The 1492 Christopher Columbus stumbled upon these shores in his search for a route to the spice islands of the far East. Since then different waves of immigrants have followed suite from other parts of the world and for different reasons. Each generation of immigrants has had its own share of encounters with the landscape, climate and peoples. Navigating America's Contradictions is a travelogue of an immigrant from Cameroon in Africa, a modest attempt to explore some aspects of life in America after September 11, meeting people, trying to bridge the digital divide and looking for employment. The author compares experiences in today's America with past experiences both here and in his native Cameroon, drawing similarities, highlighting differences and attempting to dig below the surface for an explanation of some of the observations.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

What values do Americans hold dear? What happens when real-world situations cause those values to conflict? To better understand the intellectual map of how American society works, Arthur G. Neal and Helen Youngelson-Neal analyze values prominent in American word and deed. These values appear in our nation’s formal documents—rights and privileges prominently emphasized in the US Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They have shaped the historical destiny and, indeed, include those values most extensively propagated by the general population. Using these criteria, the authors identify individualism, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, consumerism, materialism, equality of opportunity, technology, mastery of the environment, quality of marriage, and national unity as the core American values. Core values provide the raw materials for the construction of contemporary society as a moral community, wherever that community is located. Such values are clusters of ideas that are central to self-identities; they generate a sense of collective belonging and membership. As such, core values define the existing social order and advance a set of ideas for depicting a desirable future. The analysis presented here helps us understand contemporary conflicts inherent in the American value system and the problems confronted by Americans as they try to live within the limitations and contradictions of value systems.

Sophie is young and queer and into feminist theory. She decides to study abroad, choosing Paris for no firm reason beyond liking French comics. Feeling a bit lonely and out of place, she’s desperate for community and a sense of belonging. She stumbles into what/who she’s looking for when she meets Zena. An anarchist student-activist committed to veganism and shoplifting, Zena offers Sophie a whole new political ideology that feels electric. Enamored—of Zena, of the idea of living more righteously—Sophie finds herself swept up in a whirlwind friendship that blows her even further from her rural California roots as they embark on a disastrous hitchhiking trip to Amsterdam and Berlin, full of couch surfing, drug tripping, and radical book fairs. Capturing that time in your life where you’re meeting new people and learning about the world—when everything feels vital and urgent—The Contradictions is Sophie Yanow’s fictionalized coming-of-age story. Sophie’s attempts at ideological purity are challenged time and again, putting into question the plausibility of a life of dogma in a world filled with contradictions. Keenly observed, frank, and very funny, The Contradictions speaks to a specific reality while also being incredibly relatable, reminding us that we are all imperfect people in an imperfect world.

Blackness is a prized commodity in American pop culture. Marketed to white consumers, it invites whites to view themselves in a mirror of racial difference, while remaining “wholly” white. From sports to literature, film, and music to investigative journalism, Eric Lott reveals the hidden dynamics of this self-and-other racial mirroring.

In Age of Contradiction, Howard Brick provides a rich context for understanding historical events, cultural tensions, political figures, artistic works, and trends of intellectual life. His lucid and comprehensive book combines the best methods of historical analysis and assessment with fascinating subject matter to create a three-dimensional portrait of a complicated time. In one of the only books on the 1960s to put ideas at the center of the period's history, Brick carefully explores the dilemmas, the promise, and the legacy of American thought in that time.