Forthcoming

The Age of Reconstruction

In The Age of Reconstruction, Don Doyle looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction. It would drive European empires out of the Americas, hasten the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignite a host of democratic reforms in Europe.

An international history of Reconstruction, the book chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.

At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

Dear Oliver

When Susan Barry first wrote to Oliver Sacks, she never expected a response, let alone the deep friendship that blossomed over ten years of letters. Now, she is sharing those letters for the first time. Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks is an intimate and inspiring book, that explores the joy and complexity of adult friendships.

It began when Sue—a neuroscientist—wrote to share an extraordinary development in her medical history. Severely cross-eyed since birth, Sue had been told she would never acquire stereovision—the ability to see in 3D—and yet she did, a development at odds with decades of research. Within days, Oliver replied, “Your letter fills me with amazement and admiration.”

In a painful twist of fate, as Sue’s vision improves, Oliver’s declines. And as it becomes harder for him to see, his characteristic small type shifts to handwritten letters. Sue later recognizes this to be early signs of the cancer that ultimately ends his life. These letters are a joyful celebration of, as Oliver writes, a “deep and stimulating friendship” that “has been a wonderful and unexpected addition to my life.”

Class Matters

The dirty secret of elite higher education in the United States is that the focus on racial diversity provides cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. The framework of race-based preferences—a well-intentioned program that is deeply unpopular—disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color, helps justify a system of legacy preferences for the well-off, and pits working-class people of different races against one another. Major public and private universities have clung to the status quo anyway, because doing so is easier financially than helping disadvantaged students who require financial aid to enroll. These institutions act as if the predominant version of affirmative action is the only way to promote racial diversity, but that simply isn’t true. It’s just cheaper for them.

Class Matters: Imagining a Fairer and Less Divisive Future for Higher Education lays out a different vision. While there has been widespread alarm that racial diversity will plummet now that the Supreme Court has disallowed racial preferences in college admissions decisions, it doesn’t have to be that way. Ironically, in fact, that decision will likely lead to a liberal public policy result – a new robust set of affirmative efforts to enroll low-income and working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Latino. In the aftermath of this historic decision on race, upending a half century of precedent, Class Matters lays out a positive agenda for the next stage of elite college admissions that produces economic and racial diversity alike.

Can We Talk

Cory Johnson’s death, in a shooting near his home in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, shattered his family and his wide circle of friends. Cory had been one of their stars, a charismatic young man with high hopes and a gift for connecting with people and making them believe in him.

His death brought home to his family, and members of the church that supported them, how pervasive grief was in their community, and how unprepared they were to handle it. The often-hidden health risks posed by grief and bereavement only added to the inequality faced by the residents of Roxbury every day.

Roxbury Presbyterian Church, where Cory’s family worshipped, had long been central in their lives, but addressing issues of mental health was not something they were equipped to do. Liz Walker, its minister, watched as the families in her neighborhood struggled, and decided to reach beyond the church walls for help.

Can We Talk: Vulnerability, the Inequity of Grief, and How Communities Heal is the story of how the community came together to heal. Recognizing that trauma is experienced in many different ways, Roxbury Presbyterian’s Can We Talk program was built on a foundation of hospitality, acceptance, and the notion that mental health is a human right.

Looking back at her own life as a preacher’s daughter in Little Rock, Arkansas, and as well as forward as the program she launched is replicated in communities across New England and the country, Can We Talk is an important, impassioned narrative.

Untethered

The attention that the media pays to MAGA rally-goers, Midwestern miners, and Proud Boy rioters might lead one to believe that the Republican Party’s embrace of Trumpism is all about noisy members of the grassroots. But many of the people organizing election law changes and book bans have spent their lives in the mainstream, hold JDs and PhDs, and have, heretofore, been the ones to put the brakes on the more extreme elements of the party. As writer and political scientist Laura Field argues in Untethered: America’s Reactionary Intellectuals and the Future of American Conservatism, it is these conservative intellectuals, who rallied behind Trump during—and after—his term in office, who are now wielding the most lasting influence on the future of the Republican party.

Untethered is the story of the new reactionary intellectual movement—a movement made up of people who are willing to deploy means that they know are highly dangerous in order to achieve their own ends, because they are convinced that the stakes are extraordinarily high. It follows the descent of a significant proportion of the leadership of the conservative intellectual community into vulgar and anti-American authoritarianism, especially in the aftermath of January 6th .

While the future may or may not involve Trump, it is essential that we understand that the movement he has inspired isn’t a fringe phenomenon. There is great risk in not acknowledging the influence of the reactionary intellectuals, and Untethered makes clear that they must be recognized, and then defended against, on the campaign trail and in the voting booth, as well as in the public debate.

Forthcoming

Footer