desegregation

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk  · 26 Sep 2023

basis of race and ending practices like literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise Black voters. A number of carefully choreographed boycotts and sit-ins desegregated public facilities from buses in Alabama to lunch counters in North Carolina. At the height of the civil rights era, many Americans came to hope

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shape the core tenets of the new ideology that is now in the ascendant in powerful institutions across the country. DERRICK BELL’S CASE AGAINST DESEGREGATION After he graduated from law school in 1957, a young Black law student was able to secure a brief audience with his idol: William H

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man had been “born fifteen years too late.” With landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education, which provided a legal imperative to desegregate schools, already on the books, the only tasks that were left involved some “mopping up.” The brief encounter with Hastie left that young man, who

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schools. In case after case, Bell sued those authorities to make Brown v. Board a reality. All in all, he helped oversee three hundred cases desegregating schools and small businesses. At first, Bell found his work exhilarating. He was finally fulfilling his ambition of making a real difference by practicing the

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own experiences, Bell observed that many civil rights attorneys litigating cases over public schools in the American South were guided by an ideological commitment to desegregation. But the Black clients on whose behalf they were working often had different goals. They wanted their children to have access to a quality education

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, irrespective of the composition of the student body. At times, this even made them oppose efforts at desegregation outright. As a coalition of Black community groups wrote in a letter to a Boston district court that Bell used as the epigraph for his

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article, Any steps to achieve desegregation must be reviewed in light of the black community’s interest in improved pupil performance as the primary characteristic of educational equity. . . . We think it

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neither necessary nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit. Bell’s article was written in the sober, even painstaking, tone typical of contributions to American

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his conclusion was a political bombshell. Drawing on a line of argument that (as Bell himself acknowledged) had originally been advanced by racist opponents of desegregation, he warned that civil rights lawyers were trying to “serve two masters” at the same time. Caught in a conflict between their clients’ wishes and

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were wrongly prioritizing what they themselves thought was right. “Having convinced themselves that Brown stands for desegregation and not education,” Bell complained, “the established civil rights organizations steadfastly refuse to recognize reverses in the school desegregation campaign—reverses which, to some extent, have been precipitated by their rigidity.” It was time for

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equal. Many of Bell’s progressive colleagues regarded this conclusion as sacrilege. But he was undeterred. In his mind, casting doubts on the merit of desegregation was only the opening salvo in a much wider campaign to question the logic and the values of the civil rights movement. THE (SUPPOSED) PERMANENCE

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come to exert an unexpected influence on American public policy over the course of the 2010s. According to Bell, the kinds of neutral remedies, like desegregation, that had been implemented during the civil rights era would never suffice to overcome the legacy of slavery. Because judges could always reinterpret precedent in

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universalism, for these disappointments. Derrick Bell, the biggest influence on the new movement of critical race theory, concluded that civil rights lawyers erred in making desegregation the principal aim of school reform. Bell and other theorists within the tradition of critical race theory also denied that universal moral principles could help

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less numerous and less powerful groups—making it, at best, an extremely risky tool for overcoming historical injustice. As Hubert Humphrey, a passionate advocate of desegregation, reportedly insisted when he shepherded the Civil Rights Act through the Senate, giving preferential treatment to a group on the basis of its ascriptive characteristics

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-09-23-8603110287-story.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Black pupils languished: Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT much less wealth: As of 2011, the median Black household income ($32

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Bell on Racism,” filmed 1994, YouTube, video, 1:42, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVy8w0Sz9LY&t=102s. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT imperative to desegregate schools: Urban Agenda, “Derrick Bell on Racism,” 1:42. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT encounter with Hastie: For an overview of Derrick Bell’s

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TEXT quit his government position: Bernstein, “Derrick Bell, Law Professor and Rights Advocate, Dies at 80.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT three hundred cases desegregating: “In Memoriam: Derrick Bell, 1930–2011,” NYU School of Law, accessed Jan. 30, 2023, www.law.nyu.edu/news/DERRICK_BELL_MEMORIAM. GO TO NOTE

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, Dies at 80.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Any steps to achieve”: Derrick Bell, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85, no. 4 (March 1976): 470, doi.org/10.2307/795339. See also 482–83 for further context. GO TO NOTE

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open to legal remedies: As Bell asked, “Why, one might ask, have [civil rights lawyers] been so unwilling to recognize the increasing futility of ‘total desegregation,’ and, more important, the increasing number of defections within the black community?” (Bell, “Serving Two Masters,” 488.) In a 2004 book, Bell laid out his

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. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20–28. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT merit of desegregation: See in particular Derrick Bell, “The Real Cost of Racial Equality,” Civil Liberties Review 1 (1974): 79–95; Derrick A. Bell Jr., “Brown v. Board

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of critical race theory. As I described in part I, Bell was a civil rights lawyer who gradually came to believe that many efforts at desegregation in the American South were a serious mistake. This stance may seem deeply counterintuitive at first sight. But a consideration of the three key postulates

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America of the 1950s, a landmark decision like Brown v. Board of Education must have been in their racial self-interest. The true motivation for desegregation, Bell argued, was to serve the interests of whites by improving America’s international image and making it easier to develop the Sunbelt. (See Derrick

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Democratic National Convention, 300n Democratic Party, 11, 80, 210–11, 268, 270, 276–77, 340n Demos, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 45, 305n, 311n Descartes, René, 136 desegregation, see integration Dewey, John, 183 DiAngelo, Robin, 80, 107, 108, 123–24, 126, 189, 241, 244, 268 disabilities, 9, 10, 15, 46, 69, 311n, 319n

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Aug 2020

criticism that he was trying to be all things to all people; spoke candidly about his own moral failing in neglecting to speak against school desegregation until Brown v. Board of Ed, and in supporting the Vietnam War until 1971. He was blunt about America’s failings, too, citing the CIA

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Richard Nixon attempted to repeat the accomplishment in 1968, intimating his sympathy for the region’s desire to keep the federal government from forcing racial desegregation upon it, it was dubbed the “Southern strategy.” When he swept the South along with almost all the rest of the nation in 1972, experts

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black vote. In 1968, Nixon followed Goldwater’s lead, aiming his appeal at white segregationists in the South, and white Northerners opposed to busing to desegregate public schools. In 1972, nonwhites were practically the only voters who didn’t support Richard Nixon, giving him 13 percent. But for some Republicans this

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week in Miami, many of the same activists who had circulated the anti-gay-rights petitions convinced the Dade County School Board to cancel a desegregation plan. “We don’t want to lose control of our children,” one activist explained, “and that is what happens when they are bused.” Following their

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toddler by her side carried a sign reading, “IF YOU LIKED JUDGE GARRITY, YOU’LL LOVE THE ERA,” referring to the federal judge administering the desegregation of the schools in South Boston. “For a lot of these ERA people giving the feds control over the school doesn’t matter because they

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in frustration with its rightward march. Much in its pages was respectable: statistics-laden studies, for example, claiming a failure of busing to achieve quality desegregated schooling, or the ways Washington-directed urban renewal was proving counterproductive in reversing blight. Work like this comprised the most important intellectual contribution of neoconservatism

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handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, Southern public schools—sometimes entire school systems—shut down rather than desegregate. Private “segregation academies” sprung up to replace them. In some states, governments provided grants to subsidize tuition. The movement accelerated following passage of the 1964

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’s segregated schools hit a snag, he said it might not open it all—for what would be the point? Orangeburg’s public schools were desegregated, however, and the school named after the Confederate general opened its doors in the fall of 1967. Five months later, as it happened, three black

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that schools seeking tax deductible status face higher scrutiny if they were opened or expanded in a community following an order for public schools to desegregate. The civil rights group the Children’s Defense Fund began dispatching investigators to Southern towns to see if the ruling was being carried out. In

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August 21. It announced that it would apply to any school “formed or significantly expanded” after the local district began a court-ordered or voluntary desegregation plan—an estimated 3,500 of the nation’s 18,000 tax-exempt private schools. It demanded neither abortion counselors nor gay teachers. It simply

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bankruptcy), and a ban on busing—a potent pledge in Boston, still raw from the violent street clashes that followed an infamous 1974 federal court desegregation plan. Massachusetts’s Democratic Party endorsed King. Dukakis lost by nine points. “You gave us a message,” King proclaimed in his victory speech. “You said

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that they were false. Like the one about a black cook who manned the guns at Pearl Harbor so heroically the armed services were immediately desegregated. (That came seven years later.) Or a favorite “quotation” he attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “We will take Eastern Europe. We will organize the hordes of

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age of twenty-nine as a liberal, became the senator from outside the deep South who did the most to stymie busing to achieve school desegregation, and pioneered the imposition of mandatory sentences for federal crimes. (He said drug dealers were “potential killers” who should be tracked down “like we track

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Day Hicks, the legendary leader of the violent opposition to the integration of South Boston High School; he called integration supporters “Communist dupes,” the federal desegregation order “a Communist plot against Boston,” was an adamant supporter of South Africa’s apartheid government, and famously never went anywhere without a gun. Then

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, “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,” integrating blacks into the league. (There was no such guidebook, and he stopped broadcasting a decade before baseball desegregated.) He would claim that his best friend—William Franklin Burghardt, “Burgie,” a college football teammate—was black (they exchanged letters occasionally), and cite the fact

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Reagan’s campaign chairman, Senator Paul Laxalt, that would explicitly declare spanking children protected by the Constitution and ban federal legal aid for abortion, school desegregation, divorce, and homosexual rights litigation. Phyllis Schlafly’s deputy Rosemary Thomson attended a luncheon at which, she complained, the feminist minister’s invocation was “interspersed

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, 531 Denton, Jeremiah, 870 Denver, John, 573 Department of Consumer Affairs, 202 depression (economic), 849 Des Moines Register, 303, 675, 715 Des Moines Tribune, 303 desegregation, Florida and, 69 Detroit, Republican National Convention (1980), 792 Detroit News, 666, 792 Deukmejian, George, 123, 124, 125, 377 DeVos, Richard, 25, 90, 843 Diamond

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Board of Education, 347 Briggs Initiative (California), 371, 374 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 346 Christian schools, 345–355, 471–484 curriculum, 350 desegregation plan for private schools, 354 Engele v. Vital, 348 funding for, 346–355, 471 Meek v. Pittinger, 481 prayer in schools, 348 private schools seeking

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, 708, 910 Anita Bryant, 85–88, 91–92, 93, 97, 98, 110–112, 120 Connally as candidate, 619–620, 622, 624 Cuban refugees, 777–779 desegregation plan, 69 ERA and, 83, 87, 395, 495 evangelical Christians, 769 gay rights and, 68, 83–88, 92–93, 109–112 primary, 747, 750, 751

Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly  · 11 Aug 2016  · 425pp  · 116,409 words

door that had been closed like a bank vault since the end of Reconstruction. With two strokes of a pen—Executive Order 8802, ordering the desegregation of the defense industry, and Executive Order 9346, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to monitor the national project of economic inclusion—Roosevelt primed the

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strength of character that could stand up to the isolation and scrutiny that came along with being a black student on the front lines of desegregation. But a master’s degree in math would elude Katherine just as it had Dorothy. After the summer session, Katherine decided to leave WVU’s

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to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940. “So I picked you,” Davis said to Katherine that day outside her classroom; two men, then

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opinion of US racial problems, were beginning to matter—a lot—to American leaders, and concern for their opinion influenced Truman’s 1947 decision to desegregate the military through Executive Order 9981. At the start of the Korean War, the Tan Yanks remaining in active service in the US Air Force

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on segregation, North Carolina made cautious moves to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. “After careful deliberation, it is my opinion that desegregation is an idea whose hour has arrived,” said Benjamin Lee Smith, the superintendent of the Greensboro public school system. Christine, however, decided to follow in

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the pressure for Langley management to take a more active hand in the matter of integration. Langley might easily have continued its organic approach to desegregation, ending West Area Computing only after the last of the women had found a new home with an engineering section, like grade school kids waiting

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Moon to Mars. New York: Little, Brown, 2016. Hoover, Dorothy. A Layman Looks With Love At Her Church. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1970. Kalme, Albert P. “Racial Desegregation and Integration in American Education: The Case History of West Virginia State College, 1891–1973.” PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1976. Kessler, James H. et

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, 1943. Reklaitis, Victor. “Hampton Archive: J. S. Darling: Leader of Seafood Industry in Hampton.” Daily Press, August 27, 2006. Rorty, James R. “Virginia’s Creeping Desegregation: Force of the Inevitable.” Commentary Magazine, July 1956. Rouse, Parker. “Hampton Archive: Early Days at Langley Were Colorful.” Daily Press, March 25, 1990. Shloss, Leon

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,” Library of Virginia, http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vawomen/2012/?bio=stuart. 24 continued until 1950: Ibid. 25 “unusually capable”: Albert P. Kalme, “Racial Desegregation and Integration in American Education: The Case History of West Virginia State College, 1891–1973,” PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1976, 149. 25 decided to

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13, 2011. 74 waiting outside her classroom: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013. 75 walked away from an offer of $4 million: Albert P. Kalme, “Racial Desegregation and Integration and American Education: The Case History of West Virginia State College, 1891–1973,” PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1973, 173. 75 “So I

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districts to integrate: Smith, They Closed Their Schools, 144. 169 “the ‘separate but equal’ education of the Negroes marks time”: James Rorty, “Virginia’s Creeping Desegregation: Force of the Inevitable,” Commentary Magazine, July 1956. Rorty’s article offers a fascinating snapshot of Virginia’s struggle with

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desegregation in the years just after Brown v. Board of Ed. 170 “Eighty percent of the world’s population is colored”: Paul Dembling to file, July

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,” The Virginian-Pilot, January 1, 1959. The Virginian-Pilot was the only white newspaper in Virginia to take an editorial stand in favor of school desegregation. 184 A total of ten thousand of the shut-out students: Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia

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washerwomen, 12, 235–236 treatment of vs. colonialism, 103–104 women with college degrees, 40 women’s average wage, 79 See also civil rights movement; desegregation; segregation black newspapers Ace of Space John Glenn, 224 Brown v. Board of Education, 141 freedom fighting, 34–36 Goble family, 185–186 Hillside Inn

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“data analysts” for mathematicians, 259 Davis, Benjamin O., 51 Davis, John W., 72, 74–75 defense industry desegregation, 6, 15–16, 32 Delta Sigma Theta sorority, 40, 105 Dembling, Paul, 170 Derring, Eldridge, 90, 91 desegregation Brown v. Board of Education, 135, 140–141, 153–154, 157, 304 defense industry, 6, 15

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7090s at Goddard, 206, 215, 218, 221–222 CO3E software program, 207 Katherine Johnson versus, 220, 223 “Indian” use in book, ix, 45 integration. See desegregation International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), 162, 175 international view of discrimination, 103–104, 150, 170 Introduction to Celestial Mechanics (Moulton; 1914), 176, 191 Introduction to

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, 129 on Dorothy Vaughan, 173, 250 epilogue, 249–251 Eunice Smith friendship, 120, 186, 232 Flight Research Division, 122–124, 125–131 graduate studies and desegregation, 25, 75–76 homeowner, 132–133, 185–186 Jimmy Goble’s death, 133–134, 135–136, 186 John Glenn’s trajectory, xvii, 211, 216–217

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. Board of Education, 140–141 bus segregation, 44–45 Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall, 70, 74–75, 140–141 Farmville founder Dorothy Vaughan, 19 graduate school desegregation, 24, 74–75 Joseph McCarthy target, 102 teacher salaries, 70, 75 top lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, 24, 32, 70, 74–75 Virginia school integration, 169

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, 218, 239, 240 Scout solid-fuel, 219 Roddenberry, Gene, 243 Rogallo, Francis, 42 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 6, 9–10 Roosevelt, Franklin airplane production boost, 3, 41 desegregation of defense industry, 6, 15–16, 32 “Four Freedoms,” 31 photos on civil service applications, 6–7 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 101 Rosenberg trial repercussions

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell  · 21 Jan 2020  · 450pp  · 113,173 words

problem is the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years. The scholar Derrick Bell described the quarter-century after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) as “the greatest racial consciousness-raising the country has ever known.” This consciousness-raising has only

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the administrations of George Washington and John F. Kennedy. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the unanimous Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation of all the country’s schools, was not just a landmark decision but an unusual one. It was brief to the point of curtness: Shorn

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to this surveillance. And once the Civil Rights Act introduced into the private sector this assumption that all separation was prima facie evidence of inequality, desegregation implied a revocation of the old freedom of association altogether. Just as assuming that two parallel lines can meet overturns much of Euclidean geometry, eliminating

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68% moderation in enforcement of the new civil rights law 13% no choice For all their pious sentiments about desegregating the South, whites opposed every single activist step that might have brought desegregation about, and every single activist who was working to do so. In 1961, they thought, by a margin of

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not have consented to it otherwise. Patterson was one of the few who understood that there were no logical grounds for limiting its work to desegregation. The Yale University law professor Robert Bork, in his own very different way, was another. Immigrant rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and the rights

