Exploring how Southern Jews forged identity, community, and belonging in the evolving landscape of the New South.Homelands is a case study of a unique ethnic group in North America—small-town southern Jews. Both Jews and southerners, Leonard Rogoff points out, have long struggled with questions of identity and whether to retain their differences or try to assimilate into the national culture. Rogoff shows how, as immigrant Jews became small-town s...

A sweeping chronicle of Jewish life in the Tar Heel State from colonial times to the present, this beautifully illustrated volume incorporates oral histories, original historical documents, and profiles of fascinating individuals. The first comprehensive social history of its kind, Down Home demonstrates that the story of North Carolina Jews is attuned to the national story of immigrant acculturation but has a southern twist.Keeping in mind the larger southern, American, a...

A first major work of history on a crucial but under-examined topic, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faithexplores the role of religion in American foreign policy. From the first colonists to the presidents of the 21st Century, Andrew Preston's unparalleled study show us how religion has always shaped America's relationships with other nations, and what to expect in the future.During the presidency of George W. Bush, many Americans and others around the world viewed...

Finalist, 2012 National Jewish Book AwardsA riveting account of General Ulysses S. Grant’s decision, in the middle of the Civil War, to order the expulsion of all Jews from the territory under his command, and the reverberations of that decision on Grant’s political career, on the nascent American Jewish community, and on the American political process.On December 17, 1862, just weeks before Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, General G...

Jonathan D. Sarna’s award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: “Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standar...

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular cultu...

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NEWSWEEK/THE DAILY BEAST, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE PROGRESSIVEThe definitive history of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who fought for a different America, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been a story of movements that failed to gain support from mainstream America. In American Dreamers, M...

Neil Baldwin, one of the most exciting intellectual historians, has written extensively about the great thinkers and innovators who have shaped our unique American identity. In THE AMERICAN REVELATION, he turns his energies to the unfolding story of how the American spirit developed over 400 years.This inspiring examination of the ideals that have grown to inform our national identity and of the figures who set the course for our evolving self image covers:City on a Hill--Joh...

Finalist, 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the Jewish Book CouncilTraces American Jews' complicated relationship to alcohol through the years leading up to and after prohibitionFrom kosher wine to their ties to the liquor trade in Europe, Jews have a longstanding historical relationship with alcohol. But once prohibition hit America, American Jews were forced to choose between abandoning their historical connection to alcohol a...

The history of the Jewish community in Canada says as much about the development of the nation as it does about the Jewish people. Spurred on by upheavals in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jews emigrated to the Dominion of Canada, which was then considered little more than a British satellite state. Over the ensuing decades, as the Canadian Jewish identity was forged, Canada itself underwent the transformative experience of separating itself from ...

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon (128,000 words, 19 illustrations)Written by a sociologist and a journalist, The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions recounts the death of a Boston community once home to 90,000 Jews residing among African-Americans and white ethnics. The frightening personal testimonies and blatant evidence of manipulated housing prices illust...

Brings to life the impressive, surprising, and long-neglected history of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s efforts in support of the Jewish community.