Historians' conception of plantation life in the American South, both post- and antebellum, derives almost exclusively from the written record, hence mainly from the white owners' perspectives. In Creating Freedom, historical archaeologist Laurie Wilkie pulls the half-opened curtain wider by seeking out the experiences of the majority of people who made their home on plantations: the African American laborers. Specifically, Wilkie examines the lives of four black families who lived at Oakley Plantation in south Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish over the course of one hundred years. Using an innovative blend of archaeological evidence and oral interviews, as well as written documents, she builds a composite of their daily existence that is at once riveting and humanizing in its detail and invaluable in its broader applications. Creating Freedom is in part Wilkie's attempt to understand how African Americans at Oakley Plantation, and by extension most southern blacks, endured the violence and oppression of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. It is through their material culture, enhanced by a range of other data, that she descries the complex but uplifting process by which they retained their ties to a cultural past while renegotiating their identity as free persons.

The first English-language publication of writings by the collective artist Claire Fontaine, addressing our complicity with anything that limits our freedom. This anthology presents, in chronological order, all the texts by collective artist Claire Fontaine from 2004 to today. Created in 2004 in Paris by James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale, the collective artist Clare Fontaine creates texts that are as as experimental and politically charged as her visual practice. In. these writings, she uses the concept of “human strike” and adopts the radical feminist position that can be found in Tiqqun, a two-issue magazine cofounded by Carnevale. Human strike is a movement that is broader and more radical than any general strike. It addresses our inevitable subjective complicity with everything that limits our freedom and shows how to abandon these self-destructive behaviors through desubjectivization. Human strike, Claire Fontaine writes, is a subjective struggle to separate from the inevitable harm we do to ourselves and others simply by living within postindustrial neoliberalism. Human Strike is the first English-language publication of Claire Fontaine's influential and important theoretical writings.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated action to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves and denied fugitives legal rights if they were apprehended, quickly became a focal point in the debate over the future of slavery and the nature of the union. In Making Freedom, R. J. M. Blackett uses the experiences of escaped slaves and those who aided them to explore the inner workings of the Underground Railroad and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, while shedding light on the political effects of slave escape in southern states, border states, and the North. Blackett highlights the lives of those who escaped, the impact of the fugitive slave cases, and the extent to which slaves planning to escape were aided by free blacks, fellow slaves, and outsiders who went south to entice them to escape. Using these stories of particular individuals, moments, and communities, Blackett shows how slave flight shaped national politics as the South witnessed slavery beginning to collapse and the North experienced a threat to its freedom.

Named by The Washington Post as one of the 11 Leadership Books to Read in 2018 When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley. McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR—annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs—often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability. Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

The path to freedom is filled with questions and uncertainty. Is it possible to truly know who we are? Do our lives have a purpose, or are we just accidental? What are we meant to contribute? What are we meant to become, to create, and to share? In The Book of Understanding, Osho, one of the most provocative thinkers of our time, challenges us to understand our world and ourselves in a new and radical way. The first step toward understanding, he says, is to question and doubt all that we have been taught to believe. All our lives we’ve been handed so-called truths by countless others—beliefs we learned to accept without reason. It is only in questioning our beliefs, assumptions, and prejudices that we can begin to uncover our own unique voice and heal the divisions within us and without. Once we discover our authentic self, we can embrace all aspects of the human experience—from the earthy, pleasure-loving qualities that characterize Zorba the Greek to the watchful, silent qualities of Gautam the Buddha. We can become whole and live with integrity, able to respond with creativity and compassion to the religious, political, and cultural divides that currently plague our society. In this groundbreaking work, Osho identifies, loosens, and ultimately helps to untie the knots of fear and misunderstanding that restrict us—leaving us free to discover and create our own individual path to freedom.

Vincent and his wife were stuck in dead end newspaper photography jobs, in debt, stressed, with a baby on the way while making $15 an hour. After winning the highest award in his field, Vincent was offered a 3 percent raise. He knew at that moment he needed a monumental change. One month away from their baby being born, Vincent and Elizabeth started a side photography business out of desperation. In less than four years, they grew their business to pay off all of their debt, including their home, and left their jobs for a life of freedom. With the world moving rapidly towards a freelance model, Freelance to Freedom is not only timely and necessary, but it’s also entertaining, engaging and paints a picture for anyone looking for a life of freedom with money, time and location.

The ideal of freedom is at the heart of our political and economic system. It is foundational to our sense of justice, our way of life, our conception of what it is to be human. But are we free in the way that we think we are? In Creating Freedom, Raoul Martinez brings together a torrent of mind-expanding ideas, facts, and arguments to dismantle sacred myths central to our society—myths about free will, free markets, free media, and free elections. From the lottery of our birth to the consent-manufacturing influence of concentrated power, this far-reaching manifesto lifts the veil on the mechanisms of control that pervade our lives. It shows that the more we understand how the world shapes us, the more effectively we can shape the world. A highly original exploration of the most urgent questions of our time, Creating Freedom reveals that we are far less free than we like to think, but it also shows that freedom is something we can create together. In fact, our very survival may depend on our doing so.