Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...

""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power -- which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories...

"Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench. Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help...

"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. A consummate prankster with a quick wit, Tom Sawyer dreams of a bigger fate than simply being a "rich boy." Yet through the novel's humorous escapades-from the famous episode of the whitewashed fence to the trial of Injun Joe-Mark Twain explores the deeper themes of the adult world, one of dishonesty and superstition, murder and revenge,...

"Drew Gilpin Faust writes about coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America"-- "A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young...

Lily Owens is a young girl who lives on the peach farm that her abusive father owns. Rosaleen is a black woman hired by Lily's father to be a stand in mother for Lilly. Rosaleen insults some of the biggest racists in their town. Lily and Rosaleen run away to a town Lily believes that her mother once lived in. They go to live with the three Boatwright sisters on their honey farm. She finds solace in their mesmerizing world of beekeeping.

Vols. 1-3: Depicts the story of America's civil rights years from 1954-1965. Vols. 4-8: Examines the new America from 1966 to 1985, from community power to the human alienation of urban poverty.

A character-driven documentary about a billionaire family and their financial challenges in the wake of the economic crisis. With the epic proportions of a Shakespearean tragedy, the film follows two unique characters, whose rags-to-riches success stories reveal the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream.. The film begins with the family triumphantly constructing the largest privately owned house in America, a 90,000 sq. ft. palace. Over the...

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

"Heather C. McGhee's specialty is the American economy -- and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. As she dug into subject after subject, from the financial crisis to declining wages to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common problem at the bottom of them all: racism -- but not just in the obvious ways that hurt people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It's the common denominator in our most vexing...