Daniel Brook

A pioneering exploration of four cities that reflect a blend of Eastern and Western cultures traces the historical threads connecting the regions of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai while offering insight into their conflicted embrace of modernity and the roles of architects, revolutionaries and other contributors in their transformations. By the author of The Trap. 13,000 first printing.

A History of Future Cities

A Story of Race in Reconstruction

Accident of Color

Argues that rising education, housing, and health-care costs are forcing thousands of the best and brightest young Americans to choose between their dreams and the pressure to earn six-figure incomes in corporate America.

Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America

The Trap

A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white. In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all. In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day. The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston, where free biracial people exercised many rights of citizenship and fought to secure them for all after the Civil War. In coalition with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness, they notched significant victories--like desegregating streetcars and schools--and launched an audacious legal strategy to defeat racism by challenging race itself. Tragically, all was swept away by a violent political backlash, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation and usher in a binary racial regime that endures to this day. By revisiting a turning point in the evolution of America's racial system, this "poignant and powerful book" (Library Journal) brings to life a moment from our distant past that illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

The Accident of Color

Using a comparative historical methodology, this book analyzes and contrasts the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia with China's Tiananmen Square rebellion from socio-cultural and political economic perspectives.

Daniel Brook

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