This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. The book tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and reveals an unprecedented transformation in American race relations, politics, and constitutional thought. Using a wide array of archival and published sources, Professor Vorenberg argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation occurred after, not before, the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by prior historians; and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.

Winner of the Lincoln Prize A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective. At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.

Truth is being destroyed, free speech criminalized, the dollar fast becoming worthless. Ideologues at the helm of Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Business are set on the destruction of capitalism and democracy. Powerful federal agencies are no longer protectors of the people, but their primary adversary. Not since the Civil War has our nation been so divided, bringing us to the edge of national suicide. And our enemies—China being chief among them—see our weakness. If we falter, they will act. Not since World War II have we faced an adversary so determined to achieve global dominance. At this moment, they are perfecting an arsenal of weapons to use against us: Quantum computing. Artificial intelligence. Hypersonic missiles. Bio-warfare. These are threats we must defeat. But before we are able to do that, we must protect ourselves from the enemy within. Many of our forefathers had to fight a Great War to save their freedom. It falls upon this generation to fight two. But we must not lose hope. There is a way to save our nation.

Untitled Skip, The LAST Freedom Fighter By: James (Jim) Robinson After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the civil rights movement was in need of others to champion the cause. It was during this time that Skip Robinson, a black man in his early thirties, came bursting onto the scene. Skip Robinson was able to talk in a way that everyone could relate to, and he was able to lead people into action, including demonstrations, boycotts, and marches throughout the Deep South. In this biography written by his brother, James (Jim) Robinson, readers get a front-row seat to the struggle for justice and equality during what some people call the third revolution in America. Skip Robinson’s life should serve as motivation to continue the fight to end the final vestiges of racial discrimination in America.

Krishnamurti is a leading spiritual teacher of our century. In The First and Last Freedom he cuts away symbols and false associations in the search for pure truth and perfect freedom. Through discussions on suffering, fear, gossip, sex and other topics, Krishnamurti’s quest becomes the readers, an undertaking of tremendous significance.

“A refreshing and rigorous analysis of financial self-help that gets to the heart of identity formation in neoliberalism . . . sociology at its best.” —Peter Miller, London School of Economics In this era where dollar value signals moral worth, Daniel Fridman paints a vivid portrait of Americans and Argentinians seeking to transform themselves into people worthy of millions. Following groups who practice the advice from financial success bestsellers, Fridman illustrates how the neoliberal emphasis on responsibility, individualism, and entrepreneurship binds people together with the ropes of aspiration. Freedom from Work delves into a world of financial self-help in which books, seminars, and board games reject “get rich quick” formulas and instead suggest to participants that there is something fundamentally wrong with who they are, and that they must struggle to correct it. Fridman analyzes three groups who exercise principles from Rich Dad, Poor Dad by playing the board game Cashflow and investing in cash-generating assets with the goal of leaving the rat race of employment. Fridman shows that the global economic transformations of the last few decades have been accompanied by popular resources that transform the people trying to survive—and even thrive. “A gifted observer, Fridman’s ethnographic account uncovers a unique blend of morality and economics in self-help groups pursuing their dream of financial freedom. This book contributes to economic and cultural sociology but will also fascinate general readers.” —Viviana A. Zelizer, Lloyd Cotsen ’50 Professor of Sociology, Princeton University “A wonderful portrait of how financial technologies of the self work in modern culture.” —Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley

We is a dystopian novel written by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Originally drafted in Russian, the book could be published only abroad. It was translated into English in 1924. Even as the book won a wide readership overseas, the author's satiric depiction led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin's regime in the then USSR. The book's depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other novels of the 20th century. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, We describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman. Orwell claimed that Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this. The novel is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State which assists mass surveillance. Here life is scientifically managed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by reason as the primary justification for the construct of the society. By way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State, the individual's behaviour is based on logic.

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.

In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights—narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights—as a US foreign policy priority. Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War. Using Reagan's undeclared war on Nicaragua as a case study in US interventionism, Freedom on the Offensive explores how democracy promotion emerged as the centerpiece of an increasingly robust US human rights agenda. Yet, this initiative also became intertwined with deeply undemocratic practices that misled the American people, violated US law, and contributed to immense human and material destruction. Pursued through civil society or low-cost military interventions and rooted in the neoliberal imperatives of US-led globalization, Reagan's democracy promotion initiative had major implications for post–Cold War US foreign policy.