States Rights

Wanda Sykes, LeVar Burton, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Gabourey Sidibe head a cast of beloved actors performing 23 selections from the speeches, sermons, and essays of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—many never recorded during his lifetime. For the first time, teachers, students, and thoughtful listeners can hear dramatic interpretations of Dr. King’s words, chosen and introduced by Cornel West.

The sexual revolution—and the breakdown of the family—has brought misery to millions. In The Sexual State, Jennifer Roback Morse shows that the sexual revolution did not just “happen” like a force of nature. Rather, it was deliberately created by “elites”, harnessing the power of the state, allowing them inflict three false and calamitous ideologies—contraception, divorce, and gender—that have led to widespread and profound unhappiness, and worse.

In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the 20th century, the "radical right", and discusses its adherents' different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism. Questioning democracy's most basic norms and practices, these critics rejected ideas about human equality, minority rights, religious toleration, and cultural pluralism not out of implicit biases, but out of explicit principle.

The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.

The received idea of Native American history - as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did 150 Sioux die at the hands of the US Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative.

To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals. The struggle for Black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives.

Death Wears a Smile By MQ Ashcraft Clayton Samuels, a former Confederate officer known for his daring and distinctive smile, is drawn into an investigation of a past betrayal. Going undercover, he unravels unexpected layers of deceit and espionage involving double agents and hidden motives. With his loyal dog by his side, Clayton confronts blurred lines between friends and foes. Amidst it all, a timeless love story intricately weaves itself through his adventures. This action-packed mystery by MQ Ashcraft will keep you guessing until the very end.

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?

Through vivid histories drawn from virtually every continent, A World Divided describes how, since the 18th century, nationalists have struggled to establish their own states that grant human rights to some people. At the same time, they have excluded others through forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. From Greek rebels, American settlers, and Brazilian abolitionists in the 19th century to anticolonial Africans and Zionists in the 20th, nationalists have confronted a crucial question: Who has the "right to have rights?"

Today’s right-wing Evangelical Christianity stands as the very antithesis of the message of Jesus Christ. In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers.

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the 20th century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the US Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and to cost him his life. In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve....

Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left with pieces of who she used to be and is forced to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life. Her sister introduces her to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—young people are taking risks and fighting battles Rose has only seen on television.

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep.

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was an orator of Black Nationalism, and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. He advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global movement, known as Garveyism. This book, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) was compiled by his wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey, mainly from his speeches. Promoting unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule in Africa and encouraged the political unification of the continent.

Noam Chomsky argues that, contrary to popular perception, the real "rogue" states in the world today are not the dictator-led developing countries we hear about in the news but the United States and its allies. He challenges the legal and humanitarian reasons given to justify intervention in global conflicts in order to reveal the West's reliance on the rule of force. He examines NATO's intervention in Kosovo, the crisis in East Timor, and US involvement in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of 18th-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos.

The Civil Rights Movement in America is a broad term for the movement in the mid-20th century among and for the African American community in pursuit of equal protection and rights under the law. In reality, it began much earlier than the 1950s and continues until this day. What is more, it was about so much more than the extension of universal rights; the Civil Rights Movement is about the story of the long struggle to overcome the legacies of slavery and racism. It is a story of triumph over adversity and perseverance in the face of great hardship.

This book presents a public collection of four foundational documents central to the creation of the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Together, these texts serve as invaluable primary sources for understanding the American Revolution and the establishment of the nation's republican government.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress.

Thomas Sowell takes a tough, factual look at whether the civil rights movement has lived up to its hopes or its rhetoric. In the decades since the historic Supreme Court decision on desegregation, who has gained and who has lost? Which of the assumptions behind the civil rights revolution have stood the test of time, and which have proven to be mistaken or even catastrophic to those who were supposed to be helped?