Cultural Literature

Towards the Abolition of Whiteness collects David Roediger's recent essays, many published here for the first time, and counts the costs of whiteness in the past and present of the US. It finds those costs insupportable. At a time when prevailing liberal...

Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trenchtown R&B crooners swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers--one of the most influential groups in popular music. Colin Grant presents...

Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of...

In the tradition of The Other Wes Moore and Just Mercy, a searing memoir and clarion call to save our at-risk youth by a young black man who himself was a lost cause--until he landed in a rehabilitation program that saved his life and gave him purpose...

"To some a book on the origins of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not inevitable, phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the...

The founding Fathers based the American system on principles of equality and freedom, but often people who made America their home faced inequality, injustice, and legal discrimination. The Free and the Unfree documents what happened when Native...

A gripping and unforgettable true story of bravery and patriotism in the face of bitter hatred. Abraham Bolden was a young African American Secret Service agent in Chicago when he was asked by John F. Kennedy himself to join the White House Secret...

The banjo has been called by many names over its history, but they all refer to the same sound--strings humming over skin--that has eased souls and electrified crowds for centuries. The Banjo invites us to hear that sound afresh in a biography of one of...

The essential account of R. Kelly's actions and their consequences, a reckoning two decades in the making. Updated and expanded to include Kelly's 2021 trial and conviction. In 2000, Chicago journalist and music critic Jim DeRogatis received an anonymous...

Stetson Kennedy collected folklore and oral histories throughout Florida for the WPA between 1937 and 1942. The result was this classic Florida book, back in print for the first time in more than twenty years with an Afterword update and dozens of...

Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people...

Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.