Social Civil

In Revolutionary Power, Shalanda Baker arms those made most vulnerable by our current energy system with the tools they need to remake the system in the service of their humanity. She argues that people of color, poor people, and indigenous people must engage in the creation of the new energy system in order to upend the unequal power dynamics of the current system.

The life story of the most controversial, volatile, misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights. At a time of increasing gun violence in America, Waldman's book provoked a wide range of discussion. This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers. The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men - who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present.

The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights.

Ben Mattlin lives a normal, independent life. Why is that interesting? Because Mattlin was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital weakness from which he was expected to die in childhood. Not only did Mattlin live through childhood, he became one of the first students in a wheelchair to attend Harvard, from which he graduated and became a professional writer. His advantage?

When 6-year-old Ruby Bridges and her mother went to William Frantz Elementary School on November 14, 1960, they arrived to find an angry crowd of white people shouting racist insults. For her safety, Ruby had to be escorted to school every day by U.S. Marshals. But despite the hateful attitudes of others, Ruby didn't miss a single day of school that year.

Most people have heard about Rosa Parks’s brave actions that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. But there were other Black women who challenged segregation in transportation. Three years earlier, Sarah Keys Evans—a veteran—refused to give up her seat on a bus traveling through the South.

It's March 2, 1955, and an ordinary 15-year-old girl from Montgomery, Alabama is about to do something extraordinary. When a white bus driver orders Claudette Colvin to give up her seat for a white passenger, she refuses to move. After Claudette is arrested, her brave actions help inspire Civil Rights leaders organize bus boycotts and perform similar acts to defy segregation laws.

For six decades John Robert Lewis was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into "good trouble." In this biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis's upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the "conscience of Congress."

Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek. Get Trump makes clear that unconstitutional efforts to stop Trump from retaking the presidency challenge the very foundations of our liberty: due process, right to counsel, and free speech.

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.

Wolf outlines in this citizen call to action - which is reminiscent of Thomas Paine's revered Common Sense - the real threats to our civil liberties that exist and explains how by working together we can stop the growing threat.

This concise but comprehensive book lays out specific answers to myriad topical questions about free speech law, and also general explanations of how and why the law distinguishes between protected and punishable speech. The book focuses on modern First Amendment law, explaining the historic factors that propelled its evolution in a more speech-protective direction—in particular, the Civil Rights Movement. It highlights the many cases, involving multiple issues, in which robust speech-protective principles aided advocates of racial justice and other human rights causes.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.

When Frank Thompson sees a poster requesting recruits for the new Union army, he is ready and willing to enlist. Except Frank isn’t his real name. In fact, Frank isn’t a man—he is really Sarah Emma Edmonds. At only nineteen years old, Sarah had already been dressing as a man for three years and living on the run in order to escape an arranged marriage. She had tasted freedom, and there was no going back.

A “deeply spiritual and socially radical” (Dr. Obery Hendricks, PhD) call to action for those seeking justice and love in an age of division, from Reverend Otis Moss III, one of the most esteemed voices in Black theology and progressive Christianity. Once again, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr...

Nine-year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks intended to go places and do things like anybody else. So, when she heard grown-ups talk about wiping out Birmingham’s segregation laws, she spoke up. As she listened to the preacher’s words, smooth as glass, she sat up tall. And when she heard the plan - picket those white stores! March to protest those unfair laws! Fill the jails! - she stepped right up and said, "I’ll do it!"

No Campus for White Men shines a bright light on the growing obsession with diversity, victimization, and identity politics on today's college campuses, and shows how it is creating an intensely hostile and fearful atmosphere that can only lead, ultimately, to ever greater polarization in American society.

Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States - one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans.

In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel. This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group, which was thought to be possibly dangerous and potentially violent. This kneeling man is Leta McCollough Seletzky’s father.

In this cinematic memoir, follow one man's journey from gang member to Black liberation leader to political prisoner–and the justice and redemption he fought for along the way. Inspired by Malcolm X, Russell Shoatz became a lifelong crusader for justice, a soldier in the most militant units of...