Freedom Civil

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

Sur un ton énergique, ironique et engagé, l'une des plus grandes voix féminines de la Révolution française, Olympe de Gouges, rédige le premier document à évoquer l'égalité juridique et légale des femmes avec celle des hommes. “Femme, réveille-toi; le tocsin de la raison se fait entendre dans tout l'univers ; reconnais tes droits. Le puissant empire de la nature n'est plus environné de préjugés, de fanatisme, de superstition et de mensonges. Le flambeau de la vérité a dissipé tous les nuages de la sottise et de l'usurpation."

From acclaimed legal historian, author of a biography of Louis Brandeis and Dissent and the Supreme Court a history of affirmative action from its beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to the first use of the term in 1935 with the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) to 1961 and John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, mandating that federal contractors take "affirmative action" to ensure that there be no discrimination by "race, creed, color, or national origin" down to today’s American society.

Phillips charts the way forward for progressives and people of color after four years of Trump, arguing that Democrats must recognize the nature of the fight we're in, which is a contest between democracy and white supremacy left unresolved after the Civil War. We will not overcome, Phillips writes, until we govern as though we are under attack—until we finally recognize that the time has come to finish the conquest of the Confederacy and all that it represents.

My mother had the right to choose, and she chose me. I wonder if life is meant to be a cycle of living to survive, or is it merely about surviving to live? I am Darius Allen, and although I don't know for sure if abortion is right or wrong, I do believe in free will. In these modern times, we look around and witness classic examples regarding abortion that result in the cause and effect we all experience. We feel a sense of deep knowing and connection, whether by choice, politics, reason, religion, or whatever institution.

Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet examine how Mississippi confronts its history of racial violence and injustice through civil rights tourism. Mississippi's civil rights memorials include a vast constellation of sites and experiences—from the humble Fannie Lou Hamer Museum in Ruleville to the expansive Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson—where the state's collective memories of the movement are enshrined, constructed, and contested.

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how and why we have come to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights. Using rich archival sources and oral interviews, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler shows how the private lives of women and men in the American Civil Liberties Union shaped their understanding of sexual rights as they built the constitutional foundation for the twentieth-century's sexual revolutions.

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.

Speech is the lifeblood of democracy, but only if we understand its true meaning and its role in sustaining our government. Key texts from the US Supreme Court, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Meiklejohn, Ida B. Wells, and Charles Lawrence illuminate the immediate questions and pressing issues of free speech.

In this updated edition, The Making of Black Lives Matter presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and expands on the movement's relevancy. This edition includes a new introduction that explores how the movement's core ideas have been challenged, re-affirmed, and re-imagined during the white nationalism of the Trump years, as well as a new chapter that examines the ideas and importance of Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka as significant participants in the Black Power Movement and Black Arts Movement, respectively.

The Plea of Innocence offers a fundamental reform of the adversarial system: plausibly innocent people may now plead innocent and require the government to search for exonerating facts; in return, they will be required to waive their right to remain silent, speak to government agents, and participate in a search for truth. While almost all the participants within the system hope that only guilty people will be convicted, the unfortunate reality is that innocent people are convicted and imprisoned at an alarming rate.

More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve the status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how, today, Tulsa combats its racist past while remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice.

More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write what they think. The reason for this extraordinary freedom is not a superior culture of tolerance, but just 14 words in our most fundamental legal document: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Anthony Lewis tells us how these rights were created, revealing a story of hard choices, heroic (and some less heroic) judges, and fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face-to-face with one of America's great founding ideas.

All Americans, liberal or conservative, religious or not, can agree that religious freedom, anchored in conscience rights, is foundational to the US democratic experiment. But what freedom of conscience means, what its scope and limits are, according to the Constitution - these are matters for heated debate.

Die USA gelten als die unverzichtbare Nation. Ohne ihre schützende Hand, heißt es oft, würde die Welt im Chaos versinken. Bernd Greiner unterzieht diese These einem Praxistest. Was macht die Ordnungsmacht, wenn sie ordnet? Und wie sehen die Weltgegenden anschließend aus, in denen Washington ordnend eingegriffen hat? Bernd Greiners Buch zeigt, wie sich in den USA der Anspruch ausbildete, als Hüter der internationalen Ordnung aufzutreten. Es zeigt auch, wie die Vorstellung entstand, Stabilität gebe es nur auf der Grundlage amerikanischer Überlegenheit.

Spanning from the nation’s earliest years through the New Deal to the Covid pandemic, a groundbreaking work that interrogates how pivotal decisions have established and continued discriminatory practices in the United States, even as the rise of disinformation and other modern advertising techniques have plunged democracy into an ever-deepening crisis.

Freiheit ist die Grundbedingung gelingender Gesellschaften. Diese Erfolgsformel scheint leichtfertig in Vergessenheit zu geraten. Mit Sorge beobachtet Hans-Jürgen Papier, wie unsere einst hart erkämpften Freiheitsrechte Stück für Stück beschnitten werden. Für den ehemaligen Präsidenten des Bundesverfassungsgerichts gilt: Auch und gerade in Krisenzeiten, bei der notwendigen Sicherstellung von Gesundheit, beim Schutz vor Bedrohungen durch Terrorismus, Klimawandel und wirtschaftliche Krisen darf die Freiheit nicht aufs Spiel gesetzt werden.

Part biography, part history, part love story, A Small Town Rises chronicles the lives of two civil rights activists who met in the tiny cotton town of Shaw at the tail end of the Mississippi Summer Project, the voting-rights campaign known as Freedom Summer. Shaw was, like countless segregated towns across the South, a pressure cooker of violent white resistance to the growing civil rights movement. The two young freedom fighters joined forces in 1964 with local Black activist Andrew Hawkins.

Radical Volunteers tells the largely unknown story of southern student activism in Tennessee between the Brown decision in 1954 and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in May 1970. As one of the first statewide studies of student activism—and one of the few examinations of southern student activism—it broadens scholarly understanding of New Left and Black student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in front of a state senator and the legal counsel for the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, nicknamed the “Johns Committee.” His crime? Being a suspected homosexual. And the government of Florida would use any tactic at their disposal—legal or not—to get Copleston to admit it.