- Faculty
- Request Instruction
- Request Research Assistance
- Faculty Resources
- Chronicle of Higher Education
- Request Course Reserves
- Streaming Films for Courses
Service Alert
North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. African American youth during a Civil Rights demonstration in
Greenville, N.C.1971 (50.8cm x 40.6cm), Still Image, Photograph, African American History
East Carolina University, Joyner Library, Greenville, NC, http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/23567
In this series of essays, author Randy Bell raises questions about what it means to be an American in the early 21st century. Covering a range of issues such as government and its responsibility to its people, international relations, the economy and business, religion, discrimination, and human rights, Bell makes a case for informed discussion and the rejection of knee-jerk responses to complex challenges.
This book tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States. Beyond These Walls traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions--from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies--are equally complicit.
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world among major nations not because of expert assessments of how to tackle crime, but because of piecemeal emotional reactions in jurisdictions throughout the United States to high-profile crimes and public fear. The results have been predictably bad: policies that bust government budgets and devastate individual lives and communities but do nothing to promote public safety.
Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online.
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.
How rough is too rough? Rodney King is an unfamiliar name for those growing up today, but the ongoing conversation concerning police brutality is one they know all-too well. This collection deep-dives into police training procedure, what constitutes excessive force, and what happens when the community disagrees with the police and the justice system.
A valuable tool for students and law enforcement professionals, bringing them up to date with developments in the law of arrest, search and seizure, police authority to detain, questioning suspects and pretrial identification procedures, police power and its limitations, and civil liability of police officers and agencies.
Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.
With the rise of the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump, many middle- and lower-income white Americans threw their support behind conservative politicians who pledged to make life great again for people like them. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the right-wing policies that resulted from this white backlash put these voters' very health at risk--and, in the end, threaten everyone's well-being.
Derek Black grew up at the epicenter of white nationalism. His father founded Stormfront, the largest racist community on the Internet. His godfather, David Duke, was a KKK Grand Wizard. By the time Derek turned nineteen, he had become an elected politician with his own daily radio show - already regarded as the "the leading light" of the burgeoning white nationalist movement. Then he went to college. Derek had been home-schooled by his parents, steeped in the culture of white supremacy, and he had rarely encountered diverse perspectives or direct outrage against his beliefs. Derek started to question the science, history and prejudices behind his worldview. As white nationalism infiltrated the political mainstream, Derek decided to confront the damage he had done.
