NCW Libraries

As featured in the documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy

Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
An NPR Politics Podcast Book Club Choice
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by:
Washington Post * Boston Globe * NPR* Bustle * BookRiot * New York Public Library

From...

"Beginning in 1876, the Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment, at least for African-Americans, and what seemed to be the guarantee of the right to vote in the Fifteenth. And so, of the more than 500,000 African-Americans who had registered to vote across the South, the vast majority former slaves, by 1906, less than ten percent remained. Many of those were terrified to go the polls, lest they...

In 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers who had traveled to the South to encourage African-American voter registration. Examines the last three weeks in the lives of the slain activists.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1965 march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Newbery Medalist Freedman presents a riveting account of this pivotal event in the history of civil rights.

Historian Eric Foner chronicles the way in which Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. He addresses the quest of emancipated slaves searching for economic autonomy and equal citizenship, and describes the remodeling of Southern society, the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority...

In the hot and deadly summer of 1964, the nation could not turn away from Mississippi. Over ten memorable weeks known as Freedom Summer, more than 700 student volunteers joined with organizers and local African Americans in a historic effort to shatter the foundations of white supremacy in one of the nation's most segregated states, even in the face of intimidation, physical violence, and death.

"According to conventional wisdom, American women's campaign for the vote began with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The movement was led by storied figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But this women's movement was an overwhelmingly white one, and it secured the constitutional right to vote for white women, not for all women. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian...