States Rights

A reporter and abortion access correspondent investigates the secret killers and hidden motives behind the death of abortion rights. They are going to kill people, investigative reporter for The Nation Amy Littlefield knew, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After a decade covering...

In 1776, the United States of America was born from a document that declared all men created equal and free to choose who they serve in this world. What followed was a difficult fight against a monarchy, a fight that ended with the creation of a powerful country built on the tenets of freedom and equality. These documents are some of the foundational writings from the earliest days of the country that have shaped the United States government for centuries.

An acclaimed chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, Peniel Joseph presents this sweeping overview of a key component of the struggle for racial equality: the Black Power movement. This is the story of the men and women who sacrificed so much to begin a more vocal and radical push for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

"Bloody Sunday" - March 7, 1965 - was a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. The national outrage generated by scenes of Alabama state troopers attacking peaceful demonstrators fueled the drive toward the passage of the Voting Rights Acts later that year. But why were hundreds of activists marching from Selma to Montgomery that afternoon?

An exploration of how and why the Constitution's plan for independent courts has failed to protect individuals' constitutional rights, while advancing regressive and reactionary barriers to progressive regulation.

In Before the Movement, Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery.

"Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation's out of breath. We ain't running no more.” (Stokely Carmichael). In the town of Greenwood, central Mississippi, on the evening of June 16, 1966, one of the most influential speeches in modern American history was delivered on the grounds of Stone Street Negro Elementary School. Earlier in the day, as a body of marchers tried to set up camp on the grounds of the school, they were approached by local officials and law enforcement with instructions to move on.

The first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution—known as the Bill of Rights—include the guarantee that no person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Yet this soaring vision of human rights was written by enslavers who deprived others of these rights. The struggle to resolve this paradox continues to the present day. With thought-provoking text, Rebels, Robbers, and Radicals explores how our rights have evolved as the nation grew and changed.

Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner's Lincoln emerges as a leader, one whose greatness lies in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike. This powerful work will transform our understanding of the nation's greatest president and the issue that mattered most.

Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression.

On Sunday, September 9, 1739, 20 Kongolese slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charleston, South Carolina. They killed 23 white colonists, joined forces with other slaves, and marched toward Spanish Florida. There they expected to find freedom. One report claims the rebels were overheard shouting, "Liberty!" Before the day ended, however, the rebellion was crushed, and afterwards many surviving rebels were executed.

The New Hate takes listeners on a surprising, often shocking, sometimes bizarrely amusing tour through the swamps of nativism, racism, and paranoia that have long thrived on the American fringe. Arthur Goldwag shows us the parallels between the hysteria about the Illuminati that wracked the new American Republic in the 1790s and the McCarthyism that roiled the 1950s, and he discusses the similarities between the anti-New Deal forces of the 1930s and the Tea Party movement today.

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

George Mason was a short, bookish man who was a friend and neighbor of athletic, broad-shouldered George Washington. Unlike Washington, Mason has been virtually forgotten by history. But this new biography of patriot George Mason makes a convincing case that Mason belongs in the pantheon of honored Founding Fathers. Trained in the law, Mason was also a farmer, philosopher, botanist, and musician. He was one of the architects of the Declaration of Independence, an author of the Bill of Rights, and one of the strogest proponents of religious liberty in American history.

Welcome back to Sundog, Minnesota! In the three years since their adventures in the Howling Vowels, Alexa Stevens and her four friends have each grown and changed, but they are still as close as ever. It's April, and they are looking forward to a spring and summer filled with riding horses, playing with dogs, hanging out at the pool and the library, and finishing a big project: making their own movie, complete with music, scenery, and costumes!

The teaching of history has long been the subject of partisan warfare. Religion often plays a prominent role in these debates, as secular progressives and conservative Christians disagree over which historical figures are worthy of study, how (or whether) certain events should be portrayed, and ultimately how tax dollars should be spent. But what about students who are educated outside the public schools, either in religious schools or at home? How are they learning history, and what effect does that have on our democracy?

Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction era raised a new question to those in power in the US: Should African Americans, so many of them former slaves, be granted the right to vote? In this vivid portrait of the systematic suppression of the African-American vote, critically acclaimed author Lawrence Goldstone traces the injustices of the post-Reconstruction era through the eyes of incredible individuals, both heroic and barbaric, and examines the legal cases that made the Supreme Court a partner of white supremacists in the rise of Jim Crow.

Are Donald Trump's irrationality, cruelty and bombast symptoms of his personality? Is the chaos surrounding him a sign of his incompetence? Are his populism, illiberalism and nationalism just cynical appeals to existing feelings of abandonment, resentment and rage? Lawrence Grossberg shows that the truth is bigger and more frightening. Locating Trumpism in the long struggle among traditional conservatism, the new right and the reactionary right, he suggests that the chaos is far more significant and strategic...and dangerous. .

Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: Did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it?

Rogue Justice connects the dots for the first time - from the Patriot Act to today's military commissions, from terrorism prosecutions to intelligence priorities, from the ACLU's activism to Edward Snowden's revelations. And it poses a stark question: Will the American justice system ever recover from the compromises it made for the war on terror?