A biography of a remarkable figure, whose politics prefigured today's social justice, ecology, and gender equality movementsAmmon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and daughters, and then his job. For protesting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was hounded by the IRS and driven to migrant labor in the fields of the West. He had a romance with Do...

The romantic idea of the writer as an isolated genius has been discredited, but there are few empirical studies documenting the role of "gatekeeping" in the literary process. How do friends, agents, editors, translators, small publishers, and reviewers-not to mention the changes in technology and the publishing industry-shape the literary process? This matrix is further complicated when books cross cultural and language barriers, that is, when they become part of world literature. Gate...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARThe first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie booksMillions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls—the pioneer girl...

This "outstanding history" of the 1911 disaster that changed the course of 20th-century politics and labor relations "is social history at its best" (Kevin Baker, The New York Times Book Review).New York City, 1911. As the workday was about to end, a fire broke out in the Triangle shirtwaist factory of Greenwich Village. Within minutes it consumed the building's upper three stories. Firemen were powerless to rescue those trapped i...

In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes betwee...

Some samples: 1) When the United States was fighting the war in Vietnam, a sergeant wrote famed photographer Yousuf Karsh and requested a copy of a portrait that he had taken of Eleanor Roosevelt. Mr. Karsh wondered why a young man would be interested in a portrait of a woman who had been First Lady before he was born, so he wrote the soldier. As it turned out, the soldier was not young, but instead he was a career soldier who had been wounded in the Korean War. Ms. Roosevelt had visited h...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions—not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives.

An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities.Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas....

“The publication of the letters of Dorothy Day is a significant event in the history of Christian spirituality.” —Jim Martin, SJ, author of My Life with the SaintsDorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, has been called the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism. Now the publication of her letters, previously sealed for 25 years after her death and meticulously selected by Robert Ellsberg...

Some samples: • In September 2008, James Meeks, a Baptist minister and state senator, organized an impressive act of activism. He led a boycott of Chicago Public Schools by nearly 1,000 students and instead bused them to two affluent North Shore schools. His purpose was to show the differences in funding and quality of education in the schools in different areas of Illinois. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, "In a funding system fueled largely by local property taxes, New Tri...

How is it that in America the image of Jesus Christ has been used both to justify the atrocities of white supremacy and to inspire the righteousness of civil rights crusades? In The Color of Christ, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey weave a tapestry of American dreams and visions — from witch hunts to web pages, Harlem to Hollywood, slave cabins to South Park, Mormon revelations to Indian reservations — to show how Americans remade the Son of God visually time and again into a sacred...

Despite the many social changes of the last half-century, many Americans still "pass": black for white, gay for straight, and now in many new ways as well. We tend to think of passing in negative terms--as deceitful, cowardly, a betrayal of one's self. But this compassionate book reveals that many passers today are people of good heart and purpose whose decision to pass is an attempt to bypass injustice, and to be more truly themselves.Passing tells the poignant, complicat...