NOW A NATIONAL BESTSELLER!A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in AmericaA few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to r...

A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America. This program is read by the author.A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Blac...

A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law?In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between for...

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for BiographyWinner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ NonfictionWinner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian NonfictionWinner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award**A New York Times Notable Book of 2018A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artist...

**Shortlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for ExcellenceThe “closely observed, compassionate, and far-sighted” (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Under a White Sky) story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.**Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us...

Barack Obama's speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches should have represented the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial unity. Yet, in Fracture, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided—as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore.Wit...

Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thir...

This groundbreaking book tracks the massive wealth amassed from slavery from pre-Civil War to today, showing how our modern economy was built on the backs of enslaved Black people—and lays out a clear argument for reparations that shows exactly what was stolen, who stole it, and to whom it is owed.In this timely, powerful, investigative history, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery, Emmy Award-nominated journalist David Montero follows the trail of the massive wea...

**What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? From the Puritans to Donald Trump, this sweeping history will change your understanding of the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.“Elegant and insightful, Spellbound is an important contribution to the urgent project of understanding America in our time.”—Jon Meacham**A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR...

A new history of US education through the nineteenth century that rigorously accounts for Black, Native, and white experiences; a story that exposes the idea of American education as “the great equalizer” to not only be a lie, but also a myth that reproduces past harms.Education is the epicenter of every community in the United States. Indeed, few institutions are as pivotal in shaping our lives and values than public schools. Yet the nature of schooling has become...

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early AmericaBeginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions co...

From the best-selling author of These Truths, a work that examines the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century.At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of "the nation," in part because postmodernism h...