Softcover. NY, Harper Torchbooks, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 357 pages. A scholarly study about life in the Old South. Clean copy.
Softcover. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 277 pages. Starting in the 1980s, anti-immigrant discourse shifted away from the "color" of immigrants to their religion and culture. It focused in particular on newcomers from Muslim countries--people feared both as terrorists and as products of tribal societies with values opposed to those of secular Western Europe. Leo Lucassen tackles the question of whether the integration process of these recent immigrants will fundamentally differ in the long run (over multiple generations) from the experiences of similar immigrant groups in the past. For comparison, Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. Lucassen emphasizes that the geographic sources of the "threat" have changed and that contemporaries tend to overemphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Red Sea Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 321 pages. This book tells the story about an African Jewish community known as the Beta Israel that used to live in the northern part of Ethiopia. They were repatriated to Israel in many waves with the aid of the Israeli government and the Jewish Diaspora. The Beta Israel had struggled and faced hardships in order to live out their destiny which was to migrate to the Promised Land. However, their struggle did not stop there. They have had to struggle again to overcome unexpected and new challenges after their long anticipated migration. The book is organized around these two issues. The early chapters of the book describe the quest for Beta Israel identity within Ethiopia and explore their origins. The discussion on this topic is based on mainly textual analyses of previous works on the Beta Israel. It outlines their history and explores their origins. It examines whether the different types of oppressive Ethiopian regimes have contributed to their decision to leave for the Promised Land. It sketches the socio-economic background of the twentieth-century Aliyah, and briefly analyses the impact of the political upheavals in Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991 when the Derg, the post Haile Selassie military regime, was in power.
Hardcover. NY, powerHouse, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Established in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan still remains one of America's most secretive organizations. New York photojournalist Anthony Karen first transcended that secrecy several years ago when he got the opportunity to photograph a KKK cross-lighting ceremony. Since then, Karen has been documenting Klan organizations throughout the country. In The Invisible Empire: Ku Klux Klan, those photographs are compiled to form an absorbing document of one of the most notorious groups in history. Taken with unrestricted access, Karen's images bring us deep inside America's most private white nationalist organizations. Beginning with a brief introduction into the history of the Klan, the book provides detailed visual accounts of modern-day Klan life, including candid shots of rallies, individual portraits of Klansmen and women, as well as a look at the naturalization process for new members. Presented in intimate profiles are: a functioning Klan ministry, a group that has merged National Socialism with Klan ideologies, and a 58-year-old seamstress who makes custom Klan robes, among others. Accompanied by quotations from the late Dale Fox, Imperial Wizard of The Brotherhood of the Klans, The Invisible Empire: Ku Klux Klan offers an unprecedented glimpse into the shadowy society and its mysterious inner workings.
Hardcover. Hoboken NJ, Wiley Publishing, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The Last Samurai traces Saigo's life from his early days as a tax clerk in far southwestern Japan, through his rise to national prominence as a fierce imperial loyalist. Saigo was twice exiled for his political activities - sent to Japan's remote southwestern islands where he fully expected to die. But exile only increased his reputation for loyalty, and in 1864 he was brought back to the capital to help his lord fight for the restoration of the emperor.
Hardcover. Boston , Little Brown, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 368 pages. On a volcanic island in the Savu Sea so remote that other Indonesians call it "The Land Left Behind" live the Lamalerans: a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who are the world's last subsistence whalers. They have survived for half a millennium by hunting whales with bamboo harpoons and handmade wooden boats powered by sails of woven palm fronds. But now, under assault from the rapacious forces of the modern era and a global economy, their way of life teeters on the brink of collapse. Award-winning journalist Doug Bock Clark, one of a handful of Westerners who speak the Lamaleran language, lived with the tribe across three years, and he brings their world and their people to vivid life in this gripping story of a vanishing culture. Jon, an orphaned apprentice whaler, toils to earn his harpoon and provide for his ailing grandparents, while Ika, his indomitable younger sister, is eager to forge a life unconstrained by tradition, and to realize a star-crossed love. Frans, an aging shaman, tries to unite the tribe in order to undo a deadly curse. And Ignatius, a legendary harpooner entering retirement, labors to hand down the Ways of the Ancestors to his son, Ben, who would secretly rather become a DJ in the distant tourist mecca of Bali.
