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History

America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States

Cover of America for Americans: A H
by Erika Lee
2019

Many of us like to think of the United States as a nation of immigrants. We pride ourselves on our history of welcoming foreigners and believe this sets our nation apart from every other. But the phrase 'a nation of immigrants' only dates from the mid-twentieth century, and has served to paper over a much darker history of hatred of -- and violence against -- foreigners arriving on our shores.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing

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Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome
by Joy DeGruy
[2005]

In the 16th century, the beginning of African enslavement in the Americas until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and emancipation in 1865, Africans were hunted like animals, captured, sold, tortured, and raped. They experienced the worst kind of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual abuse. Given such history, isn't it likely that many of the enslaved were severely traumatized? And did the trauma and the effects of such horrific abuse end with the abolition of slavery?

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Cover of Open Veins of Latin Americ
by Eduardo Galeano
[1997]

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.
Recommended by YWCA Madison

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas

Cover of Surviving Genocide: Native
by Jeffrey Ostler
2019

In the first part of this sweeping two-volume history, Jeffrey Ostler investigates how American democracy relied on Indian dispossession and the federally sanctioned use of force to remove or slaughter Indians in the way of U.S. expansion. He charts the losses that Indians suffered from relentless violence and upheaval and the attendant effects of disease, deprivation, and exposure. This volume centers on the eastern United States from the 1750s to the start of the Civil War.

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

Cover of How We Get Free: Black Fem
Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
2017

In the last several years, Black feminism has reemerged as the analytical framework for the activist response to the oppression of trans women of color, the fight for reproductive rights, and, of course, the movement against police abuse and violence. The most visible organizations and activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement speak openly about how Black feminism shapes their politics and strategies today.

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

Cover of Dog Whistle Politics: How
by Ian Haney Lopez
[2014]

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Wrecked the Middle Class is a sweeping account of how "dog-whistle" racial politics contributed to increasing inequality in America since the 1960s. Now a pervasive term in American political coverage, "dog whistle" refers to coded signals sent to certain constituencies that only those constituencies will understand. Just as only dogs can hear a dog whistle, only a constituency fluent in a subterranean argot can understand that argot when it is used.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

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by Ronald Takaki
2008

A dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States--Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others--groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture. Now, Ronald Takaki has revised his landmark work and made it even more relevant and important.