New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams brings us the blockbuster novel of the season--an electrifying postwar fable of love, class, power, and redemption set among the inhabitants of an island off the New England coast...In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful...

The readable companion, in the oral-history tradition of Studs Terkel, to the PBS documentary series, peeking behind the veil "that still, far too often, separates black America from white."
Renowned scholar and New York Times bestselling author Gates delivers a stirring and authoritative companion to the major new PBS documentary America Behind the Color Line. The book includes thought-provoking essays from Colin Powell,...

Tattoos. Unwed pregnancy. Giving up on shaving...showering...and employment. These used to be signatures of a trashy individual. Now they're the new norm. What happened to etiquette, hygiene, and self restraint? Charlotte Hays, Southern gentlewoman extraordinaire, takes a humorous look at the spread of white trash culture to all levels of American society.

In the last 30 years, the wages of the top 1 percent have grown by 154 percent, while the wages of the bottom 90 percent have grown by only 17 percent. As the rungs of the economic ladder move further apart, some argue that opportunities to achieve the American dream of upward mobility could disappear, they assert, as the rich grow richer and the wages of the middle class and the poor hardly grow at all. But others consider income inequality a positive...

In this book, Nancy Isenberg reveals that the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise...

"The bestselling author of Bowling Alone offers [an] ... examination of the American Dream in crisis--how and why opportunities for upward mobility are diminishing, jeopardizing the prospects of an ever larger segment of Americans"-- Provided by publisher. "What has happened to the Land of Opportunity? The promise of the American Dream is that anyone, regardless of his or her origins, can have a fair start in life. If we work hard, we can get a good...

Analyzes the health care debate in America, looking specifically at how class issues influence health care and the history of government assisstance in healthcare. Provides sidebars throughout with more detailed information, and photographs from the healthcare struggle.

The One Percent offers a close look at the wealthiest one percent of Americans and how they compare to the other 99 percent, examining how this group impacts the country's economy and society.

The American Middle Class takes a close look at the segment of the population that lies between the poor and the rich, examining how this group has played an important role in US society and how it has changed in recent decades.