A revelatory memoir that earnestly reckons with whiteness.
As the product of progressive parents and a liberal upbringing, Garrett Bucks prided himself on the pursuit of being a "good white person."
The kind of white person who treats their privilege as a responsibility and not a burden; the kind of white person who people of color see as the peak example of racial allyship; the kind of white person who other white people might model their own aspirations of being "better" after.
But it's Bucks obsession with "goodness" that prevents him from building meaningful relationships, particularly those who look like him. The Right Kind of White charts Garrett's intellectual and emotional odyssey in his pursuit of this ideal whiteness, the price of its admission, and the work he's doing to bridge the divide from those he once sought distance from.
Nearly seven out of ten American Indians live in urban areas, yet studies of urban Indian experiences remain scant. Studies of suburban Natives are even more rare. Today's suburban Natives, the fastest-growing American Indian demographic, highlight the tensions within federal policies working in tandem to move and house differing groups of people in very different residential locations. In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.
American Indians and the American Dream analyzes the dispossession of Indian land, property rights, and patterns of home ownership through programs and policies that sought to move communities away from their traditional homelands to reservations and, later, to urban and suburban areas. Keeler begins this analysis with the Homestead Act of 1862, then shifts to the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, the creation of Little Earth in Minneapolis, and Indian homeownership during the housing bubble of the early 2000s.
Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.
In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined 'small' violence as essential to imperial rule and global order.
Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.
An intimate retelling of Lyndon B. Johnson's politics and presidency by one of his closest advisors.
Horace Busby was one of LBJ's most trusted advisors; their close working and personal relationship spanned twenty years. In The Thirty-First of March he offers an indelible portrait of a president and a presidency at a time of crisis. From the aftereffects of the Kennedy assassination, when Busby was asked by the newly sworn-in president to sit by his bedside during his first troubled nights in office, to the concerns that defined the Great Society-civil rights, the economy, social legislation, housing, and the Vietnam War-Busby not only articulated and refined Johnson's political thinking, he also helped shape the most ambitious, far-reaching legislative agenda since FDR's New Deal.
Here is Johnson the politician, Johnson the schemer, Johnson who advised against JFK's choice of an open limousine that fateful day in Dallas, and Johnson the father, sickened by the deaths of young men fighting and dying in Vietnam on his orders. The Thirty-first of March is a rare glimpse into the inner sanctum of Johnson's presidency, as seen through the eyes of one of the people who understood him best.
Mamah Borthwick was an energetic, intelligent, and charismatic woman who earned a master's degree at a time when few women even attended college, translated writings by a key figure of the early feminist movement, and taught at one of Germany's best schools for boys. She is best known, however, as the mistress of the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and for her shocking murder at the renowned Wisconsin home he built for her, Taliesin. A Brave and Lovely Woman offers an important corrective to the narrative of Wright and Borthwick, a love story as American in character as it is Shakespearean in conclusion.
Little of Wright's life and work has been left untouched by his many admirers, critics, and biographers. And yet the woman who stood at the center of his emotional life, Mamah Borthwick, has fallen into near obscurity. Mark Borthwick-a distant relative-recenters Mamah Borthwick in her own life, presenting a detailed portrait of a fascinating woman, a complicated figure who was at once a dedicated mother and a faithless spouse, a feminist and a member of a conservative sorority, a vivacious extrovert and a social pariah. Careful research and engaging prose at last give Borthwick, an obscure but crucial character in one of America's most famous tragedies, center stage.
A new history of the American Jewish relationship with Isreal focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights
American Jews began debating Palestinian rights issues even before Israel's founding in 1948. Geoffrey Levin recovers the voices of American Jews who, in the early decades of Israel's existence, called for an honest reckoning with the moral and political plight of Palestinian Sephardic roots, a former Yiddish journalist, anti-Zionist Reform rabbis, and young left-wing Zionist activists, felt drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history, identity, and ethics. They sometimes worked with mainstream American Jewish leaders who feared that ignoring Palestinian rights could foster antisemitism, leading them to press Israeli officials for reform. But Israeli diplomats viewed any American Jewish interest in Palestinian affairs with deep suspicion, provoking a series of quiet confrontations that ultimately kept Palestinian rights off the American Jewish agenda up to the present era.
In reconstructing this hidden history, Levin lays the groundwork for more forthright debates over Palestinian rights issues, American Jewish identity, and the U.S.-Israel relationship more broadly.
Focusing on the crucial period of 1820 to 1860, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster examines the strong economic bonds between the antebellum plantation South and the burgeoning city of New York that resulted from the highly lucrative trade in cotton. In this richly detailed work of literary and cultural history, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. charts how the partnership brought fantastic wealth to both the South and Gotham during the first half of the nineteenth century. That mutually beneficial alliance also cemented New York's reputation as the northern metropolis most supportive of and hospitable to southerners.
