A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music - now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 - and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.

Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of racial slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation. Wilentz's controversial reconsideration upends orthodox views of the Constitution. He describes the document as a tortured paradox that abided slavery without legitimizing it. This paradox lay behind the great political battles that fractured the nation over the next seventy years. As Southern Fire-eaters invented a proslavery version of the Constitution, antislavery advocates, including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, proclaimed an antislavery version based on the framers' refusal to validate property in man. No Property in Man invites fresh debate about the political and legal struggles over slavery that began during the Revolution and concluded with the Confederacy's defeat. It drives straight to the heart of the most contentious and enduring issue in all of American history.--

Since its publication in 1984, Chants Democratic has endured as a classic narrative on labor and the rise of American democracy. In it, Sean Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that accompanied early industrialization in New York. He provides a panoramic chronicle of New York City's labor strife, social movements, and political turmoil in the eras of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Twenty years after its initial publication, Wilentz has added a new preface that takes stock of his own thinking, then and now, about New York City and the rise of the American working class.

"During his 50-year association with the Village Voice, Fred W. McDarrah (1926-2007) covered the city's downtown scenes, producing an unmatched and encyclopedic visual record of people, movements, and events. McDarrah frequented the bars, cafés, and galleries where writers, artists, and musicians gathered, and he was welcome in the apartments and lofts of the city's avant-garde cultural aristocracy. He captured every vital moment, from Jack Kerouac reading poetry, to Bob Dylan hanging out in Sheridan Square, to Andy Warhol filming in the Factory, to the Stonewall Riots. Through his lens, we see the legendary birth of ideas and attitudes that continue to shape the character and allure of New York today." -- Publisher's description