Heather Ann Thompson

"Historian Heather Ann Thompson offers the first definitive telling of the Attica prison uprising, the state's violent response, and the victims' decades-long quest for justice--in time for the forty-fifth anniversary of the events"--

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

Blood in the Water

Stacey Abrams

Carol Anderson

Heather Cox Richardson

Kevin M. Kruse

"Following the model of the first book in the "History in the Headlines (HiH) series (Catherine Clinton's Confederate Statues and Memorialization), Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections offers an enlightening, history-informed conversation about voter disenfranchisement in the United States. The book includes an edited transcript of a conversation hosted by the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2019, as well as the "ten best" articles students and interested citizens should read about voter access and suppression. The book will have an online presence that hosts additional content (more articles, podcasts, other news) on the press's Manifold digital publishing platform site"--

Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections

America's urbanites have engaged in many tumultuous struggles for civil and worker rights since the Second World War. In Whose Detroit?, Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the struggles of Motor City residents during the 1960s and early 1970s and finds that conflict continued to plague the inner city and its workplaces even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions. Using the contested urban center of Detroit as a model, Thompson assesses the role of such upheaval in shaping the future of America's cities. She argues that the glaring persistence of injustice and inequality led directly to explosions of unrest in this period. Thompson finds that unrest as dramatic as that witnessed during Detroit's infamous riot of 1967 by no means doomed the inner city, nor in any way sealed its fate. The politics of liberalism continued to serve as a catalyst for both polarization and radical new possibilities and Detroit remained a contested, and thus politically vibrant, urban center. Thompson's account of the post-World War II fate of Detroit casts new light on contemporary urban issues, including white flight, police brutality, civic and shop floor rebellion, labor decline, and the dramatic reshaping of the American political order. Throughout, the author tells the stories of real events and individuals, including James Johnson, Jr., who, after years of suffering racial discrimination in Detroit's auto industry, went on trial in 1971 for the shooting deaths of two foremen and another worker at a Chrysler plant. Bringing the labor movement into the context of the literature of Sixties radicalism, Whose Detroit? integrates the history of the 1960s into the broader political history of the postwar period. Urban, labor, political, and African-American history are blended into Thompson's comprehensive portrayal of Detroit's reaction to pressures felt throughout the nation. With deft attention to the historical background and preoccupations of Detroit's residents, Thompson has written a biography of an entire city at a time of crisis.

Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City

Whose Detroit?

In Whose Detroit?, Heather Ann Thompson focuses in detail on the African American struggles for full equality and equal justice under the law that shaped the Motor City during the 1960s and 1970s. Even after Great Society liberals committed themselves to improving conditions in Detroit, Thompson argues, poverty and police brutality continued to plague both neighborhoods and workplaces. Frustration with entrenched discrimination and the lack of meaningful remedies not only led black residents to erupt in the infamous urban uprising of 1967, but it also sparked myriad grassroots challenges to postwar liberalism in the wake of that rebellion. With deft attention to the historical background and to the dramatic struggles of Detroit's residents, and with a new prologue that argues for the ways in which the War on Crime and mass incarceration also devastated the Motor City over time, Thompson has written a biography of an entire nation at a time of crisis.

Heather Ann Thompson

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