Searching for the truth behind the secret she's long concealed, Dora, a former domestic servant, is given curatorship of The National Museum of the Worker by her lover, a place that isn't at all what it seems as she unravels a monstrous conspiracy that brings her to the edge of worlds. It begins in an unnamed city nicknamed "the Fairest", it is distinguished by many things from the river fair to the mountains that split the municipality in half;...

"This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter's essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter (1872- 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political...

"From the bestselling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time"-- Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across...

This is a memoir about living, loving, dreaming, daring, and driving while female -- in a country where it's dangerous to do all of the above. Manal al-Sharif grew up in Mecca the second daughter of a taxi driver, born the year strict fundamentalism took hold. In her adolescence, she was religious radical, melting her brother's boy band CDs in the oven because music was haram: forbidden by Islamic law. But what a difference an education can make....

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary, part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten,...

A genius at devising civil protests and political maneuvers, Samuel Adams forced Britain into coercive military measures that ultimately led to America's irreversible split from the empire. He was behind nearly every major protest over British rule, and his pioneering tactics of civil disobedience outfoxed the leading ministers in England. Adams was the most influential political writer in colonial America and he used this power to guide Americans...

"Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies--vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire. In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island's politics...

This book tells the story of the twelve years after Lincoln's assassination. The viewpoint is inspired by the Dunning School, who favor conservative elements, and argues that reconstruction involved literal torture of the Southern people, with concomitant abuse of the constitution.

Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture--and how the latter prompts the former.