"There are 3.4 million South Asian-Americans in the U.S. They are creating an identity in a nation accustomed to binary racial choices, where the common understanding is that you are either black or white. The old model of immigration follows a progression from outsider to insider, or from being a person of color to either being perceived as white or being lumped in with white citizens. That transition has been documented with the help of two well...

"In 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery became part of U.S. immigration policy. As with many U.S. immigration policies over the years, the actual lived experience of the lottery generated unintended and unexpected consequences, becoming more powerful and important than its creators could envision. Dreamland tells the story of the lottery, correcting the sometimes willful misconceptions of how it works, explaining its importance, and revealing...

From the Publisher: In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free. In vivid portraits of renegades and their "respectable" adversaries, Russell shows that...

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional...

"The Butler's Child is the personal story of a Warner Brothers family grandson who spent more than fifty years as a fighting, no holds barred civil rights lawyer. Lewis explores why he, a privileged white man, devoted his life to seeking racial progress in often uncomprehending or hostile courts. In fact, after writing a feature for The New York Times Magazine entitled "Nine Men in Black Who Think White," Lewis was fired from the NAACP and the entire...