Civil Government

A rallying call for extending human rights beyond our physical selves—and why we need to reboot rights in our data-intensive world. Winner of the 2024 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Shortlisted, 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize Our data-intensive world is here to stay, but does that come at the...

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She cofounded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement. This engaging memoir relates Wells’ private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed -- and how it could have continued to thrive -- with this insightful history from an award-winning author. In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged...

The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the Black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, and FBI infiltration of civil rights groups with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, Cuba, and more.

Drawing on information sequestered until recently in FBI records, Theoharis shows how these secret activities in the World War II and Cold War eras expanded FBI surveillance powers and, in the process, eroded civil liberties without substantially advancing legitimate security interests.

Richard Hanania has emerged as one of the most talked-about writers in the nation, and in this book, he puts forward a stunning new theory about the culture war that could turn our debates upside down. Richard Hanania has come out of nowhere to become one of the best-known writers in the nation...

What are our civil rights, and how are they different from our legal rights? What do gender, age, discrimination, and the U.S. Constitution have to do with our civil rights? Learn to decipher our nation's civil rights laws and learn how they protect our citizens.

From an award-winning historian of ancient Rome, a concise and comprehensive history of the fighting forces that created the Roman Empire Roman warfare was relentless in its pursuit of victory. A ruthless approach to combat played a major part in Rome's history, creating an empire that...

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond.

In 1970, C. T. Vivian, a close colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a member of his executive staff, sat down to take stock of the civil rights movement and the progress it had made. His assessment was that it failed, and that the blame lay in the existence of myths about America. As prophetic today as it was fifty years ago, Vivian's voice rings out as a critique and a call to action for a society in deep need of justice and peace. The Black struggle for independence is more of an uphill climb than ever.

A longtime immigration activist explores what it means to be an undocumented American in this “impassioned and well-reported case for change” (New York Times). In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are...

Prairie Fire is a guide for Red Counties to survive and thrive during what looks to be another Civil War brewing. Drawing on his experience in Special Forces with counterinsurgency, the author creates a step-by-step road map to making it out alive. Featuring the same gallows humor mixed with real-world examples as Concrete Jungle: A Green Beret's Guide to Urban Survival, Prairie Fire is the spiritual successor made specifically for those in rural areas.

Profiling a diverse group of US anti-authoritarians - including Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, Malcolm X, and Lenny Bruce - in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitimate Authority is the first self-help manual for anti-authoritarians. Discussing anti-authoritarian approaches to depression, relationships, and parenting, it provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and marginalization in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for "freedom" are often its most obedient and docile citizens.

"You know what our party thinks? 'We're good people with good ideas. That's enough, isn't it?' Being tough enough, mean enough, and vicious enough is just not what they want." Well, tough, mean, and vicious isn't just for Karl Rove anymore. In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party decisively ended 12 years of electoral humiliation by seizing back Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin' is the story of that historic victory, and the one man at the center on whom everything hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel.

For five long years in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade dominated the American scene, terrified politicians, and destroyed the lives of thousands of our citizens. In this masterful history, Haynes Johnson re-creates that time of crisis. Johnson tells this monumental story through the lens of its relevance to our own time, when fear again affects American behavior and attitudes.

The original ‘Yes Minister’- 32 episodes of the beloved Civil Service sitcom Featuring the hilarious exploits of the bumbling bureaucrats of the General Assistance Department, the show starred Wilfrid Hyde-White and later Deryck Guyler as the hapless ‘Number One’, with Richard Murdoch as...

A two-time Newbery Honor Book author, Jim Murphy is among the world’s finest writers of nonfiction for children. In A Savage Thunder he takes listeners back to the American Civil War to tell the terrible yet extraordinary story of the Battle of Antietam. With the entire world watching, two armies met in Maryland in 1862. The Union needed a victory. The Confederacy hoped to continue its success. When the smoke cleared, 23,000 men were dead or wounded—and the momentum had shifted to the Union.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.

When the United States government passed the Bill of Rights in 1791, its uncompromising protection of speech and of the press were unlike anything the world had ever seen before. But by 1798, the once-dazzling young republic of the United States was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly, the First Amendment, which protected harsh commentary of the weak government, no longer seemed as practical. So that July, President John Adams and the Federalists in control of Congress passed an extreme piece of legislation that made criticism of the government and its leaders a crime.

In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....