States Rights

Unlock the hidden tapestry of American rights in "United States of America Citizen Rights That They Don’t Want You To Know About." In this illuminating journey, explore the often-overlooked corners of the Constitution, revealing a spectrum of rights that, for various reasons, remain obscured from public view. From challenging government actions to navigating the intricacies of immigration detention, this book is a roadmap through the concealed corridors of democracy.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

In this powerful and timely book, civil rights historian and political analyst Juan Williams denounces Donald Trump for intentionally twisting history to fuel racial tensions for his political advantage. In Williams's lifetime, crusaders for civil rights have braved hatred, violence, and imprisonment. Remarkably, all this progress suddenly seems to have been forgotten - or worse, undone. The stirring history of hard-fought and heroic battles for voting rights, integrated schools, and more is under direct threat from an administration dedicated to restricting these basic freedoms.

Published in 1791, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man defended the French Revolution’s values of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. He argued that a government based on justice ought to support mankind’s civil rights relating to security and protection, as well as the natural rights to life, liberty, and freedom of conscience. He also proposed plans for universal education, pensions, poverty relief, and social welfare in this classic work that was widely read across the West.

In 1789, the people of France decided to overtake the monarchy of their country in favor of a republic. The French Revolution played out like an echo of the American Revolution of the decade prior, with people rising against their governing bodies. Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution had its dissidents and supporters. Thomas Paine was one such supporter, and Rights of Man was his manifesto in support of people fighting for liberty.

James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement. It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality. The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath.

Der ehemalige Präsident des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, Andreas Voßkuhle, warnte, die größte Bedrohung für die Institutionen des Staates gehe von rechts aus. Die aktuellen Ermittlungsverfahren gegen rechtsterroristische Vereinigungen unterstreichen die Gefahren, die von Rechtsextremen in Polizei, Bundeswehr, Justiz und Verfassungsschutz ausgehen. Zuletzt wurde dies in der bundesweiten Razzia gegen mutmaßliche rechtsextreme Umsturzpläne aus dem Milieu von Reichsbürgern und AfD deutlich.

During the last three decades of the 20th century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust "family values" onto the nation's consciousness. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians.

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

In The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide, award-winning author and constitutional scholar Linda R. Monk explores the remarkable history of the Bill of Rights amendment by amendment, the Supreme Court's interpretation of each right, and the power of citizens to enforce those rights. Stories of the ordinary people who made the Bill of Rights come alive are featured throughout.

Texas may well be America’s most controversial state. Evangelicals dominate the halls of power, millions of its people live in poverty, and its death row is the busiest in the country. Skeptical outsiders have found much to be offended by in the state’s politics and attitude, and yet, according to journalist and Texan Erica Grieder, the United States has a great deal to learn from Texas. In Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right, Grieder traces the political history of a state that was always larger than life. From its rowdy beginnings, Texas has combined a long-standing suspicion of government intrusion with a passion for business.

The legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoys regular acclaim from historians, politicians, and educators. But is that true? Deploying an abundance of primary source evidence and well-reasoned arguments, historian and distinguished professor emeritus David T. Beito masterfully presents a complete account of the real Franklin D. Roosevelt: a man who abused power, violated human rights, targeted dissidents, and let his crude racism imprison American citizens merely for being of Japanese descent.

Joe Scarborough—former Republican congressman and the always insightful host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe—takes a nuanced and surprising look at the unexpected rise and self-inflicted fall of the Republican Party. Dominant in national politics for forty years under the influence of the conservative but pragmatic leadership of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the GOP, Scarborough argues, is in a self-inflicted eclipse. The only way forward? Recover the principled realism of the giants who led the party to greatness.

No Justice is the harrowing story of Robbie Tolan, who early on one New Year's Eve morning, found himself being rushed to the hospital. A White police officer had shot him in the chest after mistakenly accusing him of stealing his own car...while in his own driveway.

Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to anti-slavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still’s life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship with John Brown before the war, to his long career fighting for citizenship rights and desegregation until the early 20th century.

As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more 'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude sections of their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan. William I. Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The global police state uses a variety of methods of control, including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of environmental activists.

Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways: a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity—all (and always) on Black terms. Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis explores the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways that extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community.

What do the struggles of the past teach us about the urgent challenges in our own time? Resist chronicles the inspiring story of young Black activists who have fought tirelessly at the helm for justice over the last century, from the 1920s to the Trayvon generation—how they reshaped America, left an indelible mark on history, and pave the way for the crucial work that must be done today.

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.

Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it.