American Social History

We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.

Virtually anyone, anywhere knows that six million Jewish human beings were killed in the Jewish Holocaust. But how many African human beings were killed in the Black Holocaust - from the start of the European slave trade (c. 1500) to the Civil War (1865)? And how many were enslaved? The Black Holocaust, a travesty that killed millions of African human beings, is the most underreported major event in world history.

An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet...

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

In 1944, the big top of Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford caught fire during the middle of an afternoon performance. Nine thousand people were inside. In seconds, the big top was burning out of control. The toll of the fire, and its circumstances, haunt Hartford to the present day. But it is the intense, detailed narrative - before, after, and especially during the panic under the burning tent - that will remain with listeners long after they finish this book.

A sweeping look back at the protest movements that changed America from activist and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with personal and historical insights into lessons they can teach us today “A compelling case for standing up for justice at a time when everything, it seems, is on the line...

In these moving stories of Angelina Grimke Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld; Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis; and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.

In the 18th century, when Europeans first came upon the giant mounds and earthworks dotting the North American landscape, they couldn't imagine that the Native Americans they came into contact with were capable of producing such advanced technology and masterful engineering. In fact, when President George Washington sent Rufus Putnam to survey land in southeastern Ohio, Putnam reported that he'd discovered an impressive walled earthwork complex, which was obviously the work of some long-forgotten ancient civilization.

The findings from wide-ranging interviews and careful historical research, Black Genius explores the roots of Black achievement in America. The results are surprising and inspiring. Interweaving past and present, beginning with this country's inception, Russell covers the importance of continuity and tradition in nurturing Black artists, scientists, and leaders. Here are memorable portraits of Wynton Marsalis, Ralph Ellison, Louis Armstrong, Toni Morrison, Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, Lois Mailou-Jones, and other Black notables.

Twelve Years a Slave is the 1853 narrative of former slave Solomon Northup. He was born free in New York and kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was famously adapted for film in 2013.

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. For decades in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities, white women performed myriad duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, denying marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials.

In 1877, Chief Standing Bear's Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to Oklahoma - known then as Indian Territory - in what became the tribe's own Trail of Tears. "I Am a Man" chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a 600-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial grounds.

In the South of the 1890s, Booker T. Washington stood as the often controversial personification of the aspirations of the Black masses. The Civil War had ended, casting uneducated Blacks adrift or, equally tenuous, creating a class of sharecroppers still dependent on the whims of their former owners. Black Reconstruction, for all its outward trimming, had failed to deliver its promised economic and political empowerment.

In 1924, in response to the pursuit of increasingly racist policies in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois published a groundbreaking collection of essays that challenged the existing prejudices about Black people and provided a fuller accounting of Black contributions to American life. The accomplishments that Du Bois chronicles here - in art, literature, economics, religion, industry, the military, and more - are stunning, especially considering the obstacles facing Black Americans.

What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community's fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the Black church in the United States.

Joining the ranks of Evicted, The Warmth of Other Sons, and classic works of literary non-fiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, America’s most...

The host of the NBC Today Show’s popular segment shares his favorite stories of citizens making a difference around the country. For the six million people who watch the Emmy Award-winning "American Story with Bob Dotson" on NBC’s Today Show, Bob Dotson’s reports celebrate the inspirational stories of everyday Americans. Dotson has been crisscrossing the country for more than 40 years - logging more than four million miles - in search of people who have quietly but profoundly changed our lives and our counrty for the better.

Examines how Black women elders have managed stress, emphasizing how self-care practices have been present since at least the mid-19th century, with roots in African traditions. How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along.