American Sociology

Thirty years ago, the best-selling "letter to the government", Work in America, was published to national acclaim, including front-page coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. It sounded an alarm about worker dissatisfaction and the effects on the nation as a whole.

The Hood Needs Love Too! delves into the struggles and triumphs of marginalized communities, shedding light on the systemic issues we face and offering a message of hope and empowerment. With a keen focus on the vital pillars of Collective Strength, Spiritual Resilience, and Economic Empowerment, it aims to challenge stereotypes, dismantle prejudices, and ignite a sense of unity and compassion among listeners. Brooks equips listeners with the tools for liberation.

In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and under what conditions such a collective identification emerges, as well as how the mobilization of collective action around an ideology of whiteness and white superiority.

Asks what has happened to English football and how we can launch a revolution amongst English fandom in order not just to take back control of the game, but invent new ways our society and economy can work in the interest of the people again. Football has always been the People's Game and even after three decades of clubs being loaded with debt, ticket prices hiked, and fans blasted with gambling ads, football persists as a source of solidarity, civic engagement and national and international pride.

A welfare capitalist, Henry Ford was a leader on many fronts - he raised wages, increased leisure time, and transformed workers into consumers, and he was the most effective at making suburbs an intrinsic part of American life. The decade was dominated by this new political economy - also known as "Fordism" - linking mass production and consumption. The rise of Dearborn demonstrated that Fordism was connected to mass suburbanization as well. Ultimately, Dearborn proved to be a model that was repeated throughout the nation.

Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots - high school and youth travel program - are withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport. But the very thing that makes them so good at football - their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image - makes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries.

In his impassioned-yet-measured book, Rafael A. Mangual offers an incisive critique of America's increasingly radical criminal justice reform movement, and makes a convincing case against the pursuit of "justice" through mass-decarceration and depolicing. After a summer of violent protests in...

America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America's western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny - this is the city-state of Los Angeles.

In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side.

In Dreams of the Overworked, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian offer vivid sketches of daily life for nine families, capturing what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of impossible expectations, now amplified unlike ever before by smart devices. We are invited into homes and offices, where we recognize the crushing pressure of unraveling plans, and the healing warmth of being together. Moreover, we witness the constant planning that goes into a "good" day, often with the aid of phones and apps.

One in 10 American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision - incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in 33 American children - and one in eight African American children - goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society. Journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status.

In this provocative book, Jonathan Rothwell draws on the latest empirical evidence from across the social sciences to demonstrate how rich democracies have allowed racial politics and the interests of those at the top to subordinate justice. He looks at the rise of nationalism in Europe and the United States, revealing how this trend overlaps with racial prejudice and is related to mounting frustration with a political status quo that thrives on income inequality and inefficient markets. But economic differences are by no means inevitable.

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace presents a “carefully observed journalistic account [that] widens our view of the modern ‘immigrant experience’” (The New York Times Book Review) as he closely follows four Los Angeles high school boys as...

In 1654, 23 Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington's army during the American Revolution.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform.

On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Diaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.

Bankruptcy and the austerity it represents have become a common "solution" for struggling American cities. What do the spending cuts and limited resources do to the lives of city residents? In Broke, Jodie Adams Kirshner follows seven Detroiters as they navigate life during and after their city's bankruptcy.

For over 60 million people, work in America has been a story of declining wages, insecurity, and unsafe conditions, especially amid the coronavirus epidemic. This new and troubling reality has galvanized media and policymakers, but all the while a different and little-known story of rebirth and struggle has percolated just below the surface. On the Job is the first account of a new kind of labor movement, one that is happening locally, quietly, and among our country's most vulnerable - but essential - workers.

In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience-store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing", Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being - and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead.

What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not.