FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from J. Malcolm Garcia’s Alabama Village

From the celebrated writer J. Malcolm Garcia, a narrative nonfiction account of a forgotten Alabama neighborhood through intimate, tender, and gritty profiles of its people as they navigate immense loss and an unassailable determination to overcome their circumstances.   Overture December 2020. A friend calls and tells me about a feature story he saw on PBS about

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Colin Woodard’s Nations Apart

The bestselling author of American Nations reveals how centuries-old regional differences have brought American democracy to the brink of collapse and presents a powerful story that can bridge our cultural divisions and save the republic.   Introduction Democratic collapses, like bankruptcies, happen gradually and then all at once. So do collapses of countries. Americans are experienc­ing what

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Daniel Stone’s American Poison

From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer comes the untold story of Alice Hamilton, a trailblazing doctor and public health activist who took on the booming auto industry—and the deadly invention of leaded gasoline, which would poison millions of people across America.   1 Alice Hamilton in 1915. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1919 For as long as

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s Solidarity

From renowned organizers and activists Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, comes the first in-depth examination of Solidarity—not just as a rallying cry, but as potent political movement with potential to effect lasting change. A Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist   Introduction In 1969, an ambitious and zealous political operative named Kevin Phillips published a book

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Beth Macy’s Paper Girl

From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, her most personal and powerful work: a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown.   It was June 2023, and Silas James had just graduated from Urbana High School, forty-one years after I wore that

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s Who Gets to Be Indian?

Settler capitalism has been so effective that the very identities of Indigenous people have been usurped, misconstrued, and weaponized. In Who Gets to Be Indian?, scholar and writer Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) explores how ethnic fraud and the commodification of Indianness has resulted in mass confusion about what it means to be Indigenous in the United

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Colin M. Fisher’s The Collective Edge

The Collective Edge is an accessible, research-backed guide to understanding how groups work—and how they can work better. Drawing on examples from sports, business, and pop culture, group dynamics expert Colin Fisher shows how structure, not just motivation, shapes effective teams. The book offers students practical tools for collaboration, leadership, and community-building that will help

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly’s Somebody Should Do Something

Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something,

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence

How are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? In 2021, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative—renowned for collaborations with NASA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—announced they had the answer. They named it Primal Intelligence. It offers a new neuroscientific framework for understanding intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense—the four pillars of Primal Intelligence.

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Raymond Antrobus’s The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds—bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all. The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus’s upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World

From Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Greg Grandin, America, América is the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere. It offers a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.   1. Leaves of Grass Philosophy begins in wonder,” Socrates said. It matures, Hegel added, in terror, on the “slaughter bench” of history.

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull’s The Jailhouse Lawyer

A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time” (Sister Helen Prejean), and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.   Prologue “Whether I shall turn out

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