Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope


Nicholas D. Kristof - 2020
    About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. Taken together, these accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology


Aldon D. Morris - 2015
    Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible. Morris uncovers the seminal theoretical work of Du Bois in developing a “scientific” sociology through a variety of methodologies and examines how the leading scholars of the day disparaged and ignored Du Bois’s work.The Scholar Denied is based on extensive, rigorous primary source research; the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision. In exposing the economic and political factors that marginalized the contributions of Du Bois and enabled Park and his colleagues to be recognized as the “fathers” of the discipline, Morris delivers a wholly new narrative of American intellectual and social history that places one of America’s key intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois, at its center.The Scholar Denied is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, racial inequality, and the academy. In challenging our understanding of the past, the book promises to engender debate and discussion.

Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America


Adam Cohen - 2020
    But when Warren announced his retirement in 1968, newly elected President Richard Nixon, who had been working tirelessly behind the scenes to put a stop to what he perceived as the Court's liberal agenda, had his new administration launch a total assault on the Warren Court's egalitarian victories, moving to dismantle its legacy and replace liberal justices with others more loyal to his views. During his six years in office, he appointed four justices to the Supreme Court, thereby setting its course for the next fifty years.In Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since Nixon and exposes how rarely the Court has veered away from a pro-corporate agenda. Contrary to what Americans might like to believe, the Court does not protect equally the rights of the poor and disadvantaged, and, in fact, hasn't for decades. Many of the greatest successes of the Warren Court, such as school desegregation, labor unions, voting rights, and class action suits, have been abandoned in favor of rulings that protect privileged Americans who tend to be white, wealthy, and powerful.As the nation comes to grips with two newly Trump-appointed justices, Cohen proves beyond doubt that the trajectory of today's Court is the result of decisions made fifty years ago, decisions that have contributed directly and grievously to our nation's soaring inequality. An triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land, and should shake to its core any optimistic faith we might have in it to provide checks and balances.

The American Community College


Arthur M. Cohen - 1989
    Anyone who wants to understand these complex and dynamic institutions—how they are evolving, the contributions they make, the challenges they face, the students they serve, and the faculty and leaders who deliver the services and the curricula—will find The American Community College both essential reading and an important reference book."—George R. Boggs, president and CEO, American Association of Community Colleges"I have been a community college president for over forty-one years and a graduate professor for three decades. This book has been an inspiration to generations of students, faculty members, and administrators. It has become the classic of the field because it has great 'take-home' value to us all."—Joseph N. Hankin, president, Westchester Community College"In this latest edition of The American Community College, the authors continue to manifest their unique, highly knowledgeable perspective about the community college. This book is must-reading for all who desire to understand one of the most important educational institutions in the twenty-first century."—Barbara K. Townsend, professor and director, Center for Community College Research, College of Education, University of Missouri–Columbia"Cohen and Brawer's classic work is the touchstone for a comprehensive overview of the American community college. This is a seminal book for graduate students as well as seasoned professionals for understanding this uniquely American institution."—Charles R. Dassance, president, Central Florida Community College

HTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide (Visual QuickStart Guides)


Elizabeth Castro - 2013
    In this updated edition author Bruce Hyslop uses crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today's HTML and CSS essentials. The book has been refreshed to feature current web design best practices. You'll learn how to design, structure, and format your website. You'll learn about the new elements and form input types in HTML5. You'll create and use images, links, styles, and forms; and you'll add video, audio, and other multimedia to your site. You'll learn how to add visual effects with CSS3. You'll understand web standards and learn from code examples that reflect today's best practices. Finally, you will test and debug your site, and publish it to the web. Throughout the book, the author covers all of HTML and offers essential coverage of HTML5 and CSS techniques.

Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets


John P. Kretzmann - 1993
    A revolutionary approach to improving one's community through local institutions, including the parish.

Nations and Nationalism


Ernest Gellner - 1983
    Professor Gellner asserts here that a society's affluence and economic growth depend on innovation, occupational mobility, the effectiveness of the mass media, universal literacy, and an all-embracing educational system based on a shared, standard idiom. These factors, taken together, govern the relationship between culture and the state. Political units that do not conform to the principle, one state, one culture feel the strain in the form of nationalistic activity.

