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Lincoln Center’s Summer Forum · Lincoln Center

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Lincoln Center’s Summer Forum: Moving the Field Forward, is a five-day celebratory convening specially designed for teaching artists and educators. This is your…

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A+/P Credit Course | The New York Historical

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New York’s Changing Communities will build teachers’ content knowledge of New York City history through the lens of community.

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Posters to Podcasts: Art & Social Activism (Summer 2026) - Materials for the Arts

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From the archive to the studio, explore the ways art has carried the message of social movements. Zines, printmaking, podcasts, and more.

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250 for 250 Booklist | Brooklyn Public Library

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Brooklyn Public Library is celebrating our country’s 250th anniversary the best way we know how: with a thoughtful, surprising, irresistible booklist.

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Upcoming Programs | The New York Historical

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Join us for outstanding talks, conversations, film screenings, and tours that showcase the nations most eminent historians, writers, and thinkers.

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The Personal Librarian: A GMA Book Club Pick

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Over one million copies sold!The Instant New York Times Bestseller! A Good Morning America* Book Club Pick!Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR! Named a Notable Book of the Year by the Washington Post!“Historical fiction at its best!”*A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.

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FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • A Heather’s Pick A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.Named 2025’s Most Anticipated Release by The New York Times • Oprah Daily • The Times • ELLE (UK) • Literary Hub • The Guardian • The New Statesman • Financial Times • Marie Claire • Harper’s BAZAAR • BBC Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

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Grade 7

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New historical fiction from a Newbery Honor-winning author about how middle schooler Ariel Goldberg's life changes when her big sister elopes following the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, and she's forced to grapple with both her family's prejudice and the antisemitism she experiences, as she defines her own beliefs.
Twelve-year-old Ariel Goldberg's life feels like the moment after the final guest leaves the party. Her family's Jewish bakery runs into financial trouble, and her older sister has eloped with a young man from India following the Supreme Court decision that strikes down laws banning interracial marriage. As change becomes Ariel's only constant, she's left to hone something that will be with her always--her own voice.

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New historical fiction from a Newbery Honor-winning author about how middle schooler Ariel Goldberg's life changes when her big sister elopes following the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, and she's forced to grapple with both her family's prejudice and the antisemitism she experiences, as she defines her own beliefs.Twelve-year-old Ariel Goldberg's life feels like the moment after the final guest leaves the party.

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Superfine: Tailoring Black Style @ The Met

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Monica L. MillerMay 14, 202523 min. read

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“No Indifferent Appearance” - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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How is Black dandyism integral to Black identity and the history of fashion?

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Facing History & Ourselves is offering an array of professional development opportunities for teachers and school administrators this summer. Through these transformational learning experiences, you'll get access to innovative teaching strategies; new scholarship around identity, history, and equity; and curricular resources grounded in our unique approach. All will help you start the next school year better prepared to foster an equitable and student-centered learning environment.

Choose from self-paced or live professional development workshops, webinars, and courses for educators.

Why take professional development with Facing History

Professional development is vital for teachers in our ever-changing world. Continuous learning introduces educators to new pedagogical approaches and helps teachers adapt to teaching trends and standards. Professional development with Facing History also helps educators invite students to consider how they can make a positive impact on the world.

Empowering students to create a better future begins with equipping educators. Our professional development opportunities provide teachers with the tools to help students delve into identity and human behavior, reflect on the choices they face in their lives today, and contemplate how they can contribute positively to the world. By investing in professional growth, educators can foster more engaging and impactful learning experiences, preparing students to take an active role in shaping a more just and inclusive society.

Who these learning experiences are for

We have summer professional development opportunities for teachers, school leaders, and other types of educators who are passionate about making a difference. Most Facing History professional development offerings are geared toward middle and high school educators.

Through our learning experiences, you will connect, collaborate, and exchange ideas with dedicated educators who share your commitment to building safe, inclusive classrooms for all students to thrive.

Online Workshops and Seminars for Teachers

Each of our seminars and workshops for teachers is a real-time, interactive online classroom that incorporates our teaching methodology. Experience new and proven teaching strategies firsthand and connect with educators across the globe in expertly facilitated sessions. Seminars and workshops range from one- to four-day commitments. We estimate a time commitment of up to four to five hours each day.

Self-Paced Online Courses

Our six-week online courses, running from July 13 to August 23 are primarily self-paced and asynchronous with facilitated online discussions and optional synchronous live learning sessions. We estimate these courses are a commitment of three to four hours per week for six weeks.

Self-Paced Online Workshops

Our self-paced online workshops for teachers and educators are entirely self-guided. Each workshop features five distinct learning modules, which take about an hour to complete.

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Summer Professional Development for Teachers

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Facing History & Ourselves is offering an array of professional development opportunities for teachers and school administrators this summer. Through these transformational learning experiences, you'll get access to innovative teaching strategies; new scholarship around identity, history, and equity; and curricular resources grounded in our unique approach.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - Hanging half loose from its stretcher, a portrait of Thomas Jefferson reveals an image of a Black woman behind it. It's a provocative juxtaposition that raises a question about the relationship between the two subjects. Her hair is covered while her partially shown shoulder and leg are bare. She is brown-skinned with an indeterminable gaze. She evokes both assertion and alarm.

Titled "Beyond the Myth of Benevolence" (2014), the painting by Titus Kaphar was inspired by a Rembrandt Peale portrait of Jefferson made in 1800.

"This painting is about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and yet it is not," Kaphar said. "The reason I say, 'And yet it is not,' is because we know from the actual history that Sally Hemings was very fair. Very, very fair. The woman who sits here is not just simply a representation of Sally Hemings, she's more of a symbol of many of the Black women whose stories have been shrouded by the narratives of our deified founding fathers."

"This painting is about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and yet it is not. ...The woman who sits here is not just simply a representation of Sally Hemings, she's more of a symbol of many of the Black women whose stories have been shrouded by the narratives of our deified founding fathers."
- Titus Kaphar

Based in New Haven, Conn., Kaphar makes paintings in the style of Classic and Renaissance portraiture. Defined by physical manipulation, his work literally reconstructs accepted narratives. He rips the canvases from their frames, rolls them up, cuts them or white washes them with strokes of white paint, in order to surface suppressed histories, reckon with the nation's racial past, and undo certain biographies and expose their multifaceted nature.

The artist's depictions of prominent white men in U.S. history explore their relationships and complex interactions with African Americans and Native Americans. The Jefferson portrait hangs in a gallery alongside paintings of Andrew Jackson, Christopher Columbus, and Thaddeus Stephens (1792-1868), the congressman from Pennsylvania, who had a common law relationship with his widowed housekeeper, a "mixed-race" woman named Lydia Hamilton Smith (1815-1884).

In his portrait of Stephens, Kaphar concentrates on his eyes. The rest of his face is obscured because the canvas has been inched up to reveal a seated Black female figure. A red blanket falls around her hips and she appears to have raised the canvas by pulling a red string, an act of agency lifting the veil on their connection.

KAPHAR'S PAINTINGS ARE ON VIEW in "UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar," a new exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. The show examines the absence of African Americans, Latino Americans, and Native Americans in historical portraiture and weighs how their invisibility has influenced our understanding of U.S. history.

"UnSeen" examines the absence of African Americans, Latino Americans, and Native Americans in historical portraiture and weighs how their invisibility has influenced our understanding of U.S. history.

The museum is marking its 50th anniversary this year with a series of special exhibitions and events examining the history of American portraiture and the challenges of representation. Unveiling the portraits of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in February was a major part of the programming.

Dating back to the nation's founding, white men who owned land and could vote were the subjects of formal portraiture. As an art form, portraiture affirmed social standing. Few women and people of color appeared in portraits. When they did, their appearance was most often alongside the white male subject or often in the background, serving to confirm the power and status of the main sitter.

Co-organized by Asma Naeem, the museum's curator of Prints, Drawing and Media Arts, and Taína Caragol, curator of Painting and Sculpture and Latino Art and History, "UnSeen" is the National Portrait Gallery's first anniversary exhibition to feature work by contemporary artists.

The exhibition consists of two solo shows presented in parallel. Ken Gonzales-Day collaborated with Caragol and Naeem worked with Kaphar. After a welcome from museum's director Kim Sajet, the artists and curators walked the press through the show on Thursday in advance of its March 23 opening.

Both artists concentrate on untold histories and reframing the American narrative, but their practices are vastly different.

LOS ANGELES-BASED GONZALES-DAY mines museum archives and photographs sculptural objects most of them rarely, if ever, displayed publicly. His work deconstructs racial hierarchies, considers beauty ideals, and evaluates how artists have treated and interpreted white bodies and bodies of color. He embarked on this aspect of his practice in 2008 during a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Over the past decade, he said he has been given free reign to explore the collections of about 20 museums around the world.

In "UnSeen," one gallery focuses on busts and life masks found in Washington, D.C., museums. Gonzales-Day said he wanted show how "our" country presents its people in the nation's capital. "13 Plasters: Presidents, Men of Art and Science, and Military Men at the National Portrait Gallery" is a large-scale tableaux image of casts of figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, and George Washington-all white men, no women or people of color. Individual images of Native American busts from the National Museum of Natural History hang on the opposite wall.

The busts were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the cooperation of living Native Americans under the guidance of Smithsonian anthropologists, either in the course of field research or through meetings with Native American delegates visiting Washington to negotiate land rights and sign treaties.

"By juxtaposing these two types of sculptures and these individuals, Ken is asking us to consider them on equal ground as integral people to American history," Caragol said. Then she pointed out one of the busts, "Gives to the Poor, Pawnee Scout Battalion, United States Army" (1887), and said until recently the subject had been identified with the wrong name.

"We've been working together for four years on this project and this is a lot of thinking about not just what is missing, but who is missing. I've looked up the genealogies of all of these individuals going back as far as I could. It's not only about absence or erasure, this is really about trying to fill in some gaps," said Gonzales-Day.

"The sculpture was unidentified on a shelf and now he has his name back ("Gives to the Poor"). ...It's been misidentified for 100 years. You are the first people to know his real name outside the community and it's only because Taína and I worked together, mostly Taína on this one, to help give that name back. There are stakes here that are very real. She was just emailing descendants."

