Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly unde...

After World War II, Hollywood’s “social problem films”—tackling topical issues that included racism, crime, mental illness, and drug abuse—were hits with critics and general moviegoers alike. In an era of film famed for its reliance on pop psychology, these movies were a form of popular sociology, bringing the academic discipline’s concerns to a much broader audience.Sociology on Film examines how the postwar “problem film” translated contemporary policy debates and intell...

A collection of newly discovered and never-before-published stories by the late Kathleen Collins, a brilliant yet little-known African American writer, artist, and filmmaker.Exuberant, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, these sixteen stories by Kathleen Collins explore deep, far-reaching issues—relating to race, gender, family, and sexuality—that shape the ordinary moments in our lives. Collins's work masterfully blends the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate w...

Trayvon Martin’s parents take readers beyond the news cycle with an account only they could give: the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement.“A reminder—not only of Trayvon’s life and death but of the vulnerability of black lives in a country that still needs to be reminded they matter.”—USA TodayNow a docuseries on the Paramount Network produced by Shawn CarterYears af...

From the speechwriter and top adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson: A behind-the-scenes history of the most momentous decade in American politics.Richard N. Goodwin entered public service in 1958 as a law clerk for Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. He left politics ten years later in the aftermath of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. Over the course of one extraordinary decade, Goodwin orchestrated some of the noblest achievements in t...

From an award-winning writer, the first linked history of African Americans and Latinos in Major League BaseballAfter peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth--a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over one-quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck not only explain...

Millions of Americans have read and been galvanized by A People’s History of the United States. But many years before Howard Zinn published that epic saga of exploitation and resistance, he was organizing civil-rights protests and agitating for an end to the Vietnam War—and writing about those efforts in the pages of The Nation. From the Atlanta campus of Spelman College (where Zinn taught in the early 1960s) to North Vietnam (where he facilitated the release of American POWs), Zinn was no...

The brutal lynching of two young black men in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, cast a shadow over the town that still lingers. It is only one event in the long and complicated history of race relations in Marion, a history much ignored and considered by many to be best forgotten. But the lynching cannot be forgotten. It is too much a part of the fabric of Marion, too much ingrained even now in the minds of those who live there. In Our Town journalist Cynthia Carr explores the i...

A compelling framework for understanding the importance of the 1970s for America and the worldThe 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework f...

As the US deports record numbers of illegal immigrants and local and state governments scramble to pass laws resembling dystopian police states where anyone can be questioned and neighbors are encouraged to report on one another, violent anti-immigration rhetoric is growing across the nation. Against this tide of hysteria, Pilar Marrero reveals how damaging this rise in malice toward immigrants is not only to the individuals, but to our country as a whole. Marrero explores the rise in hate...

Using previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.S. government. Revising the standard narratives of American and West German social mobilization, Martin Klimke demonstrates the strong transnational connections between New Left groups on both sides of the Atlantic....

Most people believe that the right to privacy is inherently at odds with the right to free speech. Courts all over the world have struggled with how to reconcile the problems of media gossip with our commitment to free and open public debate for over a century. The rise of the Internet has made this problem more urgent. We live in an age of corporate and government surveillance of our lives. And our free speech culture has created an anything-goes environment on the web, where offensive an...