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. Notably, there was also a belt of conservative Democratic states with brand-new laws permitting abortion under certain circumstances. They were all in the newly desegregated South. In the 1960s, every coastal Southern state from Alabama to Virginia legislated some kind of right to abortion, starting with a Mississippi law permitting

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Constitution tinkered with. They had found ways to resist. The ERA promised to feminize public space just as the civil rights acts had promised to desegregate it. People didn’t want that. As early as the spring of 1975, among those who blocked its passage, the reason most often cited was

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be subjected to the most high-handed carrying out of federal law in the decade to follow: the court-ordered “desegregation” of Boston’s public schools, starting in 1974. The word desegregation belongs in quotation marks because most of the schools affected were within white ethnic (mostly Irish-American and Italian-American

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Great Society as the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened, a transfer from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make desegregation viable. Desegregation was, as we have said, the most massive undertaking of any kind in the history of the United States. Like any massive undertaking, it

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’s Department of Education, he discovered, once he became president, that to do any of those things would have struck at the very foundations of desegregation. So he didn’t—although Democrats and Republicans managed to agitate and inspire their voting and fundraising bases for decades by pretending he had. Meanwhile

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. That innovation caused civil rights law to work in a very different way from laws in the past. For instance, no law required busing to desegregate schools, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act seemed to forbid it. But after 1966, the Justice Department’s OCR issued guidelines that set percentage targets

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could meet. Now, though, it was a different world. Immigration was beginning to create a country with several races, not two. King’s vision of desegregation had been one in which his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The

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institutions of desegregation set up by the courts rejected that approach. They took account of race as never before. The more distant King’s vision of race relations

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Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1989 [1987]), 308. Whites made up 60 percent: Arthur Flemming et al., School Desegregation in Boston, Staff Report Prepared for U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 1975 (typescript), 20 [in University of Maryland Law School library]. The figure

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–224, 227, 228 Dell Computer, 209, 223 democracy, 159, 170, 215 Democratic National Convention 1948, 26 1968, 72, 75, 157 2004, 188 Denny, Reginald, 259 desegregation, 4, 10, 13–14, 21, 35, 109, 146, 149 busing (for school integration), 22, 77, 146 of schools, 4, 13–14, 77 (see also Jim

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968

by Thomas E. Ricks  · 3 Oct 2022  · 482pp  · 150,822 words

military terms, the Freedom Rides of 1961 are a classic example of a long-range raid behind enemy lines. Similarly, the problems that plagued the desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, the following year are instantly recognizable to any military historian who has studied how a clever, adaptive enemy can stymie an

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Woodard’s eye sockets. President Harry Truman was shocked by the incident and would cite it in a letter explaining his 1948 executive order mandating desegregation of the armed forces. “I can’t approve of such goings on,” he wrote to an old friend and former Army comrade. “I am going

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tactical discussion of how to reach that outcome: “What are you going to do?” Significantly, the session Rosa Parks attended at Highlander was titled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” That decision was the ruling the previous year by the high court in Brown v. Board of Education that racial

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of notes during the sessions. She was struck by the idea that the goal of protest was not to influence attitudes, but to force change. “Desegregation prove[s] itself by being put in action,” she wrote in her notes. “Not changing attitudes, attitudes will change.” In other words, don’t try

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that we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.” He was saying that they would shun the buses of this city until they were desegregated. The tactical business at hand was to continue the boycott beyond the one-day wildcat action. That interesting word “coercion” left hanging a question of

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its strategy, was to end the treatment of Blacks as second-class citizens and so to reorder the nation’s public culture. It wanted to desegregate public accommodations—buses, restaurants, parks, and such—and to win for Blacks the right to vote, consistently denied to them in the South. The mode

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American history. The sad opposite echo would come two decades later, when whites in the northern city of Boston reacted violently to the court-ordered desegregation of schools through what was called, in political shorthand, busing. The end of the beginning The Montgomery campaign was over, yet the war for civil

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colleges, as well as two white ones. The city prized its reputation for political moderation, which had led it to take some tentative steps toward desegregation. Lawson would soon put those steps to the test. It also had a community of engaged Black ministers who were paying close attention to the

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addressed Nash as “little lady.” No, it is not, he conceded. So, she said, should the lunch counters be desegregated? “Yes,” the mayor responded. They shook hands. With that exchange, the desegregation of Nashville began. But it would take several years for all the city’s restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels and

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, but Roy Wilkins threatened to retaliate against the SCLC if he did. King dropped the idea. On May 10, the six downtown lunch counters were desegregated. The sit-ins also taught a financial lesson: national attention aided fund-raising. By the end of that month, the balance in the Nashville Christian

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the state’s chapter of the NAACP, and they often resorted to violence. But even so, the initiative remained almost always with the forces of desegregation. One of the best examples of the variety of novel operations available to the Movement was the Freedom Rides. In them, a small band conducted

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of Order. He was only partially redeemed by a petition he filed on May 29 to the Interstate Commerce Commission asking it to adopt stringent desegregation regulations. As one historian put it, “For all their talents, the Kennedy men suffered under a colossal misconception—they thought they could steer and control

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in areas they hadn’t visited. Indeed, later that year, all CORE had to do to force forty-seven restaurants in Maryland and Delaware to desegregate was to announce that it planned sit-ins there. Almost an equal number of restaurants along the highways in the area failed to agree to

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politician Roy Harris, a dedicated segregationist and the president of the white supremacist Citizens’ Councils of America, had stated in 1959 that whites would oppose desegregation so intensely and broadly that failure was unthinkable. “There won’t be any integration in Georgia,” he confidently informed a reporter. Indeed, some 75 percent

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in Selma, Alabama, put it in November 1954, the organization’s plan was “to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit or renew a mortgage.” This was not an empty threat. Rather, it was a time-tested formula

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lost their jobs. Newspapers helped by publishing the names and addresses of those who tried to register. The fallback line of defense was tying up desegregation in the courts, fighting it in every county and school district. This approach produced much delay but few long-term victories. The final line of

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only” section of the town’s bus station. They then put together a coalition of groups called the Albany Movement with the announced purpose to desegregate the entire town. The students were then expelled from school, a punishment that provided Sherrod with an instant staff. “They had nothing else to do

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in various histories. One version is that King, in an incautious moment, supposedly vowed that he would stay jailed until there was an agreement to desegregate the city. The city then offered an unwritten “truce” under which almost all protesters would be freed, all bond money would be returned, the city

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buses would be desegregated, and a biracial committee would be formed to study further steps. In return for this, King would agree to leave town. Nothing was put in

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to seek a new truth—this situation in Birmingham was intolerable.” Young informed Birmingham’s white business leaders what the Movement wanted them to do: desegregate the city’s store and lunch counters, hire Blacks as clerks and cashiers, and drop charges against nonviolent demonstrators. The Movement also called for a

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committee to develop a way forward for school desegregation, but according to Ralph Abernathy, that demand was included simply to give white negotiators something to throw out. The white businessmen were not much interested

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process touches the life of the Negro in Birmingham.” It said that civil rights leaders in the city had tried in good faith to negotiate desegregation, but their efforts had resulted only in broken promises and hesitant steps that were reversed. The call for civil rights for Blacks had religion, morality

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essential to success in warfare. Avoiding them is a recipe for stalemate, at best. Bevel designated May 2 as D Day. The “D” stood for “desegregation,” but the echo of World War II would also have been caught, especially because The Longest Day—a Hollywood blockbuster about the D-Day landings

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settlement was reached between the city’s white business leaders and the SCLC, under which the Movement appeared to win on all its demands: the desegregation of lunch counters and bathrooms in downtown stores, the hiring of some Black salesclerks, and the formation of a biracial committee on school

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desegregation. These would not be immediate, but would be phased in. That slight compromise follows a rule of warfare of allowing your enemy an avenue for

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it happened in Birmingham, the compromise split the city’s power structure. The business community now favored change; those who held political power did not. Desegregation would be a long and difficult process in the city. Bull Connor’s sulking comment on the settlement was, “You know what’s the trouble

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away with literacy tests for anyone with a basic elementary school education. It would enable to the Justice Department to file suits to compel school desegregation. It restricted federal funding for programs that discriminated on the basis of race. Most important, it outlawed segregation in public places—stores, restaurants, hotels, and

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years. As noted, this was in part because seeking reconciliation was always listed as the final goal in nonviolent campaigns. When downtown Birmingham began to desegregate, local Movement leaders used their calmest, best-trained activists to implement the agreement. In an interesting variation on sit-in tactics, these actions were purposefully

