Social Civil

A gripping history of the Security Service and its covert surveillance on British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century.

"An important, strenuously argued contribution to the case against our nation's scandalous narcotics policies and laws. Particularly valuable are the the encyclopaedic historical and anthropological perspectives which the author brings to bear on our cultural crisis." (Peter Dale Scott, English Department, University of California, Berkeley, author of Cocaine Politics, Deep Politics, Crime & Cover-Up, Coming to Jakarta)

In this multifaceted portrait, acclaimed Lincoln biographer Stephen B. Oates, “the most popular historical interpreter of Lincoln” (Gabor S. Boritt, New York Times Book Review), exposes the human side of the great and tragic president - including his depression, his difficulties with love, and his troubled and troubling attitudes about slavery - while also confronting the many legends that have arisen around “Honest Abe”. Oates throughout raises timely questions about what the Lincoln mythos reveals about the American people.

In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, countless Black citizens endured violent resistance and even death while fighting for their constitutional rights. One of those citizens, Clyde Kennard, a Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attempted repeatedly to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College in the late 1950s. In A Slow, Calculated Lynching, Devery S. Anderson tells the story of a man who paid the ultimate price for trying to attend a white college during Jim Crow.

In his groundbreaking new book, Counterpunch, Floyd G. Brown issues both the battle cry and a strategic action plan for a populist movement in America that goes beyond any president or political party. Issue by issue, the Left chooses new markers in the sand and waits to see who will embrace their agenda. Those who don't are canceled and silenced. This leads to alienation and the feeling that violence is the only option left. Brown wants listeners to know there is another way, a civil disobedience of the state that allows us to be peaceful—and potentially more successful.

An acclaimed sportswriter offers an inside look at the Black quarterbacks whose skill and grit transformed the NFL In Rocket Men, John Eisenberg offers the definitive history of Black quarterbacks in the NFL—men who shaped not only the history of football but the cause of civil rights in...

Winning the Second Civil War is based on the current threat demonstrated in the 2020 Antifa/BLM riots and current unrest including the storming of the US Capitol, exacerbated by the deep problems with the 2020 election. The book includes analysis of the history, legality, and consequences of violent protest. It explores what the founders contemplated, what has been attempted before, and how those things influence what is playing out now.

In this pioneering study of the long and arduous struggle for civil rights in South Carolina, longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured—as well as those who risked their lives for equality. Through extensive research and interviews with more than 150 civil rights activists, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins.

What has happened to the dream of beloved community embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement of the early 1960s—the vision of a just, humane, and colorblind America, a nation of "black and white together" animated by mutual respect and strengthened by the bonds of brotherly love? As Adam Gussow shows, the dream, although pressured on every front, remains alive. At the heart of My Family and I is Gussow's determination to live out the meaning of America's creed.

John Brown was fiercely committed to the militant abolitionist cause, a crusade that culminated in Brown’s raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859 and his subsequent execution. Less well known is his devotion to his family, and they to him. Two of Brown’s sons were killed at Harpers Ferry, but the commitment of his wife and daughters often goes unacknowledged. As detailed by Laughlin-Schultz, Brown’s second wife and his daughters were in many ways the most ordinary of women. However, they also lived extraordinary lives.

In The Second Amendment, Michael Waldman traces the ongoing argument on gun rights from the Bill of Rights to the current day. Now, in The Fight to Vote, Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at an even more crucial struggle: the past and present effort to define and defend government based on "the consent of the governed". From the writing of the Constitution, and at every step along the way, as Americans sought the right, others have fought to stop them.

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early 20th century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal, but it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and have been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.

The grandson of a slave, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family to an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. When his neighbors attempted to drive him out, Sweet defended himself, resulting in the death of a white man and a murder trial for Sweet. There followed one of the most important (and shockingly unknown) cases in Civil Rights history. Also caught up in the intense courtroom drama were legal giant Clarence Darrow and the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza exposes lesser-known aspects of racism in American history and how Black people have consistently been depicted as responsible for their own oppression to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and gross inequality. Goza’s iconoclastic and incisive account exposes how revered figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln embedded white supremacy deep into our nation’s consciousness—and how Ronald Reagan manipulated this ideology so that society cheered as he advanced a set of policies that wounded our nation and intensified Black America’s suffering.

History, race, and politics converged in the 1960s in ways that indelibly changed America. In Justice Rising, a landmark reconsideration of Robert Kennedy’s life and legacy, Patricia Sullivan draws on government files, personal papers, and oral interviews to reveal how he grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader.

Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era.

This program is read by the author, Will Jawando, who has been called “the progressive leader we need” by the late congressman John Lewis. "Will Jawando's account of mentorship, service, and healing lays waste to the racist stereotype of the absent Black father. By arguing that Black fathers...

The Water Dancer meets The Prophets in this spare, gripping, and beautifully rendered novel exploring love and friendship among a group of enslaved Black strivers in the mid-19th century. They call themselves the Stolen. Their owners call them captives. They are taught their captors’ tongues...

In this ambitious - even radical - literary collection, first published in 1920, civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois tackled race, gender, art, politics, labor, and economics from the perspective of an African American who, in his own words, had “been in the world, but not of it.” Du Bois took an experimental approach in Darkwater - utilizing essays, poetry, spirituals, sketches, and autobiographical writings - to break new ground on issues of race, class, and prejudice that continue to confound us.

A unique and timeless guide to American government and its electoral process - as relevant today as when it was first published in 1972 - from the voice of Black consciousness, cultural icon Dick Gregory, the incomparable satirist, human rights and environmental activist, health advocate, social justice champion, and author of the NAACP Image Award-winning Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies.