Reading & Listening : Hip Hop Family Tree

Today's entry is short and sweet. If you're reading Hip Hop Family Tree and want the soundtrack, here it is, brought to you by Ed Piskor, on Youtube:

Reading and Listening: Comic Book Edition

It's not quite true that school's out for summer, but to revel in that marvelously relaxed and irresponsible feeling that summer weather evokes in me, I'm reading comics I picked up yesterday at Criminal Records for Free Comic Book Day. I spent more money than I should have, but I was lucky to carry home a copy of Drawn and Quarterly's 25th anniversary collection, which I had been longing for.
 Drawn and Quarterly is the publisher that puts out some of my favorite comics: feminist artist Julie Doucet's diaries,  Adrian Tomine's stories about race, identity, and relationships, and Jason Lutes' Berlin series, an imaginative historical fiction of the Weimar period and the rise of Fascism  through the eyes of a cast of artists, radicals and intellectuals.

The biggest surprise of the day for me was finding a somewhat new DC comic, The Movement in two omnibus collections "Class Warfare"and "Fighting for the Future." It tells you something about the renaissance going on in comics today that DC has a comic about class warfare! I haven't finished it yet, but it starts with a promising critique of the police, showing the heroes going after two cops who wrongfully search and intimidate a young couple in an alley, sexually harassing the girl. One of the movement heroes, a masked Black woman named Virtue,  has this classic line "Don't be too proud of your prisons.."

I also found discounted 3rd and final volume of Phonogram, a comic all about phonomancers who do magic with music and time, written by someone who may be a little too obsessed with Brit-Pop. That's clearly a must for a "Reading and Listening" post.  Also music related, is the fantastic Hip-Hop Family Tree which I didn't buy at Comic Book day, and am still only halfway through.
   For music, my all-time favorite references for comics music are Love and Rockets which is a legendary comic of my own generation. For a playlist related to the comic, see this blog .... and the also legendary Dan Clowes'  Eight-Ball, later made into the movie Ghost World, whose characters hang out in record stores and pine away over some really eccentric sounding music. In the movie, they recreate this little scene from the comic. Enid Coleslaw had said that if she couldn't find this record she'd be "lachrymose,' but it seems like that happened anyway.  That is some poignant shit, man.

NSFW, the song linked on youtube below is not mentioned specifically in the comic, but it should be. So in my own soundtrack for my favorite current comic, Sex Criminals, here's the Buzzcocks:

I didn't get any new Sex Criminals because I'm up to date on that one, but I did pick up a collection of another Matt Fraction comic, Cassanova, along with a missing issue of Papergirls while I was there. Papergirls is new. It seems at first like it's going to be a straightforward girls vs. boys story about riding bikes around the neighborhood, but then it has outer-space monsters and zombies. Whoa!

and with that, I've gotta get back to reading before the sun goes down.

Historical Reading & Listening: Instead of Hamilton

 This blog started, as I said yesterday, as a place to store weird moments of synchronicity between my reading and listening. Another one of my reasons for writing here was to promote historical and cultural studies books, which tend to be overlooked in popular literary publications and book blogs. I had first noticed this problem as I began reading around the "bookternet" and encountered the way that many bloggers defined the term microhistory. As I investigated what was going on, I realized that this was part of a bigger problem for history and historians. When they feature historical work at all, most publications, from book review sections in mainstream newspapers to blogs, generally discuss the same set of blockbuster trade non-fiction titles that tend to be quite conservative in their representation of how historical change happens. There are also tons of books listed as history that are not actually history, but general non-fiction titles, often about current events. The most-reviewed or listed history books tend to be by a small group of authors whose work is unrepresentative of contemporary historical concerns. To make an analogy to the fiction world, the gamut is short, running from the historian equivalents of James Patterson all the way to. ...Donna Tartt.
   This popular preference for trade books by journalists or other popularizers makes a lot of sense, given that most scholars aren't writing for popular audiences, and their books can be expensive and are often difficult to read. Probably more important though, is that university presses lack the promotional budgets of commercial publishers, making it quite rare for scholarly works of history to be reviewed or advertised outside academic journals, or to appear on the shelves of bookstores. Given this reality, it should not be surprising that it's uncommon for even voracious literature readers familiar with independent literary publishing to be aware of new scholarly books.
   I used the label "conservative" because the topics most commonly covered by the most popular historical trade publications are military history and presidential biography, with the occasional  famous historical sensation: such as a major disaster, crime or subsequent trial.  While popular histories of disasters, crimes and trials (including the ever-popular Salem Witch Trials) offer the possibility for radical analysis, presidential and military history tend to represent the most politically and intellectually conservative side of the historical profession.  For example, African-American historian of the Jefferson-Hemings story, Annette Gordon-Reed  has argued that the musical Hamilton successfully masks both Hamilton's own conservatism and an old-fashioned view of the founders in general through its excellent music and innovative casting:

There is no question that having a black cast insulates the play from criticisms that might otherwise appear. The genius of black music and black performance styles is used to sell a picture of the founding era that has been largely rejected in history books. Viewers (both white and black) can celebrate without discomfort because black people are playing the men who have been, of late, subjected to much criticism.  Imagine Hamilton with white actors—there are white rappers, and not all of the songs are rap. Would the rosy view of the founding era grate? Would we notice the failure to portray any black characters, save for a brief reference to Sally Hemings?

In the interests of promoting the critical standards for diversity of author and subject matter that many contemporary bloggers call for in the literary world, I offer my friends on the bookternet these alternatives to Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton.

 1.Try Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello. This book came out of Norton, and has already had a wide audience. She wrote it for lay-readers and academic readers alike. It's a history of slaves and descendants from the Jefferson plantation. In addition to being written for a wide audience, it won Gordon-Reed a MacArthur Genius grant.

2. For an international perspective on the 18th century revolutions, see Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic  Based on decades of research, it features stories of slave-rebellions and sailors' protests on the docks from Liverpool to Boston, it shows how the story of the American, French and English revolutions was made by a multi-racial seafaring working class. Great for fans of pirates too.

3. Showing the collapse of the class solidarity on lines of race through the story of colonial Virginia, a book that continues to be relevant long after its initial publication is Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. This book has provided a key piece of the history of slavery in the British colonies, and is one of the grounding texts in contemporary studies of whiteness in the United States.

4. A panoramic and passionately written classic worth returning to is Vincent Harding's There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. This book is a narrative account of Black history, with an amazing chapter on Nat Turner. I have used it as textbook when teaching African-American history and students invariably love it.

5. Especially around the time of the beginning of the War in Iraq, conflicts related to which are still broiling, lots of people I knew were interested in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Two books that go back to the distant roots are, most recently and vividly portrayed Matthew Frye Jacobson's Barbarian Virtues about U.S. imperial culture; and the classic, more detailed and comprehensive but also possibly drier,  Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams, now out with a new introduction by Greg Grandin.

6  The 1920s remain a popular era for history readers, whether because of interest in jazz and flappers or prohibition and organized crime. While there are a number of specific studies on the particularlities of crime, prohibition, jazz culture and the great migration, the best and most readable survey of the entire decade that I've read is Lynne Dumenil's The Modern Temper. Another between-the-wars book (which I haven't read, but plan to on the basis of Matthew Frye Jacobson's blurb) is  Joel Dinerstein's Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology and African American Culture Between the Wars

7. . If you're interested in the history of the Great Depression, skip biographies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and read about the labor movement and Communist Party of this era. The classic local case study is Robin D.G. Kelley's still-wonderful book, Hammer and Hoe which tells the story of Black Alabama communists in the 1930s.  Randi Storch's Red Chicago is a newer, detailed study of the Communist Party in Chicago that draws material released from the Moscow archives in the 1990s. It also gets high marks for readability.

8. For a story of the modern Civil Rights  Movement beyond the great male leaders, read Barbara Ransby's history of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

9. For those interested in the history of the labor movement and want an experiential view from workers, try the oral history landmark study of coal miners by Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County. It would be hard to over-estimate the respect and admiration that oral history practicioners have for this scholar and this book.

10. If you want to read micro-history and you're interested in true-crime, take a look at Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett, a story that starts with the murder of a 19th century New York City prostitute and opens out into a more general history of sex and gender in antebellum America.

* And finally, because we just can't get enough of the Salem Witch Trials, one of the most studied events in American history, here's my favorite. Read Carolyn F. Karlsen's 1998 feminist study, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman

Reading and Listening ....Prince and Troy Davis

This blog started as a place to put all my old Facebook posts about synchronicity between music and books. . Here is a crazy one.

I was just reading the wonderful and disturbing book, I Am Troy Davis which tells the story of Davis and his family from the time of his initial arrest through his appeals and ultimate execution in 2011. While I was reading, I was listening to the Current's A-W marathon of Prince's entire catalog. Just as I got past a section where Troy's sister, Martina got into a fight with him and stormed off from the visit earl and realizes only later that, "She had been free to get up and leave, but Troy was trapped, powerless to get up and go after her" .... Prince was there on the radio, singing:

Like an innocent man that's on death row/ I don't understand what made you go/And wanna leave me, baby/Leave me in the dark/ Can you tell me, tell me?

Been There, Read That: Books About Cities

Today's reading and listening post is also connected to this year's academic reading challenge, the hardest categories: read two books about the same topic (Sports, Music, or the Same City/Town)
one should be ethnography, the other history.

Here are some fine pairings of books I love about places, or places I love about which some academics have written important and readable books. I'm writing about my own home-towns today, Austin, TX; NYC, Chapel Hill, NC and Atlanta, GA.

New York, New York: 

History: 

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. I read this when I was teaching community college in NYC, and was doing research on riots and mobs in the 19th century for my book. It's a weighty tome that synthesizes a huge amount of scholarship into a readable narrative aimed at general readers. It won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City 1974, to the Present. Kim Moody is a labor historian who wrote this book while he was teaching in New York City, and it is hands down the best history of the NY fiscal criss of the 1970s and the subsequent neoliberalization of NY politics. Moody advised me quite wisely in 2006, while he was finishing this project up, "no, do not buy an apartment. For the first time ever, it is cheaper to rent." Whew.

Josh Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since WWII. This is another great and readable book that is cited all the time. I don't agree with every aspect of Freeman's argument, but this book contains so much detail about unions, housing and city politics in the 1950s that it is definitely worth reading if you are interested in class and labor history. Think of this as the real background story of Ralph Kramden.

Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie 1850-1896  I have not read this book, but  I have heard Beckert speak, and see him cited all the time in NY history. This book is one of the first entries in thee school of economic history now called "The History of Capitalism" and is considered important.

And hey, maybe you were thinking of reading Jill Jonnes on the South Bronx, but I'd skip that one for now. She designed a friggin museum for the DEA headquarters in Washington. This suggests that she is not qualified to understand anything about the South Bronx. You'd be better off with Eric Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation which charts the rise of hip-hop in the South Bronx.

Ethnography:

Karen Ho,Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. This book says it in the title. Ho worked on Wall St while in Graduate school, and for this project she also attended formal recruitment events at elite colleges with her friends, and did interviews with people around Wall Street. It's a view into the world of the 1% as well as the work culture and infrastructure that supports them, very interesting.

Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. I have not read this book, but it comes highly recommended by my friend, KB, who really knows the South Bronx, and who regularly organizes author-talks and community education events in NYC. If anyone knows what to read, he does. Also, it gets props from both Junot Diaz and Lisa Lowe. Putting it on my TBR right now.

Oneka LaBennett, She's Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn I've been teaching this book as a great example of interdisciplinary ethnography for two years now, and my students love it. LaBennett, who is herself West Indian, did her study while volunteering at the Brooklyn Children's Museum where she got to know a group of West Indian girls and did work with them for a period of about ten years. Focused on the ways that teen girls really interact with popular culture, it is an intervention in current debates about hip-hop, gender, sexuality and body-image. She has a whole chapter based on a focus-group watching "America's Next Top Model" - really smart.

Phillipe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. This is a classic ethnography about the lives of young men selling crack in East Harlem. It's just about to come out in a second edition. I've also taught this book when I lived in New York and was teaching majority Black and Brown adult students working white-collar or service jobs around the financial district. What he has to say about how Black and Brown men are treated in such jobs and how they experience this definitely resonated with my students.

Atlanta, GA

History

Kevin Kruse, White Flight. I've already included this on my gentrification must-reads list, but it remains the essential history for anyone who lives in Atlanta today to read in order to understand what the Hell is going on in this city and how it relates to American politics more broadly.

Another must-read for ATlians is the late Cliff Kuhn's,Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City 1914-1948. These interviews began as radio broadcasts, and the book was part of the UGA Press "Brown Thrasher" series.  If I were teaching a class on Atlanta history, this book would be on the top of my list. Kuhn who died last year, was also the executive director of the National Oral History Association, and was a mentor to almost every Georgia history student/professor I have met since moving to Atlanta.

Two more recent books on my own TBR about Atlanta are these:

Winston A. Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights 1960-1977 which is blurbed by Barbara Ransby; and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, which gets high praise as the best and most exhaustive work on the history of Civil Rights in Atlanta, and finally William Link's Atlanta: Cradle of the New South, which is about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta. Perhaps this would be good to read this July when the Battle of Atlanta is being commemorated around my neighborhood.

Ethnography: 

There was much less that I could find here, largely because most ethnographers hide the identity of the space where they did fieldwork.
   However, I did see this one, which looks interesting:  riffing off Elijah Anderson's "Code of the Street", Scott Jacques and Richard Wright's Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers is a study of drug-dealers in an Atlanta suburb.

Just outside the Atlanta Metro is Dalton, GA, known as the carpet capital of the world, and home of  large Latin-American immigrant community. You can read about them in Davis et al, Voices from the Nueva Frontera, which as the title says, tries to give us the voices of immigrants outside the anti-immigrant rhetoric so common in this state.

Augusta, rather than Atlanta is the location of Melissa Checker's Polluted Promises, an historical ethnography of a neighborhood activist group. This is another beautifully written book, which I've also taught with success. Checker worked with an African-American community organization whose neighborhood had been made unliveable by industrial pollution, and explores the racial differences in environmentalist organizing at the local and national level.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina/Research Triangle

Chapel Hill is a much smaller town than Atlanta, but it's connected to Durham and Raleigh through what's called "The Research Triangle" and there are quite a few good studies about this whole region.

My favorite historical work featuring a large portion on Chapel Hill is Glenda Gilmore's
Defying Dixie which reveals the secret radical history of the town when Pauli Murray was there.

Leslie Brown, who did remarkable work on the Behind the Veil oral history project for the Center of Documentary Studies, is the author of this history of Durham under Jim Crow, Upbuilding Black Durham. Again, I haven't read this book, but it looks good.

For ethnography in this area, try this one:

Sarah Mayorga Gallo's Behind the White Picket Fence is about the Creekbridge Neighborhood in Durham. It appears to delve into the details of neighborhood association life

and the final city on our tour is my original hometown of
:

 Austin, TX

History

Austin's history is pretty fascinating, and I haven't read any scholarly work about it at all, I'm ashamed to say.  I have some vague recollections of elementary school tales of some guy named Stephen. BUT. given the time, I'd probably start with one of these:

Elliot Tretter and co's, Shadows of a Sunbelt City is part of a geographies and social justice series and aims to unpack the myths of Austin's "high tech" boosterism. This seems relevant to Atlanta history too, since we have been drawing on this "smart city" magic through GA-Tech and hyper-privatized development initiatives.

Travis Stimmeling's Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks is a history of the New Country music explosion in Austin during the 1960s-1970s., the era when I lived there, and providing the soundtracak to my childhood.

Ethnography:

I have not read  Joshua Long''s, Weird City, but this book is a set of interviews by a sociologist and about the fight to "Keep Austin weird" in light of the aforementioned "high tech" development. It sounds like fun.

I may have been born in Austin, and spent a lot of important growing-up years there, but I admit, I don't have much in the way of book-learning about it. I welcome your suggestions on Austin history or ethnography, or on any of these others locales, dear readers, put them in the comments here.

Reading Challenge Suggestions: Sports History and Ethnography

For those of you participating in my 2016 academic reading challenge, I've got recommendations for  U.S. sports history and ethnography, with special thanks to my friend, L.!

Let's start with some sports history. Going way, way back in the music archives, here's Kurtis Blow for my generation of sports' fans.

For a general overview of sports in American history, labor historian, Elliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein have updated their Brief History of American Sports, which begins with games played by the English colonists, and ends with chapters on debates about performance-enhancing drugs. If you are looking for a brief, readable survey written by historians, this might be a good starting point.

Anyone interested in the study of popular culture should read the Trinidadian Marxist, C.L. R James' book about cricket:  Beyond a Boundary. The book is a collection of essays that explore colonialism and anti-colonial activism through the West Indian adoption and transformation of the English sport of cricket. It is one of those few outstanding books of cultural studies that captures cultural interaction and historical transformation through the deep study of some seemingly "unpolitical" cultural activity. Originally written in 1963, it connects West Indian cricketers to James' struggle to build a West Indies Federation at that time.

Since James' time, cultural studies scholars and historians have written a ton of interesting books that explore the roles of race, gender, and social class in the performance, practice, and spectacle of sports.

Jack Johnson was a Black American U.S. prize-fighter in the early 1900s, and his career has become symbolic of the obstacles Black athletes faced because of white racism.  Because he dated white women, he was charged with the violation of "white slavery" laws. He's been the subject of more than one biographical study, including a documentary film by Ken Burns. My friend L highly recommends Theresa Rundstetler's biography:  Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line, which, as the title suggests, explores Johnson's travels to France, South and Central America, and Great Britain.

Katherine Mooney's Race Horse Men is another of L's recommendations for recent books. This study, by a historian from Louisiana State University in New Orleans, is about the development of American horse-racing through slavery and plantation society. The "Race Horse Men" of the title were enslaved men who became celebrities in the 19th century for their expertise with training and racing horses. This appears to be an excellent book giving insight into a surprising piece of the history of slavery in the United States.

Also about racing, with an emphasis on social class and regional culture is, Gwynneth Anne Thayer, Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism and American Popular Culture.This book is part of an excellent American Studies series from the University of Kansas press, and tells the history of dog-racing, which began as an elite sport connected to the British aristocracy, and has become increasingly seedy and suspect in the present.  This book bridges sports and animal studies.

On my own personal to-read shelf for this challenge because I'm a basketball fan, is Aram Goudsouzian's King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution, a biography of Celtics' player, Bill Russell, who was the first major African-American basketball star. This book provides a  history of the sport of basketball and the NBA, and how it went from being a "Jewish game" in the 1920s and 1930s to an increasingly Black-identified game a generation after the Great Migration of African-Americans into Northern and Western cities. The reviews of the book also say it has great "white-hot game narratives,"and Gousouzian is an avid pick-up basketball player who loves the sport.

Another tempting sports biography is by feminist historian, Susan Ware. Game, Set, Match; Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports is likely to speak to a whole generation of (mostly white) girls who grew up watching Billie Jean King demonstrate what it meant to be a powerful woman. I know it's cheesy, but Helen Reddy and Billie Jean King go together in my childhood memories of the second wave era of feminism.

Jennifer Lansbury's book A Spectacular Leap is a history of great Black women athletes who were less often in the limelight than Black men or white women, starting with high-jumper, Alice Coachman and continuing with such greats as Althea Gibson and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, another 70s icon. whose sister-in-law, the famous Flo-Jo also features in the book.

*****

I know next to nothing about football. Looking at the Rutgers U. Press series on sport and society, I was intrigued by the description of Jeffrey Montez De Oca's book Discipline and Indulgence described by its reviewers as a blend of sociology and history to understand the relationship between the Cold War and college football.

Another sociological/historical account of a sport, is this book by softball mom and political scientist, Jennifer Ring. Stealing Bases gives a history of how baseball became a male sport, and where softball came from.

For Sports Ethnography:

I can't wait to read Lucia Trimbur's Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing at Gold's Gym, a recent book on men who box at Gleason's Gym. Trimbur, a sociologist, trained as a boxer at the gym, so this is an immersive as well as interview-based study that uses the window of the gym  and the sport of boxing to understand transformations of race and gender in urban spaces.

Stanley Thangaraj's Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of American Masculinity is another book I've been looking forward to. Thangaraj's book explored the complicated dynamics of race and gender formation among South Asian men who play basketball in several different cities between the U.S. and Canada.

Michael Messner's It's All for the Kids is an ethnography of children's sports in the United States by a sociologist who's also a Soccer-dad.  This book looks at the persistence of gender norms in sports, whether they apply to coaches, parents or kid athletes, as well as racial and class dynamics within the world of children's sports.

Sociologist and athlete Eric Anderson's book In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity tells the individual stories of Gay male athletes navigating the hyper-masculine world of sports through the lens of sociology. This book is also part of an academic press series on sports and society. This one is at SUNY press.
   ***   Maybe it's overplayed in this context, but this is a classic closer for a reason.

For all those Who Feel the Bern.....Here's books for you

I have an older blog called lefter warmer where I haven't been posting much, but I've been inspired by the primary season to start working out my ideas on the significance of the Sanders campaign and assorted left reactions to it that I've seen around the internet. Based on some of the abrupt switches in tone I've seen among even some very staunch electoral skeptics, I think it might be worth considering if it's time to start partyin' like it's 1905, or maybe like it's 2011.

  It sounds a little crazy to turn back the wheel to 1905, but what the New Yorker called "nostalgia" for 2012, might be the return of the political "moment" that began in 2011. Remember that?   The enthusiasm for Sanders, which I see as a direct outgrowth of Occupy and to some extent Black Lives Matter, might be something that could lead into the growth of a general left revival on a scale beyond supporting an individual candidate, and which could take the role of effectively pushing whoever is elected in November to make policy that we believe in  (not just the president, but congress, and lawmakers at local and state levels) rather than just checking the box by their name, hoping for the best, and then becoming their cheerleaders no matter what.

  Part of pushing effectively is knowing some history and some theory, and all that, so here's a primary season list of book recommendations.

If this is something like a 1905 moment, regardless of what conclusions you draw from it, it's a good idea to read and discuss Lenin's What is to Be Done?   both as a historical document, and as a political analysis.

Another landmark political document that people might want to consider reading is The Port Huron Statement which was the founding document of the  Students for a Democratic Society in 1962.  I saw an effort to revive SDS about 11 years ago, and I don't necessarily think that's the way to go, but reading this document might be helpful in thinking about the kind of visionary writing that a student or youth movement can do.

My own favorite US movement model is the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the radical Southern student movement against Jim Crow that began with the lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro, NC.  One collection that I have not read myself, but which looks good is Hands on the Freedom Plow, a group of essays by women from SNCC about their organizing experiences.
   Not a book, but a great movie about SNCC, is Freedom on My Mind which I used to show every year in my U.S. history survey.

On the more academic side of things, check out Robin D.G. Kelley's Freedom Dreams, in which you will find a compelling and fairly detailed argument for reparations. If you don't have time for the whole book, there is an excerpt with that position laid out here.
   If you are thinking, "wait, hasn't everyone who supports Sanders  agreed that reparations is a Black nationalist demand that won't help the rest of the working-class?" not so fast. Some of us think that racial justice remains central to progress for the entire working class, and that reparations is a demand with long historical roots. On that note, check out David Roediger's most recent book, Seizing Freedom, which is inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois' argument about the General strike of the slaves following the Civil War from Black Reconstruction. .

For reading relevant to thinking about our two biggest youth social movements of recent years, I suggest these two books:

If you want to know more about Black Lives Matter, Christina Heatherton and Jordan Camp's edited collection Policing the Planet brings together a bunch of writing about the police from scholars and activists who have been involved in movements in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere.

If you want to know more about Occupy Wall St., N+1's collection Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America is a collection of writing that emerged during the Wall St. Occupation. N+1 also produced the Occupy Gazette while it was happening, and provide a good "on the ground" perspective.

Going back to the more recent past of electoral politics and the present day fix we're in there, here are some reaches back to a couple of relevant election challenges:

Sheila Collins, The Rainbow Challenge. This book is about Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow coalition of the 1980s, to which a few people are beginning to compare the present-day Sanders campaign. I read it in college when I was taking a class with Mike Honey (also the author of a number of good books) and found it pretty inspiring at the time.

Another comparison that people are making to the Sanders campaign now is the McGovern vs. Nixon match up of 1972. Joe Lowndes, whose book I recommend as a way to understand the contemporary Republican party more generally, has a chapter about that election in his book,  From the New Deal to the New Right.  I'm going to read Bruce Miroff's The Liberals' Moment about that campaign, as it seems to provide a different analysis than the one I am most familiar with, which is "You can't support a real liberal or left candidate because the outcome will be the same as with McGovern in 1972."  On that election, see also the data on voter turnout at this link.

It is also still relevant to read anything by Frances Fox Piven when you're thinking about what goes into Democratic movement building.  her book, Poor People's Movements is a classic with great insights that we should keep in the front of our minds when engaging in any electoral campaign. She also has given one of the best answers to the question of Why Americans Still Don't Vote that can get you way beyond tsk-tsking your more apathetic friends and acquaintances.

Researching the opposition is also important. Matt Taibbi's Griftopia which brings together his writing on the relationship between Wall St. banks, the 2008 crash, and our elected representatives is still required reading. We are still living in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008. Another useful couple of books for understanding the electoral right and its own grass-roots origins, along with Joe Lowndes' book noted above, are Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors and Kevin Kruse's White Flight. 

If you are thinking from voting from fear of the Republican party in particular: I do not always agree with Doug Henwood, whose arguments about "identity politics" earn my ire, but his book on Hillary Clinton, My Turn is one that anyone considering supporting Hillary Clinton should read. Henwood has been attacked for it, needless to say, but the book is inexpensive, and not too long. Throw it in the mix. Also forthcoming is an edited collection of writing by socialist feminists who oppose Clinton,  Liza Featherstone's, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton.

 Here's one feminist who's got this to say to the opposition. When I saw Lucinda Williams in Atlanta, she dedicated this song to the Sanders campaign as a response to the senator's fear-mongering, lying opponents.