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was best known for having been forced out of his leadership position in 1949 under President Truman after “publicly and pugnaciously” opposing the executive order desegregating the military. Royall and Blaik wandered around the town, did not seem to learn much, and never produced a report. Once again, the executive branch

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the following Monday. About this time, the SCLC and SNCC began conducting small reconnaissance patrols, seeing how demonstrators would be received in motels and restaurants. Desegregating these places wasn’t the primary focus of the campaign, but it still had a purpose. “The main thing is to keep the police busy

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(University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 136. “Had you seen Rosa Parks (the Montgomery sparkplug)”: Charron, Freedom’s Teacher, 235. “Desegregation prove[s] itself by being put in action”: “Rosa Parks Notes, School Desegregation Workshop, Highlander Center, July 24–August 8, 1955,” Civil Rights Movement Archive, crmvet.org/docs/5507park.htm. “At Highlander

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battle in Americans for the Preservation of the White Race Anderson, Carol Anderson, William G. Anniston, Ala. Appel, John armed forces, U.S. Blacks in desegregation of presence missions of Ranger Handbook of war colleges of see also military and warfare Armstrong, Thomas arrests bail and of children violence in see

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Bible Biewen, John Bigelow, Albert Bilbo, Theodore Birmingham, Ala. Black veterans killed in bombings in Freedom Riders in Gaston Motel in police in segregation and desegregation in shopping mall in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in violence in Birmingham Barons Birmingham campaign allies in arrests and imprisonments in Bevel in Birmingham

…

.S. Black members of House of Representatives Senate Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Rides and in Freedom Summer campaign; see also Freedom Summer restaurant desegregation and Connor, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Birmingham campaign and Freedom Rides and Pritchett and Constitution, U.S. First Amendment to Cook, Eugene Cooper, Annie Lee CORE

…

Bridge, Bloody Sunday at education Algebra Project Black educators in Selma campaign in Black history Freedom Schools in literacy segregation in, see school segregation and desegregation voting and Edwards, Don Edwards, Len Egerton, John Eig, Jonathann Eisenhower, Dwight Ellis, Kate Emancipation Proclamation Episcopal Church Erenrich, Susie Erikson, Erik H. Eskew, Glenn

…

Drang, Battle of India Chauri Chaura incident in Delhi Pact and partition of Salt March in strikes in insurgency and counterinsurgency integration, see segregation and desegregation Internal Revenue Service (IRS) internet social media Interstate Commerce Commission interstate travel, segregation in Iraq Isaac, Larry Ivory, Cecil Jackson, Bacardi Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Jimmie

…

Jeffries, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Judson Jemison, T. J. Jesus Jesus and the Disinherited (Thurman) Jet Jeter-Bennett, Gisell Jim Crow laws see also segregation and desegregation Johnson, Jacqueline Johnson, James Johnson, Kathryn Lee Johnson, Lyndon civil rights and King’s meeting with Reeb’s murder and Voting Rights Act and Wilkins

…

student movement Reeb and SCLC and in Selma campaign in Selma to Montgomery march Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and Nashville, Tenn. bombing attack in desegregation of Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) Nashville sit-ins arrests in attacks on protesters in Big Saturday in documentary on effects of jailing of protesters

…

, City, Wisc. Scanlon, Jennifer Scheips, Paul J. Schlesinger, Arthur Schmitt, Brad SCLC, see Southern Christian Leadership Conference schools and education, see education school segregation and desegregation Brown v. Board of Education ruling on busing and in St. Augustine at Little Rock High School at University of Mississippi, see University of Mississippi

…

Schultz, Bud Schultz, Ruth Schwerner, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, Rita Scott, Willie Emma Seale, Bobby Sears, Zena segregation and desegregation of armed forces of buses; see also Montgomery bus boycott delay tactics against desegregation in housing in interstate travel Jim Crow laws local versus national laws on of lunch counters of restaurants of

…

schools, see school segregation and desegregation Selma campaign and “separate but equal” and Wallace on segregationists assessment of power of Black veterans and and children employed in civil rights movement communism

Influence: Science and Practice

by Robert B. Cialdini  · 1 Jan 1984  · 405pp  · 121,531 words

, when scientists have examined school integration—the area offering the single best test of the contact approach—they have discovered quite the opposite pattern. School desegregation is more likely to increase prejudice between blacks and whites than to decrease it (Stephan, 1978). Let’s stay with the issue of school

…

desegregation for a while. However well intentioned the proponents of interracial harmony through simple contact are, their approach is unlikely to bear fruit because the argument

…

part, often hold the unsuccessful children in contempt, calling them “dumb” or “stupid.” (Aronson, 1975, pp. 44, 47) Should we wonder, then, why strict school desegregation—whether by enforced busing, district rezoning, or school closures—so frequently produces increased rather than decreased prejudice? When our children find their pleasant social and

…

is 10 times more likely that the academic performance of minority students will significantly increase rather than significantly decline after desegregation (Stephan, 1978). We must be cautious in our approach to school desegregation so that we do not throw out the baby with the bath water. The idea, of course, is to

…

away that hostility is emerging from the research of education specialists into the concept of “cooperative learning.” Because much of the heightened prejudice from classroom desegregation seems to stem from increased exposure to outside group members as rivals, these educators have experimented with forms of learning in which cooperation rather than

…

but to greater group success (Stanne, D. W. Johnson, & R. T. Johnson, 1999). Back to School In the welter of racial tensions that followed school desegregation, certain educational psychologists began to see the relevance to the classroom in Sherif et al.’s findings. If only the learning experience there could be

…

. Like Sherif’s campers working on tasks that could be successfully accomplished only jointly, the students become allies rather than enemies. When tried in newly desegregated classrooms, the jigsaw approach has generated impressive results. Studies have shown that, compared to other classrooms in the same school using the traditional competitive method

…

one crack in the gloom, and I find myself genuinely excited about it. What’s the point of this digression into the effects of school desegregation in race relations? The point is to make two points. First, although the familiarity produced by contact usually leads to greater liking, the opposite occurs

…

’s? Why? What parallels can you see between the findings of the boys’ camp studies and those of studies on the effects of (a) school desegregation and (b) cooperative learning in the classroom? Suppose you wanted the person sitting next to you in class to like you more. Using the factors

…

. S. (1998). Conflict of interest in the debate over calcium-channel antagonists. New England Journal of Medicine, 333, 101–106. Stephan, W. G. (1978). School desegregation: An evaluation of predictions made in Brown vs. Board of Education. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 217–238. Stewart, J. E., II. (1980). Defendant’s attractiveness as

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, James, 214 Davis, Neil, 182 Deadline tactic, 203 Dean, John, 41 Death, social proof principle and, 120–128 DeGaulle, Charles, 73 Demitrius, Jo-Ellen, 60 Desegregation, 152–154 jigsaw classroom and, 156–157 Deutsch, Morton, 71 Diller, Barry, 219–220 Directed deference, 175–176 Dorr’s Rebellion, 214 Dress, effect of

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and adults, 207–210 and censorship, 210–213 and child development, 205–206 Public commitment, 71–73 Pyne, Joe, 228 Quayle, Dan, 182 Race relations desegregation and, 152–154 jigsaw classroom and, 156–157 scarcity principle and, 214–215 Razran, Gregory, 164 Real estate market perceptual contrast in, 14–16 scarcity

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

by Rick Perlstein  · 1 Jan 2008  · 1,351pp  · 404,177 words

loudly reporters couldn’t phone in their stories. Martin Luther King was in Chicago. In 1956, Eleanor Roosevelt had said that if the Windy City desegregated, it would set a lovely example for the South. Mayor Daley replied that there was no segregation in Chicago. He was still proclaiming it—even

…

though, in 1965, after Dick Gregory led silent desegregation marches past Daley’s Bridgeport house, neighborhood school-girls adopted a new jump-rope chant: “I’d like to be an Alabama trooper / That is

…

, Mississippi, “while,” the New York Times reported, “state and local law-enforcement officials stood by, laughing and chuckling,” a white mob ran off six hundred desegregation marchers. (“You’re going to see a show tonight,” the sheriff had promised newsmen.) In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s

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-funding law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and a series of federal courts ruled that jurisdictions with dual school systems would have to file desegregation plans with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to get federal money (which would, in some school districts, make up a quarter of

…

clouds of technicalities. Mendel Rivers’s side was winning the debate. On Wednesday, September 21, Rules Committee Republicans engineered a surprise investigation into HEW’s desegregation guidelines; on Thursday the Senate Appropriations Committee slashed HEW’s enforcement budget; on Monday, the same committee argued the guidelines were illegal under the terms

