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In Architecture and the Right to Heal, Esra Akcan calls for architecture to take an active role in healing communities affected by socioeconomic, political, and environmental disasters. Akcan frames these processes by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to climate change mitigation and transitional justice. Focusing on lands held by the former Ottoman Empire, Akcan highlights the ongoing struggle to heal after internal social, state, and business-led violence ranging from forced disappearance to mass extinction. Putting forth the concept of resettler nationalism as a source of displacement and partition, she argues that while architecture and urban planning have been weaponized to segregate and subjugate minorities throughout history, they could instead confront systemic violence and make accountability and reparations possible. For Akcan, healing constitutes a matter of rights as well as a holistic notion of justice that addresses the intersections of social, global, and environmental issues and one can be achieved through architecture. By locating spaces of political and ecological harm, Akcan advocates for healing on individual, communal, and planetary levels.

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

In less than four months, beginning with a staff of five, an obscure office buried deep within the federal bureaucracy transformed the nation's hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. These powerful private institutions, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, began equally caring for all on the basis of need.

The book draws the reader into the struggles of the unsung heroes of the transformation, black medical leaders whose stubborn courage helped shape the larger civil rights movement. They demanded an end to federal subsidization of discrimination in the form of Medicare payments to hospitals that embraced the "separate but equal" creed that shaped American life during the Jim Crow era. Faced with this pressure, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations tried to play a cautious chess game, but that game led to perhaps the biggest gamble in the history of domestic policy. Leaders secretly recruited volunteer federal employees to serve as inspectors, and an invisible army of hospital workers and civil rights activists to work as agents, making it impossible for hospitals to get Medicare dollars with mere paper compliance. These triumphs did not come without casualties, yet the story offers lessons and hope for realizing this transformational dream.

This book is the recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.

How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799–1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual. 

A black minister from New England, Easton rose to prominence during the 1820s and 1830s by joining in the struggle of free African Americans to resist southern slavery and secure racial equality. From this experience he developed a deep understanding of the problem of "race" in the United States and became a trenchant critic of white supremacy and its devastating consequences. This volume brings back into print the only extended writings of Easton that have survived into our time: his insightful, almost prescient A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, first published in 1837; and his passionate 1828 Thanksgiving Day “Address.” The book also provides a biographical portrait of Easton and his family, drawn from primary documents as well as secondary sources in the areas of biography, genealogy, and social history.