The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.**"Gripping." —**New York Times**“A stinging indictment of slavery.” —**NPR Books?Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bon...

From Cornell University Professors Louis Hyman and Edward E. Baptist, a collection of the most relevant readings on the history of capitalism in America, created to accompany their EdX course American Capitalism: A Reader.To understand the past and especially our own times, arguably no story is as essential to get right as the history of capitalism. Nearly all of our theories about promoting progress come from how we interpret the economic changes of the l...

Set on the antebellum southern frontier, this book uses the history of two counties in Florida’s panhandle to tell the story of the migrations, disruptions, and settlements that made the plantation South.Soon after the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, migrants from older southern states began settling the land that became Jackson and Leon Counties. Slaves, torn from family and community, were forced to carve plantations from the woods of Middle Florida, while plan...

The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.**"Gripping." —**New York Times**“A stinging indictment of slavery.” —**NPR Books?Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bon...

From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book tracing the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord.A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIn this masterly work of history, the culmination of more than four decades of research and thought, Mary Beth Norton ...

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early AmericaIn life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence,...

Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800—1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David S. Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War.When does principled resistance become anarchic brutality? How can a murderer be vi...

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon's masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of listeners.A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black ps...

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated in what came to be known as Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. Waves of hungry peasants fled across the Atlantic to the United States, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you could walk dry shod to America on their bodies."In this sweeping history, Ireland's best-known h...

How a notorious far right organization set the Republican Party on a long march toward extremismAt the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism...

As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers join the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Fred Kaplan.Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the “information warfare” squads of the military s...

In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author herself. With a foreword by Geoff Dyer.“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his foreword to this stellar collection. Carefully culled fr...