Political Black Girl Magic explores black women’s experiences as mayors in American cities. The editor and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine black female mayoral campaigns and elections where race and gender are a factor—and where deracialized campaigns have garnered candidate support from white as well as Hispanic and Asian American voters. Chapters also consider how Black female mayors govern, from discussions of their pursuit of economic growth and how they use ...

Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy highlights the experiences and narratives emerging from Indigenous mothers in the academy who are negotiating their roles in multiple contexts. The essays in this volume contribute to the broader higher education literature and the literature on Indigenous representation in the academy, filling a longtime gap that has excluded Indigenous women scholar voices. This book covers diverse topics such as the journey to motherhood, lessons through mot...

This book promotes the notion of second chances and the importance of human services within the communities most affected by crime and the criminal justice system. Recognition of the fallibility of humans and the necessity of redemption is the first step to change our attitude toward guilt and punishment. Barring citizens with criminal records from obtaining housing, employment, education, and public benefits like Medicaid and food stamps is not only unjust but unproductive for a human soc...

New York Times BestsellerRising Star is the definitive account of Barack Obama's formative years that made him the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the CrossBarack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as A...

In contrast to the economic and cultural dominance by the south and the east coast over the past several centuries, influence in China in the early Middle Ages was centered in the north and featured a significantly multicultural society. Many events that were profoundly formative for the future of East Asian civilization occurred during this period, although much of this multiculturalism has long been obscured due to the Confucian monopoly of written records. Multicultural China in the...

This “bracing corrective to national mythology” around the American civil rights movement “shows us how little we remember, and how much more there is to understand” (New York Times).“Theoharis’s view of history is expansive” as it reveals the diverse, unsung heroes of the movement and criticizes the oversimplification of complex figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. (O Magazine).The civil rights movement has become nation...

After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literatur...

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries?In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past di...

A 16th century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci was the founder of the Catholic Mission in China and one of the most famous missionaries of all time. A pioneer in bringing Christianity to China, Ricci spent twenty eight years in the country, in which time he crossed the cultural divides between China and the West by immersing himself in the language and culture of his hosts. Even 400 years later, he is still one of the best known westerners in China, celebrated for introducing western scientif...

“Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one.” —Rachel MaddowA Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction)As Texas Goes . . . provides a trenchant yet often hilarious look into American politics and the disproportional influence of Texas, which has become the model for not just the Tea Party but also the Republican Party. Now wi...

For the Chinese, the drive toward growing political and economic power is part of an ongoing effort to restore China's past greatness and remove the lingering memories of history's humiliations. This widely praised book explores the 1500–1800 period before China's decline, when the country was viewed as a leading world culture and power. Europe, by contrast, was in the early stages of emerging from provincial to international status while the United States was still an uncharted wilderness...

Jonathan Cohn's The Ten Year War is the definitive account of the battle over Obamacare, based on interviews with sources who were in the room, from one of the nation's foremost healthcare journalists.The Affordable Care Act, better known as "Obamacare," was the most sweeping and consequential piece of legislation of the last half century. It has touched nearly every American in one way or another, for better or worse, and become the defining political figh...