Civil Liberties

In the early 20th century over 200 of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names - Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney, and the like - carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.

Howard Fast's firsthand account of the infamous 1949 Peekskill riots, including historical documents, photos, and newspaper reports. In 1949, author Howard Fast found himself in the middle of a violent and terrifying anticommunist riot in Peekskill, New York. Fast was the master of ceremonies at a civil rights benefit concert featuring Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and others. But local newspapers stoked anticommunist anger, and the event was besieged by a mob armed with rocks, clubs, fence posts, and knives.

In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world.

The world’s discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: This is President Jimmy Carter’s call to action. A Call to Action addresses the suffering inflicted upon women by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare. Key verses are often omitted or quoted out of context by male religious leaders to exalt the status of men and exclude women.

In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of US immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out.

Against the backdrop of post-9/11 America, listeners are taken behind the scenes of some of the most important civil liberties cases in America. From the story of the "American Taliban" to the battle against the National Security Agency's warrantless spying program, In Defense of Our America tracks a roster of skirmishes in the larger fight for civil liberties in this country.

Books about the Kennedys are legion. Yet missing until now has been the exploration of the bond between Jack and Bobby, and the part that it played in their rise and fall. Richard D. Mahoney gives us Jack and Bobby in all their hubris and humanity, youthfulness and fatalism. Here is American history as it unfolds. The Kennedy Brothers is a fresh and masterful account of the men whose legacy continues to hold the American imagination.

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.

Extended solitary confinement has been condemned as a severe violation of human rights. Yet it is still widely used in Iranian prisons. In White Torture, thirteen women, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, share their experiences of imprisonment: harassment and beatings by guards, total blindfolding and denial of medical treatment. Angry interrogators threaten their families and lie about their whereabouts. One prisoner is even told she is dead.

Gerhardt Blume provides a unique analysis of the logic behind the various social justice movements. As he demonstrates, movements across the spectrum of social justice—from BLM to the radical gender ideology—are all deeply comprised of a common, and dangerous, Cultural-Marxist logic. The Social Justice Movement (SJM) through its inherent self-contradictions represents some very serious threats to Democracies around the world.

What J. D. Vance did for Appalachia with Hillbilly Elegy, CNN analyst and one of the youngest state representatives in South Carolina history Bakari Sellers does for the rural South, in this important book that illuminates the lives of America’s forgotten Black working-class men and women. Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South's past, present, and future.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction.

Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion?

Anthony Comstock was one of the most important men in the lives of 19th-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long prison sentences and steep fines. Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press.

In Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War Friedman takes the listener on a personal journey to understand the history of the Cohens. At the center of the story is a sensitive young man pulled between love and duty, a close-knit family straining under moral and political conflicts, and a city coming into its own.

America’s anti-gun lobby wants you to “leave guns to the professionals.” The police and military will protect you, they say. Really? Ask the people of Israel how well that worked out for them. On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis in cold blood. Civilians waited in anguish for the army or police to rescue them. Why? Because the country’s restrictive gun laws left most people unarmed. The Israeli government made an immediate about-face after October 7. They loosened gun laws to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves.

As white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, rabid misogyny, and anti-immigrant fervor coalesce, a new and uniquely American form of fascism looms. Could our current moment actually bring about the end of democracy in the United States? Are Americans willing to surrender their freedom and dignity, along with their ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and mutual respect in the face of the rising tide of political and ideological extremism?

Hubert Humphrey was one of the great liberal leaders of postwar American politics, yet because he never made it to the Oval Office, he has been largely overlooked by biographers. Historian Arnold A. Offner has explored vast troves of archival records to recapture Humphrey's life, giving us previously unknown details of the vice president's fractious relationship with Lyndon Johnson, showing how Johnson colluded with Richard Nixon to deny Humphrey the presidency, and describing the most neglected aspect of Humphrey's career.

In The Tougaloo Nine, M. J. O'Brien delves into Tougaloo College's culture of resistance, Mississippi's determination to preserve segregation, and the early stirrings of the student movement in Jackson. Through numerous interviews and years of detailed research, O'Brien tells the stories of these courageous African American students.