My library button
  • Book cover of Development as Freedom
    Amartya Sen

     · 1999

    The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its thousand charms to the unfree citizens. The author explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism.

  • Book cover of Anarchy, State, and Utopia
    Robert Nozick

     · 1974

    Presents arguments in support of the author's libertarian views on the nature of the state, its legitimate functions, and its justifications.

  • Book cover of A Force More Powerful

    "How popular movements have used nonviolent weapons to overthrow dictators, obstruct military invaders, and secure human rights in country after country over the past century"--Back cover.

  • Book cover of The Other Slavery

    NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST | WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE. A landmark history—the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early twentieth century. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. “The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue...In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Résendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.” — Literary Hub, 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade ““One of the most profound contributions to North American history.”—Los Angeles Times

  • Book cover of A World Made New

    Unafraid to speak her mind and famously tenacious in her convictions, Eleanor Roosevelt was still mourning the death of FDR when she was asked by President Truman to lead a controversial commission, under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations, to forge the world’s first international bill of rights. A World Made New is the dramatic and inspiring story of the remarkable group of men and women from around the world who participated in this historic achievement and gave us the founding document of the modern human rights movement. Spurred on by the horrors of the Second World War and working against the clock in the brief window of hope between the armistice and the Cold War, they grappled together to articulate a new vision of the rights that every man and woman in every country around the world should share, regardless of their culture or religion. A landmark work of narrative history based in part on diaries and letters to which Mary Ann Glendon, an award-winning professor of law at Harvard University, was given exclusive access, A World Made New is the first book devoted to this crucial turning point in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, and in world history. Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

  • Book cover of A New Deal for the World

    In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Borgwardt traces the history of the Atlantic Charter, describing how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie the modern international human rights regime.

  • Book cover of State of Exception

    Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

  • Book cover of Are Women Human?

    More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is and is entitled to, MacKinnon asks: Are women human yet? She exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation as she points toward fresh ways of targeting its toxic orthodoxies.

  • Book cover of Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights

    Collects 14 articles on women's suffrage. DuBois (history, U. of California in Los Angeles) traces the trajectory of the suffrage story against the backdrop of changing attitudes to politics, citizenship, and gender, and the resultant tensions over such issues as slavery and abolitionism, sexuality and religion, and class conflict. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

  • Book cover of Human Trafficking

    This book examines all forms of human trafficking globally, revealing the operations of the trafficking business and the nature of the traffickers themselves. Using a historical and comparative perspective, it demonstrates that there is more than one business model of human trafficking and that there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. Drawing on a wide body of academic research - actual prosecuted cases, diverse reports and field work and interviews conducted by the author over the last sixteen years in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and the former socialist countries - Louise Shelley concludes that human trafficking will grow in the twenty-first century as a result of economic and demographic inequalities in the world, the rise of conflicts and possibly global climate change. Coordinated efforts of government, civil society, the business community, multilateral organizations and the media are needed to stem its growth.