eruption of violence resulted from the "closed society's" long defiance of the civil rights movement and federal law.

In Hope and Healing, former Morehouse College president John Silvanus Wilson, Jr. looks to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to examine what it takes not only to survive as a relevant institution of higher education, but to thrive. Wilson draws on pivotal moments in the timelines of HBCUs and the work of past visionaries to yield important perspectives on the future of higher education and the role of HBCUs within it.

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in expanding American democracy. In The Power of Black Excellence, Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1865.

On April 4, 1968, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., shocked the nation. Later that month, the Reverend John Brooks, a professor of theology at the College of the Holy Cross who shared Dr. King’s dream of an integrated society, drove up and down the East Coast searching for African American high school students to recruit to the school, young men he felt had the potential to succeed if given an opportunity. Among the twenty students he had a hand in recruiting that year were Clarence Thomas and Theodore Wells....

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions - and university responses to them - expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education.

In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America’s so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university - in states from California to Maine - Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation’s founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good?

If you are a young person, and you work hard enough, you can get a college degree and set yourself on the path to a good life, right? Not necessarily, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, and with Paying the Price, she shows in damning detail exactly why. Drawing on an unprecedented study of 3,000 young adults who entered public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008 with the support of federal aid and Pell Grants, Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls.

Wild mustangs, ghosts on the ranch, gun-toting outlaws and trailblazing cowboys roam the pages of this collection of 8 classic stories about the American frontier. Travel down "The Road to Hell" with a mysterious ranch builder, face down the "Yellow Devil" mountain lion, travel "Where the Wind Blows Free," and join in on a herd of other adventures that will keep you reading until long after high noon.

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for 100 years.

With My Face to the Enemy is one of the most provocative and wide-ranging anthologies on the Civil War to come along in years. Its illuminating essays examine the war from perspectives that were critical to its outcome - the larger-than-life personalities of its important players and the national strategies and key battle tactics that shaped the four-year-long crisis.

Through historical newspaper accounts and the personal letters of soldiers, the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself are stunningly recreated. You will enter the mind of Robert E. Lee as he makes the fateful decision to cross the Potomac River and take the offensive. You will feel the frustration of Abraham Lincoln as he struggles to convince George McClellan to fight. And you will stand side-by-side with foot soldiers as the peaceful Maryland countryside explodes.

The debate over sexual violence on campus is reaching fever pitch, from headlines about out-of-control fraternities to the "mattress protests" by female students at Columbia University and other colleges. The Hunting Ground, the new documentary by award-winning filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, has taken this debate to a new level, becoming a galvanizing catalyst for discussion at the hundreds of campuses where the documentary is being screened each month.