America In The Dark

The climate futurist presents a sobering analysis of America’s future in the face of climate change—and how we can prepare to make the most of it. After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion. What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, using a clear-eyed analysis of ecology, economics, and history to discern what the next 500 years or so might look like. As globalization ends, the United States—and Western civilization—will enter the stages of decline and fall. Though Dark Age America offers an uncompromising assessment of our collective future, it is by no means without hope. Knowing where we're headed is a crucial step in responding to the challenges of the future and doing what we can now to help our descendants make the most of the world we're leaving them.

For a brief time following the end of the U.S. Civil War, American political leaders had an opportunity—slim, to be sure, but not beyond the realm of possibility—to remake society so that black Americans and other persons of color could enjoy equal opportunity in civil and political life. It was not to be. With each passing year after the war—and especially after Reconstruction ended during the 1870s—American society witnessed the evolution of a new white republic as national leaders abandoned the promise of Reconstruction and justified their racial biases based on political, economic, social, and religious values that supplanted the old North-South/slavery-abolitionist schism of the antebellum era. A Long Dark Night provides a sweeping history of this too often overlooked period of African American history that followed the collapse of Reconstruction—from the beginnings of legal segregation through the end of World War II. Michael J. Martinez argues that the 1880s ushered in the dark night of the American Negro—a night so dark and so long that the better part of a century would elapse before sunlight broke through. Combining both a “top down” perspective on crucial political issues and public policy decisions as well as a “bottom up” discussion of the lives of black and white Americans between the 1880s and the 1940s, A Long Dark Night will be of interest to all readers seeking to better understand this crucial era that continues to resonate throughout American life today.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" was a crass slogan intended to appeal to the most antiquated and base emotions, resentments, and bigotry that plague far too many "Americans" who still believe in white supremacy. Using historical sources found on various research platforms, Part I reviews the genocide, persecution, and bigotry practiced from Columbus to Trump on natives, immigrants, Africans, and others. There is no review of Trump as what he has done and is doing is well-covered by present-day media. Acknowledging it is hardly an exhaustive compilation, Part II lists the contributions made by those who suffered from their not being white Anglo immigrants to America. The book is an attempt to have Americans, who will listen and care, recognize that America does not need to be made "great again." America needs to be made great.

Published in the years following 9/11, David Darks book The Gospel according to America warned American Christianity about the false worship that conflates love of country with love of God. It delved deeply into the political divide that had gripped the country and the cultural captivity into which so many American churches had fallen. In our current political season, the problems Dark identified have blossomed. The assessment he brought to these problems and the creative resources for resisting them are now more important than ever. Into this new political landscape and expanding on the analysis of The Gospel according to America, Dark offers The Possibility of America: How the Gospel Can Mend Our God-Blessed, God-Forsaken Land. Dark expands his vision of a fractured yet redeemable American Christianity, bringing his signature mix of theological, cultural, and political analysis to white supremacy, evangelical surrender, and other problems of the Trump era.