Nyu Press imprint: 1731 books

Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision ordering the desegregation of America's public schools, is perhaps the most famous case in American constitutional law. Criticized and even openly defied when first handed down, in half a century Brown has become a venerated symbol...

2017 Wilbur Non-Fiction Award Recipient Winner of the 2018 Author's Award in scholarly non0fiction, presented by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance In Black Women’s Christian Activism, Betty Livingston Adams examines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth...

Still Lifting, Still Climbing is the first volume of its kind to document African American women's activism in the wake of the civil rights movement. Covering grassroots and national movements alike, contributors explore black women's mobilization around such areas as the black nationalist movements,...

Few institutions have become as ferociously fought over in democratic politics as the courts. While political criticism of judges in this country goes back to its inception, today’s intensely ideological assault is nearly unprecedented. Spend any amount of time among the writings of contemporary...

The Al-Qaeda terror attacks of September 11, 2001, aroused a number of extraordinary counter measures in response, including an executive order authorizing the creation of military tribunals or “commissions” for the trial of accused terrorists. The Supreme Court has weighed in on the topic with...

Finalist for 2010 LGBT Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Awards Unwed teen mothers, abortion, masturbation, pornography, gay marriage, sex trafficking, homosexuality, and HIV are just a few in a long line of issues that have erupted into panics. These sexual panics spark moral crusades and...

The staggering string of victories by the gay rights movement’s campaign for marriage equality raises questions not only about how gay people have been able to successfully deploy marriage to elevate their social and legal reputation, but also what kind of freedom and equality the ability to marry...

In the nineteenth century, New York City underwent a tremendous demographic transformation driven by European immigration, the growth of a native-born population, and the expansion of one of the largest African American communities in the North. New York's free blacks were extremely politically active,...

The history of blacks at Harvard mirrors, for better or for worse, the history of blacks in the United States. Harvard, too, has been indelibly scarred by slavery, exclusion, segregation, and other forms of racist oppression. At the same time, the nation's oldest university has also, at various times,...

Among the most prominent icons of the American south is that of the southern belle, immortalized by such figures as Scarlett O'Hara, Dolly Madison, and Lucy Pickens (whose elegant image graced the Confederate $100 bill). And yet the women of America's south iave always defied pat generalization, no...

In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists. The Methodist...

From Billy Graham and Ronald Regan to Newt Gingrich and William Bennett, God is a Conservative provides an important look at the role of religion in conservative politics in modern America. Kenneth J. Heineman reveals the profoundly religious nature of contemporary conservatism, offering an intriguing...

The meaning of the American Revolution has always been a much-contested question, and asking it is particularly important today: the standard, easily digested narrative puts the Founding Fathers at the head of a unified movement, failing to acknowledge the deep divisions in Revolutionary-era society...

Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in...