The Garamond Agency

David

The People’s Champ

Legal aid, the program through which legal assistance is made available to people who cannot otherwise afford it, has had a controversial history.  Support for providing legal services has waxed and waned.  But while it has not always received widespread acclaim, legal aid has been a legal lifeline for people who would not otherwise have access to some measure of justice.

In The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration, legal scholar Shaun Ossei-Owusu provides a broad history of legal aid in America.  He locates its origins much earlier than has typically been assumed, looking back to the antebellum period when abolitionists actively sought legal rights for fugitive slaves and the white citizens who gave them assistance.

This sweeping narrative of America’s legal aid efforts also reveals how central race was, and continues to be, to the delivery of legal services.  While the conventional assumption is that legal aid was focused on the poor, irrespective of race, Ossei-Owusu shows how race has always been central to the way in which legal aid programs operated.  This perspective illuminates another angle on the history of discrimination, incarceration, and the delivery of social justice in this country.

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Prison

The United States has a prison problem. Many of the statistics are, by now, well known: the country’s prison population has grown by more than 500 percent since 1973. Today, more than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in over 6,000 jails, prisons, and detention centers nationwide. Another five million live under some form of correctional supervision or control. Almost everyone who is incarcerated, and millions who once were, cannot vote or access other public services. Most of them are poor, and an overwhelming number of them are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and/or suffering from a physical or mental disability. The United States stands alone among industrialized nations in retaining the death penalty, the widespread use of long-term solitary confinement, and the incarceration of juveniles in adult prisons. From preventable deaths to popular disenfranchisement, this carceral archipelago shapes the whole country.

Prison: An American History tells the story of the country through its enduring use of incarceration. Forced confinement enabled European settlers and their descendants to take Indigenous land, and it was a fundamental component of slavery—both the transatlantic slave trade and its domestic equivalent made widespread use of chains and cages. In the century after the Civil War, incarcerated people industrialized much of the country while prison development strengthened both federal and state local government. Since World War II, successive wars on communism, crime, drugs, gangs, and terror have made the country through prison. Nearly every moment in the country’s history can be understood through its reliance on captivity. From matters of labor discipline to political activism and beyond, prison helps explain the rise of the United States. 

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Stayed on Freedom

The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.  

Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.  

Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.  

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Can You Forgive Me?

At least at first blush, the idea of forgiveness is pretty simple. When society forgives, it makes a judgment that a person should be accepted back into the fold after having violated its norms. But almost everything about this idea is more complex than it seems.
There is more to forgiveness than we may have thought. On the one hand, it is a universal experience, which makes these dilemmas instantly recognizable: everyone has asked to be forgiven, and everyone has been asked to forgive. On the other hand, it is also political. Forgiveness depends on unstated value judgments that society makes without conscious awareness, including our perception of the person who seeks it, the person wronged, the norm violated, etc. Like any social benefit, the prize is doled out unevenly. In Can You Forgive Me? The Politics of Forgiveness in an Angry Age, Joseph Margulies hopes to get people thinking about the hidden politics of a universal experience.

By revealing that there is a politics of forgiveness, Can You Forgive Me? requires us to grapple not only with the idea of forgiveness, but the corollary notion that a person can be unforgiveable and cast permanently beyond the pale. Buy telling stories of people who committed supposedly “unforgiveable” acts, the book compels readers to question what that label means and to consider the transformative potential of looking at forgiveness differently.

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Just Like Us

Winner of the 2021 Tonous and Warda Johns Family Book Award

At a time when fear of the “other” is being consistently stoked, it is not only timely, but important to look at how Americans have thought about and engaged with foreigners since the founding of the nation and, particularly, since the end of World War II. Across the twentieth century, and most notably over the Cold War years, the United States increasingly interacted with people from foreign lands—both at home and abroad. A look at attitudes toward them offers one path toward greater understanding of the history of the United States and its relationship to the rest of the modern world.

In Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners, Tim Borstelmann explores this history and considers how Americans have come to understand their own American identity, and what the implications are of that understanding. Our ambivalence is evident from the earliest European colonial settlements in North America to contemporary U.S. cultural and political life. From concerns about race and religion, and the so-called American way of life to exclusion and incorporation of immigrants, competition with Communism, Americans abroad, and U.S. expansion into Asia, we have struggled with the question of who could be considered fully American, in legal terms and also in terms of politics and popular culture.

We do live in a radically more inclusive public society, current threats notwithstanding. And it stemmed in large part from the imperatives of our foreign relations. While we have worried, repeatedly, about losing who we are to outside threats, the absorptive, acquisitive individualism of American culture has turned out to be the force that would challenge traditions around the world.

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