…

, who spoke of how “the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life,” was a Southern senator who voted down the line against desegregation. Lowenstein wrote them all letters nonetheless, begging them to stand in the gap. Only Eugene McCarthy, the diffident, difficult senator from Minnesota, expressed any interest

…

system without a ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund immediately asked federal district courts to revisit all desegregation plans for compliance with New Kent County. And how to keep on fighting federally mandated integration was now the abiding obsession of every ambitious Southern

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tailor his message to suit local tastes. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a fast-growing New South metropolis where the NAACP had recently filed a school desegregation lawsuit, he boldly, boldly affirmed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Then he added, undercutting that message, “To use

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House of Representatives, because Nixon wouldn’t have won an electoral college majority. If Nixon didn’t “carry out his commitments,” Wallace said—lay off desegregation guidelines and appoint “constitutionalists” to the federal bench—the Alabaman would run for president again in 1972. Nixon hadn’t even been inaugurated, and his

…

-day delay. Just to make sure, Nixon met with his HEW secretary, Robert Finch, and told him to personally monitor that any action on school desegregation was “inoffensive to the people of South Carolina.” Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman was the linchpin of the White House system. He and his partner and

…

biological weapons, begun the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) with the Soviet Union. He was “allowing some Southern school districts more time to formulate their desegregation plans,” but chose as his chief justice Warren Burger, whose Supreme Court “unanimously rejected the delays”: perfect equipoise. Some of the Middle Americans Time profiled

…

schools, steadily and speedily, in accordance with the law”—but that “a policy requiring all school districts, regardless of the difficulties they face, to complete desegregation by the same terminal date is too rigid to be either workable or equitable.” The next day was the NAACP’s July 4 national convention

…

administration’s double-dealing was “almost enough to make you vomit.” It was hard to play both sides sedulously, the higher the stakes got. “Complete desegregation by the same terminal date”—the start of the 1969–70 school year—was exactly what the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had demanded

…

that John Stennis of Mississippi, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was threatening to block the administration’s defense authorization bill if more desegregation went through. Nixon replied, “Anybody who knows Senator Stennis and anybody who knows me would know that he would be the last person to say

…

Mississippi went to the Supreme Court. For the first time since Brown v. Board of Education, the federal government argued on the side against school desegregation. It lost. On October 30, 1969, in the middle of Nixon’s preparations for the Silent Majority speech, the Supreme Court handed down Alexander v

…

school situation in Washington can be worked out.” Another memo, from Dent to Finch on White House stationery marked CONFIDENTIAL, asked Finch to drop a desegregation case in Strom Thurmond’s Columbia, South Carolina. A third indicated that Dent had intervened with a judge. Winning the South for the Republicans was

…

as anyone else, buy a nice home, a car or two in the garage, send their kids to nice suburban schools. The problem was forced desegregation, which let folks jump the queue: “Now, on this busing, I said many years ago, if we don’t stop the federal takeover of the

…

,913; “Senate Restricts Rights Guideline; Would Allow Segregation of Patients in Certain Cases,” NYT, September 28, 1966. Explained Majority Leader: “Mansfield Asks Slowdown on School Desegregation,” NYT, September 29, 1966. Indeed, in May, 32 percent: USNWR, October 10, 1966. Crowed Senator James Eastland: Carter, Politics of Rage, 307. See also Reporter

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6 press conference: “Johnson Concedes Errors on Rights,” NYT, October 7, 1966; PPP 501, October 6, 1966. “We accept tokenism”: “Mansfield Asks Slowdown on School Desegregation.” It seems HEW is determined: Elizabeth Kulcyzk to Douglas, September 30, 1966, PDP722. He was lying: September 11, 1966, Gallup poll in LBJCR, Reel 3

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman  · 2 Sep 2008  · 358pp  · 95,115 words

of no longer become the message he listened to? The Diverse Environment Theory is the core principle behind school desegregation today. Like most people, I assumed that after thirty years of school desegregation, it would have a long track record of scientific research proving that the Diverse Environment Theory works. Then Ashley

…

to UCLA. In the summer of 2007, Orfield and a dozen top scholars wrote an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court supporting school desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. After completing the 86-page document, Orfield e-mailed it to all the social scientists on his mailing list

…

the science available to make their case “wasn’t what we really wanted.” Despite having at their disposal at least a thousand research studies on desegregation’s effects, “I was surprised none were longitudinal. It really has a substantial effect, but it has to be done the right way.” Just throwing

…

of integration.” This ambiguity is visible in the text of the amicus brief. Scientists don’t like to overstate their case. So the benefits of desegregation are qualified with words like “may lead” and “can improve.” “Mere school integration is not a panacea,” the brief warns. UT’s Bigler was one

…

you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.” Calling attention to this can feel taboo. Bigler is an adamant proponent of desegregation in schools, on moral grounds. “It’s an enormous step backward to increase social segregation,” she commented. But it’s important for parents to know

…

Rights Project studied high school juniors in six school districts around the country. One of those was Louisville, which appears to be a place where desegregation has had the intended benefits. Surveys of high school juniors there show that over 80% of students (of all races) feel their school experience has

…

didn’t look so great. Lynn, Massachusetts, which is ten miles northeast of Boston, is generally regarded as another model of diversity and successful school desegregation. When its students were polled if they’d like to live in a diverse neighborhood when they grow up, about 70% of the nonwhite high

…

emeritus at New Mexico State University, made it his life’s work to survey students’ racial attitudes after their first year of desegregation. He found that in 16% of the desegregated schools examined, the attitudes of whites toward African Americans became more favorable. In 36% of the schools, there was no difference

…

is that he’s taken that into account: Moody included statistical controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate) students within the school. And the rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division between students. Having done its own analysis

…

. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact. I can’t help but wonder—would the track record of desegregation be so mixed if parents reinforced it, rather than remaining silent? Over the course of our research, we about race when they’re very young

…

York: Scholastic (1996). Stephan, Walter G., “Improving Intergroup Relations in the Schools.” In: C. H. Rossell, D. J. Armor, and H. J. Walberg (Eds.), School Desegregation in the 21st Century, pp. 267–290. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers (2002). Tynes, Brendesha M., “Role Taking in Online ‘Classrooms’: What Adolescents Are Learning About

City on the Verge

by Mark Pendergrast  · 5 May 2017  · 425pp  · 117,334 words

in the first suburbs (like Inman Park). During the 1920s, the automobile began to change that way of life and culture. In the postwar era, desegregation and white flight to the suburbs hollowed out downtowns, a trend ultimately tied to important public health issues such as air pollution, global warming, water

…

a three-year-old, I became a citizen of Atlanta.) In 1955, the year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandated eventual school desegregation, Hartsfield declared Atlanta “the city too busy to hate,” and it did indeed avoid most of the racial violence that occurred in places like Little

…

South. “The reality,” observed historian Kevin Kruse, “was that the city had enacted a minimalist program of tokenism that amounted to the smallest commitment to desegregation imaginable.” The new black students were ostracized, harassed, pushed, tripped, spat on, and cursed. White teachers tacitly encouraged such behavior by ignoring it. One girl

…

found a note in her locker: “Go back to Africa, Jungle Bunny.” As the rate of school, park, swimming pool, restaurant, and department store desegregation increased in the early 1960s, white flight snowballed. In 1962, for instance, after a local elementary school switched from white to black, Grant Park homes

…

sold to blacks within weeks. “As they fled from the schools in record numbers and at record speeds,” wrote Kruse, “yet another desegregated public space passed from segregation to resegregation, with barely any time spent on true ‘integration’ at all.” Wealthy whites sent their children to private north

…

to produce ever-better (allegedly faked) student test results. The poor performance of the Atlanta schools was in part due to the legacy of forced desegregation, when many white parents either fled or put their children in private schools. In 2011 Reed had brought in Erroll Davis, former chancellor of the

…

two-story residences, such as the home where Martin Luther King Jr. lived as a child, now preserved as a museum. As a result of desegregation, many middle- and upper-class blacks moved from the neighborhood, and local businesses failed. The area swiftly went downhill, until one determined black newcomer named

…

ever crossed the railroad tracks, other than mean-spirited policemen. “In many ways, our neighborhood was a world unto itself,” one woman told Moriba Kelsey. Desegregation destroyed Pittsburgh, as blacks who could afford to leave did, and Interstate 75/85 cut off the southeastern corner of the community. The population fell

…

Darlington apartment building, 234, 243 Davis, Erroll, 164, 198 Davis, Murphy, 119 Deal, Nathan, 124 Deel, Bruce, 114–115 Delp, Jeff and Katie, 195–197 desegregation, 80–81, 200 Designing Healthy Communities (Jackson), 137–139 Desmond, Matthew, 206–207 detention pond, 90, 143 Dickens, Andre, 273–274 Dirty Truth Campaign, 98

