Sociology History

In partnership with Texas Monthly, the following articles spotlighting true crime are now available in a bundle as an audio download: "The Cheerleader Murder Plot" features a woman who went to extreme, murderous lengths to ensure her daughter's spot on the cheerleading squad. "The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob" profiles the mysterious Peggy Jo Tallas who, disguised as a man, robbed banks and confounded police for years. Also featuring "A Kiss Before Dying", "The Talented Mr. Khater", and "Just Desserts".

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement - whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens - speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.

In this Very Short Introduction, Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person's level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female.

"Biografía de la inhumanidad" representa la antítesis del libro anterior de José Antonio Marina. Mientras "Biografía de la humanidad" explicaba la historia de la evolución cultural (a través del desarrollo del arte, la política, las instituciones sociales, las religiones, los sentimientos y la tecnología), "Biografía de la inhumanidad" pretende explorar los mayores errores o crueldades de nuestra historia, y por qué en su momento estas acciones fueron llevadas a cabo o se aceptaron como una especie de destino implacable.

What is visible to the naked eye has been exhaustively raked over; in Underground London, acclaimed travel writer Stephen Smith provides an alternative guide and history of the capital. It's a journey through the passages and tunnels of the city, the bunkers and tunnels, crypts and shadows. As well as being a contemporary tour of underground London, it's also an exploration through time.

In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long 20th century.

From January until April 2003, for 101 days, Asne Seierstad worked as a reporter in Bagdad for Scandinavian, German, and Dutch media. Through her articles and live television coverage she reported on the events in Iraq before, during, and after the attacks by the American and British forces.

When 1919 began, the city of Chicago seemed on the verge of transformation. Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into "the Metropolis of the World". But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city’s highest ambitions were suddenly under attack by the same unbridled energies that had given birth to them in the first place.

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean."

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

Understanding wealth in the United States - who has it, how they acquired it, and how they preserve it - is crucial to addressing the economic and political challenges facing the nation. But until now we have had little reliable information. Edward Wolff, one of the world's great experts on the economics of wealth, offers an authoritative account of patterns in the accumulation and distribution of wealth since 1900. A Century of Wealth in America demonstrates that the most remarkable change has been the growth of per capita household wealth.

We humans have an extraordinary capacity for compassion—much of it in response to the atrocities we inflict on the planet, its animals, and each other. The popular explanation for this paradox is that we evolved as carnivorous “killer apes,” who gradually curbed our lust for violence (with frequent exceptions) by implementing humane social norms. This explanation is so well worn, especially in the American psyche, that it epitomizes cliché. So, we could be forgiven for believing it, when nearly every word is fiction.

From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country—our political class.

Wer wissen möchte, wie wir und vor allem unsere Kinder bald schon leben, welche Technologien sie und die Welt prägen werden, muss durch Shenzhen streifen. Die 12-Millionen-Metropole in Südchina gehört zu den innovativsten Städten der Welt. Eine Megacity, die quasi aus dem Nichts entstand, wo Nachhaltigkeit und moderne Lebensqualität selbstverständlich sind, aber eben auch Gesichtserkennung und der gläserne Mensch. Die Cloud in Shenzhen weiß alles. Die Shenzhener Techies stellen inzwischen das Silicon Valley in den Schatten, ihre Start-ups zählen zu den wertvollsten der Welt.

Changing the world is a skill. Right now, we’re bad at it...but we can learn how to be good at it. That's the powerful message at the heart of this transformational book. Deftly and accessibly pulling together decades of social science research, Dr. Lynn explains what we know about how to create social change and what we’ll need to do to address our biggest problems today. The result is a bold, inspiring, yet realistic - a prescription for how to pull ourselves out of our current divisive, dysfunctional crisis and get our society back on track.

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life.

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? draws on the voices of individual working people to tell the stories left out of standard histories of that era, and helps us imagine how to address our own failed economy, and how to imagine and build movements challenging it that do not themselves replicate racism and patriarchy.

Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.

Imperial San Francisco is the epic saga of how all great cities parasitize their hinterlands for the sake of those elites who own and run them by using the mass media at their command to shape the thought of those who unwittingly serve their interests. Using San Francisco as an example of how cities employ remote control technology to exploit water, energy, natural resources, and labor from an expansive imperium, it takes the listener from ancient Rome to the University of California’s role in the creation of nuclear weaponry and its first use.

Fifteen Cents on the Dollar follows the lives of four Black Millennial professionals and a banking company founded with the stated mission of closing the Black-white wealth gap. That company, known as Greenwood, a reference to the historic Black Wall Street district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, generated immense excitement and hope among people looking for new ways of business that might lead to greater equity. But the twists and turns of Greenwood’s journey also raise tough questions about what equality really means.