Both parties initially found the commercial and cultural entente advantageous, but their collaboration grew increasingly fraught by the 1840s as rising abolitionist sentiment in the North decried the system of chattel slavery that made possible the mass production of cotton. In an effort to stem the swelling tide of abolitionism, conservative southerners demanded absolute political fealty to their peculiar institution from the city that had profited most from the cotton trade. By 1861, reactionary circles in the South viewed New York's failure to extend such unalloyed validation as the betrayal of an erstwhile ally that in the words of one polemicist deemed Gotham worthy of being 'blotted from the list of cities.'
In Bringing Home the White House, Melissa Estes Blair introduces us to five fascinating yet unheralded women who were at the heart of campaigns to elect and reelect some of our most beloved presidents. By examining the roles of these political strategists in affecting the outcome of presidential elections, Blair sheds light on their historical importance and the relevance of their individual influence.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century both major political parties had Women's Divisions. The leaders of these divisions-five women who held the job from 1932 until 1958-organized tens of thousands of women all over the country, turning them into the 'saleswomen for the party' by providing them with talking points, fliers, and other material they needed to strike up political conversations with their friends and neighbors. The leaders of the Women's Divisions also produced a huge portion of the media used by the campaigns-over 90 percent of all print material in the 1930s-and were close advisors of the presidents of both parties.
In spite of their importance, these women and their work have been left out of the narratives of midcentury America. In telling the story of these women, Blair reveals the ways that women were central to American politics from the depths of the Great Depression to the height of the Cold War.
'Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know.' -Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever
When Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves was published it was a literary revelation of sorts. In a raw, stylized voice it told the story of a white boy growing up with homesteading parents in Arctic Alaska and trying to reconcile his largely subsistence and Native-style upbringing with the expectations and realities tied to his race. It hit numerous bestseller lists, was critically acclaimed, and won a number of awards.
Seth's nonfiction second book, the memoir Shopping for Porcupine, was even more compelling for many-the same raw details of a homesteading upbringing, but intensely personal. Now, in Swallowed by the Great Land, he once again brings us into his lyrical wilderness existence.
Swallowed by the Great Land features slice-of-life essays that further reveal the duality in the author's own life today, and also in the village and community that he inhabits-a mosaic of all life on the tundra. Unique characters, village life, wilderness and the larger landscape, a warming Arctic, and hunting and other aspects of subsistence living are all explored in varied yet intimate stories.
This nation's Cold War and Global War on Terror defense structures need an update. U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century provides such a framework for the changed world we live in, offering a roadmap that shows how the U.S. can field a war-winning fleet that can also compete aggressively in peacetime against dangerous competitors. Brent Sadler presents a compelling new strategy and organizing approach that he calls naval statecraft, which acknowledges the centrality and importance of the maritime domain. While similar to Cold War containment strategies against the Soviets, naval statecraft is much more. It must be to challenge China's involvement in global supply chains, which gives that country significant financial heft and influence around the world. Unlike what existed during of the Cold War, however, Sadler provides a unique vision for competing with China and Russia. Rather than simply calling for better coordinated U.S. diplomacy, military operations, and economic statecraft, Sadler argues for integrating the levers of national power coherently and sustainably. It is an approach imminently appropriate to our times but comes with a realization that the nation is not ready for the competition it faces from China and Russia. The book is a valuable contribution to the national debate over how best to respond to China's rise and Russia's antagonisms.
In Dusty Booze: In Search of Vintage Spirits, journalist Aaron Goldfarb goes on an adventure in vintage spirits. This is an intoxicating story of obsessives on the hunt for old bottles of whiskey, tequila, rum, chartreuse-you name it-from estate sales, grandpa's liquor cabinet, and out-of-the-way and inner-city liquor stores that may just have a case or a few bottles lying around in the basement.
What Goldfarb and these 'dusty hunters' discover are more than just bottles from bygone brands or old formulations no longer available-they find portals into history. Spirits, once bottled, don't age like wine. A bourbon from the 1935 lets you savor the end of Prohibition. A 1940s rum cocktail with actual 1940s rum tastes the way it would to a GI returning from WWII. An old Italian amaro captures la dolce vita in a glass, and vintage gin is a drinkable time capsule from Mad Men-era lunchtime martinis.
Dusty Booze mixes the history of our drinking culture and the Indiana Jones-meets-Simpsons Comic Book Guy adventures of the collectors, including the hunt for rumored stash from a reclusive Hollywood legend. This is a buoyant, thirst-triggering voyage into a unique subculture that has exploded in popularity in recent years.