"We've been working together for four years on this project and this is a lot of thinking about not just what is missing, but who is missing. ...It's not only about absence or erasure but this is really about trying to fill in some gaps." - Ken Gonzales-Day

Profiled Series: KEN GONZALES-DAY, "Gives to the Poor, Pawnee Scout Battalion, United States Army by unidentified artist, plaster, 1887; National Museum of Natural History," 2014/printed 2017 (archival ink on rag paper). | Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Copyright 2017, Ken Gonzales-Day, all rights reserved

DAY'S GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH extends to the history of lynching. Generally from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, Blacks in the South were the targets of lynchings at the hands of whites. Lesser known is the history of other races victimized by lynching.

Historically, the NAACP kept track of lynchings, categorizing victims in two distinct groups-Black or white. The vast majority were Black and, according to Gonzales-Day, those recorded as white, in most cases were actually Latino American, Native American, or Asian American.

In the exhibition, he examines the gamut, emphasizing the violent incidents that took place in the Western United States. He also notes prior research that uncovered documentation of 547 Mexicans killed by lynching between 1848 and 1928.

The artist's "Erased Lynchings" series is based on archival images of lynchings that occurred between 1850 to 1942. Modest-sized gatherings and mob scenes near trees and hanging scaffolds in places like Canon City Colo., Delphi, Ind., Tampa, Fla., Atlanta, Ga., and Downieville, Calif., are shown in the historic photographs. The captions reference "Executing Bandits in Mexico" and describe some victims as "Unidentified African American."

Gonzales-Day presents 21 images previously circulated as postcards and souvenirs in a gallery-style installation. Using digital editing, he has removed the victims from the images, in order to to avoid re-victimizing them and concentrate on the people gathered to witness their violent deaths. The wall text describes the bystanders as "men in suits, children looking perplexed, and soldiers smiling broadly."

The artist's "Erased Lynchings" series is based on archival images of lynchings that occurred between 1850 to 1942. Mob scenes near trees and hanging scaffolds are shown in the historic photographs. The wall text describes the bystanders as "men in suits, children looking perplexed, and soldiers smiling broadly."

ACROSS THE CORRIDOR, Kaphar is showing 17 paintings and one sculpture. "UnSeen" is the largest presentation of his work to date. Similar to Gonzales-Day, his output is the result of an inordinate amount of time spent in museums. Kaphar has an affinity for history and art history and obsessively studied early portraiture to enhance his academic training (he has an MFA from Yale) and become a better painter. But the exercise was not without conflict, which is evident in his work.

Kaphar addresses the marginalization and absence of African Americans in portraiture by foregrounding them and introducing interventions that speak to the complications of American history. A portrait of a white woman and Black man in formal dress titled "Civil Union," acknowledges interracial unions dating back centuries. "The Fight for Remembrance II," an image of a Black Union soldier in uniform, responds to the little-told contributions of African Americans in the Civil War. Kaphar applied bold slashes of white paint to both of these paintings, partially obscuring the images to emphasize the historic erasure of the narratives.

(He used the same white-washing technique in 2014 when he depicted a contemporary moment for Time magazine -the protestors in Ferguson, Mo., who took a stand against the police killing of Mike Brown.)

A pair of paintings imagines how Billy Lee (1750-1828), George Washington's valet, and Ona Judge (c. 1773-1848), who served as a personal attendant to Martha Washington, would appear if they had the opportunity to sit for formal portraits. The fine silk clothing worn by the enslaved figures contrasts with the black tar impasto covering their faces, a gesture Kaphar employed to speak to the absence of their images in the American canon and his inability, therefore, to depict them accurately.

His "Columbus Day Painting" subverts the hero narrative of Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer and colonizer. Inspired by John Vanderlyn's 1846 painting, "Landing of Columbus," Kaphar shrouds Columbus and his crew in raw canvas, shifting the viewer's focus to the indigenous people easily overlooked in the background, on the margins.

"I at once see the fact that these images support Colonialist ideas and at the same time, as a maker, as a person interested in material, as a person interested in history, I still really love them," Kaphar said. "So the works themselves exist in that place of conflict. It's not simply a critique of the past, in that way. It's a wrestling, trying to come to an understanding within myself."

"I at once see the fact that these images support Colonialist ideas and at the same time, as a maker, as a person interested in material, as a person interested in history, I still really love them. So the works themselves exist in that place of conflict." - Titus Kaphar

THE SMITHSONIAN, America's foremost public, cultural institution, ranks among major organizations such as National Geographic, the New York Times, and universities that benefitted from slavery, that are beginning to reconcile the narrow narrative they have been promoting for generations with the more complex truth of the nation's founding, its shameful history with race, and the diverse figures who contributed to its progress. Introducing Kaphar's work, Naeem spoke to the revolutionary symbolism of the images presented in "UnSeen."

"We're asking some tough questions," she said. "We're asking questions that may have not been asked before and we are asking questions about whose history is told. Who is shown on our walls? Who has been erased from our histories and hasn't been shown and how can those exclusions lead to different interpretations of history?" CT
"UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar" is on view at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., March 23, 2018-Jan. 6, 2019.
CORRECTION (03/28/18): This story was updated to cite the correct source regarding the lynching of 547 Mexicans. The information does not come from the research of Ken Gonzales-Day, but prior findings documented by William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb and published in their book "Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928."

READ MORE about Titus Kaphar and Ken Gonzales-Day on their websites

BOOKSHELF
"Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)" documents Ken Gonzales-Day's lynching research. Published by the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Profiled (LACMA PAC Prize, 2011)," explores his work mining museum collections to analyze depictions of race in sculptural objects dating from the 18th to 20th century.

Profiled Series: KEN GONZALES-DAY, "Untitled: Bust of an African Woman by Henry Weeks, marble, 1859. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Bust of Mm. Adélaïde Julie Mirleau de Newville, née Garnier d'Isle by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, marble, 1750s. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles," 2009/printed 2017 (archival ink on rag paper). | Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Copyright 2017, Ken Gonzales-Day, all rights reserved

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National Portrait Gallery: Titus Kaphar and Ken Gonzales-Day Explore 'UnSeen' Narratives in Historic Portraiture

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - Hanging half loose from its stretcher, a portrait of Thomas Jefferson reveals an image of a Black woman behind it. It's a provocative juxtaposition that raises a question about the relationship between the two subjects. Her hair is covered while her partially shown shoulder and leg are bare.

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“Part treatise, part memoir, part call to action, Tell Me How It Ends inspires not through a stiff stance of authority, but with the curiosity and humility Luiselli has long since established.” —Annalia Luna, Brazos Bookstore”Valeria Luiselli’s extended essay on her volunteer work translating for child immigrants confronts with compassion and honesty the problem of the North American refugee crisis. It’s a rare thing: a book everyone should read.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books”Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Trump work being published in early 2017.” —Katharine Solheim, Unabridged Books”While this essay is brilliant for exactly what it depicts, it helps open larger questions, which we’re ever more on the precipice of now, of where all of this will go, how all of this might end. Is this a story, or is this beyond a story? Valeria Luiselli is one of those brave and eloquent enough to help us see.” —Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company”Appealing to the language of the United States’ fraught immigration policy, Luiselli exposes the cracks in this foundation. Herself an immigrant, she highlights the human cost of its brokenness, as well as the hope that it (rather than walls) might be rebuilt.” —Brad Johnson, Diesel Bookstore”The bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration, the dangers of searching for a better life, all of this and more is contained in this brief and profound work. Tell Me How It Ends is not just relevant, it’s essential.” —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore”Humane yet often horrifying, Tell Me How It Ends offers a compelling, intimate look at a continuing crisis—and its ongoing cost in an age of increasing urgency.” —Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

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National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Shelf Awareness, Goodreads, Esquire, The Atlantic, NPR, and Barack Obama With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience. In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them. How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.

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Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * Winner of the Whiting Award * Longlisted for the National Book Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize * Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize * Finalist for the Kirkus Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Refinery29, NPR, The Root, HuffPost, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Chicago Tribune, PopSugar, and The Undefeated In one of the season’s most acclaimed works of fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires offers “a firecracker of a book...a triumph of storytelling: intelligent, acerbic, and ingenious” (Financial Times).Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with race, identity politics, and the contemporary middle class in this “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo) collection. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks—while others are devastatingly poignant. In the title story, when a cosplayer, dressed as his favorite anime character, is mistaken for a violent threat the consequences are dire; in another story, a teen struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with so-called black culture. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires “has taken the best of what Toni Cade Bambara, Morgan Parker, and Junot Díaz do plus a whole lot of something we’ve never seen in American literature, blended it all together...giving us one of the finest short-story collections” (Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division).

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Grade 6

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Inside Out and Back Again is a #1 New York Times bestseller, a Newbery Honor Book, and a winner of the National Book Award! Inspired by the author’s childhood experience as a refugee—fleeing Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon and immigrating to Alabama—this coming-of-age debut novel told in verse has been celebrated for its touching child’s-eye view of family and immigration.Hà has only ever known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, and the warmth of her friends close by. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. Hà and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope—toward America. This moving story of one girl’s year of change, dreams, grief, and healing received four starred reviews, including one from Kirkus which proclaimed it “enlightening, poignant, and unexpectedly funny.” An author’s note explains how and why Thanhha Lai translated her personal experiences into Hà’s story. This updated digital edition also includes an interview with the author, an activity you can do with your family, tips on writing poetry, and discussion questions.

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Bringing Student Civic Learning & Reflection to Life with Infographics- Facing History 

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Bringing Student Civic Learning & Reflection to Life with Infographics- Facing History 

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Bringing Student Civic Learning & Reflection to Life with Infographics

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Join us and KQED during national Civic Learning Week to explore ways students can identify, research, and communicate about issues they care about.

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Writing Black, Writing Back, Writing Beyond with Joanna Davis-McElligatt | The Center for Fiction

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Online | How have Black writers responded to (or ignored) Faulkner’s vision of the South? Uncover how three Black women—Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Jesmyn Ward—write the South on their own terms, imagining the afterlife of slavery, manipulating history…

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Lincoln Center's Summer Forum · Lincoln Center

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From July 9-12, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts presents Summer Forum, bringing together teaching artists, educators, and practicing artists to...

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Learn how to design discipline-specific literacy instruction that increases academic engagement and supports college and career readiness. This practical resource offers contexts and strategies for addressing a fundamental question that teachers bring to their work with middle and high school learners: How do I support literacy development alongside specific content goals? By exploring the histories and potentials of discipline-specific literacy instruction, this book provides a clear framework for engaging students as active participants in the authentic activities and processes of each content area. It goes beyond content-area reading strategies by situating literacy within the purposes, audiences, and formats of each area of study. Readers are invited to develop their own disciplinary knowledge to ensure authenticity in their representations of literate practices, to involve students deeply in the work of their disciplinary communities, and to support students' continued engagement beyond the classroom.

Book Features:

Strategies to deepen teachers' awareness of disciplinary text, practices, and habits of mind to inform the ways they model, teach, and invite literacy into their classrooms.

Activities to support students in developing the meta-discursive awareness that allows them to navigate the texts of different disciplines.

Guidance to intentionally and expertly develop multiple literacies that create equity, choice, and access for all learners.

Exercises and examples appropriate for educators entering the field, as well as veterans who want to revitalize their instruction or prepare for new content, courses, or grade levels.

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Learn how to design discipline-specific literacy instruction that increases academic engagement and supports college and career readiness. This practical resource offers contexts and strategies for addressing a fundamental question that teachers bring to their work with middle and high school learners: How do I support literacy development alongside specific content goals?

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"My favorite maps have always been the ones made in the moment, either out of necessity or on a whim."

- Tim wallace, senior editor of geography, new york times

"My favorite maps have always been the ones made in the moment, either out of necessity or on a whim."

- Tim wallace, senior editor of geography, new york times

Start creating maps today.

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Felt - The best way to work with maps on the internet

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Felt lets you create maps collaboratively, using world-class data, and share them in a single click. For team projects or epic adventure with friends.

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

"This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."-San Francisco Chronicle

IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE * Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD * NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time * NPR * The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * Vanity Fair * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Paste * Town & Country * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her-but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children-the violent and capricious separation of families-and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer isa propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations-and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy." -Rolling Stone

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1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom."This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi

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As an English teacher, Kate Roberts has seen the power of whole-class novels to build community in her classroom. But she's also seen too many kids struggle too much to read them--and consequently, check out of reading altogether. Kate's had better success getting kids to actually read - and enjoy it--when they choose their own books within a workshop model. "And yet," she says, "I missed my whole-class novels."

In A Novel Approach, Kate takes a deep dive into the troubles and triumphs of both whole-class novels and independent reading and arrives at a persuasive conclusion: we can find a student-centered, balanced approach to teaching reading. Kate offers a practical framework for creating units that join both teaching methods together and helps you: - Identify the skills your students need to learn
- Choose whole-class texts that will be most relevant to your kids
- Map out the timing of a unit and the strategies you'll teach
- Meet individual needs while teaching whole novels
- Guide students to choice books and book clubs that build on the skills being taught. Above all, Kate's plan emphasizes teaching reading skills and strategies over the books themselves. "By making sure that our classes are structured in a way that really sees students and strives to meet their needs," she argues, "we can keep reaching for the dream of a class where no student is unmoved, no reader unchanged by the end of the year." Video clips of Kate working with students in diverse classrooms bring the content to life throughout the book.

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As an English teacher, Kate Roberts has seen the power of whole-class novels to build community in her classroom. But she's also seen too many kids struggle too much to read them--and consequently, check out of reading altogether. Kate's had better success getting kids to actually read - and enjoy it--when they choose their own books within a workshop model.

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Finding ways to organize your classroom instruction for knowledge building and literacy learning can be challenging. How can you incorporate more nonfiction and informational text in your content area curriculum while expanding and deepening representation with diverse texts? What can motivate student learning while providing equity and access for different learning styles and needs? Text sets are the answer!In Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy, authors Erika Thulin Dawes and Mary Ann Cappiello demonstrate how text sets offer students the opportunity to build critical thinking skills and informational literacy while generating interest and engagement across the content areas. Put your students in the center of the meaning-making in your classroom with multimodal multi-genre text sets in action. In Text Sets in Action, the authors:

Model how text sets build foundational skills and metacognitive strategies as students experience a carefully scaffolded and sequenced exploration of ideas, academic, and content vocabulary

Explain how text sets encourage classroom discussion by having students ask questions about what they read, debate different perspectives, and relate the texts to their own personal experiences and the changes they would like to see in the world

Show how children's literature and multimodal, multi-genre texts can serve as mentor texts for student writing and inspire creativity and advocacy

Demonstrate how to curate text sets that can introduce diverse and underrepresented voices into the classroom, fostering appreciation for different points of view and generate deeper critical thinking

Provide resources and suggestions for designing text sets a multimodal, multi-genre text set can include children's literature of all genres, as well as digital texts, YouTube videos, news articles, podcasts, and more

Text Sets in Action will help you create a collection of text sets that can be added to or edited over the years to align with your lesson plan goals. Teachers who have adopted this approach saw greater student reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. By introducing a multitude of text, teachers will ignite a spirit of inquiry and engagement for lifelong learning.

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Finding ways to organize your classroom instruction for knowledge building and literacy learning can be challenging. How can you incorporate more nonfiction and informational text in your content area curriculum while expanding and deepening representation with diverse texts? What can motivate student learning while providing equity and access for different learning styles and needs?

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An unforgettable journey through the stars, to the very heart of what makes us human. The incredible Newbery Medal-winning novel from Donna Barba Higuera.“Gripping in its twists and turns, and moving in its themes - truly a beautiful cuento.”- NEW YORK TIMESHabía una vez . . .There lived a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita.But Petra’s world is ending. Earth will soon be destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children - among them Petra and her family - have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race.Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet - and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinister Collective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity’s past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard - or purged them altogether.Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, any hope for our future. Can she make them live again?

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Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB

American Book Award winner

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Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book AwardA haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . .

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Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Don't miss Alvarez's new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, available now!
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas-the Butterflies.
In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.
"Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."-Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review
"This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." -Popsugar.com
"A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." - People
"Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." - Los Angeles Times
"A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time." - St. Petersburg Times
"Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."-Cosmopolitan.com

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Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo."

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WINNER OF THE 2021 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY O MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER, THE WASHINGTON POST, REAL SIMPLE, THE GUARDIAN, AND MORE

FINALIST FOR: THE STORY PRIZE, THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE, THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE

"Sublime short stories of race, grief, and belonging . . . an extraordinary new collection . . ." -The New Yorker

"Evans's new stories present rich plots reflecting on race relations, grief, and love . . ." -The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice
"Danielle Evans demonstrates, once again, that she is the finest short story writer working today." -Roxane Gay, The New York Times-bestselling author of Difficult Women and Bad Feminist

The award-winning author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history.

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters' lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief-all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history-about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.

In "Boys Go to Jupiter," a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend's unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a black scholar from Washington, DC, is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.

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WINNER OF THE 2021 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY O MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER, THE WASHINGTON POST, REAL SIMPLE, THE GUARDIAN, AND MORE FINALIST FOR: THE STORY PRIZE, THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE, THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE "Sublime short stories of race, grief, and belonging .

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About The Book

A "heartfelt and thoroughly enriching" (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders) work that expands on how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

"Brilliant and beautiful" (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

About The Author

Camille T. Dungy is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Book Award. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Raves and Reviews

" Soil is on one level a book about the rewards of gardening...On a deeper level it's about Black American resilience and roots. [ Soil] insist[s] on making the domestic visible and argue[s] that an ethics of care that we often associate with maternity-whether we are mothers or not-is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis. [Dungy] emphasize[s] the collective over the individual, posing old questions in fresh and urgent ways: What is our responsibility to the next generation? What does it mean to mother through perilous times of uncertainty, struggle, trauma, and change; to mother against violence, discrimination, plunder, and greed? To write "mother" as verb?" -The New York Review

"Fans of Dungy's poetry will delight in her sparkling prose, and the wide-ranging meditations highlight the connections between land, freedom, and race. It's a lyrical and pensive take on what it means to put down roots." -Publishers Weekly

"Instead of the conventional nature narrative, in which an individual-most often White and well-off-communes with nature, Dungy offers a more complex, nuanced story in which the experience of nature is vital but is also entangled with race, national and family history, motherhood, and more. The text is the literary equivalent of the garden Dungy gradually coaxed into being: lively, messy, beset by invasive weeds, colorful, constantly changing, never quite under control, and endlessly interconnected." -Kirkus Reviews

"In Soil, Dungy plants poems next to memoir next to critical analysis next to environmental history next to African American history, cultivating the radical ecological thought she wants to see more of in the world. This vibrant memoir challenges readers to look beyond the racial and scientific uniformness of most environmental literature and discover the rich wildness and hope that lies all around them." -BookPage

"Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home." -Harvard Book Store

"In Soil, Dungy draws a connection between diversifying the plant life in her garden and diversifying the canon of nature writing." -NPR

"A poignant portrait of life and its challenges, told through the beauty of nature." -Library Journal (starred review)

"This book isn't just a pastoral portrait of the American west. It's also a window into the care and awareness we bring to the spaces we call home." -LitHub

"In Soil, [Dungy] creates a lively space for all voices to sprout and become included in the solutions that can help build, rather than tear down, diverse communities, both human and non-human... In another testament tocommunity, Dungy demonstrates the possibility of inspirational and informativeenvironmental literature that calls for our family and loved onesin and throughout." -The Brooklyn Rail

"This is a smart, beautiful, wide-ranging book that will draw you in and change how you look at the world around you." -The Southern Bookseller Review

"In her new book, Soil, [Dungy] takes her trowel to the issues of justice, wilderness, brutality, and neighborliness, and the garden that blooms through her sentences is both captivating and sobering." -The Millions

"A heartfelt and thoroughly enchanting tribute to family and community. Dungy shows us how to tend a garden, and how to tend a full and fragrant life." -AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, NYT Bestselling Author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

"The green of growing things calms me. Plants stabilize me," Camille Dungy writes in this brilliant and beautiful memoir of her deepening relationship with the earth that necessarily demands she consider questions of family, history, race, nation, and power. Soil demands we witness what erodes or frays or severs the stabilizing roots between us. Let us put our hands in and try to listen." - Ross Gay, NYT Bestselling Author of The Book of Delights

"Gardening, poetry, motherhood, history-dirty and beautiful, difficult and sublime, the agony of failure, the exhalation of a spring bloom. . . Dungy's poetic ear illuminates her language, whether listing botanical names or reflecting on the tumult of the 2020s. A significant, beautiful, meditative, and wholly down-to-earth memoir with high appeal for book groups and nature lovers." -BOOKLIST (Starred Review)

"Camille Dungy's SOIL is an instant classic. Provocative, beautifully written, and also wildly informative, this memoir cum manifesto asks us to contemplate our responsibility to our land - and each other. I felt transformed by this graceful and generous book." - Jami Attenberg, Author of I Came All This Way to Meet You

"With this book Dungy shows, by comparison, how unrooted so many of us are - ecologically, historically, and socially - and makes a poetic case that home is where you know the plants. This poignant, lovely work will make you want to nurture a garden, and all life." - Ayana Johnson, Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab

"In Soil, Camille Dungy welcomes us into an abundant, intimate, unfurling space - the exterior landscape of her garden and the interior landscape of her sapience. To dig in the dirt, we learn, is also to dig up and into history, identity, ecology, hope. Dungy shows, by example, how to honor the pain and the possibility of whatever fraught, holy ground we each call home. A deeply life-giving book." - Katharine Wilkinson, Executive Director of The All We Can Save Project

"Camille Dungy is one of the greatest American writers, period. And Soil is her finest work yet. In prose that is personal, political, urgent, and honest, Dungy lays bare the perils of homogeneity -in our gardens and in our communities-and offers powerful reminders of why diversity-that watered-down, defanged buzzword-matters. Soil is a delicate and resilient exploration of gardening, motherhood, memory, love, and what it means to thrive as a Black woman tending her garden, her family, and her career in a white supremacist ecosystem." -Kate Schatz, NYT-Bestselling author of Rad American Women A-Z and Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book

"We are all of the soil. Whether clay, sand, loam or rocky till, each of us arises from it. Camille Dungy's Soil, is the new ground work for growing an illumination of our ties to to the precious earth lain under our feet. From what suffers to grow in her Rocky Mountain backyard, through sketches of Black folk's ties to seed, furrow, mule and hoe, she digs into our soul solum with an artfully conversational style, that's bound to a personal and conversational vulnerability, which firmly links everything important to us, to the fertility underfoot. Herein, Dungy winds Earth's care into human justice and wildness, then tends the story of connections to nature past, present and to come, upward around an awareness of how root, tendril, blossom, bird and bee, make us who we are. Camille is our perennial flower, bloomed again in Soil." -J. Drew Lanham, Author of The Home Place -- Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed 2016)

"What an intoxicating book. Dungy's words smell of rot, roots, and blossoms. She brings proof that incantations for nature can come from a yard in a subdivision, and that a family can turn hard soil into life." -Craig Childs, Author of House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

Resources and Downloads

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Soil by Camille T Dungy - A "heartfelt and thoroughly enriching" (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders) work that exp...

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Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

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The classic, bestselling book on the psychology of racism-now fully revised and updated Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America.“An unusually sensitive work about the racial barriers that still divide us in so many areas of life.”--Jonathan Kozol

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view - From the "literary icon" (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson's critically acclaimed film American Fiction
"Genius"--The Atlantic - "A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own."--Chicago Tribune - "A provocative, enlightening literary work of art."--The Boston Globe - "Everett's most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful."--The New York Times

"If you liked Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, read J ames, by Percival Everett" -- The Washington Post

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a "literary icon" ( Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view - From the "literary icon" (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson's critically acclaimed film

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Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life's biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.

A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family.

Khong's follow-up to her sweet, slim debut- Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)-is again about parents and children but on a more ambitious scale, portraying three generations in what feel like three linked novellas, or somehow also like three connected gardens. The first begins in 1999 New York City, where Lily Chen stands next to a man at an office party who wins a big-screen TV in the raffle. He insists she take it; he is Matthew Maier, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and has all the TVs he needs. On their first date, they go to Paris after dinner, and as this section ends, they've had their first child. The second part of the book moves to 2021 on an island off the coast of Washington state. It's narrated by Lily's now-15-year-old son, Nick; his father is nowhere in sight, at least for now. The closing section unfolds in 2030 in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's told by Lily's now elderly mother, May, with an extended flashback to her youth in China during the Cultural Revolution and her first years in the U.S. As a budding scientist, May was fascinated by genetics. Of the lotus flowers she studied at university, she observes, "Raindrop-shaped buds held petals that crept closer, each day, to unfurling. As humans we were made of the same stuff, but their nucleotides were coded such that they grew round, green leaves instead of our human organs, our beating hearts." This concern for how and why we turn out the way we do animates the book on every level, and along with science, social constructs like race and class play major roles. Every character is dear, and every one of them makes big mistakes, causing a ripple effect of anger and estrangement that we watch with dismay, and hope.

Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life's biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.

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A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family.

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Emmanuel Ebegbe, Rivers Curry, Tyler Timmers, Max Korte

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What do The Douglass Family Scrapbooks Show Us?

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NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD

"If you read one debut novel in 2022, this should be it." -Los Angeles Times

In the bustling streets and cloistered homes of Lagos, a cast of vivid characters-some haunted, some defiant-navigate danger, demons, and love in a quest to lead true lives.
As in Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. They are those who inhabit transient spaces, who make their paths and move invisibly, who embrace apparitions, old vengeances and alternative realities. Eloghosa Osunde's brave, fiercely inventive novel traces a wild array of characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance: a driver for a debauched politician with the power to command life and death; a legendary fashion designer who gives birth to a grown daughter; a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work; a wife and mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her world. As their lives intertwine-in bustling markets and underground clubs, churches and hotel rooms-vagabonds are seized and challenged by spirits who command the city's dark energy. Whether running from danger, meeting with secret lovers, finding their identities, or vanquishing their shadowselves, Osunde's characters confront and support one another, before converging for the once-in-a-lifetime gathering that gives the book its unexpectedly joyous conclusion.

Blending unvarnished realism with myth and fantasy, Vagabonds! is a vital work of imagination that takes us deep inside the hearts, minds, and bodies of a people in duress-and in triumph.

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NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKERLONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD"If you read one debut novel in 2022, this should be it."

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In partnership with the United Way of New York City, Eagle Academy Foundation, Black Edfluencers-United, and Association of Black Educators of New York, BERC is leading the development of an interdisciplinary PK-12 Black studies curriculum and professional learning plan for the New York City schools and assessing educational equity in NYC with a focus on the implications for Black students, families, educators, and communities.

Read the full TC Newsroom article

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EEAP Project | Black Education Research Center | Teachers College, Columbia University

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Teachers College, Columbia University, is the first and largest graduate school of education in the United States, and also perennially ranked among the nation's best.

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A pilot to infuse Black history and culture in social studies curriculum is gaining ground in the nation's largest school district, offering a potential model to overcome widespread political debates over how to teach race in public schools.

In a symposium on the project at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference last week, M.C. Brown II, the executive director at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, called New York City's $3.25 million Black studies curriculum "a nationally historic moment."

The curriculum "acknowledges the history and the contributions of Black Americans predating slavery, which is where much of American social studies begins," Brown said, "and provides a paradigm for professional learning that can support effective implementation, not just in New York City, but around the world."

The project comes amid vicious political fights over critical race theory, which holds that race is a social construct, and racism can be embedded in policies and laws (such as enrollment policies that tend to segregate schools), not just personal prejudice. The legal concept is separate from but often conflated with culturally responsive teaching, which holds that students learn more effectively when teachers use their customs, experiences, and identities as tools in the classroom.

The New York curriculum, developed in collaboration between local educators and the Black Education Research Center at Columbia University Teachers College, includes pre-K-12 lessons aligned with the state's language arts and social studies standards, designed to be used throughout the year. If it proves successful in an ongoing evaluation, the collaborative plans to roll it out to more schools in New York and other states.

Dawn Brooks DeCosta, the deputy superintendent of the 6,500-student Harlem Community School District 5, said its 23 schools piloted units of the curriculum this year across different grades.

Harlem District 5 recruited elementary and secondary teachers with backgrounds and interests in Black studies. They met biweekly with researchers from the Black Education Research Center at neighboring Teachers College, Columbia University to design curricular standards and units, as well as professional development needed for teachers.

"As teachers were contributing and helping to refine and design the lesson, ... they didn't understand what it means to co-design," said Rodney Hopson, acting education co-dean and professor at American University, who is leading an evaluation of the curriculum. "It wasn't just like, 'Here's a [curriculum] package, run with it,' ... we were actually trying to collaboratively build this thing together."

For example, Samantha Chung, a Teachers College doctoral researcher, helped design a unit for 5th grade in which students read and listen to Black poets and discuss the literary form's use in advocacy.

"Black studies started out with a pedagogical mission, not just content," said Joyce King, the chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership and an education policy professor at Georgia State University, during the discussion at AERA. "... That includes inspiring people to learn deeply and critically about the African diaspora histories and contemporary social formation, to recognize and affirm our peoplehood-that we are a people across many different cultures."

In New York, that's particularly important, according to Linda Tillman, chairman of BERC's advisory board. Tillman said teachers and researchers worked to incorporate Dominican, Puerto Rican, and other Black students' cultures into the curriculum "to combat misconceptions about the history of African Americans and Black people throughout the global diaspora."

For example, in one of the earliest units, kindergarten students explore the meanings and origins of their names, and talk about the importance of pronouncing names correctly. Studies find name mispronunciations are often one of the earliest and most common alienating experiences, particularly for children of color.

Beyond 'Critical Race Theory' debates

The curriculum offers a holistic way for teachers to discuss the role of culture and race in American and world history at a time when many educators face restrictions on how they can approach the subject. As of 2023, at least 18 states have passed bans or limits on how teachers can discuss race or gender in class, and the research firm RAND Corp. found half of K-12 teachers nationwide said they face state and/or local restrictions on teaching about race.

Yet in a nationally representative survey this fall, more than 8 in 10 registered voters told the Black Education Research Center that public school students should learn both about the history of racism and slavery in the United States and how it affects students and communities today.

"Students should gain skills in biology and chemistry, physics, business, et cetera, and then use their Black studies knowledge, the curriculum, to gain an understanding of the significance of a role of those subject areas in the development of the Black community," said Kofi Lomotey, the chancellor and professor of educational leadership at Western Carolina University.

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How These Teachers Build Curriculum 'Beyond Black History'

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A pilot to infuse Black history and culture in social studies is gaining ground in New York.

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"Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family. . . Luiselli has become a writer to watch, in part because it's truly hard to know (but exciting to wonder about) where she will go next."-The New York Times

I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I'm grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.

Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous" like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Her novel, The Story of My Teeth, is the winner of the LA Times Book Prize in Fiction.

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"Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family. . .

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movementin the 1960s-and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. * "The finest essay I've ever read." -Ta-Nehisi Coates

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movementin the 1960s-and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. * "The finest essay I've ever read."

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Collectively growing readers, writers + thinkers. Contact Us NQC Literacy is a certified woman-owned education consulting firm supporting leaders + teachers in a holistic approach to literacy instruction. We work with PreK-8 schools + districts through tailored professional learning, individualized teacher coaching + long-term planning for powerful experiences that lead to strengthened communication skills serving [...]

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THE STORY: On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Catherine, a troubled young woman, has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, a famous mathematician. Now, following his death, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the

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THE STORY: On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Catherine, a troubled young woman, has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, a famous mathematician. Now, following his death, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the

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Deepen the dialogue to address racial disparities in your organization Schools, like all organizations, face a nearly insurmountable hurdle when addressing racial inequities--the inability to talk candidly about race. In this timely update, author Glenn Singleton enables you to break the silence and open an authentic dialogue that forges a path to progress for racial equity. The third edition offers new coverage of the structural inequities in schools and society that have been exposed by the pandemic as well as heightened public awareness of racial injustice. Courageous Conversations about Race allows you to deepen your personal understanding of race and its impact on all students. You will discover how to apply the strategy and protocol to Embrace the four agreements--stay engaged, speak your truth, experience discomfort and accept non-closure--to deepen interracial dialogue Build a foundation for advancing equity using the Six Conditions of Courageous Conversation Examine the role of race in your life using the Courageous Conversation Compass to understand and guide your actions Expand your capacity to lead others on the journey in addressing institutional racism disparities This guide empowers you with practical tools and insights to successfully challenge racist policies and practice in schools and beyond. It is your call to leadership--one that will impact student achievement and drive systemic transformation.

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Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year

One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú - the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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Winner of:The Pulitzer PrizeThe National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardThe Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel PrizeA Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...

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A great reccomendation from Jenn Kean Thompson

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An affecting picture book from Tameka Fryer Brown and #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator Nikkolas Smith (The 1619 Project: Born on the Water) that challenges the meaning behind the still-waving Confederate flag through the friendship of two young girls who live across the

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Grade 6 consideration

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This "important and timely" (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America-and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks-those that are honest about the past and those that are not-that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism
A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

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This "important and timely" (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America-and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

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The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race-collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation-are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify" (USA TODAY).
In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon."

Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwin's words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generation's most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns.

The Fire This Time is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume.

In the fifty-odd years since Baldwin's essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. Baldwin's "fire next time" is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about.

Contributors include Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Garnette Cadogan, Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Mitchell S. Jackson, Honoree Jeffers, Kima Jones, Kiese Laymon, Daniel Jose Older, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, Clint Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson, and Kevin Young.

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The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race-collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation-are "thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * One of today's most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone-not just for people of color.
WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, BookRiot, Library Journal

"This is the book I've been waiting for."-Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist

Look for the author's podcast, The Sum of Us, based on this book!

Heather McGhee's specialty is the American economy-and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis of 2008 to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a root problem: racism in our politics and policymaking. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?

McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm-the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she meets white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams, and their shot at better jobs to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country-from parks and pools to functioning schools-have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world's advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare.

But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: the benefits we gain when people come together across race to accomplish what we simply can't do on our own. The Sum of Us is not only a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also a heartfelt message, delivered with startling empathy, from a black woman to a multiracial America. It leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * One of today's most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone-not just for people of color.

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New York Times Bestseller * Notable Book of the Year * Editors' Choice Selection
One of Bill Gates' "Amazing Books" of the Year
One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Year
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction
Gold Winner * California Book Award (Nonfiction)
Finalist * Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)
Finalist * Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize

This "powerful and disturbing history" exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review).

Widely heralded as a "masterful" (Washington Post) and "essential" (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, "virtually indispensable" study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

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New York Times Bestseller * Notable Book of the Year * Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates' "Amazing Books" of the Year One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner * California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist * Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist * Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This "powerful and disturbing history" exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review).

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Teaching About the Native American Fight for Representation, Repatriation and Recognition (Published 2021)

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In this teaching resource, we provide six short lesson plans about the actions that Native Americans are taking to redress past wrongs and foster a better future.

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The way the question is phrased really embodies the key issue of scientific discourse: What's the relationship between a body of data and the conclusions one can draw from the data? I think we have to start off first by asking exactly what do we mean by athleticism. Because obviously a lot of diverse characteristics go into that - strength, flexibility, coordination, eyesight, endurance, just to name a few. But, obviously, very different kinds of talents are required in athletes. I happen to have seen a lot of white guys who jump quite well. They're all in ballet, not in basketball. But, one of the questions is what kinds of commonsense ideas are inflecting the way that the question is being asked. As opposed to a rigorous approach to it.

If we take the sort of commonsense idea that black people are faster than white people, what does that actually mean in a rigorous test? Does it mean that all blacks are faster than all whites? Well, that's demonstrably false. Does it mean a hypothetical average black person is faster than a hypothetical black person? Well, that's meaningless because I don't know how you'd find the hypothetical average person. Does it mean the ten fastest black people are faster than the ten fastest black people? This is, I think, close to what people mean when they say something like that. But the problem with that, is it's statistically nonsensical to characterize a group of a couple of billion people by its most extreme members.

What we're looking at here in the best athletes is essentially occupational overrepresentation. There are a lot of reasons why people are attracted to sports as a vocation. For example, in boxing, there's an overrepresentation of blacks. There's also an overrepresentation of Hispanics in boxing. It's a consequence of the opportunities open to the particular group in question. And where most avenues to upward mobility are closed to you, you're going to gravitate to something that seems just as low a probability of success as anything else. If other venues are open to you, that don't involve getting beaten up on a regular basis, you're probably more likely to take those.

When we look at the general issue of occupational overrepresentation, as evidence of genetic superiority, we're kind of left with the promise of Irish policeman yielding Irish police genes, and Jewish comedians being the result of Jewish comedy genes, and Chinese laundry genes, which, of course, is ridiculous. The point of all this is that there are a lot of reasons why people are attracted to certain professions and certain occupations and certain things to do with their lives. Only one of which is that they have some sort of natural ability for it.

Another important point is that while we like to talk about ability, we have no real way of measuring it. It's a metaphysical, abstract quality. Ability is something you're born with that is independent of the development you will incur during your life. But the fact is, the only thing that we can measure is what you actually do, how you actually perform. The score you get on a pencil and paper test, or whether you actually shoot ten freethrows in a row. And that is not independent of the life history that you have. Any IQ test, for example, has a vocabulary component. And there's no way that you can talk about vocabulary that is independent of the words you've been exposed to during the course of your life!

I'd love to do a count of, for instance, the proportion of Norwegians that won medals in the winter Olympics versus people from the Congo. Or even the number of Finns that have won middle distance races compared to the population size of Finns. My guess is, if we were focused on looking at, say, Scandinavian excellence in athletics, you could come up with the same set of questions being asked. What is it genetically about people in those cold countries and that Norwegian success in the winter Olympics? Well, gosh, maybe it's because they have a lot of snow up there or something like that.

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RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Ask the Experts | PBS

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The way the question is phrased really embodies the key issue of scientific discourse: What's the relationship between a body of data and the conclusions one can draw from the data? I think we have to start off first by asking exactly what do we mean by athleticism.

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This story map was created with the Story Map Cascade application in ArcGIS Online.

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Introduction

In " Healing From Moral Injury," Lauren Porosoff writes, "Psychologist Brett Litz and his colleagues define 'moral injury' as 'perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.'" Have you suffered a moral injury? Did the experience hurt your professional practice and the way you feel about teaching?

Self-reflection is powerful tool in healing from moral injury and sustaining your service to students.

Essential Questions

1. How can I reflect on a moral injury?

2. How can I recover from a moral injury?

Procedure

1. Read the personal essay, "Healing From Moral Injury."

2. Read the guided-reflection questions in "Reflecting On and Recovering From Moral Injury."

3. Complete the questions on your own or with colleagues-provided mutual trust and safety is felt in this group.

4. Take the time needed to fully and authentically reflect on the questions and your answers.

5. Identify reasonable and realistic commitments or strategies that can help you recover from a moral injury in the future. How can others in your school community support you?

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How do teachers recover from moral injury? This toolkit includes a guided self-reflection to help sustain you and your service to students.

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Kanopy - Stream Classic Cinema, Indie Film and Top Documentaries

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"I'm going to make a play called Death of a Salesman 2: Willy Loman Sucks," playwright Eleanor Burgess recalls telling a friend. It was 2017 and she was fed up with how women were represented in much of American theatre. So, she started writing Wife of a Salesman, which envisions a meeting between Linda Loman and her husband Willy's unnamed mistress from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

"I wanted to open up that world," explains Burgess about her female-forward riff on the classic. "If we had a chance to hear from the women and it wasn't about the men in their lives, what would that sound like?" Wife of a Salesman debuted in 2022 with rolling premieres at Chicago's Writers Theatre and Milwaukee Rep.

Burgess isn't alone in her reimagining of Miller. Over the past few years, many women and nonbinary dramatists have penned new works in conversation with his plays Death of a Salesman and The Crucible that center characters who were ignored, underwritten or misrepresented by the canonical American writer. It's telling that in 2022, when Death of a Salesman was receiving its sixth Broadway production since its 1949 premiere, Burgess' Wife of a Salesman and Barbara Cassidy's Mrs. Loman were also running on smaller stages, along with the Crucible-influenced Becky Nurse of Salem by Sarah Ruhl at Lincoln Center Theater. Now there are two more Crucible variations: Talene Monahan's The Good John Proctor, which played at Bedlam in the spring and is currently running in rep with Becky Nurse of Salem at Rhode Island's Trinity Rep, and Kimberly Belflower's John Proctor Is the Villain, which begins performances at Boston's Huntington in February 2024.

The timing of these plays is not coincidental. Just as Miller was fueled by McCarthyism and the elusiveness of the American dream, most of the playwrights interviewed cited Donald Trump's presidency as fodder, particularly his constant and inaccurate use of the term witch hunt.

"When Hillary Clinton was the nominee, the violence of the crowd wanting to lock her up was so disturbing for me," recalls Ruhl, whose Becky Nurse of Salem focuses on a modern-day descendent of Rebecca Nurse, the oldest woman to be hung for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. "It felt as though there was a kind of witch hunt around her."

Monahan, whose The Good John Proctor explores the events leading up to The Crucible from the perspective of the girls who make the accusations, believes that Miller's play is responsible for the shift in meaning of witch hunt and why it's often misused by powerful men. "I don't think that would be the case if The Crucible hadn't depicted this very compelling story of a good man falsely accused by a band of lying teenage girls," she says.

An actor as well as writer, Monahan aspired to be in The Crucible when she was starting out as a performer. But as she matured, she began to have a more critical take on Miller's view of those adolescent girls. "I discovered that the girls at the center of the trial in real life were much younger than they are in The Crucible," she says, noting that Abigail Williams- The Crucible's conniving mastermind-was only 11 years at the time. "That really reframed my understanding of what the events might have been."

Belflower was similarly shocked when she decided to reacquaint herself with The Crucible at the height of the #MeToo movement. "I couldn't believe that I was reading the same play I had read and loved in high school!" she says.

She also happened to be reading The Witches: Salem, 1692 by feminist historian Stacy Schiff at the time, which Monahan and Ruhl also consulted while working on their respective plays. The book emphasizes the youth of the girls, the trauma they endured as children and the unlikelihood of an affair between Abigail and Crucible protagonist John Proctor.

This new information inspired Belflower's John Proctor Is the Villain about contemporary teenagers dealing with accusations of sexual misconduct in their community. "What I'm trying to examine more than anything is cycles of power and how #MeToo didn't just come out of nowhere," she explains about the play, which was developed as a collaboration between three colleges and had its world premiere at DC's Studio Theatre in 2022.

While the high school students in Belflower's play are studying The Crucible, accusations of witchcraft and sexual assault aren't analogous. As Burgess notes, "Witches aren't real. At the Salem Witch Trials, they were hanging innocent people. Sexual misconduct is real, and people should be brought to justice for doing that."

With Wife of a Salesman, Burgess opted to respond to Death of a Salesman not The Crucible. But, like Ruhl, Belflower and Monahan, she was motivated by a desire to give the women in Miller's plays their due. Also loosely based on the stories of her own grandmothers, Burgess' play is "an encounter between a woman who has children and a woman who does not, and an opportunity for them to explore that space."

While Wife of a Salesman is a prequel of sorts to Death of a Salesman, Cassidy's Mrs. Loman, which had its world premiere at The Tank last year, is a sequel that starts the day of Willy Loman's funeral. " Death of a Salesman was always one of my favorite plays except that I hated the way that Linda and the women were portrayed and treated and spoken about," she explains. "I wanted to create a world for Linda as a critique of Salesman in some way."

In Mrs. Loman, Linda discovers her son Happy has sexually assaulted someone and she's unsure of what to do. "When you look at Salesman, the things Happy says [about women], they're not nice," says Cassidy. "It's not a far-fetched idea."

Although Cassidy's and Belflower's plays evoke different Miller classics, both feature characters grappling with how to respond when their family members are accused of sexual assault. And all the plays delve into feminist issues, especially gender dynamics and bodily autonomy, which are even more top of mind since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.

"I thought my play was about how things used to be. I didn't think I was writing a play about how things are," Burgess says about Wife of a Salesman, which unpacks the challenges related to abortion in pre-Roe times. "It was appalling to me how much more relevant the play became. We have a tendency to make feminist art that doesn't grapple with motherhood. But to me, there is no feminist art without dealing with motherhood and the female reproductive system."

The real-life events that inspired The Crucible involved motherhood, too, though Miller chose to de-emphasize that. "It's my understanding that one of the women in the town was grief-stricken over the loss of one of her children and wanted to talk to her dead child," says Ruhl about one victim who got caught up in the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.

Rebecca Nurse, the real-life ancestor of Ruhl's fictional title character in Becky Nurse of Salem, was the town midwife-a dangerous job during such a superstitious era. If a woman or baby died in childbirth, the midwife could be blamed for the loss and possibly accused of witchcraft. "All of this grief and hope surrounding motherhood, so many children were stillborn," Ruhl says. "How do you not go crazy around that biological reality?"

While Ruhl and Monahan understand why Miller focused on John Proctor in The Crucible, they take issue with his choice. "That was his way in, which I don't fault him for," says Monahan. However, considering 17 of the 19 people hanged during the Salem Witch Trials were women, "it's just wild, given who actually suffered."

Miller's decision to seemingly concoct an affair between Proctor and Williams is even more problematic. "Miller came to that assumption on his own-that's not documented anywhere else," says Sheri Wilner, whose 2013 play Kingdom City depicts the cancellation of a production of The Crucible at a Midwestern high school. "The real Abigail was a scared child looking for affection. And girls have been taught that sometimes it's through sex or attractiveness or seduction that you get attention or affection." Ruhl calls the supposed romance "an act of historical imagination" and Sarah Tuft, whose play Abigail is currently in development, explains he got the idea from a transcript in which Williams said her fingers were burning when she grazed Proctor's hood. "How you could extrapolate that there's an affair there, I have no idea," Tuft says.

Women have been grappling with Miller's treatment of Williams for a while now. With her 2013 play Witch Hunt or, A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, Liz Duffy Adams told The Dramatist magazine that she "wanted to rescue Abigail from his unconsidered mid-century misogyny."

Of course, playwrights have long been known to take creative liberties with history for the sake of drama. The Crucible isn't a documentary after all. Unfortunately, it's frequently perceived as an accurate account of the Salem Witch Trials-a mistake that Belflower, Monahan, Ruhl and others are dismantling with their work.

" The Crucible has merged with actual history in a way that theatre and plays very rarely do," Monahan says. She credits its "ubiquity" with its prevalence in American high school curricula. Ruhl adds: "History is confusing.... It's susceptible to all kinds of manipulation and fantasy."

While The Crucible was a staple of the American high school theatre experience for decades, that's changing. Since the pandemic, it no longer appears on the Educational Theatre Association's list of top ten most produced plays in high schools.

None of the playwrights interviewed are asking for Miller to be canceled. In fact, they all express admiration for his talent and body of work. However, they would like to see women and nonbinary playwrights, perspectives and parts become better represented in the American theatre canon.

"It's a little like a betrayal," says Tuft. "I come to the altar, and I pray at your work. And you're telling me that's all I'm worth?" Their feelings compelled them to want to write Abigail in response. "I'm going to pay you the highest compliment by acknowledging your work's impact by correcting where it went wrong, while also upholding what we love about it."

Monahan agrees. "I think there's something about the ubiquity of Miller's plays-and the limits of his female characters-that make theatre artists hungry to reexplore these stories from different perspectives."

It's heartening that many of these new plays are now being taught or produced in schools alongside Miller's classics, giving students a more expansive and inclusive view of these stories. "I would be thrilled if they were reading my play in conversation with The Crucible, and also hoping that they would be able to question things," said Belflower. "I didn't question things nearly enough when I was young; I just accepted them."

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Why Female Playwrights Are Reimagining Arthur Miller's Work

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Women and nonbinary playwrights including Sarah Ruhl discuss their plays written in response to the work of Arthur Miller.

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico blends poignant romance, bittersweet wit, and delicious recipes.

This classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef, using cooking to express herself and sharing recipes with readers along the way.

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico blends poignant romance, bittersweet wit, and delicious recipes. This classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy.

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On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic

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The acclaimed novelist lost her beloved husband—the father of her children—as COVID-19 swept across the country. She writes through their story, and her grief.

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I think we all read at least some of the same short stories in high school English class. "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson or "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury or "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Throw in some Kate Chopin, Edgar Allen Poe, maybe James Joyce or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Mark Twain and you've covered the majority of what I read through junior high and high school. No modern short stories for high school readers to be found.

For decades, these stories have been on the reading lists of teenagers everywhere. And they're good short stories. Honestly, they are. Good for teaching voice or theme or pacing in bite-sized chunks, just hard enough to challenge students without frustrating them to the point of quitting. I still think about Omelas and the woman in the wallpaper and the one day of sunlight even now. They're good and they serve the purpose they are meant to, whether students get annoyed or not.

But they're not very contemporary. They don't necessarily account for modern events, perspectives, or context. Many of them, while reading, feel too removed from the modern day to really connect to them. And they're mostly written by white men and women.

So, for a little variety and newness for your reading list, here are 15 modern short stories for high school English class.

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I hope you found one of these modern short stories for high school interesting! If you want more short story options, try these best short stories of all time or these short scary stories!

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15 Modern Short Stories for High School English Class | Book Riot

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For a little variety and newness for your reading list, here are fifteen modern short stories for high school English class.

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I'm trying not to internalize these feelings about the Trayvon Martin case and make it about me - but hey, it is what it is, and maybe I'm melodramatic. All I'm consumed with is my positioning inlife.