The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die


Keith Payne - 2017
    The levels of inequality in the world today are on a scale that have not been seen in our lifetimes, yet the disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically; it also has profound consequences for how we think, how we respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and even how we view moral concepts such as justice and fairness.Research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has not only revealed important new insights into how inequality changes people in predictable ways but also provided a corrective to the flawed view of poverty as being the result of individual character failings. Among modern developed societies, inequality is not primarily a matter of the actual amount of money people have. It is, rather, people's sense of where they stand in relation to others. Feeling poor matters--not just being poor. Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social maladies we associate with poverty, including lower than average life expectancies, serious health problems, mental illness, and crime.The Broken Ladder explores such issues as why women in poor societies often have more children, and why they have them at a younger age; why there is little trust among the working class in the prudence of investing for the future; why people's perception of their social status affects their political beliefs and leads to greater political divisions; how poverty raises stress levels as effectively as actual physical threats; how inequality in the workplace affects performance; and why unequal societies tend to become more religious. Understanding how inequality shapes our world can help us better understand what drives ideological divides, why high inequality makes the middle class feel left behind, and how to disconnect from the endless treadmill of social comparison.

Classical Sociological Theory


Craig J. Calhoun - 2002
    It explores the pioneering minds of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, who developed our modern idea of society; and looks at the powerful influence of the works of early the sociologists Mead, Simmel, Freud, and Du Bois.

Essential Research Methods for Social Work


Allen Rubin - 2006
    Illustrations and examples throughout show you how you can apply research to practice. Studying is made easy with a book-specific website that provides you with tutorial quizzes and links to additional related concepts. Outlines, introductions, boxes, chapter endings with main points, review questions and exercises, and internet exercises provide you with the information and practice you need to succeed in this course.

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy


Tressie McMillan Cottom - 2015
    Yet little is known about why for-profits have expanded so quickly and even less about how the power and influence of this big-money industry impact individual lives. Lower Ed, the first book to link the rapid expansion of for-profit degrees to America’s increasing inequality, reveals the story of an industry that exploits the pain, desperation, and aspirations of the most vulnerable and exposes the conditions that allow for-profit education to thrive.Tressie McMillan Cottom draws on her personal experience as a former counselor at two for-profit colleges and dozens of interviews with students, senior executives, and activists to detail how these schools have become so successful and to decipher the benefits, credentials, pitfalls, and real costs of a for-profit education. By humanizing the hard choices about school and survival that millions of Americans face, Lower Ed nimbly parses the larger forces that deliver some of us to Yale and others to For-Profit U in an office park off Interstate 10.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America


Linda Tirado - 2014
    Linda Tirado, in her signature brutally honest yet personable voice, takes all of these preconceived notions and smashes them to bits. She articulates not only what it is to be working poor in America (yes, you can be poor and live in a house and have a job, even two), but what poverty is truly like—on all levels. Frankly and boldly, Tirado discusses openly how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why “poor people don’t always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should.”

The Skin That We Speak


Lisa D. Delpit - 2001
    The Skin That We Speak takes the discussion of language in the classroom beyond the highly charged war of idioms and presents today's teachers with a thoughtful exploration of the varieties of English that we speak, in what Black Issues Book Review calls "an essential text." Edited by bestselling author Lisa Delpit and education professor Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, the book includes an extended new piece by Delpit herself, as well as groundbreaking work by Herbert Kohl, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Victoria Purcell-Gates, as well as classic texts by Geneva Smitherman and Asa Hilliard. At a time when children are written off in our schools because they do not speak formal English, and when the class- and race-biased language used to describe those children determines their fate, The Skin That We Speak offers a cutting-edge look at crucial educational issues.

Foundations of Earth Science


Frederick K. Lutgens - 1996
    This highly visual, non- technical survey emphasizes broad, up-to-date coverage of basic topics and principles in geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy. The text's flexible design lends itself to the diversity of Earth science courses in both content and approach. As in previous editions, the main focus is to foster student understanding of basic earth science principles.

The American Intellectual Tradition: Volume II: 1865 to the Present


David A. Hollinger - 1989
    Uniquely comprehensive, The American Intellectual Tradition includes classic works in philosophy, religion, social theory, political thought, economics, psychology, and cultural and literary criticism. Organized chronologically into thematic sections, the two volumes trace the evolution of intellectual writing and thinking from its origins in Puritan beliefs to the most recent essays on diversity and postmodernity. Pedagogical features include introductions and headnotes to the selections, updated bibliographic material throughout, and detailed chronologies at the end of each book. Addressing such highly contested subjects as race, class, gender, aesthetics, political religion, and the role of the United States in the world, The American Intellectual Tradition, Fifth Edition, is invaluable for undergraduate courses in intellectual history. It is also an excellent supplement for graduate seminars and classes in American history, American studies, and American literature. Volumes I and II now offer new selections from Roger Williams, John Humphrey Noyes, Asa Gray, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Augustus Briggs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walter Lippmann, Thurman Arnold, Henry Luce, Henry A. Wallace, Albert Einstein, Aldo Leopold, James Baldwin, George Kennan, Milton Friedman, Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, Gloria Anzaldua, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Joan W. Scott, Samuel Huntington, and Carl Sagan.