…

–66, 72, 76–78, 80–81 late nineteenth century, 66–71 post-Civil War period, 64–66 race riot of 1906, 73–75, 189 school desegregation, 80–81 slavery, 64 voting rights, 65, 68, 79, 81, 254 white flight, 78–82 Ragsdale, Jack, 208 Ragsdale, Liz, 208 railroads belt line, 14

…

, Jacob, 80 Ruff, Solon, 238 Russell, Herman, 161, 288 Rytter, Chantelle, 131, 287 Salvation Army, 108, 116 Sandy Springs, 244 Saporta, Maria, 25, 163 school desegregation, 80–81 school system, Gwinnett County, 249 Schroder, Jim, 49 Schwab, Otto, 75 Scott, Deborah, 61, 272 Seaboard Air Line Railway, 14, 37 Sears, Roebuck

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

by Christopher Lasch  · 16 Sep 1991  · 669pp  · 226,737 words

and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated. The great liberal victories—desegregation, affirmative action, legislative reapportionment, legalized abortion— were won largely in the courts, not in Congress, in the state legislatures, or at the polls. Instead of

…

these reforms, liberals pursued their objectives by indirect methods, fearing that popular attitudes remained unreconstructed. The trauma of McCarthyism, the long and bitter resistance to desegregation in the South, and the continued resistance to federal spending (unless it could be justified on military grounds) all seemed to confirm liberals in the

…

1963, public opinion polls showed large majorities, according to Harvard Sitkoff, "in favor of laws to guarantee blacks voting rights, job opportunities, good housing, and desegregated schools and public accommodations." Under the weight of federal legislation, backed up by solid public support, segregation gave way, together with the system of disfranchisement

…

a distance—to people in the suburbs, for example, who do not have to worry about the safety of their streets or the impact of desegregation on their schools. In city neighborhoods where anxiety about these things has become a way of life, the attempt to achieve racial justice through busing

…

-working, forgotten American." Antibusing activists point out, with good reason, that "limousine liberals" in the suburbs expect the cities to carry the whole burden of desegregation. "The burden is being put unfairly on the poor blacks and the working‐ class whites." The fact that many black people themselves reject busing and

…

dominated the Citywide Coordinating Council, appointed by Judge Arthur Garrity in 1975 as the "eyes and ears of the court," when his ambitious plan for desegregation began to run into fierce popular opposition. * The Globe described the Coordinating Council as a "mixture of community people, clergy, educators and businessmen," which promised

…

local resentment of Garrity's judge-made law. "A great injustice has been done to the people of South Boston by forcing on them a desegregation plan that didn't consider the needs of the students or the working-class background of the community." She admired the community pride she discovered

…

is illustrated by the case of Vinnie, the only student in Charlestown willing to submit to busing into Roxbury during the first year of the desegregation program. Held up as a model of racial enlightenment in an account of the busing crisis by Pamela Bullard and Judith Stoia, Boston television reporters

…

a similarly ambiguous example of successful integration. Monti reports a conversation with a white student in his sociology class at the University of Missouri. The desegregation plan in St. Louis, unlike the one in Boston, required suburban schools to accept black pupils from the city. Monti's student drove a school

…

those kids, but it ain't from no ghetto family." The bus driver, Monti adds, "knew from his daily experience what many observers of the desegregation order had been complaining about. The black youngsters who 'volunteered' for long bus rides to county schools were not like their peers left back in

…

(New York Times, 2 March 1980) is quoted in Robert A. Dentler and Marvin B. Scott, Schools on Trial: An Inside Account of the Boston Desegregation Case (1981). The idea that "racism" explains all that anyone needs to know about the rise of the new right is so pervasive that it

…

. Ione Malloy's diary of the South Boston -565- conflict was published under the title Southie Won't Go: A Teacher's Diary of the Desegregation of South Boston High School (1986). Additional information can be found in J. Michael Ross and William M. Berg, "I Respectfully Disagree with the Judge

…

's Order": The Boston School Desegregation Controversy (1981); Thomas J. Cottle, Busing (1976); and the book by Dentler and Scott, cited at the beginning of this chapter. Jon Hillson, The Battle

…

of Boston (1977), sees nothing but "racism." On desegregation in St. Louis, see Daniel J. Monti, A Semblance of Justice: St. Louis School Desegregation and Order in Urban America (1985). On desegregation in general, see George R. Metcalf, From Little Rock to Boston: The History of School

…

Desegregation (1983); and Jennifer L. Hochschild, The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (1984). Hochschild's book is a puzzle. The

…

author supports desegregation but introduces a good deal of

…

evidence damaging to the belief that desegregation is the best way to improve black education. Contrary to the assumption underlying the Brown decision

…

and the whole struggle for desegregation—"that white institutions are superior to black ones," in Hochschild's words—"evidence seldom shows that racially isolated blacks have impaired self‐ esteem, and it

…

all too often shows that blacks in desegregated schools do." One study cited by Hochschild concludes that desegregation leads to "bitter rejection, isolation, and intellectual incompetence." Desegregation often means, moreover, that black teachers lose their jobs and that black principals are demoted. The

…

from black professionals who contrast their own experience in segregated schools, where teachers "made very strong demands" on them, with their children's experience in desegregated schools. "Lower expectations on the part of the teachers," these parents complain, undermine their children's "drive for educational achievement." In view of all this

…

discouraging evidence, it is not surprising that black support for desegregation dropped from 78 percent in 1964 to 55 percent in 1978; that a former civil rights lawyer, Derrick Bell, now pronounces

…

desegregation "wasteful, dangerous, and demeaning"; that a number of black scholars have begun to argue that attempts to achieve racial balance may "prove disastrous for black

…

children and their communities"; that the Atlanta NAACP "gave up its fight for mandatory desegregation in favor of black control of the city's public school system"; and that Hochschild herself concedes that opposition to

…

desegregation is no longer "synonymous" with racism. Yet Hochschild, like most liberals, still comes down on the side of desegregation—the only solution, in her view, that assures equal protection under the laws. "After all, we

…

that racially balanced schools fall into the category of basic rights, even if we could agree to overlook "preferences or consequences"; and her support for desegregation therefore ap -566- pears doubly arbitrary: not only is the weight of empirical evidence against it, but the argument from abstract rights fails her too

…

. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (1987), makes a similarly unconvincing and halfhearted case for desegregation. Gutmann believes that desegregation is the only means of reducing "racial prejudice among whites," but the most generous reading of her own evidence leads to the conclusion that

…

an unresolved dilemma—the "greatest dilemma of democratic education in our time." But that does not prevent her from advocating a more aggressive program of desegregation. In effect, she chooses liberalism over democracy, while clinging to the hope that it is unnecessary to make such a choice. When democratic liberalism carries

…

of prejudice, 128, 131 ; on tolerance, 123 n. Burnham, James, 510 Bush, George, 485 n. Bushnell, Horace: on Christian nurture, 291 -573- busing (in school desegregation), 403, 407, 409-10, 477, 478, 504 -5, 507, 525 ; in Boston, 496-504 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 353 Byllesby, Langton: on wage labor, 203 Byron

…

., 476, 507 Democratic Review (New York), 96 Dempsey, Jack, III Dennis, Lawrence, 459 Descartes, René, 126, 289, 305 -6, 447 ; on universal language, 124 -25 desegregation: in schools, 565 -66; see also busing Destler, Chester M., 220 Dewey, John, 188, 352, 363, 370 ; on Middletown, 424 -25; on nostalgia, 113 ; on

…

, 322, 323 Guild Socialism Restated (Cole), 323, 325, 327 Gunther, John: on Mencken, 361 Gutman, Herbert G.: on artisanal radicalism, 211 Gutmann, Amy: on school desegregation, 567 Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.), 172, 546, 548 Hahn, Steven: on populism, 543 -44 Hamilton, Alexander, 195 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 237 Hapgood, Hutchins

…

with James, 294 Hobson, John A.: against thrift, 72 Hobson, S. G.: on Fabian socialism, 318 ; on guild socialism, 321 Hochschild, Jennifer L.: on school desegregation, 566 -67 Hodges, Harold: on working-class insularity, 466 Hofer, Johannes, 106 Hoffer, Eric, 463 Hoffman, Abbie, 27 Hofstadter, Richard, 176, 473, 543 ; on American

