Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965. He came to organize non-violent demonstrations against discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events from that turbulent winter of 1965--events that changed not only the lives of these two little girls but the lives of all Alabamians and all Americans. From 1975 to 1979, award-winning journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with Webb and West, weaving their recollections into this luminous story of fear and courage, struggle and redemption that readers will discover is Selma, Lord, Selma.

    In the words of Seale the book "...continues to have a universal apppeal as an account of an oppressed people's struggle for human liberation."

    Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement. The single most important intellectual influence on Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, Negroes with Guns is a classic story of a man who risked his life for democracy and freedom.

    It covers an incredible range of topics and offers fresh insights on nearly every page... the author's great gift is his ability to penetrate the minds of both slaves and masters, revealing not only how they viewed themselves and each other, but also how they contradictory perceptions interacted.

    Each story features a short synopsis of the crime and the journey through the justice system that brought them to the execution chamber.

    The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual from the past as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice. Hamer's ideas and fearless activism reveal how we all, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, ability, economic status, or educational background, have the power to transform society.Born in Webster County, Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), the youngest of twenty children, was the granddaughter of enslaved people and worked as a sharecropper before dedicating herself to activism. Hamer fought for her community by working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), assisting with Black voter registration, and serving as vice chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.Hamer’s 1964 televised speech before the DNC's credentials committee was delivered before millions, and addressed two central issues that remain relevant today: voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence. Hamer described the scare tactics and violence she and other African Americans experienced and their lack of access to the vote. Throughout her life, Hamer fought for Black voting rights, social justice, women's empowerment, human rights and economic rights.

    The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

    Ride with author John Hall into the turbulent world of 1960s bike club culture, from the time he joined an upstart motorcycle club from Dixie, and rose to become Long Island chapter president of the Pagans, a club that the FBI called "the most violent criminal organization in America." Follow him into the Pagan heartland of Pennsylvania where he fell in love, got in a roadhouse brawl over a honky-tonk angel, and eventually went to jail for "takin' care a club business." Now after a career as a journalist and college professor, he returns to the violent days of his youth and smashes up stereotypes like he once smashed up bars, resurrecting long-dead brothers, in a style reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Mark Twain.  Hall presents them as they really were: hard living, hard loving, hard drinking, hard fighting rebels, but also hardworking, patriotic, loyal, and lovable characters, and a band of brothers whose outlandish behavior forged an all-American outlaw legend in the tradition of Jesse James, Doc Holliday, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd.  Outlaws yes, but outlaws as American as apple pie.

    But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump's victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump's rise--including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer's writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn't happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible. Without acknowledging and confronting these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to another ambitious demagogue.

    Who hasn’t heard of Jesse James, the Dalton Brothers, Black Bart, or Belle Starr? They are as much a part of American folklore as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. There’s something about the west that has brought out the best, and the worst in mankind. The funny thing is, a cult following has developed around many of these bandits, making them out to be something they weren’t. The legend that grew up around Joaquin Murrieta was that he was just a normal guy who moved from Mexico to California, and tried to strike it rich during the gold rush. What he discovered instead, was a big sign that read, “No Mexicans Allowed.” His supporters say, that because of the Foreign Claim Tax, he was forced off his land, and into a life of outlawry. And, then to support that claim, a whole legend has been built up, about how he stole from the rich, and shared his wealth with poor Mexican families. The only problem is the facts don’t support that interpretation. The same stories developed around Jesse James. Legend has it, Jesse only stole from rich bankers and railroad men, and the reason he could disappear into thin air after pulling a bank job or train robbery was because he shared the booty with poor Missouri families. As with Murrieta, that probably never happened. Jesse James was a thief. He stole money wherever he could get his hands on it. He robbed stagecoaches, banks, trains, and you-name-it. And, last, but not least, there’s Belle Starr, one of the most badass female robbers on record. Belle called her pistols her “babies,” and ruled an outlaw kingdom based out of her home in Indian Territory. She lived by the gun, and she died by the gun. The outlaw life was almost always portrayed as a glamorous life, filled with loose women, blazing guns, and saddlebags overflowing with gold, silver, and greenbacks. What a life! The only thing is, all the movies, books, and TV shows painted a distorted portrait of life in the old west. James Dodsworth lived the outlaw life for six weeks while riding as a spy with the Doolin-Dalton Gang. He said the gang was constantly on the move. They rarely spent more than one night in any one place. Dalton and Doolin, both worried they’d end up like Jesse James—shot in the back. At night, the gang always posted at least one man on watch duty. The rest of the gang slept with Winchesters by their sides, and pistols under their heads. Every one of them were ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. And, as for those saddlebags overflowing with riches, more often than not, they were like a Charlie Brown Halloween special—filled with rocks rather than gold. Sometimes the gang would cut off the wrong car during a train robbery, and end up riding away empty handed. Sometimes a posse would chase them off a little too soon, before they could grab their booty. Other times, it was slim pickings, and there was nothing to take. The first train job the Dalton Gang pulled went totally awry. The Express man got away before they could convince him to open the safe, and in their haste to rob the Atlantic Express the boys forgot to bring dynamite to blow the safe. Black Jack Ketchum, and his gang, made off with $100,000 in unsigned bank notes. Pearl Hart’s fame rests upon a single stage coach robbery that netted her under $500, and several years in the caboose after she was captured. The sad truth is most outlaws led a short life that ended, either at the end of a rope, or with a bullet in the brain.

    In September 1970, two boys met in the playground on their first day at secondary school in North London. They formed what would be described at the Old Bailey thirty years later as ‘a unique and wicked bond’. Between 1982 and 1986, striking near lonely railway stations in London and the Home Counties, their partnership took them from rape to murder. Three police forces pooled their resources to catch them in the biggest criminal manhunt since the Yorkshire Ripper Enquiry.A Dangerous Place is the first full-length account of the crimes of John Duffy and David Mulcahy. Told by the son of one of the police officers who led the enquiry, exhaustively researched and with unprecedented access, this is the story of two of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century and the times they operated in. It is the story of the women who died at their hands. It is the story of the women who survived them, and who had the courage to ensure justice was done. And it is the story of a father, told by a son.

    This monumental biography--eight years in the research and writing--treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.

    They had one jumpseat passenger, an off-duty colleague who they assumed was simply taking advantage of the FedEx perk allowing virtually all employees to ride the company jet for free. The shock came twenty minutes later, before the plane had reached its normal cruising altitude.The lone passenger attacked the pilots with hammers and a spear gun. He'd had his diabolical plan in the works for months: By crashing the plane into the Federal Express Memphis hub, he'd ruin the company, which he felt had treated him unfairly. With superhuman strength fueled by sheer fury, the attacker struck. What he didn't count on was the skill and intelligence of the pilots. While Sanders and Peterson tried to stop the relentless battering, copilot Tucker swung the aircraft into dangerous flight maneuvers in an attempt to literally knock the man off his feet. Covered in their own blood and exhausted from the struggle, the pilots finally managed to subdue their attacker, returning the plane safely back to Memphis as heroes.

    "On a cold January morning in 1969, a young white graduate student from Massachusetts, stumbling along the dim trail of a long-defunct radical organization of the 1930s, the Alabama Sharecropper Union, heard that there was a survivor and went looking for him. In a rural settlement 20 miles or so from Tuskegee in east-central Alabama he found him—the man he calls Nate Shaw—a black man, 84 years old, in full possession of every moment of his life and every facet of its meaning. . . . Theodore Rosengarten, the student, had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history." —H. Jack Geiger, New York Times Book Review

    In this reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.