Justice History

Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender is a recent invention with a surprisingly contentious history - one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state" but also about the contours and compromises of 20th-century liberalism.

Deadly Secrets...Unbreakable Honor...Silent Justice...and everlasting family ties that spans generations. David Delahass enjoyed solving puzzles whether they originated thousands of years ago or found during one of his ambling walks among the majestic oaks and towering pines that were still plentiful on Delahass land. And it was during one of those walks he came across one such puzzle and wondered what secrets it held...if any at all. Then in the midst of his research to find the answers...he found that last thing he or any of his cousins could have suspected...but should have. Some of ...

The Awakening of Malcolm X is a powerful narrative account of the activist's adolescent years in jail, written by his daughter Ilyasah Shabazz along with 2019 Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe award-winning author, Tiffany D. Jackson.

War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

Engaging but caustic and openly ideological, Antonin Scalia was among the most influential justices ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. In this fascinating new book, legal scholar Richard L. Hasen assesses Scalia's complex legacy as a conservative legal thinker and disruptive public intellectual. The left saw Scalia as an unscrupulous foe who amplified his judicial role with scathing dissents and outrageous public comments.

If you have questions about U.S. civics, law, and justice but don’t want to wade through dry and dull legalese to get the answers, you will love this down-to-earth collection of essays that provide an insider’s view of the legal system. In Civics, Law, and Justice - How We Became U.S., career trial lawyer and judge J. Layne Smith offers crystal-clear insight and straightforward answers to everything you’ve ever wondered about the art and science of justice in American history and society.

At 18, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement who left Washington, D.C. by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans.

Time Skip is a twist on the usual time travel adventure. The story centers around Curtis Lovelle who doesn't exactly travel through time, he skips back in it. Curtis is a middle aged man with a happy life. He has a good marriage and little boy who is the light of his life. He can honestly say that if he were given the opportunity to do things over again, he wouldn't change a thing. He doesn't believe in fate. In his mind, every triumph and foible is essential in the journey to where he is now. But, when he wakes up in his parent’s house, eighteen years in the past, he finds out just how ...

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States after the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, and was nearly appointed to that august body in 1922. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.

Righteous Troublemakers shines a light on everyday people called to do extraordinary things—like Pauli Murray, whose early work inspired Thurgood Marshall, Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus months before Rosa Parks did the same, and Gwen Carr, whose private pain in losing her son Eric Garner stoked her public activism against police brutality. Sharpton also gives his personal take on more widely known individuals, revealing overlooked details, historical connections, and a perspective informed by years of working in the social justice movement.

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.

Ever since it was established in 1789, the United States Supreme Court has had a major impact on the lives of all Americans. Some of its landmark decisions have helped end segregation, protected a person’s privacy, and allowed people to marry whomever they love.

Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military's prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush's executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions.

In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century; and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous generations. Why this is so and what we should do about it is the subject of this book.

On 26th May 1986, the body of an undercover British agent was found by the side of a muddy lane, with a rope tied around its wrists and tape over each eye. The brutal killing of Frank Hegarty began a decades-long search for justice. In a compulsive blend of investigative journalism and true crime thriller, Henry Hemming exposes the parallel worlds of the IRA and British intelligence through the lives of those inextricably bound up in both.

Ken Boutwell and I became fast friends soon after he sent me a manuscript to publish as his first book in 2016. He was referred to my publishing company by a mutual friend who was his pastor at First Baptist Church in Tallahassee, Florida. He told me at that time that he was also working on a second book which would address racism and bigotry throughout history with an invitation to join him and others in changing these cruel cultures around the world.

More than 50 years ago, an assassin's bullet robbed us of one of the most eloquent voices for 20th-century human rights and justice. Drawing on a new generation of scholarship about the civil rights era, To the Promised Land goes beyond the iconic view of King as an advocate of racial harmony to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class, and his call for "nonviolent resistance" to all forms of oppression, including economic injustice.

In February 1971, racial tension surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, culminated in four days of violence and skirmishes between white vigilantes and black residents. The turmoil resulted in two deaths, six injuries, more than $500,000 in damage, and the firebombing of a white-owned store before the National Guard restored uneasy peace. Despite glaring irregularities in the subsequent trial, 10 young persons were convicted of arson and conspiracy and then sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison.

On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s 50th birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. The young nation had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free? American Radicals is a dynamic, timely history of 19th-century activists - free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes - and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.