Originally published in 1866, Civil Disobedience asks when and in what circumstances an individual should actively oppose government and its justice system. Thoreau’s argument is that opposition is legitimate whenever government actions or institutions are unacceptable to an individual’s conscience. But he goes further, saying anyone who believes something to be wrong has a duty to resist it actively. While he was not widely known during his lifetime, the ideas he put forward in Civil Diso...

In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau looks at old issues in new ways, asking: is there ever a time when individuals should actively oppose their government and its justice system?After a thorough review of the evidence, Thoreau comes to the conclusion that opposition is legitimate whenever government actions or institutions are unacceptable to an individual’s conscience. What is particularly interesting is that Thoreau’s creative mind took him deeper into the argumen...

This book discusses a number of ways in which the dialogue about Europe’s past and future could be rendered more inclusive, such as the promotion of critical and sentimental education and the creation of virtual and actual social spaces in which citizens and organised identity groups can participate. The discussion about European memory is far from being a “merely” symbolic issue with no political consequences. Imagining Europe and its past in different ways will lead to different real pol...

The bestseller that reminded us what it means to be an American is more timely than ever in this updated and enlarged edition, including "Schlesinger's Syllabus," an annotated reading list of core books on the American experience.The classic image of the American nation — a melting pot in which differences of race, wealth, religion, and nationality are submerged in democracy — is being replaced by an orthodoxy that celebrates difference and abandons assimilation. While this upsurge...

The timeless and essential anthology of Black Feminist thought—showing that Black women have always understood the need for feminism to be intersectional“In this pathbreaking collection of articles, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall has taken us from the early 1830s to contemporary times. . . . She has refused to cut off contemporary African American women from the long line of sisters who have righteously struggled for the liberation of African American women from ...

Lauded for its contribution to the theory and conceptualization of the field of women’s history and for its sensitivity to the differences of class, ethnicity, race, and culture among women, The Majority Finds Its Past became a classic volume in women’s history following its publication in 1979. This edition includes a foreword by Linda K. Kerber, introducing a new generation of readers to Gerda Lerner’s considerable body of work and highlighting the importance of the essays in th...

After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves free, yet largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Drawing on his professional research into political leadership and intellectual development in African American society, as well as his personal roots in the social-gospel teachings of black churches and at Lincoln University (PA), the political scientist Martin Kilson explores how a modern African American intelligentsia developed in the face of institu...

How did African-American slaves view their white masters? As demons, deities or another race entirely? When nineteenth-century white Americans proclaimed their innate superiority, did blacks agree? If not, why not? How did blacks assess the status of the white race? Mia Bay traces African-American perceptions of whites between 1830 and 1925 to depict America's shifting attitudes about race in a period that saw slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and urban migration. Much has been writte...

Contentious debates over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, believed that nurturing a student’s capacity for lifelong learning was useful for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. In this provocative contribution to the dispute...

Eschewing the often romanticized Underground Railroad narrative that portrays southern Ontario as the welcoming destination of Blacks fleeing from slavery, The Promised Land reveals the Chatham-Kent area as a crucial settlement site for an early Black presence in Canada. The contributors present the everyday lives and professional activities of individuals and families in these communities and highlight early cross-border activism to end slavery in the United States and to promote...

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James AwardSeen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery,...

Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking. Making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. This volume moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life. This book maps the changing conditions of ...