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.

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

The question of national specificity in science was vigorously debated in 19th century Russia and remains relevant to the geographical and cultural contextualization of scholarship. This article introduces the term academic particularism to denote this phenomenon and addresses it through an examination of the career, ideas and legacy of Karl von Baer in the fields of geography, ethnology and physical anthropology. The article traces significant shifts in Baer’s interests and views after his relocation to Russia in 1835 and identifies a cluster of key ideas present in Baer’s work in the mid-19th century that were further developed by subsequent scholars in the late 19th century and came to constitute a distinctive strain in the Russian human sciences. Echoes of these early ideas on race can be found in many other cultures, and are still heard today.

Dedicated to Trayvon Martinn, this searing anthology is edited by two-time National Book Award winner Jesymn Ward. Envisioned as a contemporary response to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time assembles essays and poems from writers including Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, and Kevin Young, who dissect the historic legacy of structural racism in the US, unpack the violent inequities of the contemporary moment, and envision a brighter future for people of color.

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.”

Super Bowl Champion and two-time Pro Bowler Michael Bennett is an outspoken proponent for social justice and a man without a censor. One of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, he is also a fearless activist, grassroots philanthropist, and organizer.

Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is a sports book for our times, a sports memoir and manifesto as hilarious as it is revealing.

Bennett, a defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks, has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter Movement and women’s rights. Bennett donates all his endorsement money and half of the proceeds from his jersey sales to fund health and education projects for poor underserved youth and minority communities, and has recently expanded his reach globally to provide STEM programming in Africa.

Dave Zirin has been called the “finest, most important writer on sports and politics in America,” by Dr. Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at the Harvard Divinity School. He is sports editor for The Nation and author of several titles for Haymarket Books, including his critically acclaimed book The John Carlos Story, written with 1968 Olympian John Carlos.

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.

In Kingian Nonviolence, a philosophy developed out of the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., there is a distinction made between nonviolence spelled with a hyphen, and nonviolence spelled without a hyphen. “Non-violence” is essentially two words: “without” “violence.” When spelled this way, it only describes the absence of violence. As long as I am “not being violent,” I am practicing non-violence. And that is the biggest misunderstanding of nonviolence that exists.

In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations—secret societies, women’s clubs, labor unions, and churches-to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting. Ortiz’s eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.

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.

Short, emotional, literary, powerful―Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all in the US who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations should read.

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one person’s voice soars with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece “Death in Black and White,” Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―-a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

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.

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."

Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential leaders of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister. Here, the man who called himself “the angriest Black man in America” relates how his conversion to true Islam helped him confront his rage and recognize the brotherhood of all mankind. A brilliant, painful, important book that transformed Malcom X’s life into his legacy.

What is presented here is nothing less audacious than a cosmogony of the Industrialized World presented by the most politically powerful and independent non-Western political body surviving in North America. It is, in a way, the modern world through Pleistocene eyes.

In this seminal 1952 novel, an unnamed narrator recounts his epic life-story, from coming-of-age in a rural Southern town, to the violent streets of Harlem.

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.