Roots Social Science

In her memoir, Giorgia Meloni speaks about herself in depth for the first time. She talks about her roots, her childhood, and her relationship with her mother Anna, her sister Arianna, her grandparents Maria and Gianni, and the pain of her father’s absence. She shares her visceral passion for politics, which took her from her neighborhood of Garbatella to the Government as a Minister, and then to the leadership of Fratelli d’Italia and the European Conservatives.

The fundamental drive to answer these questions is at the heart of Finding Your Roots, the companion book to the hit PBS documentary series. As Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. shows us, the tools ofcutting-edge genomics and deep genealogical research now allow us to learn more about our roots, looking further back in time than ever before. Gates' investigations take on the personal and genealogical histories of more than twenty luminaries.

August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the "creation myth" of settler colonialism and how the US was formed.

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.

Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians expressed pervasive anxiety about Jews as equal members of society, and, with European expansion in the early modern period, that anxiety extended to people of color. This troubling legacy still haunts us today. Christian Supremacy demonstrates how theological and legal frameworks created by the church centuries ago laid the seeds of antisemitism and anti-Black racism and reveals why Christian identity lies at the heart of the world’s violent white supremacy movements.

The Communist Manifesto stands as one of the most influential and incendiary documents in modern history, a concise yet world-shaking declaration that exposed the deep fractures beneath industrial society and demanded that listeners reconsider every assumption about wealth, labor, and power.

Individual liberty rarely vanishes overnight. It erodes gradually—quietly, incrementally, and often in the name of good intentions. In The Forbidden Idea, Mark A. Monoscalco challenges the assumptions that have shaped modern political and economic thought, arguing that human flourishing depends on unfettered minds and voluntary cooperation—not coercion, central planning, or wealth redistribution.

The southern Appalachians are rich in folk magic and witchery. This book explores the region's customs and traditions for magical healing, luck, prosperity, and more. Author Byron Ballard - known as the village witch of Asheville, North Carolina - teaches you about the old ways and why they work, from dowsing to communicating with spirits.

Language does not merely divide or connect; it resonates. The Mutual Enrichment of Languages explores the hidden kinship among the Germanic tongues and reveals how meaning expands when words diverge yet remain bound by a shared inner form. Moving beyond academic linguistics, this book offers a philosophical exploration of how recognition arises in the mind when familiar roots return in altered shapes across Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Old English.

The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists.

Western culture hates the fact that we have bodies-from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture.

Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America's moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation's racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early anti-drug laws in the United States arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how United States drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity.

Forensic Science Errors and Wrongful Convictions: Case Studies and Root Causes provides a rigorous and detailed examination of two key issues: the continuing problem of wrongful convictions and the role of forensic science in these miscarriages of justice.

From the family to the workplace to the marketplace, every facet of our lives is shaped by cooperative interactions. Yet everywhere we look, we are confronted by proof of how difficult cooperation can be - snarled traffic, polarized politics, overexploited resources, social problems that go ignored. The benefits to oneself of a free ride on the efforts of others mean that collective goals often are not met. But compared to most other species, people actually cooperate a great deal. Why is this?

Eminent scholar Peter Irons makes a powerful and persuasive case that Blacks have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions that can hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children, this searing and sobering account of legal and extra-legal violence against Blacks peels away the fictions and myths expressed by White racists.

John A. Thompson takes a long view of America's dramatic rise as a world power, from the late 19th century into the post-World War II era. He shows how American leaders from Wilson to Truman developed an ever more capacious understanding of the national interest, and why by the 1940s most Americans came to support the price tag, in blood and treasure, attached to strenuous efforts to shape the world. The beliefs and emotions that led them to do so reflected distinctive aspects of U.S. culture, not least the strength of ties to Europe.

They shed their skin at midnight and ride the sleeping... In the shadowy corners of Louisiana's bayous, an ancient terror still prowls. The Boo Hag—a shapeshifting spirit that slips from its skin to torment the innocent—represents one of America's most enduring supernatural traditions, rooted in the profound spiritual heritage of enslaved Africans. Anthropologist David G. Stone takes listeners on a haunting journey through centuries of hidden folklore, revealing how these malevolent spirits evolved from West African cosmology into distinctly American entities.

The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society and a place apart from human ideas and institutions. But as environmental historian - and thru-hiker - Sarah Mittlefehldt argues, the trail is also a conduit for community engagement and a model for public-private cooperation and environmental stewardship. In Tangled Roots, Mittlefehldt tells the story of the trail’s creation.

This book explains the historical roots of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, which has lost none of its explosiveness to the present day, in a comprehensive and easy-to-understand manner. The question of who owns the Holy Land is more relevant today than ever. The debates on this topic are often characterized by ignorance and strong emotions, while partiality and power interests still obscure the view on the political situation in the Middle East.

In July 2012, aged 30, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery and felt for the first time that her body matched the person she felt she had been since childhood. Through university and then in a series of dead end clerical jobs, Jacques felt out of place with her surroundings, and with who she really was. Living in Brighton, trying to launch a career as a writer, she navigates the hostilities and misunderstandings of growing up in a time when the mainstream media - and even feminism - fail to acknowledge transgender identity.