I often tell cute, self-deprecating celebrity run-in stories that end with my own "pie in the face" moment. But rarely do I share stories of a more serious nature, another genre of "pie in the face" moments, mostly because in the age of social media, most people are quick to dismiss my tales as #FirstWorldProblems. But I can't tell you how many times a year I'm in a serious situation, only to hear the magic words "Oh, wait ... Questlove?" Hey guys, it's Questlove. "We're so sorry, you can go!" Like, five to seven times a year, a night ending in the words "Thank God for that Afro or we'd never have recognized you" happens tome.

I'm in scenarios all the time in which primitive, exotic-looking me - six-foot-two, 300 pounds, uncivilized Afro, for starters - finds himself in places where people who look like me aren't normally found. I mean, what can I do? I have to be somewhere on Earth, correct? In the beginning - let's say 2002, when the gates of "Hey, Ahmir, would you like to come to [swanky elitist place]?" opened - I'd say "no," mostly because it's been hammered in my to not "rock the boat," which means not making "certain people" feeluncomfortable.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people's safety and comfort first, before your own. You're programmed and taught that from the gate. It's like the opposite ofentitlement.

The problem is, I do have desires to go to certain places and do certain things and enjoy the perks and benefits of being a person who works his arse off as much as I do. So I got over my hang-ups of not wanting to be the odd guy in the room sometime around 2007. It's been mixed results at best. Some of it is "Oh, that wasn't that bad"; some of it is "Well, that was awkward ... " This is the prime reason I hate vacations. I don't feel like being the "odd guy out" at vacation spots, hence the reason my 2009 hobo journey train trip was my best vacation ever. There's no scaring people on a train ride. My friends know that I hate parking lots and elevators, not because they are places that danger could occur, but it's a prime place in which someone of my physical size can be seen as a dangerous element. I wait and wait in cars until I feel it's safe for me to make people feel safe. I know most of y'all are eye-rolling, but if you spent a good three months in these size fourteens, you'd understand why I take thatposition.

I recently told a friend one of these stories: I live in a "nice" building. I work hard. You know I work hard. My logic is (naïve alert in 5, 4, 3, 2 ... ) "Well, there can't be any fear of any type in this building" - you've got to go through hell and high water just to get accepted to live here, like it's Dartmouth or UPenn. Secondly, there are, like, five to eight guards on duty 24/7, so this spot is beyond safe. Like, Oscar winners and kids of royalty and sports guys and mafia goombahs live here. One night, I get in the elevator, and just as the door closes this beautiful woman gets on. Because of a pain in the arse card device you have to use to get to your floor, it just makes it an easier protocol for whoever is pressing floors to take everyone's request, like when you are at the window of a drive-thru. So I press my floor number, and I ask her, "What floor, ma'am?" (Yes, I say "ma'am," because ... sigh, anyway.) She says nothing, stands in the corner. Mind you, I just discovered the Candy Crush app, so if anything, I'm the rude one because I'm more obsessed with winning this particular level than anything else. In my head I'm thinking, There's no way I can be a threat to a woman this fine if I'm buried deep in this game - so surely she feelssafe.

The humor comes in that I thought she was on my floor because she never acknowledged my floor request. (She was also bangin', so inside I was like, "Dayuuuuuuuuuuum, she lives on my floor? * bow chicka wowow*!" Instantly I was on some "What dessert am I welcome-committee-ing her with?") Anywho, the door opens, and I waited to let her off first because I am a gentleman. (Old me would've rushed first, thus not putting me in the position to have to follow her, God forbid if she, too, makes a left and it seems like I'm following her.) So door opens and I flirt, "Ladies first." She says, "This is not my floor." Then I assume she is missing her building card, so I pulled my card out to try to press her floor yet again. She says, "That'sokay."

Then it hit me: "Oh God, she purposely held that information back." The door closed. It was a "pie in the face"moment.

I laughed at it. Sortof.

Inside I cried. But if I cried at every insensitive act that goes on in the name of safety, I'd have to be committed to a psych ward. I've just taught myself throughout the years to just accept it and maybe even see it as funny. But it kept eating at me ( Well, I guess she never watched the show ... My English was super clear ... I called her "ma'am" like I was Webster ... Those that know you know that you're cool, but you definitely know that you are a walking rape nightmare - right, Ahmir? Of course she was justified in not saying her floor. That was her prerogative! You are kinda scary-looking, I guess?). It's a bajillion thoughts, all of them self-depreciating voices slowly eating my soulaway.

But my feelings don't count. I don't know why it's that way. Mostly I've come to the conclusion that people over six feet and over weight regulation or as dark as me (or in my tax bracket) simply don't have feelings. Or it's assumed we don't have feelings. I mean, it's partially right: I literally figured the only way for me to not go insane in a career that creates junkies (or at best Kanye) is to desensitize myself from feelings. The thing is, though, I'm a halfway crook, an awesome poker player. Yeah, I hurt. But I'll be damned if I let you know that. Call me a 75 percent robot, 25 percent humanbeing.

When I got off a plane Sunday morning, after the "not guilty" verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, and I was waiting in customs, I read an apology e-mail from a friend who said, "I am wrong about many things, but I want to apologize for taking that particular story you told me too lightly." The one about the woman in the elevator. And it kinda touched me. My friend related to me, and it was a gut-punch I wasn't expecting on an already emotional day, so I guess I started to almost ...cry?

Then the Roots' manager Rich hits me on the phone seconds later. Boom. I know it's sad to say, but we in the Roots circle love each other like family. But not enough to trust each other in vulnerable moments. (This is a man who waited until he was on the operating table, minutes away from surgery, to finally reveal to me he was going through a life-or-death cancer procedure, simply because he didn't want to distract me or create excuses as to why I didn't finish my book.) On the phone, I do my best "straighten up, stop sobbing" shtick, and he says, "What's wrong?" In four seconds flat, I bury it, and I'm back to normal. I'm not proud of that. I've spent eleven of the last twenty years in therapy trying to deal with that. So I decide to abandon Operation Bury, and I say, "Well ..."

What's wrong?" asksRich.

How do I answer that? This does feel like an average day. Remember how nice everyone was post-September 11? Eerie. Almost surreal. Like everyone is acting "too nice," and I don't know how to process that. Then there are people that are acting like nothing happened. ("Hey, Quest, where is Dave Chappelle at!?") It was just one of those days that didn't feel normal to me. But Rich keeps picking at the question like a three-month-old scab: "What'swrong?"

And I'm like, "Need I say it!?" I can't tell if he's provoking me or not. I don't know how to not internalize the overall message this whole Trayvon case has taughtme:
You ain't shit.
That's the lesson I took from thiscase.

You ain't shit.

These words are deep because these are words I've heard my whole life: I heard from adults in my childhood that I needed to be "about something" other than all that banging and clanging and music I play all the time. As I got older, I heard I wasn't as good as so-and-so is at music. All the "you ain't shit" stories I got - Jesus, it's a wonder I madeit.

Rich asks, "Wait, you're not surprised, are you?" I'm not surprised at all, but that doesn't mean it stings anyless.

I should be angry, right? I remember when the Sean Bell verdict came out and I just knew, "Oh, God, New York is gonna go up in flames." And yet no one was fuming. It was like, "[ Shrug] ... No surprises here. That'slife."

Rich asks again, "Are you surprised ... that you ain'tshit?"

It hurts to hear it, and I say, "I'm not surprised, but who wants to be reminded?" What fat person wants to hear that they aren't pleasing to the eye? Or what addict wants to hear they are a constant F-up? Who wants to be reminded that - shrug - that's just the way itis?

I guess I'm struggling to get at least 1 percent of this feeling back, from all this protective numbness I've built around me, to keep me from feeling. Because, at the end of the day, I'm stillhuman.

... Right?

Questlove is the author of Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove.

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Questlove: Trayvon Martin and I Ain't Shit

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The Roots drummer on the George Zimmerman verdict.

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In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.

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Over the past eight years or so, I've been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don't have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren't married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.

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My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week-something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.

We're enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?

Over the past few years, different social observers have offered different stories to explain the rise of hatred, anxiety, and despair.

The technology story: Social media is driving us all crazy.

The sociology story: We've stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.

The demography story: America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.

The economy story: High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.

I agree, to an extent, with all of these stories, but I don't think any of them is the deepest one. Sure, social media has bad effects, but it is everywhere around the globe-and the mental-health crisis is not. Also, the rise of despair and hatred has engulfed a lot of people who are not on social media. Economic inequality is real, but it doesn't fully explain this level of social and emotional breakdown. The sociologists are right that we're more isolated, but why? What values lead us to choose lifestyles that make us lonely and miserable?

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I'm going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions-families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces-helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that's terrible at moral formation.
Read: American shoppers are a nightmare
Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things. First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control? Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively? And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here's how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.

For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). "Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed," Benjamin Franklin wrote, "as they are generally more easily provok'd than reconcil'd, more dispos'd to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv'd than undeceiv'd."

If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. In 1788, Noah Webster wrote, "The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities ; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head." The progressive philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality "every moment of the day, five days a week." Hollis Frissell, the president of the Hampton Institute, an early school for African Americans, declared, "Character is the main object of education." As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers' unions, stated that "an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values continues to be a top priority for education."

The moral-education programs that stippled the cultural landscape during this long stretch of history came from all points on the political and religious spectrums. School textbooks such as McGuffey's Eclectic Readers not only taught students how to read and write; they taught etiquette, and featured stories designed to illustrate right and wrong behavior. In the 1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois's magazine for Black children, The Brownies' Book, had a regular column called "The Judge," which provided guidance to young readers on morals and manners. There were thriving school organizations with morally earnest names that sound quaint today-the Courtesy Club, the Thrift Club, the Knighthood of Youth.

Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; the settlement-house movement, which brought rich and poor together to serve the marginalized; Aldo Leopold's land ethic, which extended our moral concerns to include proper care for the natural world; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations, which, in addition to enhancing worker protections and paychecks, held up certain standards of working-class respectability. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious communities. Mere religious faith doesn't always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved-those things tend to.
Arthur C. Brooks: Make yourself happy-be kind
An educational approach with German roots that was adopted by Scandinavian societies in the mid-to-late 19th century had a wide influence on America. It was called Bildung, roughly meaning "spiritual formation." As conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Bildung approach gave professors complete freedom to put moral development at the center of a university's mission. In schools across Scandinavia, students studied literature and folk cultures to identify their own emotions, wounds, and weaknesses, in order to become the complex human beings that modern society required. Schools in the Bildung tradition also aimed to clarify the individual's responsibilities to the wider world-family, friends, nation, humanity. Start with the soul and move outward.

