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First published in 1995, I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Bringing together writings by prominent Black thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee made the case for a tradition of “relational humanism” distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the West.

Over the past twenty years, however, new scholarly research has uncovered other contributions to the discipline now generally known as “Africana philosophy” that were not included in the original volume. In this revised and expanded edition, Hord and Lee build on the strengths of the earlier anthology while enriching the selection of readings to bring the text into the twenty-first century. In a new introduction, the editors reflect on the key arguments of the book's central thesis, refining them in light of more recent philosophical discourse. This edition includes important new readings by Kwame Gyekye, Oyeronke Oy ewumi­, Paget Henry, Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Charles Mills, and Tommy Curry, as well as extensive suggestions for further reading.

One man's life unfolds into a memoir of the defining cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century and beyond.

I Never Made Love with James Baldwin is a dazzling memoir told through a succession of attorney Stanley Cohen's vivid encounters with some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century and beyond. Moving between America, Europe, and Asia, Cohen recounts moments shared with artists, writers, jurists, and financiers, including Alexander Calder, Joseph Heller, Robert Caro, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yehuda Hanani, and members of the Rothschild family. These figures appear not as distant icons but as sharp, human presences—brilliant, eccentric, generous, and flawed. Cohen’s life unfolds like a performance, shaped less by planning than by intensity: conversations, friendships, arguments, and coincidences that flare briefly and leave lasting marks. With wit, candor, and an eye for the telling detail, he captures a vast social and creative network spanning the mid-twentieth century to the present. The result is an intimate, unconventional portrait of an exceptional life and of the people who lit its path.

The working lives of Deaf Americans from the mid-1850s to the post-World War II era depended upon strategies created by Deaf community leaders to win and keep jobs through periods of low national employment as well as high. Deaf people typically sought to de-emphasize their identity as sign language users to be better integrated into the workforce. But in his absorbing new book Illusions of Equality, Robert Buchanan shows that events during the next century would thwart these efforts.

       The residential schools for deaf students established in the 19th century favored a bilingual approach to education that stressed the use of American Sign Language while also recognizing the value of learning English. But the success of this system was disrupted by the rise of oralism, with its commitment to teaching deaf children speech and its ban of sign language. Buchanan depicts the subsequent ramifications in sobering terms: most deaf students left school with limited educations and abilities that qualified them for only marginal jobs. He also describes the insistence of the male hierarchy in the Deaf community on defending the tactics of individual responsibility through the end of World War II, a policy that continually failed to earn job security for Deaf workers. Illusions of Equality is an original, edifying work that will be appreciated by scholars and students for years to come.

This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of women, blacks, and poor whites.

Tracy focuses on the historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Using variations on a recurring plot—in which a young planter/hero rescues a planter's daughter from an “enemy” of her class—each of these novelists reinforced an idealized vision of a Southern civilization based on male superiority, white supremacy, and class inequality. It is a world in which white men are represented as the natural leaders of loyal and dependent women, grateful and docile slaves, and inferior poor whites. According to Tracy, the interweaving of these themes reveals the extent to which the Southern defense of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War was an argument not only about race relations but about gender and class relations as well.

A Powerful Portrait of Resilience, Heritage, and Change on Alabama's Gulf Coast.

The Gulf Coast villages of Bayou La Batre and Coden are two of Alabama’s most distinctive, with roots going back to the French settlements of the 18th century. For generations, the proud inhabitants of these communities have extracted their modest livings from the sea, sustained by a lesson handed down over time— that providing for the needs of one’s family is the only true measure of success. But the world has changed drastically for them. A global economy of higher gas prices and cheap imported seafood has threatened the lifeblood of the area. And in recent years a rash of hurricanes, culminating with Hurricane Katrina, has battered the hopes and dreams of these Bayou towns.

But they have known hard times and massive changes before. In the 1970s, refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos flooded into the area and within a few years made up a third of the local population. Three Buddhist temples soon took their places among the Catholic, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches that predominated, and for a time the different ethnic groups coexisted in a kind of uneasy peace. But now they are learning to pull together in an uncertain struggle to rebuild their communities.

In the Path of the Storms is a powerful portrait in words and photographs of a unique and unforgettable place. It is a story of tradition, and forces of change, and the epic struggle of these Gulf Coast communities to survive and thrive.