…

and society, 140 n. Montaigne, 262 Montesquieu, 51, 172 Montgomery, David: on populism, 220 -21, 222 Montgomery bus boycott, 405, 406 Monti, Daniel: on school desegregation, 504 n. Moody, Samuel: on new divinity, 258 Moore, Barrington, Jr.: on conservative modernization, 156 -57; on dying classes, 2I0; on progress, 43 Moore, G

…

, The" (Bourne), 35I Quest for Certointy, The (Dewey), 365 race problem, 355, 357 n., 370, 392 -93, 441, 477-78, 496 -504; see also busing, desegregation "race suicide," 296, 339 -586- Racial Imbalance Act (Massachusetts, 1965), 499 Radical Probe, The (Miles), 477 Rambling Kid (Ashleigh), 337 Ratliff, Beulah Amidon: on Mississippi

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Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity

by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods  · 13 Jul 2020

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles

by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer  · 10 Mar 2016

The Library: A Fragile History

by Arthur Der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree  · 14 Oct 2021  · 457pp  · 173,326 words

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

by Yochai Benkler  · 14 May 2006  · 678pp  · 216,204 words

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson  · 20 Mar 2012  · 547pp  · 172,226 words

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents

by Gary Ginsberg  · 14 Sep 2021  · 418pp  · 134,401 words

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

by Sarah Jaffe  · 26 Jan 2021  · 490pp  · 153,455 words

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson  · 6 Sep 2010  · 740pp  · 227,963 words

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

by M. Nolan Gray  · 20 Jun 2022  · 252pp  · 66,183 words

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America

by Jon C. Teaford  · 1 Jan 2006  · 395pp  · 115,753 words

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975

by Hannah Arendt  · 6 Mar 2018  · 653pp  · 218,559 words

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

by Christopher Lasch  · 1 Jan 1978

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy

by Peter Temin  · 17 Mar 2017  · 273pp  · 87,159 words

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

by Joanna Schwartz  · 14 Feb 2023  · 422pp  · 114,817 words

El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory

by Jazmine Ulloa  · 3 Mar 2026  · 395pp  · 116,052 words

The Danger Within Us

by Jeanne Lenzer  · 12 Dec 2017  · 328pp  · 98,127 words

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline

by Steven K. Kapp  · 19 Nov 2019

Eastern USA

by Lonely Planet

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

by Shawn Lawrence Otto  · 10 Oct 2011  · 692pp  · 127,032 words

The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 14 Sep 2017  · 520pp  · 153,517 words

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner  · 11 Apr 2005  · 339pp  · 95,988 words

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Mar 2009  · 1,037pp  · 294,916 words

A People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn  · 2 Jan 1977  · 913pp  · 299,770 words

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

by Adam Winkler  · 27 Feb 2018  · 581pp  · 162,518 words

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris  · 14 Feb 2023  · 864pp  · 272,918 words

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill  · 4 Oct 2021  · 569pp  · 165,510 words

USA Travel Guide

by Lonely, Planet

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

by Alice Schroeder  · 1 Sep 2008  · 1,336pp  · 415,037 words

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin  · 21 Jun 2023  · 248pp  · 73,689 words

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

by Fredrik Deboer  · 3 Aug 2020  · 236pp  · 77,546 words

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates  · 2 Oct 2017  · 349pp  · 114,914 words

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All

by Robert Elliott Smith  · 26 Jun 2019  · 370pp  · 107,983 words

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup

by F. H. Buckley  · 14 Jan 2020

1968: The Year That Rocked the World

by Mark Kurlansky  · 30 Dec 2003  · 538pp  · 164,533 words

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

by Jamie Raskin  · 4 Jan 2022  · 450pp  · 144,939 words

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

by Beth Macy  · 17 Oct 2016  · 398pp  · 112,350 words

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream

by Christopher B. Leinberger  · 15 Nov 2008  · 222pp  · 50,318 words

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer  · 19 Jan 2016  · 558pp  · 168,179 words

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

by Sudhir Venkatesh  · 13 Aug 2010

The Stolen Year

by Anya Kamenetz  · 23 Aug 2022  · 347pp  · 103,518 words

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

by Timothy Cresswell  · 21 May 2006

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy

by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley  · 10 Jun 2013

What's the Matter with White People

by Joan Walsh  · 19 Jul 2012  · 284pp  · 85,643 words

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Frederick Kempe  · 30 Apr 2011  · 762pp  · 206,865 words

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor

by William Julius Wilson  · 1 Jan 1996  · 399pp  · 116,828 words

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

by Eric Klinenberg  · 10 Sep 2018  · 281pp  · 83,505 words

Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World

by Sara C. Bronin  · 30 Sep 2024  · 230pp  · 74,949 words

Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

by Yoni Appelbaum  · 17 Feb 2025  · 412pp  · 115,534 words

Amazing Stories of the Space Age

by Rod Pyle  · 21 Dec 2016

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger  · 11 Oct 2021  · 572pp  · 124,222 words

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler  · 14 Sep 2021  · 735pp  · 165,375 words

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America

by David Callahan  · 9 Aug 2010

The autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X; Alex Haley  · 15 Aug 1999  · 508pp  · 192,524 words

I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi  · 23 Oct 2017  · 392pp  · 112,954 words

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream

by Gary Younge  · 11 Aug 2013  · 162pp  · 51,445 words

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

by Robert D. Putnam  · 10 Mar 2015  · 459pp  · 123,220 words

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

by Jim Rasenberger  · 4 Apr 2011  · 742pp  · 202,902 words

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath  · 2 Oct 2017  · 274pp  · 72,657 words

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein  · 7 Apr 2008  · 304pp  · 22,886 words

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars

by Nathalia Holt  · 4 Apr 2016  · 288pp  · 92,175 words

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 2002  · 901pp  · 234,905 words

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson  · 6 May 2007  · 420pp  · 98,309 words

The New Geography of Jobs

by Enrico Moretti  · 21 May 2012  · 403pp  · 87,035 words

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns  · 4 Sep 2017  · 1,433pp  · 315,911 words

Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein  · 28 Jan 2020  · 412pp  · 96,251 words

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett  · 15 Feb 2000

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

by Yascha Mounk  · 15 Feb 2018  · 497pp  · 123,778 words

The Abandonment of the West

by Michael Kimmage  · 21 Apr 2020  · 378pp  · 121,495 words

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

by Richard Kluger  · 1 Jan 1996  · 1,157pp  · 379,558 words

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

by Judith Stein  · 30 Apr 2010  · 497pp  · 143,175 words

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom

by Mary Catherine Bateson  · 13 Sep 2010  · 287pp  · 99,131 words

Presidents of War

by Michael Beschloss  · 8 Oct 2018

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age

by Robert Stone and Alan Andres  · 3 Jun 2019

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky  · 1 May 2017  · 1,261pp  · 294,715 words

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz  · 8 May 2017  · 337pp  · 86,320 words

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present

by Jeff Madrick  · 11 Jun 2012  · 840pp  · 202,245 words

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

by Radley Balko  · 14 Jun 2013  · 465pp  · 134,575 words

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

by Ingrid Robeyns  · 16 Jan 2024  · 327pp  · 110,234 words

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back

by Marc J Dunkelman  · 17 Feb 2025  · 454pp  · 134,799 words

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

by Brian Goldstone  · 25 Mar 2025  · 512pp  · 153,059 words

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg  · 31 Aug 2016  · 262pp  · 66,800 words

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America

by Jamie Bronstein  · 29 Oct 2016  · 332pp  · 89,668 words

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

by Samuel I. Schwartz  · 17 Aug 2015  · 340pp  · 92,904 words

The Geek Feminist Revolution

by Kameron Hurley  · 1 Jan 2016  · 251pp  · 76,225 words

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

by Brené Brown  · 15 Mar 2017  · 149pp  · 41,934 words

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America

by Writers For The 99%  · 17 Dec 2011  · 173pp  · 54,729 words

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath  · 18 Dec 2006  · 313pp  · 94,490 words

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them

by Philip Collins  · 4 Oct 2017  · 475pp  · 156,046 words

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms

by Russell Napier  · 18 Jan 2016  · 358pp  · 119,272 words

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect

by David Goodhart  · 7 Sep 2020  · 463pp  · 115,103 words

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson  · 14 Sep 2020  · 470pp  · 137,882 words

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

by Scott Barry Kaufman  · 6 Apr 2020  · 678pp  · 148,827 words

The Passenger

by The Passenger  · 27 Dec 2021  · 202pp  · 62,397 words

American Foundations: An Investigative History

by Mark Dowie  · 3 Oct 2009  · 410pp  · 115,666 words

Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms and the Corruption of Justice

by David Enrich  · 5 Oct 2022  · 373pp  · 108,788 words

Costa Rica

by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda and César G. Soriano  · 2 Jan 2008

