Reading List

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  Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity

  by Marc Lamont Hill

  For over a decade, educators have looked to capitalize on the appeal of hip-hop culture, sampling its language, techniques, and styles as a way of reaching out to students. But beyond a fashionable hipness, what does hip-hop have to offer our schools? In this revelatory new book, Marc Lamont Hill shows how a serious engagement with hip-hop culture can affect classroom life in extraordinary ways. Buy now

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  Can You Hear Me Now? The Inspiration, Wisdom, and Insight of Michael Eric Dyson

  by Michael Eric Dyson

  Review by President Barack Obama

  Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison. He is an outstanding scholar and an outstanding author. Buy now

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  Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought

  by Melissa Harris-Lacewell

  Review by Patricia Hill Collins, Ethnic and Racial Studies

  The book impressively weaves multiple research methods to provide a comprehensive understanding of black political ideology. . . . By following Harris-Lacewell’s example of paying close attention to the intersection of race and other forms of social stratification, we could better understand how the meaning of blackness and the ‘Black agenda’ is constructed within the black community. Buy now

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  The Yankee Years

  by Joe Torre

  Product Description

  Twelve straight playoff appearances. Six American League pennants. Four World Series titles. This is the definitive story of a dynasty: the Yankee years. When Joe Torre took over as manager of the New York Yankees in 1996, the most storied franchise in sports had not won a World Series title in eighteen years. The famously tough and mercurial owner, George Steinbrenner, had fired seventeen managers during that span. Buy now

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  Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (Religion, Race, and Ethnicity)

  by Jonathan L. Walton

  Buy now

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  Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

  by John L. Jackson

  Product Description

  A provocative new paradigm of race relations in the twenty-first century, in which the overt racism of the past has been replaced by subconscious suspicions and whispered conspiracy theories. The Civil War put an end to slavery, and the civil rights movement put an end to legalized segregation. Crimes motivated by racism are punished with particular severity, and Americans are more sensitive than ever about the words they choose when talking about race… Buy now

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  Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

  by Eve Rachelle Sanders

  Review by Awards’ Committee, The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

  A sophisticated analysis of how girls and boys learned gender roles as they learned to read and write and how gender differences were supported or critiqued in the English public theater and in writings by women and men. The book is first-rate literary history and first-rate social and cultural history that confronts the connections between gender theory and historical practice. This is fine scholarship. Buy now

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  Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal

  by Laura Ahearn

  Product Description

  Invitations to Love provides a close examination of the dramatic shift away from arranged marriage and capture marriage toward elopement in the village of Junigau, Nepal. Laura M. Ahearn shows that young Nepalese people are applying their newly acquired literacy skills to love-letter writing, fostering a transition that involves not only a shift in marriage rituals, but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and attribute responsibility for events. Buy now