In this well researched and carefully argued book, Horowitz traces the origins of the reparations movement and its implications for American education and culture.

'America's Uncivil Wars' explores the social & cultural issues that preoccupied America in the years 1954-1974.

In An Uncivil War, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent sounds an urgent alarm about the deeper roots of our democratic backsliding—and how we can begin to turn things around between now and 2020. American democracy is facing a crisis as fraught as we’ve seen in decades. Donald Trump’s presidency has raised the specter of authoritarian rule. Extreme polarization and the scorched-earth war between the parties drags on with no end in sight. The recent Kavanaugh confirmation hearings are only the latest example of this, and of the GOP’s continued ability to steamroll the Democrats and their supporters. At the heart of this dangerous moment is a paradox: It took a figure as uniquely menacing as Trump to rivet the nation’s attention on the fragility of our democracy. Yet the causes of our dysfunction are long-running—they predate Trump, helped facilitate his rise, and, distressingly, will outlast his presidency. In An Uncivil War, Sargent reveals why we’ve fallen into the ditch—and how to get out of it. Drawing upon years of research and reporting, he exposes the unparalleled sophistication and ambition of GOP tactics, including computer-generated gerrymandering, underhanded voter suppression, and ever-escalating legislative hardball. We are also plagued by other brutal, seemingly intractable problems such as dismal turnout and powerful, built-in temptations to tilt the political playing field with unscrupulous partisan trickery. All of this has been accompanied by foreign-government intervention and an unprecedented level of political disinformation that threatens to undermine the very possibility of shared agreement on facts and poses profound new challenges to the media’s ability to inform the citizenry. Yet the Republican Party is only part of the problem. As Sargent provocatively reveals, Democrats share culpability for helping to accelerate this slide. But our plight is far from hopeless, and Sargent offers a series of doable prescriptions for saving our democracy, including a shift of focus toward state legislatures, creative voter registration policies, innovative approaches to fairer districting, and a new sense of purpose. The result is a book that could not be more essential as we head toward the elections that most matter.

With a focus on both national and local levels, Uncivil Wars takes an energetic and critical look at the mechanics of political campaigning through the lens of communication theory.

No other Reconstruction state government was as chaotic or violent as Louisiana's, located in New Orleans, the largest southern city at the time. James K. Hogue explains the unique confluence of demographics, geography, and wartime events that made New Orleans an epicenter in the upheaval of Reconstruction politics and a critical battleground in the struggle for the future of southern society. No other Reconstruction state government was as chaotic or violent as Louisiana's, located in New Orleans, the largest southern city at the time. James K. Hogue explains the unique confluence of demographics, geography, and wartime events that made New Orleans an epicenter in the upheaval of Reconstruction politics and a critical battleground in the struggle for the future of southern society. Hogue characterizes Reconstruction in Louisiana as a continuation of civil war, waged between well-organized and well-armed forces vying to control the state's government. He details five key New Orleans street battles, in which elite Confederate veterans played central roles, and gives an in-depth account of how the Republican state government raised militias and a state police force to defend against the violence. In response, a white supremacist movement arose in the mid-1870s and finally overthrew the Republicans. The occupation of Louisiana by federal troops from 1862 to 1877 was the longest of its kind in American history. Not coincidentally, Hogue argues, one of the longest unbroken periods of one-race, one-party dominance in American history followed, lasting until 1972. Uncivil War reveals that the long-term military impact of the South's occupation included twenty-five years of crippled War Department budgets inflicted by southern congressmen who feared another Reconstruction. Within Louisiana, the biracial Republican militias were dismantled, leaving blacks largely unarmed against future atrocities; at the same time, the nucleus of the state's White Leagues became the Louisiana National Guard, which defended the "Redeemer" government's repressive labor policies. White supremacist victory cast its shadow over American race relations for almost a century. Moving between national, state, and local realms, Uncivil War demystifies the interplay of force and politics during a complex period of American history.

The first English-language book to place the works of Elena Garro (1916–1998) and Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in dialogue with each other, Uncivil Wars evokes the lives of two celebrated literary figures who wrote about many of the same experiences and contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity but were judged quite differently, primarily because of gender. While Paz’s privileged, prize-winning legacy has endured worldwide, Garro’s literary gifts garnered no international prizes and received less attention in Latin American literary circles. Restoring a dual perspective on these two dynamic writers and their world, Uncivil Wars chronicles a collective memory of wars that shaped Mexico, and in turn shaped Garro and Paz, from the Conquest period to the Mexican Revolution; the Spanish Civil War, which the couple witnessed while traveling abroad; and the student massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, which brought about social and political changes and further tensions in the battle of the sexes. The cultural contexts of machismo and ethnicity provide an equally rich ground for Sandra Cypess’s exploration of the tandem between the writers’ personal lives and their literary production. Uncivil Wars illuminates the complexities of Mexican society as seen through a tense marriage of two talented, often oppositional writers. The result is an alternative interpretation of the myths and realities that have shaped Mexican identity, and its literary soul, well into the twenty-first century.

The War after the War is a lively military history and overview of Reconstruction that illuminates the new war fought immediately after the American Civil War. This Southern Civil War was distinct from the American Civil War and fought between southerners for control of state governments. In the South, African American and white unionists formed a successful biracial coalition that elected state and local officials. White supremacist insurrectionaries battled with these coalitions and won the Southern Civil War, successfully overthrowing democratically elected governments. The repercussions of these political setbacks would be felt for decades to come. With this book John Patrick Daly examines the political and racial battles for power after the Civil War, as white supremacist terror, guerrilla, and paramilitary groups attacked biracial coalitions in their local areas. The Ku Klux Klan was the most infamous of these groups, but ex-Confederate extremists fought democratic change in the region under many guises. The biracial coalition put up a brave fight against these insurrectionary forces, but the federal government offered the biracial forces little help. After dozens of battles and tens of thousands of casualties between 1865 and 1877, the Southern Civil War ended in the complete triumph of extremist insurrection and white supremacy. As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of the Southern Civil War, its lessons are more vital than ever.