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Behind the success of every great politician, inspiring activist, or business titan, there is a staffer; Jorge B. Haynes was that staffer for some of the most influential leaders in Texas, Florida, and California.

Jorge B. Haynes had a knack for finding his way into the rooms where history was being made. From his work boycotting farmworker conditions alongside Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta as a young man in California to his role in President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA war room in the 1990s, he was the man advising some of the country’s most influential leaders and he left an imprint on the monumental moments that defined their time. His career spanned almost five decades, beginning with his decision to leave home in Laredo to serve in the US Air Force. But his service to the country took many different forms. Haynes worked for the Bureau of the Census the first year Latinos were allowed to declare their Hispanic heritage. He wrote speeches and orchestrated pivotal meetings for top political leadership in Texas and later Florida. In the final years of his career, he fought to make college a more accessible path for under-represented students in California.

As his paternal grandmother used to say, “Cuando vas a un lugar donde nunca has estado, finge que has estado allí,” which means, “When you go somewhere that you've never been, pretend like you've been there before.” By the end of his career, there weren’t many places that Haynes hadn’t been.

From Alabama to Congress—Arthur W. Mitchell’s fight for justice rewrote the rules of Black political power.

A Carpetbagger in Reverse offers a landmark reassessment of the life, career, and accomplishments of groundbreaking Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the first Black Democrat elected to Congress and the only Black member of Congress during his four terms of service from 1935 to 1943.

Born to former enslaved people in Alabama in 1883, Mitchell studied with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute and later moved to Washington DC and became a lawyer. He continued his career in Chicago, where the Great Migration had helped transform the city’s South Side into a vibrant, multiracial enclave.

As a congressman, Mitchell helped to create an enduring alliance between Black Americans and the Democratic party. Seeing his primary role as representing the South’s disempowered Black population, his belief that solutions to the region’s racial problems should arise from a new cadre of locally trained leaders brought him into frequent, vituperative conflict with the NAACP, the Republican Party, and the Black press. The first Black lawyer to argue successfully before the Supreme Court, his unanimous victory in Mitchell v. United States would have long-term consequences for the Civil Rights Movement.

A Carpetbagger in Reverse is the first publication significantly based on Mitchell’s papers, an essential and often overlooked source of insights about the development of Black political and culture life in the 1930s and 1940s.

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

The first full-scale biography of Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society and planted some of modern conservatism’s most insidious seeds.
 
Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right.

A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.

This volume provides the most economical and textually accurate version of Calhoun’s Disquisition available today. As a treatise, the Disquisition is one of the greatest and most enduring works of American politial thought, and a text of seminal importance to all students of American politics, history, philosophy, and law. In the Disquisition, Calhoun believed he had laid a “solid foundation for political science” through revitalizing popular rule. To complete his theoretical and practical mission, Calhoun attempts to explain the best example of the diffusion of authority and cultivation of liberty: the American Constitution. The fundamental law of the American republic provided, after all, the “interior structure” for regulating the shape and scope of government. As a guide for the states and the general government, the Constitution was also part of the “organism” that limited the centralization of authority and allowed for genuine popular rule; and it was Calhoun’s exposition of the connection between the moral demands of a properly constituted concept of popular rule and the need for practical ordering principles that is articulated in this book.

Calhoun presents a theory of politics that is both original and in accord with the mainstream of the American political tradition. More than any other thinker of his period, Calhoun sought to explain the enduring qualities of American political thought in light of the troubled world of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike other theorists who had preceded and would follow Calhoun, both American and European, he did not seek to invent a new mode of philosophical speculation or a “grand theory” for the human sciences. Instead, he attempted to offer a refinement of classical, medieval, and modern notions regarding the relationship between government and the social order. As an effort in philosophical retrenchment, the Disquisition strengthened many pre-existing conceptions regarding political liberty and popular rule within the American regime, while offering such insight with a view toward the future that awaited America. Calhoun’s attempt in the Disquisition to reconcile the good of popular rule with ethical requirements have singular relevance to the many nations in the twenty-first century now engaged, despite the ethnic animosities threatening their destruction, in building post-ideological, civilized political and social orders, especially the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Africa.

Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has struggled for over 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. This is the story of how he fought for the human rights of his patients and overcame the Israeli authorities' cruel indifference to their suffering.

Kanaaneh is a native of Galilee, born before the creation of Israel. He left to study medicine at Harvard, before returning to work as a public health physician with the intention of helping his own people. He discovered a shocking level of disease and malnutrition in his community and a shameful lack of support from the Israeli authorities. After doing all he could for his patients by working from inside the system, Kanaaneh set up The Galilee Society, an NGO working for equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel.

This is a brilliant memoir that shows how grass roots organisations can loosen the Zionist grip upon Palestinian lives.

WINNER, LILLIAN SMITH AWARD

WINNER, JAMES F. SULZBY, JR. AWARD

The fire of freedom that changed Birmingham—and America.

When Fred Shuttlesworth suffered only a bump on the head in the 1956 bombing of his home, members of his church called it a miracle. Shuttlesworth took it as a sign that God would protect him on the mission that had made him a target that night. Standing in front of his demolished home, Shuttlesworth vigorously renewed his commitment to integrate Birmingham's buses, lunch counters, police force, and parks. The incident transformed him, in the eyes of Birmingham's blacks, from an up-and-coming young minister to a virtual folk hero and, in the view of white Birmingham, from obscurity to rabble-rouser extraordinaire.

From his 1956 founding of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights through the historic demonstrations of 1963, driven by a sense of divine mission, Shuttlesworth pressured Jim Crow restrictions in Birmingham with radically confrontational acts of courage. His intensive campaign pitted him against the staunchly segregationist police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor and ultimately brought him to the side of Martin Luther King Jr. and to the inner chambers of the Kennedy White House.

First published in 1999, Andrew Manis's award-winning biography of "one of the nation's most courageous freedom fighters" demonstrates compellingly that Shuttleworth's brand of fiery, outspoken confrontation derived from his prophetic understanding of the pastoral role. Civil rights activism was tantamount to salvation in his understanding of the role of Christian minister.

A field guide to a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it

A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal is an unexpected approach to philosophy from a guerrilla-logic point of view. Harnessing critical theory to creatively reimagine counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare, and interventions beyond the political mainstream, it takes us on a journey through anarchist infowar, queer outlaws, and black insurgency—through a subterranean network of communiques, military documents, contemporary art, political slogans, adversarial blogs, and captive media. In doing so, it provides powerful new insight into contemporary political movements that pose no demands, refuse labels, and offer no solutions.

Written to both inspire and provoke, A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal urges us to think through the refusal to participate in politics as usual. Author Andrew Culp demonstrates how evasion can combatively deny the existing order its power. Focusing on punk cinema, anarchist pamphlets, feminist art projects, hacker manifestos, and guerrilla manuals, he foregrounds invisibility as a novel force of disruption. He draws on concepts of criminality, fugitivity, and anonymity to bring a more nuanced understanding of how power makes things—and people—visible.

The book’s unique format is that of a theoretical manual, comprising freestanding segments instead of blueprints. Poised to reach beyond the academy into activist circles, this potent theory-in-action intervention forces us to reconsider the terrain upon which our struggles against patriarchy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and the state operate.

A new ontology for a globalized world

Rich with analyses of concepts from deconstruction, systems theory, and post-Marxism, with critiques of fundamentalist thought and the war on terror, this volume argues for developing a philosophy of being in order to overcome the quandary of postmodern relativism. Undergirding the contributions are the premises that ontology is a vital concept for philosophy today, that an acceptable leftist ontology must avoid the kind of identity politics that has dominated recent cultural studies, and that a new ontology must be situated within global capitalism.

This insider's view of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, of the tumultuous presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and of the conflicts and factions of the president's staff has become a political classic since its original publication in 1972. In this reissue, Harry McPherson adds a new preface in which he reflects on changes in Washington since the Johnson era and on the lessons Bill Clinton could learn from the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

As climate change, pandemics, disasters, migrations, and conflicts increasingly overlap, crises are becoming more complex and difficult to address. The Anthropocene is an era characterized by uncertainty and contestation, in which traditional approaches to crisis management are no longer working. This book examines the ideas that have emerged to help societies move forward, including resilience, navigation, adaptation, precaution, and slow peacebuilding. While these approaches promise hope and progress, A Pragmatism of Beginnings critically highlights their limitations, showing how they often focus on coping with crises in ways that merely preserve and reproduce a decaying status quo.

Drawing on philosophical pragmatism, the book places these imaginaries that drive crisis management today in dialogue with the work of the classical pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, as well as contemporary philosophers Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Elizabeth Grosz, to assess both their promises and their limitations. Across a series of case studies covering disaster response, peacebuilding, global health, climate governance, migration management, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda, the book shows how contemporary crisis governance often seeks to preserve the status quo by managing risks and avoiding breakdown rather than pursue transformative change. A Pragmatism of Beginnings argues that responding to today’s crises requires more; it also demands the courage and imagination to seize new beginnings.

The first full-length biography of a consequential figure in twentieth-century American politics

In 1962, Edward W. Brooke (1919–2015) upended political convention by becoming the first popularly elected African American attorney general of Massachusetts. His victory was striking not only because Massachusetts was an overwhelmingly white state with a small Black population, but also because Brooke was a Republican and an Episcopalian in a deeply Democratic, Irish Catholic political culture. Navigating these contradictions, Brooke crafted a distinctive political style—measured, pragmatic, and quietly transformative—that reshaped civil rights politics in the North. In A Quiet Challenge, Jordan O’Neal Alexander offers the first full-length biography of Brooke, revealing him as a Black Republican whose carefully calibrated approach to race, law, and governance won broad white support while often distancing him from Boston’s Black community.

As attorney general, Brooke sought to uphold the rule of law while advancing principles of fairness, equality, and public safety, an approach that reflected both political constraint and moral resolve. Brooke again defied expectations in 1966 when he won election to the United States Senate, becoming the first popularly elected African American senator since Reconstruction. Serving two terms during the height of the civil rights movement, he emerged as a powerful national voice on issues of racial justice. He played a key role in blocking two Supreme Court nominees aligned with President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” even as his support for school desegregation and busing during the Boston Busing Crisis contributed to his eventual political decline. Throughout his career, Brooke remained committed to building a society in which Black Americans—and all Americans—could fully participate and prosper. This volume demonstrates how Brooke’s restrained, yet persistent political strategy helped expand the possibilities for Black leadership within mainstream American politics. 

Brings back into print a classic account of courage and calamity in the long march toward racial justice in the South, and the nation

On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls. The very next day, a prominent white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. was scheduled to speak at a luncheon held by the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham. A well-regarded figure in the city’s legal and business establishment, Morgan had been mentioned frequently as a candidate for political office. To the shock of his longtime friends and associates, Morgan deviated from his planned remarks, instead using his platform to place the blame for the murder of the four young girls squarely on the shoulders of the city’s white middle-class establishment, those seated before him.

As much as his stand was admired nationally, in Birmingham the results were destructive for him personally. Threats against his life and the lives of his family poured in daily by phone and mail, his political career was finished, and he was faced with financial ruin. Within weeks, he moved his family out of the state, and thenceforward committed himself to legal action in the name of racial justice. In 1964, he established the regional office of the ACLU in Atlanta. In the 1964 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims, Morgan successfully argued that districts in state legislatures needed to be of nearly equal size, establishing the principle of “one man, one vote” to effectively end the use of gerrymandering.

A Time to Speak was originally published in 1964, a mere year after Morgan and his family fled Birmingham. The memoir recounts not only his speech, but his entire upbringing and the political, cultural, and social milieus in which he was raised and which gave rise to the cowardice, institutional silence, fear, and hate that those conditions nursed. This new edition features a foreword from US Senator Doug Jones.