Chronicles the story of the Reconstruction-era Secret Service and its battle against the KKK's effort to suppress the emancipated African-American vote, sharing particular insights into the career of controversial Secret Service chief, Hiram C. Whitley. In the years following the Civil War, a new battle began. Newly freed African American men had gained their voting rights and would soon have a chance to transform Southern politics. Former Confederates and other white supremacists mobilized to stop them. Thus, the KKK was born. After the first political assassination carried out by the Klan, Washington power brokers looked for help in breaking the growing movement. They found it in Hiram C. Whitley. He became head of the Secret Service, which had previously focused on catching counterfeiters and was at the time the government's only intelligence organization. Whitley and his agents led the covert war against the nascent KKK and were the first to use undercover work in mass crime--what we now call terrorism--investigations. Like many spymasters before and since, Whitley also had a dark side. His penchant for skulduggery and dirty tricks ultimately led to his involvement in a conspiracy that would bring an end to his career and transform the Secret Service. Populated by intriguing historical characters--from President Grant to brave Southerners, both black and white, who stood up to the Klan--and told in a brisk narrative style, Freedom's Detective reveals the story of this complex hero and his central role in a long-lost chapter of American history.

No Snowflake in an Avalanche goes deep inside the world of religious extremism in America s military and political infrastructure from the perspective of Michael L. Mikey Weinstein proud Academy graduate and father of graduates who single-handedly brought to light the Evangelicals' utter disregard of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state that is so essential to the nations military mission. Weinsteins war pits him and his small band of fellow graduates, cadets, and concerned citizens of varying religious backgrounds against a program of Christian fundamentalist indoctrination that could transform our fighting men and women into right-thinking warriors more befitting a theocracy than a democracy.

From the speechwriter and top adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson: A behind-the-scenes history of the most momentous decade in American politics. Richard N. Goodwin entered public service in 1958 as a law clerk for Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. He left politics ten years later in the aftermath of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. Over the course of one extraordinary decade, Goodwin orchestrated some of the noblest achievements in the history of the US government and bore witness to two of its greatest tragedies. His eloquent and inspirational memoir is one of the most captivating chronicles of those turbulent years ever published. From the Twenty-One quiz-show scandal to the heady days of John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign to President Lyndon Johnson's heroic vote wrangling on behalf of civil rights legislation, Remembering America brings to life the most fascinating figures and events of the era. As a member of the Kennedy administration, Goodwin charted a new course for US relations with Latin America and met in secret with Che Guevara in Uruguay. He wrote Johnson's historic civil rights speech, "We Shall Overcome," in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and formulated the concept of the Great Society and its programs, which sought to eradicate poverty and racial injustice. After breaking with Johnson over the president's commitment to the Vietnam War, Goodwin played a pivotal role in bringing antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy to within a few hundred votes of victory in the 1968 New Hampshire primary. Three months later, he was with his good friend Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles the night that the young senator's life--and the progressive movement that had rapidly brought about such significant change--came to a devastating end. Throughout this critical decade, Goodwin held steadfast to the passions and principles that had first led him to public service. Remembering America is a thrilling account of the breathtaking victories and heartbreaking disappointments of the 1960s, and a rousing call to action for readers committed to justice today.

What does is it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Susan Griffin’s provocative investigation of that question takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the Iraq War, with many stops in between. Her conclusion: democracy is nothing less than a revolution of consciousness, and the revolution has just begun.

"[A] swiftly written debut memoir...[Segal] vividly describes his firsthand experience as a teenager inside the Stonewall bar during the historic riots, his participation with the Gay Liberation Front, and amusing encounters with Elton John and Patti LaBelle . . . A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement's true pioneers." --Kirkus Reviews "With great verve and spirit, Segal has rendered a lively and dramatic memoir of the early days of the gay rights struggle; the infighting over strategies and objectives; the long, hard road of progress; and a look at the challenges still ahead." --Booklist On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, "Gays protest CBS prejudice!" He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community. Mark Segal's job, as he saw it, was to show the nation who gay people are: our sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. Because of activists like Mark Segal, whose life work is dramatically detailed in this poignant and important memoir, today there are openly LGBT people working in the White House and throughout corporate America. An entire community of gay world citizens is now finding the voice that they need to become visible.

Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is an intensely personal meditation on the nature of America by a White Philosopher who joined a Black Studies Department and found his understanding of the world transformed by the experience. The book begins with an autobiographical narrative of the events leading up to Wolff's transfer from a Philosophy Department to the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and his experiences in the Department with his new colleagues, all of whom had come to Academia from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Wolff discovered that the apparently simple act of moving across campus to a new Department in a new building worked a startling change in the way he saw himself, his university, and his country. Reading as widely as possible to bring himself up to speed in his new field of academic responsibility, Wolff realized after a bit that his picture of American history and culture was undergoing an irreversible metamorphosis. America, he realized, has from its inception been a land both of Freedom and of Bondage: Freedom for the few, and then for those who are White; Bondage at first for the many, and then for those who are not White. Slavery is thus not an aberration, an accident, a Peculiar Institution -- it is the essence and core of the American experience. Wolff's optimistic outlook leads him to express the hope that our acknowledging the realities of America's racial history and present will begin to tear down the formidable barrier to change. He sees this refashioning of the American story as a first step toward the crafting of a truly liberatory project. Robert Paul Wolff is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of numerous books, including Introductory Philosophy and In Defense of Anarchism.