Robert M. Franklin provides first-person advice and insight as he identifies the crises resident within three anchor institutions that have played key roles in the black struggle for freedom. Black families face a "crisis of commitment" evident in the rising rates of father absence, births to unmarried parents, divorce, and domestic abuse or relationship violence. Black churches face a "mission crisis" as they struggle to serve their upwardly mobile and/or established middle class "paying customers" alongside the poorest of the poor. Historically black colleges and universities face a crisis of "relevance and purpose" as they now compete for the best students and faculty with the broad marketplace of colleges. With clarity and passion, Franklin calls for practical and comprehensive action for change from within the African American community and from all Americans.

In The Broken Village, Daniel R. Reichman tells the story of a remote village in Honduras that transformed almost overnight from a sleepy coffee-growing community to a hotbed of undocumented migration to and from the United States. The small village--called here by the pseudonym La Quebrada--was once home to a thriving coffee economy. Recently, it has become dependent on migrants working in distant places like Long Island and South Dakota, who live in ways that most Honduran townspeople struggle to comprehend or explain. Reichman explores how the new "migration economy" has upended cultural ideas of success and failure, family dynamics, and local politics.During his time in La Quebrada, Reichman focused on three different strategies for social reform--a fledgling coffee cooperative that sought to raise farmer incomes and establish principles of fairness and justice through consumer activism; religious campaigns for personal morality that were intended to counter the corrosive effects of migration; and local discourses about migrant "greed" that labeled migrants as the cause of social crisis, rather than its victims. All three phenomena had one common trait: They were settings in which people presented moral visions of social welfare in response to a perceived moment of crisis. The Broken Village integrates sacred and secular ideas of morality, legal and cultural notions of justice, to explore how different groups define social progress.

One hundred kilometers from Seville, there is a small village, Marinaleda, that for the last thirty years has been at the center of a long struggle to create a communist utopia. In a story reminiscent of the Asterix books, Dan Hancox explores the reality behind the community where no one has a mortgage, sport is played in the Che Guevara stadium and there are monthly "Red Sundays" where everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. In particular he tells the story of the village mayor, Sanchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after leading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalucian unemployed.

This is a study of German villages during the Thirty Years' War. It shows how diverse interests interested in the village, and how those interests were transformed between 1570 and 1720.

This compelling book analyzes the dramatic changes in rural Chinese society as a result of rapid urbanization. Building on eight decades of studies of the village of Lengshuigou, Chinese sociologists examine the fundamental changes over the last century that have radically transformed centuries-old systems of patriarchy and generational order.

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”