Softcover. Oxford UK, Cambridge University Press , 1st pbk, 1993, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 484 pages, b&w illustrations. "In eighteenth-century London the gallows at Tyburn was the dramatic focus of a struggle between the rich and the poor. Most of the London hanged were executed for property crimes, and the chief lesson that the gallows had to teach was: 'Respect private property'. The executions took place amid a London populace that knew the same poverty and hunger as the condemned. Indeed, in this stimulating account Peter Linebaugh shows how there was little distinction between a 'criminal' population and the poor population of London as a whole. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the laws of a privileged ruling class." Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 267 pages. A compelling true story of how a maid's daughter moves from a girlhood of rage and resentment to a level of empowerment, as a grown woman. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1964, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages, illustrated wraps. A documentation and moving tribute to the Civil Rights activists of the 1960s, many b&w photographs by Danny Lyons. Stated First Printing. Wrappers have chipping, rubbing. Lorraine Hansberry, best known for her award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun, contributed the text.
Softcover. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1st pbk, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 154 pages. Michael Harrington was a political scientist and activist best known for The Other America, an examination of poverty in the midst of affluence in the U.S. Here, he reexamines the state of the U.S. twenty years after his landmark book. Bob Adelman is a respected photojournalist, b&w photos throughout; 11 x 8.5 inches. SIGNED BY ADELMAN. "Adelman has moved beyond the familiar cliches of most documentary photography into that rare sphere wherein technical ability and social vision combine to create a great work of art." Quote by Ralph Ellison.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 541 pages. b&w illustrations. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among John-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the 'white negro' and Black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages. This book concerns itself with the different ways in which money is used, the relationships which then arise, and the institutions concerned in maintaining its various functions. Thomas Crump examines the emergence of institutions with familiar and distinctive monetary roles: the state, the market and the banking system. However, other uses of money - such as for gambling or the payment of fines - are also taken into account, in an exhaustive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject, which extends far beyond the range of conventional treatises on money. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 412 pages including index. Dispelling the general assumption that social institutions survive because of their sophisticated adaptive advantages, this ground-breaking work asserts that the commonest customs and institutions may endure because of their very simplicity or as a result of simple human proclivity. Using religious, military, and kinship institutions to illustrate this argument, the author shows that a precise combination of these factors may lead to the emergence of new forms of social evolution. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 369 pages. Evans "tells of his grandparents' debate to leave Lithuania for America, the first few years in the Baltimore slums, and their decision to gamble on the South. He writes about the family store, and describes his boyhood in Durham, in the North Carolina tobacco belt, where his father was mayor from 1950 to 1962 during the stormiest years of the Civil Rights era. " Also a history of earlier German & Sephardic Jewish communities in the South & the role of Southern Jews in the Civil War & Reconstruction. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 321 pages. formulate an adequate theory of "populist" movements. In a novel analysis of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, Calhoun argues that popular protest was mounted by reactionary radicals whose ideology was largely a defense of the traditional values of culture and community against an emerging industrial order. He also offers through reconsiderations of several histories of class struggle, including E. P. Thompson's influential masterpiece, The making of the English Working Class. Calhoun focuses on the social foundations for collective action. In his view, English radicalism during the 1810s and early 1820s was based in local and craft communities. Rather than include this English populism within the Marxist notion of class struggle, Calhoun shows that it was rooted in the particular situation of English workers in social and economic transition. As he reassesses these populist movements, he broadens our understanding of community, class, tradition, and collective action. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Controversy has raged around Lasch's targeted attack on the elites, their loss of moral values, and their abandonment of the middle class and poor, for he sets up the media and educational institutions as a large source of the problem. In this spirited work, Lasch calls out for a return to community, schools that teach history not self-esteem, and a return to morality and even the teachings of religion. He does this in a nonpartisan manner, looking to the lessons of American history, and castigating those in power for the ever-widening gap between the economic classes, which has created a crisis in American society. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2nd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 261 pages, previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. "Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage and destructive tendencies in human nature. Understanding this challenges our optimistic illusions about the effectiveness of reason and morality in bettering human lives. But abandoning these illusions is vitally important because they are obstacles to countering the threat of evil. The aim of this book is to explain why people act in these ways and what can be done about it." The first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210; Robespierre's Terror of 1793?94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi death camp in 1943?44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975. John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to account for these cases and then provides an original explanation of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular.
Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 286 pages, b&w illustrations. This book examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals. Odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behavior in animals and there are claims that odor can play the same role in humans. The place of odors and scents in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis serves to illustrate the link between the emotional centers and the brain. The book presents arguments to explain the way in which our ancestral past has given rise to our modern day olfactory enigmas. Contains a glossary and chapter summaries. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages. In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia. Clean copy.
Softcover. Madras, Government Press, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Heavy gray paper wraps, 158 pages. 12 plates of b/w photographs. A complete survey of the origin and development of the Brahmanas as well as an authoritative exposition of their liturgical codes and an accurate account of their cultural life. This work also deals with Vaishnavism of south India. Azhvars, Acharyas, Ramanuja, Visistadvaita philosophy, cardinal principles of Sri Vaishnavism. Some interesting illustrations enhance the beauty of this volume. Light wear to wrappers, clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, blue clith with gilt lettering on spine, 328 pages. Dr Moore's enterprising book focuses on an apparent paradox: the failure of Sri Lanka's highly politicized smallholder electorate to place on the national political agenda issues relating to the public distribution of material resources. Sri Lanka has more than fifty years' history of pluralist democracy and such issues directly affect the interests of the smallholder population. Yet successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued economic policies favouring food consumers and the state itself at the expense of agricultural producers. In exploring the features of Sri Lanka's history, geography, politics and economy which explain this paradox, the author looks in detail at some of the dominant features of contemporary Sri Lanka: the political consequences of the plantation experience; the persistence of elite political leadership; and the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict. Clean copy, paper tanning slightly.
Softcover. NY, Doubleday Anchor Book, 1st US, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 298 pages. First published in 1917 and long regarded as a classic of English social history. Preface by Asa Briggs. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st US, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 522 pages, b&w illustrations. By the end of World War I, Britain had become a laboratory for modernity. Intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists-among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells-sought a vision for a rapidly changing world. Coloring their innovative ideas and concepts, from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, was a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilization. In The Twilight Years, award-winning historian Richard Overy examines the paradox of this period and argues that the coming of World War II was almost welcomed by Britain's leading thinkers, who saw it as an extraordinary test for the survival of civilization- and a way of resolving their contradictory fears and hopes about the future. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, W W Norton, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 724 pages. Illustrated in b&w and color. A revisionist panorama of the nineteenth century examines the era's material and spiritual changes in the wake of emerging British capitalism and imperialism, as told through the writings of such figures as Darwin, Marks, George Eliot, and Kipling. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Prentice Hall, 1st pbk, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 184 pages. Revealing and disturbing study of the racist ideas and fantasies of southern whites after the Civil War and examines their racial fantasies and the social and psychological roots of those fantasies. He reveals how a complex set of anxieties and repressions in Southern life led whites to need "Negro" Inferiority." Name on title page otherwise clean.
Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 464 pages. Richard Stites views the struggle for liberation of Russian women in the context of both nineteenth-century European feminism and twentieth-century communism. The central personalities, their vigorous exchange of ideas, the social and political events that marked the emerging ideal of emancipation--all come to life in this absorbing and dramatic account. The author's history begins with the feminist, nihilist, and populist impulses of the 1860s and 1870s, and leads to the social mobilization campaigns of the early Soviet period. Spine with light fading, otherwise a clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Atglen, PA, Schiffer Publishing, 2nd, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 489 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Color photo throughout. While You Were Sleeping was a graffiti and pop culture magazine started by graffiti supply business owner Roger Gastman when he was 19. Here are some of the greatest stories the magazine ever published-and many that are not so good. From stories on admirable serial killers and interviews with child stars to photos of graffiti and people's naked sisters, this book takes you into the dirty minds of Gastman and his team of juvenile delinquents. You've been warned.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 222 pages. Why does sacrifice, more than any other major religious institution, depend on gender dichotomy? Why do so many societies oppose sacrifice to childbirth, and why are childbearing women so commonly excluded from sacrificial practices? In this feminist study of relations between sacrifice, gender, and social organization, Nancy Jay reveals sacrifice as a remedy for having been born of woman, and hence uniquely suited to establishing certain and enduring paternity. Drawing on examples of ancient and modern societies, Jay synthesizes sociology of religion, ethnography, biblical scholarship, church history, and classics to argue that sacrifice legitimates and maintains patriarchal structures that transcend men's dependence on women's reproductive powers.
Hardcover. London, The Athlone Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, orange cloth covers, 287 pages. Anthropological essays by the author based on his 30 years of field work in Ghana. Clean copy.
Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 311 pages. As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta-the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south-in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Clean copy.
Softcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st pbk, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, yellow card wraps with b&w designs and black lettering. 287 pages with 55 b/w line drawings and 96 b/w plates. The first publication in English that gives a general survey of the development of the inner structure of the town from a dual point of view: that of the function of the square in the life of the community and that of its conception in purely aesthetic terms. Zucker shows a continuous development from Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the creative heights of the 17th and 18th centuries, periods which he considers the culmination of this development. The concluding chapter surveys the role of the square in early American life. Clean copy.
Softcover. Cambridge MA, Peabody Museum, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 527 pages, 10.25 x 7.75 inches. Scarce ethnological and archeological study of Liberia's culture and myths. Large fold-out colored map, measuring 20.25 x 43 inches, is slipped into the inner rear cover. Copious illustrations and diagrams throughout. Light chipping to paper covers but with a very good interior. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf otherwise clean.
Softcover. University of Chicago Press, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 555 pages. Traces the political fortunes of the Puritans from 1524, the year in which William Tyndale left London for Germany, to the Stuart Settlement at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The author then examines the social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of Puritanism which, he believes, represented a more genuine idealism than any rival religious movement during the Tudor period. Remainder mark to bottom edge, otherwise a clean copy.
Hardcover. London, The Athlone Press, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers, 94 pages, bibliography. Previous owner's name otherwise a clean copy, no dust jacket.
Softcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 255 pages, b&w photos. A Peace Corps worker sent to the Sakel to establish a fish-farming project, the author lived with a family in a tiny Sengalese village near the Mauretania border. We share her initial feelings of dislocation as she contends not only with a primitive lifestyle, lack of creature comforts, and the overt sexism of the Moslem men she supervises, but also with her burgeoning relationships with the women in the little compound who become as much her family as her relatives in America. In a guileless narrative filled with affection and anger, Lowerre tells of the ill health and bureaucratic failings that beset her; she acknowledges the Pulaar people's love and good humor, and offers an unprettified closeup of daily life in an African village. Clean copy.
Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd pr., 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 387 pages. Softcover. Black & white illustrations throughout. Faded spine. Light shelf wear to cover. Pen marks to three pages. Otherwise clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 896 pages. This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times. The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book. 1980 National Book Award winner. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
hardcover. NY, Worker's Library, 1st, 1934, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Foreward by John Dos Passos. A study of the Bonus Marches of the Thirties. Light edgewear.
Hardcover. London, Book Club Associates, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, bright copy in a similar dust jacket.
Softcover. NY, Harper Torchbooks, reprint, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 397 pages. "Few works that I know convey the excitement of the intellectual life of nineteenth-century England as immediately as Gertrude Himmelfarb's Victorian Minds. The essays are remarkable no less for the cogency of their wit than for the range and precision of their scholarship" ` ~ Lionel Trilling. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 292 pages. A look at early Federal society and government in an epistolatory format by a young Scottish woman on tour in America in the early 1800s. Edited by Paul R. Baker. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean
Softcover. Canada, Penguin Books, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 640 pages. The Western world is full of paradoxes. We talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet we've never been under more pressure to conform. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about invasive government, yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are deteriorating. All these problems, John Ralston Saul argues, are largely the result of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the past 400 years, our "rational elites" have turned the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts--"Voltaire's bastards"--whose cult of scientific management is empty of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertain-ment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose ordinary citizens are increasingly excluded from the decision-making process. In this wide-ranging anatomy of modern society and its origins--whose "pages explode with insight, style and intellectual rigor" (Camille Paglia, The Washington Post)--Saul presents a shattering critique of the political, economic and cultural estab-lishments of the West. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Palgrave Macmillan, reprint, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 270 pages, b&w illustrations. The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Gretna LA, Pelican Publishing, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. In June 1892, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class railway ticket from his native New Orleans to Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The two-hour trip had hardly begun when Plessy was arrested and removed from the train. Though Homer Plessy was born a free man of color and enjoyed relative equality while growing up in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, by 1890 he could no longer ride in the same carriage with white passengers. Plessy's act of civil disobedience was designed to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, one of the many Jim Crow laws that threatened the freedoms gained by blacks after the Civil War. This largely forgotten case mandated separate-but-equal treatment and established segregation as the law of the land. It would be fifty-eight years before this ruling was reversed by Brown v. Board of Education. Keith Weldon Medley brings to life the players in this landmark trial, from the crusading black columnist Rodolphe Desdunes and the other members of the Comite des Citoyens to Albion W. Tourgee, the outspoken writer who represented Plessy, to John Ferguson, a reformist carpetbagger who nonetheless felt that he had to judge Plessy guilty. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press , 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dustjacket, 255 pages. Laura Tabili is the first historian to examine the concrete connections between the legacy of imperialism and the problem of racial antagonism inside Britain. Previous efforts to explain ethnic conflict have often resorted to pessimistic "common-sense" assumptions about the universality of xenophobia and racism; here Tabili recovers the historical conditions under which racial inequality was institutionalized in Britain. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 480 pages. In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing--if occasionally entertaining--poor white trash. "When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there's always a chance that the dancing bear will win," says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.
 "The Next America; the decline and rise of the United States. Photographs by Bob Adelman (SIGNED BY ADELMAN)by: Harrington/Bob Adelman, Michael")
 "The Town Labourerby: J.L. and Barbara Hammond")
 "The Worst of While you were Sleepingby: Gastman, Roger")
 "Town and Square: From the Agora to the Village Greenby: Zucker, Paul")
 "Veterans on the Marchby: Douglas, Jack")
 "Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and of Ideologies in Transitionby: Himmelfarb, Gertrude")
 "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in Americaby: Isenberg, Nancy")