Showing results for "America's Challenge" in History

Reluctant Race Men traces a history of the disparate challenges Black American reformers lodged against race across the long nineteenth century. It factors their opposition into the nation's history of race and reconstructs a reform tradition largely ignored in accounts of Black activism. Black-controlled newspapers, societies, churches, and conventions provided the principal loci and resources for questioning race. In these contexts, people of African descent generated a lexicon for refuting race, debated its logic, and, ultimately, reinterpreted it.

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

From true-crime legend T. J. English, the epic, behind-the-scenes saga of “Los Muchachos,” one of the most successful cocaine trafficking organizations in American history—a story of glitz, glamour, and organized crime set against 1980’s Miami. Despite what Scarface might lead one to...

In 1991, the smoldering ruins of Saddam Hussein’s regime testified to America’s unchallenged might. Having defeated one of the world’s largest armies in a matter of days, the United States looked forward to a new century of peace and prosperity. Thirty years later, a ragtag Taliban chased us out of Afghanistan in a humiliating rout. At home, our cities are cesspools of homelessness and crime. The former land of opportunity seems to be in irreversible decline.

“There are times when I feel like a stranger in this country. I am not complaining and it’s not for lack of opportunity. But it is something of a disappointment. I never would have imagined that after having spent thirty five years in the United States I would still be a stranger to so many...