Are the victims of Nazism, Zionism, Trumpism, and similar racist ideologies entitled to freedom of expression in a democracy?

In 1977, Frank Collin, leader of the National Socialist Party of America, sought to hold a Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois. In this Chicago suburb, over half the population was Jewish, and many were victims of the Holocaust in Europe.

The proposed march sparked a host of legal challenges. Skokie asked for an injunction to prevent the Nazis from marching, and new ordinances were adopted to block the march. Collin applied to hold a march on a later date, but was denied.

An ACLU lawsuit was brought in federal court seeking to invalidate the ordinances put in place to prevent the Nazi march. In the end, the Nazis did not march in Skokie, but in 1978 the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in defense of free speech rights for all.

The ACLU was severely weakened by a backlash from seemingly liberal groups who conveniently ignored their liberal principles when the targets of censorship were their own perceived enemies.

Writing from his perspective as national executive director of the ACLU, Aryeh Neier tells the story, and ponders the consequences, of Skokie and other cases in which the enemies of freedom claim for themselves rights that they would (often with the best of intentions) deny to other enemies of freedom.

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.

A 1980 nonfiction book presenting a long-neglected side of history that avoids the typical “nationalist glorification of country”. Zinn does not hide or sugarcoat the many tragedies of US history. The book is assigned in many high schools and colleges across the United States, and has inspired in a quiet revolution in the field of historical research, which now commonly includes previously ignored stories.

In a 1998 interview, Zinn said his goal in writing the book was to inspire a “quiet revolution”. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives."

Immediate, illuminating, and hopeful: this is the key set of talks given by leading Zen Buddhist teacher Larry Ward, PhD, on breaking America’s cycle of racial trauma.

When Donald Trump lost the 2016 presidential election, and won the presidential college selection, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots.

Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold.

As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives… [Her] attentive, detailed portraits…reveal a gulf between Hochchild’s ‘strangers in their own land’ and a new elite.”

Already a favorite book in communities and on campuses across the country and called “humble and important” by David Brooks and “masterly” by Atul Gawande, Hochschild’s book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others.

A note of sanity against biased propaganda circulating through the corporate echo chamber. The academic field of critical race theory challenges traditional ways of looking at race and racism. The field’s theoreticians argue that supposedly neutral concepts and institutions, such as meritocracy and legal assumptions, mask systemic inequality and institutionalized racism. This book is one of the discipline’s classics. Some conservatives view critical race theory as “dangerous” because some of its proponents view the Constitution and the fabric of the US democracy as imbued with racism.

In this “penetrating new analysis” (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century US history, demonstrating that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created and/or administered in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by ex-enslaved-holding Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, “Katznelson’s incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American [sic] history.”