One of the most memorable images of the British women’s suffrage movement occurred on June 4, Derby Day, 1913. As the field of horses approached a turning at Epsom, militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison ducked out from under the railing and ran onto the track, reaching for the bridle of the King’s horse, and was killed in the collision. While her death transformed her into a heroine, it all but erased her identity. To identify what impelled Davison to suffer multiple imprisonments, to experience the torture of force-feedings and the insults of hostile members of the crowds who came to hear her speak, Carolyn P. Collette explores a largely ignored source—the writing to which Davison dedicated so much time and effort during the years from 1908 to 1913. Davison’s writing is an implicit apologia for why she lived the life of a militant suffragette and where she continually revisits and restates the principles that guided her: that woman suffrage was necessary to improve the lives of men, women, and children; that the freedom and justice women sought was sanctioned by God and unjustly withheld by humans whose opposition constituted a tyranny that had to be opposed; and that the evolution of human progress demanded that women become fully equal citizens of their nation in every respect— politically, economically, and culturally.

In the Thick of the Fight makes available for the first time the archive of published and unpublished writings of Emily Wilding Davison. Collette reorients both scholarly and public attention away from a single, defining event to the complexity of Davison’s contributions to modern feminist discourse, giving the reader a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Davison’s suffrage writings.

The story of a Social Gospel leader who brought faith, activism, and social justice into the heart of modern American politics.

Radical religious and political leader Harry F. Ward started life quietly enough in a family of Methodist shopkeepers and butchers in London. But his relentless pursuit of social justice would lead him to the United States and a long career of religious activism. Ward served as professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for two decades. He also became a leader in labor groups, Protestant activist organizations, and New York intellectual circles. 

David Duke builds his comprehensive story of this fiery leader from extensive archival sources, including FBI files and private correspondence, sermons, class notes, and other unpublished material. Duke skillfully charts Ward's rise from an idealistic Methodist minister in a Chicago stockyard parish to a prominent national religious leader and influential political figure. Ultimately, Ward's lifelong attempt to synthesize the beliefs of Jesus and Marx and his role as an admirer of the Soviet Union put him on a collision course with McCarthyism in Cold War America. Viewed by some as a prophet and by others as a heretic, traitor, and communist, Ward became increasingly marginalized as he stubbornly maintained his radical positions. Even in his own circle, he went from being a figure of unquestioned integrity who eloquently spoke his convictions to a tragically short-sighted idealogue whose unwavering pro-Soviet agenda blinded him to the horrors of Stalinist oppression. 

Harry Ward's long, colorful career intersected nearly every intellectual current in American culture for more than a half century. This biography will be important for scholars of American religious history, students of liberalism and politics, social Christians, and general readers who enjoy a compelling tour into the private and public lives of notable figures of history. 
 

The work of Ralph Waldo Emerson has long been synonymous with the American ideals of self-reliance and individualism. Like those ideals, it has come to mean different things, at different times, to different people. Emerson has been identified as the source of both the best and worst in the American intellectual tradition, his authority invoked by back-to-the-landers and industrial capitalists, the philosopher Nietzsche, as well as the promoters of Nike footwear.  

This book explores the intertwined history of Emerson and individualism. Charles E. Mitchell begins by examining those who regarded Emersonian individualism with ambivalence or hostility, focusing on the comments of such diverse figures as Henry James, Sr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Van Wyck Brooks, and H.L. Mencken. He then offers an alternative view as reflected in the work of William James, John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Carlos Williams. Each of these figures embraced Emerson’s claim for the sanctity of the individual and wove it into a social vision that sought to reconcile the paradox at the heart of American life: a simultaneous devotion to the community and the individual, tradition and innovation, order and freedom. 

While indirectly answering Emerson’s more fervent critics, James, Dewey, Du Bois, and Williams also constructed a vibrant tradition of their own, one that offers guidance as Americans continue to struggle with these competing claims. 

Following the stories of twenty women connected to Oregon breweries before Prohibition, Inherited Work recognizes the overlooked contributions of the women who inherited, managed, and navigated Oregon’s brewing industry. At a time when recordkeeping and historical memory obscured their authority, these women were negotiating debt, managing workers, protecting property, arranging sales, supporting family wealth, and making strategic decisions about the future of their businesses.

