From New Books comes an interview with Jefferson Cowie, who discusses The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press).
The Guardian calls Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press) the "magisterial" "prequel to Michelle Alexander's ... The New Jim Crow."
And, The Nation prescribes five books of essential reading: "Five Books: These Histories of Black Struggle Should Inform Us in 2016," including:"Hinton doesn’t only blame the police, though. She tracks how money is spent on building prison-like security features to public housing in St Louis (which terrified residents), charts money spent on job training programs, and demonstrates how the LEAA grows 13-fold. And yet, “a federal employment drive to create jobs for black men never materialized” in the manner of the Works Progress Administration, which rescued impoverished white people during the Great Depression. At the same time, in allocating generous funding through the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, the Johnson administration did underwrite robust hiring in nearly all-white police departments – some of which also began patrolling inner-city school campuses."
- Robin D.G. Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (2d, deluxe edition, UNC Press, 2015).
- Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (Lawrence Hill Books, 1988).
- Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (re-relased by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 2015).
- Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese (Vintage Books, 1976).
- Hunter Cutting and Makani Themba-Nixon's Talking the Walk: A Communications Guide for Racial Justice (AK Press, 2006).
