Cultural Literature

"One of our true superstars of nonfiction" (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche. We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we...

What happens to a little girl who grows up without a father? Can she ever feel truly loved and fully alive? Does she ever heal--or is she doomed to live a wounded, fragmented life and to pass her wounds down to her own children? Fatherlessness afflicts...

- Revised and expanded with recently uncovered information - Detailed maps of escape routes and networks - Eyewitness accounts of fugitives Organized in antebellum America to help slaves escape to freedom, the Underground Railroad was cloaked in secrecy...

Born into "the blessings of liberty in a free State," Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Bayou Boeuf region of Louisiana's Red River Valley. Twelve Years a Slave is the chronicle of his captivity at the mercy of sadistic...

From the Upstate to the Lowcountry, African Americans have had a gigantic impact on the Palmetto State. Unfortunately, their stories are often overshadowed.Collected here for the first time, this selection of essays by historian Damon L. Fordham brings...

What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? The Suspect draws on the author's lived experiences of being suspected of terrorism to take the reader on a journey through British...

How community-centered, peer-to-peer, youth knowledge exchanges are evolving into a strong economic and political foundation on which to build radical public education. Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and...

"[Robinson's] lifelong triumph over adversity belongs to the greatest of American success stories." --Peter Hannaford, Washington Times In this gripping, never-before-told tale, biographer Thomas E. Simmons brings to life the true story of John C...

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost...

With hate crimes on the rise and social movements like Black Lives Matter bringing increased attention to the issue of police brutality, the American public continues to be divided by issues of race. How do adolescents and young adults form friendships...

Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don't even notice it - in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable,...

The dark heart of race science... and why it's nonsense. Racial differences are rooted in biological reality, right? That's certainly what a small group of anthropologists, psychologists and pundits would have you believe. Portraying themselves as brave...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how...

New York Times BestsellerRising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the CrossBarack Obama's...

A powerful argument for adopting a model of restorative justice as part of the Innocence Movement--so exonerees, crime victims, and their communities can come together to heal In Rectify, a former Innocence Project director and journalist Lara Bazelon...

Together these two essays mark the philosophic cornerstone of democratic morality and represent a thought-provoking search for the true balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the state. Thoroughly schooled in the principles of the...