What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
10 best books like What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Peggy Pascoe): The Crying of Lot 49, The House of Mirth, Not Even Bones, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Notes of a Native Son, Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humor, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd...
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| ISBN | 1844082938 |
First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.
Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated,...
Dexter meets This Savage Song in this dark fantasy about a girl who sells magical body parts on the black market — until she’s betrayed.
Nita doesn’t murder supernatural beings and sell their body parts on the internet—her mother does that. Nita just dissects the bodies after they’ve...
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
| Author | Michelle Alexander |
| ISBN | 1595581030 |
"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot...
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
| Author | Douglas A. Blackmon |
| ISBN | 0385506252 |
In this groundbreaking historical exposé, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate...
| Author | James Baldwin |
| ISBN | 0807064319 |
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.” - James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin was a fascinating and eloquent man, one who I would have loved to have had a conversation with....
Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines
| Author | Nic Sheff |
| ISBN | 1416913629 |
The story that inspired the major motion picture Beautiful Boy featuring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet.
This New York Times bestselling memoir of a young man’s addiction to methamphetamine tells a raw, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful tale of the road from relapse to recovery.
Nic...
| Author | Clayborne Carson |
| ISBN | 0674447271 |
With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet even-handed book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and...
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
| Author | Lisa McGirr |
| ISBN | 0691096112 |
In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered...
| Author | Tiya Miles |
| ISBN | 0520250028 |
This beautifully written book tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. It is the story of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master...
| Author | Michael J. Klarman |
| ISBN | 0195310187 |
A monumental investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow To Civil Rights spells out in compelling detail the political and social context within which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of their decisions for American race relations. In a highly provocative...
| Author | Mary L. Dudziak |
| ISBN | 0691095132 |
In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States'...
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
| Author | Robin D.G. Kelley |
| ISBN | 0807842885 |
Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms....
Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party
| Author | Paul Frymer |
| ISBN | 0691134650 |
In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the...
The Lost Promise of Civil Rights
| Author | Risa L. Goluboff |
| ISBN | 0674024656 |
Listen to a short interview with Risa Goluboff
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane In this groundbreaking book, Risa L. Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education has long dominated...
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace
| Author | Nancy MacLean |
| ISBN | 0674019091 |
In the 1950s, the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans. Today, diversity in the workforce is a point of pride. How did such a transformation come about? In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American...
Many Minds, One Heart: Sncc's Dream for a New America
| Author | Wesley C. Hogan |
| ISBN | 0807859591 |
How did the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee break open the caste system in the American South between 1960 and 1965? In this innovative study, Wesley Hogan explores what SNCC accomplished and, more important, how it fostered significant social change in such a short time. She offers new...
The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-Of-The-Century New York City
| Author | Mary Ting Yi Lui |
| ISBN | 0691130485 |
In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman's strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese...
