This Is America

When the Gordons escaped pogrom-ridden Russia and washed up on the shores of Ellis Island, little could they have fathomed how the course of their lives was about to change. Forever. With bustling tenements, endless sweatshops, and throngs racing madly to work...this was definitely the New World.

In “This is America,” Katie Rios considers current American artists who build encoded gestures of resistance into their works. These gestures recur across images, live performances, and videos, becoming recognizable acts of resistance leveled at injustices based on a number of categories, including race, gender, class, religion, and politics.

"Incredible and searing." --Nic Stone, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin The Hate U Give meets Just Mercy in this unflinching yet uplifting first novel that explores the racist injustices in the American justice system. Every week, seventeen-year-old Tracy Beaumont writes letters to Innocence X, asking the organization to help her father, an innocent Black man on death row. After seven years, Tracy is running out of time--her dad has only 267 days left. Then the unthinkable happens. The police arrive in the night, and Tracy's older brother, Jamal, goes from being a bright, promising track star to a "thug" on the run, accused of killing a white girl. Determined to save her brother, Tracy investigates what really happened between Jamal and Angela down at the Pike. But will Tracy and her family survive the uncovering of the skeletons of their Texas town's racist history that still haunt the present? Fans of Nic Stone, Tiffany D. Jackson, and Jason Reynolds won't want to miss this provocative and gripping debut.

Ilhan Omar's career is a collection of historic firsts: she is the first refugee, the first Somali-American and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the United States Congress. Against a xenophobic and divisive administration, she has risen to global fame as a powerful voice in the Democratic Party's new progressive chorus of congresswomen of colour.'This Is What America Looks Like' is a tale of the aspirations, disappointments, successes and surprises in the life of an immigrant and Muslim in the US today. This is Omar's story told on her own terms: from a childhood in Mogadishu and four long years at a Kenyan refugee camp, to her arrival in America--penniless and speaking only Somali--and her triumphant election to the US House of Representatives.In the face of merciless slander and constant attacks from opponents in both parties, Omar continues to speak up for her beliefs. Courageous, hopeful and defiant, her memoir is marked by her irrepressible spirit, even in the darkest of times.

What values does America truly stand for? In The Idea That Is America, a preeminent foreign policy scholar elegantly reminds us of the essential principles on which our nation was established: liberty, democracy, equality, tolerance, faith, justice, and humility. Our ongoing struggle to live up to America’s great promise matters not only to us, but also to the billions of people everywhere who look to the United States to lead, protect, and inspire the world. In The Idea That Is America, Anne-Marie Slaughter shows us the way forward.

Selections from M. Sasek’s most popular children’s travel guides compiled into one big look at the United States and its unique history. Celebrated the world over for his famous children’s books, master illustrator and storyteller M. Sasek captured the essence of the world’s major cities and brought them to life for an entire generation of young readers. Now comes a new edition from the master. Culled from the pages of M. Sasek’s renowned series of illustrated children’s books, This is America is a witty, urbane, and child-friendly introduction to some of the United States’ most popular destinations. From east to west, this is an inspirational travelogue that introduces readers to the art, architecture, music, food, and traditions of multiple cities and states. From a rodeo in Texas to a subway car in New York City, with stops in Cape Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge, This is America is the perfect book for international travelers shopping for a gift to take home, and is also perfect for those looking for a nostalgic view on the history of the United States. This anthology includes excerpts from This is New York, This is Texas, This is San Francisco, This is Washington, D.C., and This is the Way to the Moon.

From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past. Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.