Disponible por primera vez en español, Julia de Burgos cuenta la destacada historia de la poeta y activista puertorriqueña.

Timeless photos offer a rare portrait of the jubilant, vibrant, vital, nearly hidden, and now all-but-vanished world of small-town Black rodeos.

Long before Americans began to officially commemorate Juneteenth, in the heat of East Texas, saddles were being cinched, buckles shined, and lassoes adjusted for a day on the Black rodeo circuit in honor of the holiday. In the late 1970s, as they had been doing for generations, Black communities across the region held local rodeos for the talented cowboys and cowgirls who were segregated from the mainstream circuit. It was to these vibrant community events that bestselling Texas writer Sarah Bird, then a young photojournalist, found herself drawn.

In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird’s lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders—who still compete on today’s circuit—as “descendants” in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys. A gorgeous tribute to the ropers and riders—legends like Willie Thomas, Myrtis Dightman, Rufus Green, Bailey’s Prairie Kid, Archie Wycoff, and Calvin Greeley—as well as the secretaries, judges, and pick-up men and even the audience members who were as much family as fans, Juneteenth Rodeo ultimately seeks to put Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.

Death, wrote Walter Benjamin, lends storytellers all their authority. How do trials, in turn, borrow their authority from death? This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice.

Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."

Examining legal events that tried to repair the crimes and injuries of history, Felman reveals the "juridical unconscious" of trials and brilliantly shows how this juridical unconscious is bound up with the logic of the trauma that a trial attempts to articulate and contain but so often reenacts and repeats. Her book gives the drama of the law a new jurisprudential dimension and reveals the relation between law and literature in a new light.

By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet a mere ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become “white”? Just around Midnight reveals the interplay of popular music and racial thought that was responsible for this shift within the music industry and in the minds of fans.

Rooted in rhythm-and-blues pioneered by black musicians, 1950s rock and roll was racially inclusive and attracted listeners and performers across the color line. In the 1960s, however, rock and roll gave way to rock: a new musical ideal regarded as more serious, more artistic—and the province of white musicians. Decoding the racial discourses that have distorted standard histories of rock music, Jack Hamilton underscores how ideas of “authenticity” have blinded us to rock’s inextricably interracial artistic enterprise.

According to the standard storyline, the authentic white musician was guided by an individual creative vision, whereas black musicians were deemed authentic only when they stayed true to black tradition. Serious rock became white because only white musicians could be original without being accused of betraying their race. Juxtaposing Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, and many others, Hamilton challenges the racial categories that oversimplified the sixties revolution and provides a deeper appreciation of the twists and turns that kept the music alive.

Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 were often portrayed in the media as a dawn of democracy in the region. But the revolutionaries were—and saw themselves as—heirs to a centuries-long struggle for just government and the rule of law, a struggle obstructed by local elites as well as the interventions of foreign powers. Elizabeth F. Thompson uncovers the deep roots of liberal constitutionalism in the Middle East through the remarkable stories of those who fought against poverty, tyranny, and foreign rule.

Fascinating, sometimes quixotic personalities come to light: Tanyus Shahin, the Lebanese blacksmith who founded a peasant republic in 1858; Halide Edib, the feminist novelist who played a prominent role in the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution; Ali Shariati, the history professor who helped ignite the 1979 Iranian Revolution; Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who rallied Egyptians to Tahrir Square in 2011, and many more. Their memoirs, speeches, and letters chart the complex lineage of political idealism, reform, and violence that informs today’s Middle East.

Often depicted as inherently anti-democratic, Islam was integral to egalitarian movements that sought to correct imbalances of power and wealth wrought by the modern global economy—and by global war. Motivated by a memory of betrayal at the hands of the Great Powers after World War I and in the Cold War, today’s progressives assert a local tradition of liberal constitutionalism that has often been stifled but never extinguished.

“In most accounts of the tumultuous 1960s, Robert Kennedy plays a supporting role…Sullivan corrects this and puts RFK near the center of the nation’s struggle for racial justice.”
—Richard Thompson Ford, Washington Post

“A profound and uplifting account of Robert F. Kennedy’s brave crusade for racial equality. This is narrative history at its absolute finest.”
—Douglas Brinkley, author of Rosa Parks

“A sobering analysis of the forces arrayed against advocates of racial justice. Desegregation suits took years to move through the courts. Ballot access was controlled by local officials…Justice Rising reminds us that although he was assassinated over 50 years ago, Kennedy remains relevant.”
—Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier

“A groundbreaking book that reorients our understanding of a surprisingly underexplored aspect of Robert Kennedy’s life and career—race and civil rights—and sheds new light on race relations during a pivotal era of American history.”
—Kenneth Mack, author of Representing the Race

“Brilliant and beautifully written…could hardly be more timely.”
—Daniel Geary, Irish Times

Race and politics converged in the 1960s in ways that indelibly changed America. This landmark reconsideration of Robert Kennedy’s life and legacy reveals how, as the nation confronted escalating demands for racial justice, RFK grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader.

Intertwining Kennedy’s story with the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s, Justice Rising provides a fresh account of the changing political alignments that marked the decade. As Attorney General, Kennedy personally interceded to enforce desegregation rulings and challenge voter restrictions in the South. Morally committed to change, he was instrumental in creating the bipartisan coalition essential to passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After his brother’s assassination, his commitment took on a new urgency when cities emerged as the major front in the long fight for racial justice. On the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, two months before he would himself be killed, his anguished appeal captured the hopes of a turbulent decade: “In this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are and what direction we want to move in.” It is a question that remains urgent and unanswered.