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight

by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker  · 1 Jun 2011  · 376pp  · 110,796 words

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

by Robert N. Proctor  · 28 Feb 2012  · 1,199pp  · 332,563 words

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays

by Phoebe Robinson  · 14 Oct 2021  · 265pp  · 93,354 words

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs

by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen and Deron Triff  · 14 Oct 2021  · 309pp  · 96,168 words

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town

by Beth Macy  · 14 Jul 2014  · 473pp  · 140,480 words

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

by Kathryn Paige Harden  · 20 Sep 2021  · 375pp  · 102,166 words

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

by George Packer  · 14 Jun 2021  · 173pp  · 55,328 words

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

by Michael Dobbs  · 3 Sep 2008  · 631pp  · 171,391 words

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg  · 1 Jan 2011  · 455pp  · 116,578 words

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers

by Simon Winchester  · 27 Oct 2015  · 535pp  · 151,217 words

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific

by David Bianculli  · 15 Nov 2016  · 676pp  · 203,386 words

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt

by Russell Napier  · 19 Jul 2021  · 511pp  · 151,359 words

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy

by Michael Dobbs  · 24 May 2021  · 426pp  · 117,722 words

The Rough Guide to New York City

by Martin Dunford  · 2 Jan 2009

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

by Steven Brill  · 5 Jan 2015  · 554pp  · 167,247 words

Hard Landing

by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr.  · 1 Jan 1995  · 726pp  · 210,048 words

Mattering: The Secret to Building a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose

by Jennifer Breheny Wallace  · 13 Jan 2026  · 206pp  · 68,830 words

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky and Frank Barat  · 9 Nov 2010  · 279pp  · 72,659 words

City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

by Megan Kimble  · 2 Apr 2024  · 430pp  · 117,211 words

Globalists

by Quinn Slobodian  · 16 Mar 2018  · 451pp  · 142,662 words

The Enlightened Capitalists

by James O'Toole  · 29 Dec 2018  · 716pp  · 192,143 words

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

by Carl Benedikt Frey  · 17 Jun 2019  · 626pp  · 167,836 words

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist

by Alex Zevin  · 12 Nov 2019  · 767pp  · 208,933 words

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

by Lawrence Wright  · 15 Sep 2014  · 503pp  · 126,355 words

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

by David Sedaris  · 22 Apr 2013

Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron  · 28 Apr 2013  · 201pp  · 67,347 words

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

by Anatol Lieven  · 3 May 2010

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City

by Mike Davis  · 27 Aug 2001

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It

by Robert B. Reich  · 3 Sep 2012  · 124pp  · 39,011 words

Wealth, Poverty and Politics

by Thomas Sowell  · 31 Aug 2015  · 877pp  · 182,093 words

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

by Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller  · 3 Feb 2015  · 202pp  · 8,448 words

The Sellout: A Novel

by Paul Beatty  · 2 Mar 2016  · 271pp  · 83,944 words

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev  · 29 Jul 2019  · 240pp  · 74,182 words

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society

by Binyamin Appelbaum  · 4 Sep 2019  · 614pp  · 174,226 words

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr  · 19 Feb 2019

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism

by Ashton Applewhite  · 10 Feb 2016  · 312pp  · 84,421 words

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees

by Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon  · 2 Mar 2010  · 613pp  · 181,605 words

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities

by Benjamin R. Barber  · 5 Nov 2013  · 501pp  · 145,943 words

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

by Angie Schmitt  · 26 Aug 2020  · 274pp  · 63,679 words

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie  · 8 Oct 2019

Artificial Whiteness

by Yarden Katz

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

by Jesselyn Cook  · 22 Jul 2024  · 321pp  · 95,778 words

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot  · 2 Feb 2010  · 370pp  · 114,741 words

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools

by Steven Brill  · 15 Aug 2011  · 559pp  · 161,035 words

Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century

by Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston  · 18 Apr 2016  · 338pp  · 92,465 words

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

by Jennifer Burns  · 18 Oct 2009  · 495pp  · 144,101 words

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker  · 24 Sep 2012  · 1,351pp  · 385,579 words

How to Be Black

by Baratunde Thurston  · 31 Jan 2012

Social Democratic America

by Lane Kenworthy  · 3 Jan 2014  · 283pp  · 73,093 words

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

by William Easterly  · 4 Mar 2014  · 483pp  · 134,377 words

Arrival City

by Doug Saunders  · 22 Mar 2011  · 366pp  · 117,875 words

Frommer's San Diego 2011

by Mark Hiss  · 2 Jan 2007

Parks Directory of the United States

by Darren L. Smith and Kay Gill  · 1 Jan 2004

Give People Money

by Annie Lowrey  · 10 Jul 2018  · 242pp  · 73,728 words

Assassination Vacation

by Sarah Vowell  · 28 Mar 2005  · 208pp  · 69,863 words

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

by Phillip Lopate  · 12 Feb 2013  · 207pp  · 64,598 words

This America: The Case for the Nation

by Jill Lepore  · 27 May 2019  · 86pp  · 26,489 words

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

by Matthew Syed  · 19 Apr 2010  · 304pp  · 84,396 words

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay  · 14 Jul 2020  · 378pp  · 107,957 words

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History

by Derek S. Hoff  · 30 May 2012

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States

by Bernadette Hanlon  · 18 Dec 2009

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea

by Mark Kurlansky  · 7 Apr 2008  · 186pp  · 57,798 words

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

by Tripp Mickle  · 2 May 2022  · 535pp  · 149,752 words

Owning the Sun

by Alexander Zaitchik  · 7 Jan 2022  · 341pp  · 98,954 words

The Broken Ladder

by Keith Payne  · 8 May 2017

Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider

by Weimar Gay  · 31 Dec 2001

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot  · 9 Jan 2018  · 972pp  · 259,764 words

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond  · 1 Mar 2016  · 444pp  · 138,781 words

California

by Sara Benson  · 15 Oct 2010

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker  · 14 Sep 2010  · 602pp  · 120,848 words

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

by Alvin E. Roth  · 1 Jun 2015  · 282pp  · 80,907 words

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner  · 14 Sep 2015  · 317pp  · 100,414 words

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception

by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller  · 21 Sep 2015  · 274pp  · 93,758 words

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900

by David Edgerton  · 7 Dec 2006  · 353pp  · 91,211 words

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram Rajan  · 26 Feb 2019  · 596pp  · 163,682 words

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism

by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart  · 31 Dec 2018

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

by Hunter S. Thompson  · 6 Nov 2003  · 893pp  · 282,706 words

A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919

by Claire Hartfield  · 1 Jan 2017  · 152pp  · 40,733 words

The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale  · 9 Oct 2017  · 318pp  · 82,452 words

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman  · 20 May 2020  · 562pp  · 153,825 words

Economic Dignity

by Gene Sperling  · 14 Sep 2020  · 667pp  · 149,811 words

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

by Sarah Kendzior  · 6 Apr 2020

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers

by Michael Fabey  · 13 Jun 2022  · 319pp  · 102,839 words

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff  · 13 Jun 2022  · 234pp  · 67,589 words

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

by Dan Bouk  · 22 Aug 2022  · 424pp  · 123,180 words

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

by Gary Gerstle  · 14 Oct 2022  · 655pp  · 156,367 words

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America

by Conor Dougherty  · 18 Feb 2020  · 331pp  · 95,582 words

Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris  · 30 May 2022  · 206pp  · 64,212 words

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

by Richard V. Reeves  · 22 May 2017  · 198pp  · 52,089 words

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein  · 12 Jun 2017  · 357pp  · 94,852 words

A History of Future Cities

by Daniel Brook  · 18 Feb 2013  · 489pp  · 132,734 words

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

by Tyler Cowen  · 27 Feb 2017  · 287pp  · 82,576 words

The Payoff

by Jeff Connaughton  · 202pp  · 66,742 words

And Never Stop Dancing: Thirty More True Things You Need to Know Now

by Gordon Livingston  · 15 Feb 2006

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Matt Taibbi  · 15 Feb 2010  · 291pp  · 91,783 words

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War

by Norman Stone  · 15 Feb 2010  · 851pp  · 247,711 words

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte  · 11 Mar 2014  · 455pp  · 133,719 words

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 10 Oct 2018  · 482pp  · 149,351 words

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze  · 31 Jul 2018  · 1,066pp  · 273,703 words

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

by Safiya Umoja Noble  · 8 Jan 2018  · 290pp  · 73,000 words

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation

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Jaws

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