Helen Plum Library

"A sweeping history of the Latinx experience in the United States. The first new edition in ten years of this important study of Latinos in U.S. history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries--from the European colonization of the Americas to the 2020 election. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, and their impact on American culture and politics is greater than ever. With family portraits of real-life immigrant Latino...

"Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American,...

The pioneering political scientist presents his "fragment theory" of class, culture and ideology in post-colonial societies around the world. In his groundbreaking work, The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz demonstrated that beneath America's history of political conflict was an enduring consensus around Lockean liberal principles. In The Founding of New Societies, Hartz continues his examination of ideology and national identity with a...

"In an unprecedented demographic shift, Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in just a matter of decades. While their influence shapes everything from electoral politics to popular culture, many Americans still struggle with two basic questions: Who are Latinos, and where do they fit in America's racial order? Laura E. Gómez, a leading expert on race in America, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans,...

"An award-winning journalist, TV political analyst, and creator of TheGrio documentary, Afro-Latinx Revolution: Puerto Rico, recounts her experiences as an African American and Puerto Rican woman, reflecting on her improbable journey from Syracuse to Harvard, hedge fund boardrooms to newsrooms, and beyond in pursuit of America's infinite opportunities. Part inspiring memoir, part cultural analysis, with remarkable self-determination, Natasha S. Alford...

"An in-depth and masterful account of how Ronald Reagan's foreign policy "team of rivals" ended the Cold War and laid the foundation for the twenty-first century. Today, the ending of the Cold War seems a foregone conclusion. But in the early 1980s, U.S. intelligence predicted the Soviet Union would last another century. Ronald Reagan entered the White House with no certainty of what would happen next, only an overriding faith in American democracy...

"Haiti's state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise and not a single elected leader holds office, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters, both man-made and natural, that destroyed much of Haiti's infrastructure and institutions. How did a nation founded on...