Drawing on census records, probate files, property records, newspapers, court documents, and oral histories, Tiah Edmunson-Morton traces the legal and economic landscape of the time, demonstrating the conditions and decisions these women faced in managing their personal lives and livelihoods. From widows like Victoria Bauerlin, Johanna Behrens, and Mary Meller—who inherited not only property but also the financial terms that shaped what they could do next—to the matriarch of a brewing dynasty, Louisa Weinhard, Inherited Work reveals how their influence endured.

Today, women can be found throughout the industry as brewers and owners, as well as chemists, restaurant managers, bookkeepers, educators, graphic designers, and hop brokers. While their roles are more visible than they once were, the history of women in brewing remains incomplete. Who were these women? What did it mean to be part of the brewing industry at the turn of the century? And what changes when we bring their stories into the history of brewing?

Writing the history of law involves choices: whose stories are to be told, and how? 

While earlier scholarship centered on judges, lawyers, and legislators, recent work increasingly examines the experiences of women, colonial subjects, and gender-nonconforming people, using new sources and methods. Insiders and Outsiders in the History of Lawpresents research on the boundaries between legal insiders and outsiders across seven centuries of British legal history.

Drawing on underused records from contexts ranging from medieval Wales to twentieth-century British India, the chapters explore how individuals became insiders or outsiders, how the law treated them, and how they used legal processes. This book highlights the fluidity of this divide and calls for a more representative legal history.

Tracing the evolution of the library as a modern institution from the late eighteenth century to the digital era, this book explores the diverse practices by which Americans have shared reading matter for instruction, edification, and pleasure. Writing from a rich variety of perspectives, the contributors raise important questions about the material forms and social shapes of American culture. What is a library? How have libraries fostered communities of readers and influenced the practice of reading in particular communities? How did the development of modern libraries alter the boundaries of individual and social experience, and define new kinds of public culture? To what extent have libraries served as commercial enterprises, as centers of power, and as places of empowerment for African Americans, women, and immigrants? Institutions of Reading offers at once a social history of literacy and leisure, an intellectual history of institutional and technological innovations that facilitated the mass distribution and consumption of printed books and periodicals, and a cultural history of the symbolic meanings and practical uses of reading in American life. In addition to the editors, contributors include Elizabeth Amann, Michael Baenen, James Green, Elizabeth McHenry, Barbara Mitchell, Christine Pawley, Janice Radway, James Raven, Karin Roffman, and Roy Rosenzweig.

In the 1930s, with the rise of the Third Reich, thousands of European intellectuals sought refuge in the United States. Through the tireless efforts of Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, nearly two hundred of these scholars came to be affiliated with the University in Exile, later known as the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. This book presents an intellectual history of that remarkable group of social and political scientists, documenting their experiences and their influence on both European and American thought.

Johnson was one of the first to recognize the need for action to prevent Hitler’s destruction of the German intellectual tradition. He sought out many of the best European scholars of the day and brought them to the newly created University in Exile in New York. There, the refugees framed as intellectual problems the social and political experiences that had so disrupted their lives and careers. They examined the cultural roots of fascism, the bureaucratization of Western societies, and the prerequisites for a historically and morally informed social science. In the field of economics, the exiles developed theoretical concepts and models that came to be instrumental in the formation of New Deal policies and that remain relevant today.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

The queer recluse, the shambling farmer, the clannish hill folk—white rural populations have long disturbed the American imagination, alternately revered as moral, healthy, and hardworking, and feared as antisocial or socially uncouth. In Peculiar Places, Ryan Lee Cartwright examines the deep archive of these contrary formations, mapping racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural twentieth-century United States.

Sensationalized accounts of white rural communities’ aberrant sexualities, racial intermingling, gender transgressions, and anomalous bodies and minds, which proliferated from the turn of the century, created a national view of the perversity of white rural poverty for the American public. Cartwright contends that these accounts, extracted and estranged from their own ambivalent forum of community gossip, must be read in kind: through a racialized, materialist queercrip optic of the deeply familiar and mundane. Taking in popular science, documentary photography, news media, documentaries, and horror films, Peculiar Places orients itself at the intersections of disability studies, queer studies, and gender studies to illuminate a racialized landscape both profoundly ordinary and familiar.

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.