This fascinating in-depth history celebrates Appalachian heroes from Nina Simone to Cormac McCarthy, challenging traditional stereotypes of the American South.Few places in the United States confound and fascinate Americans like Appalachia, yet no other area has been so markedly mischaracterized by the mass media. Stereotypes of hillbillies and rednecks repeatedly appear in representations of the region, but few, if any, of its many heroes, visionaries, or innovato...

This "powerful, urgent" narrative history of resistance campaigns throughout history and how they affect today's battles (Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright)––from the American Revolution and the defeat of fascism during WWII, to landmark battles for civil rights and the new movements for equity.Across cities, towns, and campuses, Americans are grappling with overwhelming challenges and the daily fallout from the most authoritarian White House polici...

Cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us to the dark amphitheatre ruins of his family's nearly 200-year-old hillside homestead that has been strip-mined on the edge of the first federally recognized Wilderness Site in southern Illinois. In doing so, he not only comes to grips with his own denied backwoods heritage, but also chronicles a dark and missing chapter in the American experience: the historical nightmare of coal outside of Appalachia, serving as an expos' of a secret legacy of sha...

State Out of the Union is award-winning journalist and historian Jeff Biggers' riveting account of Arizona, the famed frontier state whose conflict over immigration and state's rights has become a national bellwether. Biggers shows how Arizona's long history of labor and civil rights battles, its contentious entry into the union, as well as cyclical upheavals over immigration rights, place the state front and center in a greater American story playing out across the United States....

Long-listed for the PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, The Trials of a Scold is a groundbreaking and passionate biography of America’s first female muckraker, who was convicted as a “common scold” in 1829 in one of the most bizarre trials in the nation’s history.Anne Royall was an American original—a stranger to fear who defied nineteenth-century skeptics as a prolific literary force, satirist, and social critic. Publishing her first book in 1826 at age fifty-seven, Royall ...

In an inspiring narrative history, Jeff Biggers reframes today's battles as a continuum of a vibrant American tradition. Resistance is a chronicle of the courageous resistance movements that have insured the benchmarks of our democracy—movements that served on the front lines of the American Revolution, the defense of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the defeat of fascism during World War II, and landmark civil rights and environmental protection achievements.Legendary...

A stunning history of legendary treasure seekers and enigmatic natives in Mexico's Copper CanyonBased on his one-year sojourn in Copper Canyon among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers who have journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From A...

**An expat in Rome makes his way as a writer in this gripping and genre-defying novel, first published in 1965 by a rediscovered great of Black American literature.“One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.” —Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo**In this masterpiece of metafiction set in the Rome of the tumultuous 1960s, Black American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his attempts to write a novel about his friend Doris, another Black American working as one o...

**A propulsive debut political thriller set in the aftermath of a global nuclear weapons crisis—from the acclaimed filmmaker of The Fugitive and an award-winning journalist . . ."A knife-edged investigation that morphs into a political thriller about a world on the brink. An ingenious page turner." —Michael Mann**A plot to disrupt a global peace summit in Chicago collides with a civil rights case breakthrough at a mysterious archaeological site . . .

An expat in Rome makes his way as a writer in this gripping and genre-defying novel, first published in 1965 by a rediscovered great of Black American literature.In this masterpiece of metafiction set in the Rome of the tumultuous 1960s, Black American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his attempts to write a novel about his friend Doris, another Black American working as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaidens in the filming of Cleopatra. Utterly dependent upo...

With employers offering free flu shots and pharmacies expanding into one-stop shops to prevent everything from shingles to tetanus, vaccines are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccines and immunization in the United States: American children now receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases are standard. Yet, while vaccination rates have soared and cases of ...

We are living through a time of upheaval and social unrest, with increasing threats to global health, democratic institutions, and the world’s economies. But behind the alarming headlines is another issue that must be quickly addressed: the role of workers is being transformed—and often rendered obsolete—by automation and artificial intelligence.As Jamie Merisotis, the president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, argues in Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines