Social Class

On any given night, more than half a million Americans and Canadians find themselves sleeping on the streets, in shelters, cars, and other places not meant for human habitation. Yet as this crisis continues to grow, it remains one of the least talked about—especially in churches. Kevin Nye introduces listeners to the Christ he’s met in tents, shelters, and drop-in centers. He demystifies homelessness by journeying into complex issues like affordable housing, mental illness, addiction, and more, while reimagining our theological approach to these matters.

This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain’t No Makin’ It Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the "Brothers" and the "Hallway Hangers". Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved listeners and challenged ethnic stereotypes.

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security.

An unflinching memoir and "invaluable resource" (Kirkus) about navigating social mobility as a first gen Latina—offering both a riveting personal story and an examination of the unacknowledged emotional tolls of being a trailblazer. Alejandra Campoverdi has been a child on welfare, a White...

Each of them is one in a million. They number 6,000 on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time.

"La idea de salir a recorrer -y a contar- las grandes ciudades sudacas se me ocurrió cuando pensé que quería tratar de entender qué es hoy América Latina. Hace mucho que no lo intentamos y, en general, solemos conservar esa imagen rural, ecololó de una región que es, ahora mismo, la más urbana del mundo. Cuatro de cada cinco latinoamericanos viven en ciudades, pero no son ciudades como las que uno imagina cuando piensa en Barcelona o en París. Para saber cómo son -cómo es Latinoamérica- decidí volver a hacer eso que siempre me ha gustado hacer: ir, mirar, escuchar, pensar, contarlo."— Martín Caparrós

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

Cities and the Creative Class gathers in one place for the first time the research leading up to Richard Florida's theory on how the growth of the creative economy shapes the development of cities and regions. In a new introduction, Florida updates this theory and responds to the critics of his 2002 best seller, The Rise of the Creative Class.

The leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class" and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class deepens the ever-wider class divide.

A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America—written by an acclaimed journalist and Army Ranger who, after returning from Iraq to a painfully divided country, rediscovered its core values in the bleachers of a minor league ballpark...

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with Black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the Black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of Black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between White progressives, business interests, and Black Atlantans. But Atlanta's political leadership has consistently mishandled the Black poor.

Amid increasing hardship and limited employment options, poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, they're capitalizing on the public's fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys, a group of 30 or so young men on Chicago's South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of "drill music" (slang for "shooting music").

"This is the story of Mary Prince", who was sold into slavery at the age of 12 for £38 sterling. It is the first account of the life of a black woman ever to be published in the United Kingdom, and it was published at a time when slavery was still legal in the British Colonies. "The history of Mary Prince" is firsthand testimony of the brutalities of enslavement. Its tone is direct and authentic, which makes this vivid story go straight to the heart.

In this boldly drawn portrait of 18th-century England, Roy Porter defines a nation from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered run the gamut, covering diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and translated into English by Samuel Moore in 1888 under Engels’ supervision, is one of the most influential political texts in modern history. Originally published in 1848, this concise manifesto lays out the principles of communism, the theory of historical materialism, and the role of class struggle as the driving force of history. Marx and Engels call for the working class to unite against capitalist oppression and envision a future society free from class divisions.

En la cima de su carrera y después de años de negativas, Julio Cortázar acepta dar un curso universitario de dos meses en los Estados Unidos. Las clases -más que conferencias magistrales, una serie de charlas sobre literatura- tratan aspectos del cuento fantástico; la musicalidad, el humor, el erotismo y lo lúdico en la literatura; la imaginación y el realismo, la literatura social y las trampas del lenguaje.

L’Établi, ce titre désigne les quelques centaines de militants intellectuels qui, à partir de 1967, s’embauchaient, s’établissaient dans les usines ou les docks. Robert Linhart fût l’un de ceux-là. Après une année comme ouvrier dans l’usine Citroën de Choisy, il décide, dix ans plus tard, délivrer son témoignage. Poignant et précis, ce récit nous permet de saisir le rapport que les hommes entretiennent entre eux par l’intermédiaire des objets.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Most of the top jobs for the future require students to have a strong foundational understanding of mathematics. Our failure to mathematically educate most students in general, and students of color in particular, is bad not only for these students individually but also for our society. In Choosing to See, Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown offer a substantive, rigorous, and necessary set of interventions to move mathematics education toward greater equity, particularly in serving the needs of Black and Brown students, who are underrepresented and underserved as math scholars.

Debtors have been mocked, scolded, and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: who would benefit?