Skip to Main Content

Staff Picks

Showing 2 of 2 Results

Cover ArtThis book explores how American cities were intentionally built to segregate minorities and discourage investment in their neighborhoods, creating urban blight and sustained poverty. The consequences of this de facto apartheid are still felt today and contribute to continued discrimination.

Publisher's description:
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know.

Find The Color of Law in our online catalog
Cover ArtThe Secret History explores the world of a prestigious and exclusive fine arts school in New England and the exacerbating circumstances that drive a group of Classics students to commit murder. The novel is pensive and brooding, with the tendency to wax poetic, yet still be highly engaging.
 
Publisher description:
Richard Papen had never been to New England before his nineteenth year. Then he arrived at Hampeden College and quickly became seduced by the sweet, dark rhythms of campus life--in particular by an elite group of five students, Greek scholars, worldly, self-assured, and at first glance, highly unapproachable.

Find The Secret History in our online catalog
Field is required.