Books

Books

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortíz
This class-savvy peoples’ history explores the silences haunting our national narrative. Like her friend and colleague, historian Howard Zinn, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a great rememberer and researcher. This brilliant bottom-up people’s history places settler-colonialism and genocide exactly where they belong: as foundational to the existence of the U.S. Told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and […]
Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian
Howard Zinn
In this lively collection, Zinn discusses historical and political topics, ranging from Columbus; The Bill of Rights; the role of the Supreme Court; and higher education. Failure to Quit includes two of his most famous essays: “The Optimism of Uncertainty” and “The Problem is Civil Obedience” as well as the classic Barsamian-Zinn interview: “Who Controls the Past […]
Howard Zinn on Race
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn on Race is Zinn’s choice of the shorter writings and speeches that best reflect his views on America’s most taboo topic. As chairman of the history department at all-black women’s Spelman College, Zinn was an outspoken supporter of student activists in the nascent civil rights movement. In “The Southern Mystique,” he tells of how […]
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
Jason Stanley
As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States […]
Retargeting Iran
David Barsamian, Ervand Abrahamian, Noam Chomsky, Nader Hashemi, Azadeh Moaveni, Trita Parsi
“ReTargeting Iran is not a travelogue about Iran but a facts-only objective account of where America has gone wrong, stupidly wrong—yet again—in its foreign policy, dominated by a mythical belief that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. All one needs to know about the threat is this: as of mid-2020, the United States had […]
Men Explain Things To Me
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit’s comic, scathing essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” went viral and inspired the word mansplaining. She took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the […]
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Rebecca Solnit
A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit‘s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a […]
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has […]
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Angela Davis
In these collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, she discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom […]
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky’s back-pocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control has been updated and expanded into a two-section book and redesigned following the acclaimed format of his Open Media anti-war bestseller, 9-11. The new edition of Media Control also includes “The Journalist from Mars,” Chomsky’s 2002 talk on the media coverage of America’s “new war on terrorism.” Chomsky […]
The Death of Democracy
Benjamin Hett
Benjamin Hett chronicles the demise of constitutional rule in Germany from 1930-1934 and what enabled Nazism. The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic resonates with contemporary corollaries without ever having to identify them. The work serves as an important reminder of the fragility of democracy.
Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World
Cynthia Kaufman
Arguing that we only have democracy when systems of power are held to account, Cynthia Kaufman examines the real work being done to challenge the operations of power that underlie four unruly social problems: climate change, sweatshop labor, police abuse, and economic deprivation. In Challenging Power, she pairs each of these issues with an operation of power–the […]

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