Sociology History

Maybe you know someone who swears by the reliability of psychics or who is in regular contact with angels. Or perhaps you're trying to find a nice way of dissuading someone from wasting money on a homeopathy cure. How do you find a gently persuasive way of steering people away from unfounded beliefs, bogus cures, conspiracy theories, and the like? Longtime skeptic Guy P. Harrison shows you how in this down-to-earth, entertaining exploration of commonly held extraordinary claims.

According to the 2010 US census, more than 70 percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north.

Funerary rituals show us what people thought about mortality; how they felt about loss; what they believed came next. From Roman cremations and graveside feasts, to deviant burials with heads rearranged, from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales, Buried provides an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain.

Eamonn McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto - first published in 1974 - quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state. This book describes the people involved in the war and gives an account of the springs of the "Catholic" opposition.

We don't understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today's political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe.

With breathtaking scope and unparalleled knowledge of the game, The Age of Football explores soccer's vital role in our social, political, and economic lives: its connections to social discord in the Middle East and political division in Europe; the reasons behind its surprising surge in popularity in China, India, and the United States; and its use (and misuse) in the global advance of equality and human rights. Goldblatt proves that whether you call it football or soccer, you can't make sense of the modern world without understanding its most popular sport.

It is widely understood that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution completely revolutionized the study of biology. Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won’t be truly complete until it is applied more broadly - to everything associated with the words “human,” “culture,” and “policy.”

In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shaping the American economy, beginning in the country's earliest years....

Investigating the historical roots of our peculiar brand of political paranoia, Arthur Goldwag helps us make sense of the senseless and, in so doing, uncovers three uncomfortable truths: that it is older than Trumpism and will outlast it; that theocratic authoritarianism is as hardwired in our American heritage as the principles of the Enlightenment; and that the fear that our system is “rigged” is not altogether unfounded. A probing, surprising, and critical examination of America’s paranoid style, The Politics of Fear sheds new light on the age-old question: What exactly are we so afraid of?

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

In Distracted, journalist Maggie Jackson ponders our increasingly cyber-centric world and fears we're entering a dark age of interruption that will render us unable to think critically, work creatively or cultivate meaningful relationships.

In Our Kindred Creatures, Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, and veterinarian Monica Murphy offer a fascinating history of this crusade and the battles it sparked in American life. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more.

By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told stories. While a fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, he found that the notion of a dangerous bias called “xenophobia” arose not so long ago.

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.

From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the "paths of least resistance", there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience.

This Noble Land is Michener's most personal statement about America, an examination of the issues that threaten to fragment and undermine the nation - racial conflict, the widening gulf between rich and poor, the decline of education, the inadequacies of our health care system - as well as a thought-provoking prescription for sustaining our "outstanding success". First published shortly before Michener's death, This Noble Land stands as a wake-up call for a troubled era, infused with the wisdom and passion of a lifetime.

De l'émergence d'homo sapiens à nos jours, cette brève histoire de l'humanité est délibérément tournée vers l'intelligence du monde tel qu'il se recompose sous nos yeux. Or, c'est dans les profondeurs les moins conscientes de la vie sociale, celles auxquelles Emmanuel Todd a consacré sa vie de chercheur, que gît l'explication de ce qui nous apparaît aujourd'hui comme le grand désordre du monde.

A parallel army lives on the margins of the Iraq war - nearly 100,000 armed men, invisible yet in plain sight, doing jobs the overstretched and understaffed military can't or won't do. The U.S. media call them "security contractors." They call themselves "mercs," and they operate under their own rules. Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru traveled with several groups of security contractors to find out what motivates them to put their lives in danger every day.

From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country's 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform.