This book is about the thinking and courage to do what needs doing to innovate and build prosperity. It is a book about the benefits of individual freedom. Schools teach children to color, write and print between the lines, observe the rules, wrap their minds in a bubble of disciplines to discourage living out of a community box. Children learn to behave as members of a managed herd, avoiding challenging that which is accepted and established by tradition. In art, however, unusual, deviant, almost outlaw behavior is admired. Artists existing outside the limits of the herd can even improve the herd. American innovators are artists causing prosperity from their thinking, acting, creating and inventive minds changing things for the better. Americans left the Old World limitations behind, where thinking and acting out of the box was discouraged, creating a New World almost 400 years ago. They proved individual freedom and creative elbowroom was the only source of prosperity, which explains American exceptionalism and what this book is all about.

An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.

The story of gay rights has long been told as one of single-minded focus on the fight for sexual freedom. Yet its origins are much more complicated than this single-issue interpretation would have us believe, and to ignore gay liberation's multidimensional beginnings is to drastically underestimate its radical potential for social change. Ferguson shows how queer liberation emerged out of various insurgent struggles crossing the politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and deeply connected to issues of colonization, incarceration, and capitalism. Tracing the rise and fall of this intersectional politics, he argues that the one-dimensional mainstreaming of queerness falsely placed critiques of racism, capitalism, and the state outside the remit of gay liberation. As recent activism is increasingly making clear, this one-dimensional legacy has promoted forms of exclusion that marginalize queers of color, the poor, and transgender individuals. This forceful book joins the call to reimagine and reconnect the fight for social justice in all its varied forms.

Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.

Download the first chapter of Jonathan Franzen's next novel, Crossroads. It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.