The Bildung movement helped inspire the Great Books programs that popped up at places like Columbia and the University of Chicago. They were based on the conviction that reading the major works of world literature and thinking about them deeply would provide the keys to living a richer life. Meanwhile, discipline in the small proprieties of daily existence-dressing formally, even just to go shopping or to a ball game-was considered evidence of uprightness: proof that you were a person who could be counted on when the large challenges came.

Much of American moral education drew on an ethos expressed by the headmaster of the Stowe School, in England, who wrote in 1930 that the purpose of his institution was to turn out young men who were "acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck." America's National Institute for Moral Instruction was founded in 1911 and published a "Children's Morality Code," with 10 rules for right living. At the turn of the 20th century, Mount Holyoke College, an all-women's institution, was an example of an intentionally thick moral community. When a young Frances Perkins was a student there, her Latin teacher detected a certain laziness in her. She forced Perkins to spend hours conjugating Latin verbs, to cultivate self-discipline. Perkins grew to appreciate this: "For the first time I became conscious of character." The school also called upon women to follow morally ambitious paths. "Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go," the school's founder implored. Holyoke launched women into lives of service in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet (Franklin D. Roosevelt's), was galvanized there.
Read: Students' broken moral compasses
These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures. But we learn most virtues the way we learn crafts, through the repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture-a community of common values, whose members aspire to earn one another's respect.

The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste: An objective moral order exists, and human beings are creatures who habitually sin against that order. This recognition was central, for example, to the way the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s thought about character formation. "Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice," Martin Luther King Jr. believed. Elsewhere, he wrote, "The force of sinfulness is so stubborn a characteristic of human nature that it can only be restrained when the social unit is armed with both moral and physical might."

At their best, the civil-rights marchers in this prophetic tradition understood that they could become corrupted even while serving a noble cause. They could become self-righteous because their cause was just, hardened by hatred of their opponents, prideful as they asserted power. King's strategy of nonviolence was an effort simultaneously to expose the sins of their oppressors and to restrain the sinful tendencies inherent in themselves. "What gave such widely compelling force to King's leadership and oratory," the historian George Marsden argues, "was his bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe."

A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn't produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn't succeed in making people angels-it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.

Furthermore, we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many thou shall not s and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism. Yet a wise accounting should acknowledge that emphasizing moral formation meant focusing on an important question-what is life for?-and teaching people how to bear up under inevitable difficulties. A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard. In some ways, the old approach to moral formation was, at least theoretically, egalitarian: If your status in the community was based on character and reputation, then a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker. This ethos came down hard on self-centeredness and narcissistic display. It offered practical guidance on how to be a good neighbor, a good friend.

And then it mostly went away.

The crucial pivot happened just after World War II, as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century. One group, personified by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued that recent events had exposed the prevalence of human depravity and the dangers, in particular, of tribalism, nationalism, and collective pride. This group wanted to double down on moral formation, with a greater emphasis on humility.

Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority. The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.
After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where 74 million people looked at Donald Trump's morality and saw presidential timber.
A cluster of phenomenally successful books appeared in the decade after World War II, making the case that, as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman wrote in Peace of Mind (1946), "thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses." People can trust the goodness inside. His book topped the New York Times best-seller list for 58 weeks. Dr. Spock's first child-rearing manual was published the same year. That was followed by books like The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). According to this ethos, morality is not something that we develop in communities. It's nurtured by connecting with our authentic self and finding our true inner voice. If people are naturally good, we don't need moral formation; we just need to let people get in touch with themselves. Organization after organization got out of the moral-formation business and into the self-awareness business. By the mid‑1970s, for example, the Girl Scouts' founding ethos of service to others had shifted: "How can you get more in touch with you? What are you thinking? What are you feeling?" one Girl Scout handbook asked.

Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and '50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America : "By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat" as educators "paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities." The postwar period saw similar change at the college level, Anthony Kronman, a former dean of Yale Law School, has noted. The "research ideal" supplanted the earlier humanistic ideal of cultivating the whole student. As academics grew more specialized, Kronman has argued, the big questions-What is the meaning of life? How do you live a good life?-lost all purchase. Such questions became unprofessional for an academic to even ask.
Read: The benefits of character education
In sphere after sphere, people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant. Psychology's purview grew, especially in family and educational matters, its vocabulary framing "virtually all public discussion" of the moral life of children, James Davison Hunter, a prominent American scholar on character education, noted in 2000. "For decades now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been muted or nonexistent." Psychology is a wonderful profession, but its goal is mental health, not moral growth.

From the start, some worried about this privatizing of morality. "If what is good, what is right, what is true is only what the individual 'chooses' to 'invent,' " Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1955 collection, Essays in the Public Philosophy, "then we are outside the traditions of civility." His book was hooted down by establishment figures such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the de-moralization of American culture was under way.

Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation's books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop "a meaningful philosophy of life"; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the interviewees had not given the subject of morality much thought. "I've never had to make a decision about what's right and what's wrong," one young adult told the researchers. "My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague," many teenagers said.

The moral instincts that Smith observed in his sample fell into the pattern that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called "emotivism": Whatever feels good to me is moral. "I would probably do what would make me happy" in any given situation, one of the interviewees declared. "Because it's me in the long run." As another put it, "If you're okay with it morally, as long as you're not getting caught, then it's not really against your morals, is it?" Smith and his colleagues emphasized that the interviewees were not bad people but, because they were living "in morally very thin or spotty worlds," they had never been given a moral vocabulary or learned moral skills.

Most of us who noticed the process of de-moralization as it was occurring thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result: You do you and I'll do me. That's not what happened.

"Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy," the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind. When you are raised in a culture without ethical structure, you become internally fragile. You have no moral compass to give you direction, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance. "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how," the psychiatrist (and Holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl wrote, interpreting a famous Nietzsche saying. Those without a why fall apart when the storms hit. They begin to suffer from that feeling of moral emptiness that Émile Durkheim called "anomie."

Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much. A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call "vulnerable narcissists." We all know grandiose narcissists-people who revere themselves as the center of the universe. Vulnerable narcissists are the more common figures in our day-people who are also addicted to thinking about themselves, but who often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.

"The breakdown of an enduring moral framework will always produce disconnection, alienation, and an estrangement from those around you," Luke Bretherton, a theologian at Duke Divinity School, told me. The result is the kind of sadness I see in the people around me. Young adults I know are spiraling, leaving school, moving from one mental-health facility to another. After a talk I gave in Oklahoma, a woman asked me, "What do you do when you no longer want to be alive?" The very next night I had dinner with a woman who told me that her brother had died by suicide three months before. I mentioned these events to a group of friends on a Zoom call, and nearly half of them said they'd had a brush with suicide in their family. Statistics paint the broader picture: Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, according to the CDC.

Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection-of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice-because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them.
Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning.
Lonely eras are not just sad eras; they are violent ones. In 19th-century America, when a lot of lonely young men were crossing the western frontier, one of the things they tended to do was shoot one another. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. People grow more callous, defensive, distrustful, and hostile. The pandemic made it worse, but antisocial behavior is still high even though the lockdowns are over. And now we are caught in a cycle, ill treatment leading to humiliation and humiliation leading to more meanness. Social life becomes more barbaric, online and off.

If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.

According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren't lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.
David Brooks: America is having a moral convulsion
The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.

Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person's moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don't have to be good; you just have to be liberal-or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group's claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.

Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don't have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.

Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war-red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it's primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.

This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We've shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He's trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn't work.

The politics of recognition doesn't give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging-but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.

If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you've left the moral vacuum-but you've landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level -only 8 percent did the same in 1990.

America's Founding Fathers studied the history of democracies going back to ancient Greece. They drew the lesson that democracies can be quite fragile. When private virtue fails, the constitutional order crumbles. After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump's morality and saw presidential timber.
Read: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life
Even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won't You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness -his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.

In the summer of 2020, the series Ted Lasso premiered. When Lasso describes his goals as a soccer coach, he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but he says, "For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field."

That is a two-sentence description of moral formation. Ted Lasso is about an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely. Amid lockdowns and political rancor, it became a cultural touchstone, and the most watched show on Apple TV+.

Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people, as part of their elemental nature, yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning. People still want to build a society in which it is easier to be good. So the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?
Healthy moral ecologies don't just happen. They have to be seeded and tended.
A few necessities come immediately to mind.

A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.

The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch's book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that "nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous." For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually-treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a "just and loving" attention on other people.

Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, "What are you going through?" and cares about the answer.

I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, "grow by looking."

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch's character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don't teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills-but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we're going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call "How to Live." Yale has one called "Life Worth Living." Notre Dame has one called "God and the Good Life." A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don't give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions-Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today's world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn't be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.

Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It's about pursuing self-interest.

There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic-the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)

Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.

These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.

Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals-moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.

In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.

Moral renewal won't come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here's how we're growing financially, but also Here's how we're learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here's how we're going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.

Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.

Politics as a moral enterprise. An ancient brand of amoralism now haunts the world. Authoritarian-style leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping embody a kind of amoral realism. They evince a mindset that assumes that the world is a vicious, dog-eat-dog sort of place. Life is a competition to grab what you can. Force is what matters. Morality is a luxury we cannot afford, or merely a sham that elites use to mask their own lust for power. It's fine to elect people who lie, who are corrupt, as long as they are ruthless bastards for our side. The ends justify the means.

Those of us who oppose these authoritarians stand, by contrast, for a philosophy of moral realism. Yes, of course people are selfish and life can be harsh. But over the centuries, civilizations have established rules and codes to nurture cooperation, to build trust and sweeten our condition. These include personal moral codes so we know how to treat one another well, ethical codes to help prevent corruption on the job and in public life, and the rules of the liberal world order so that nations can live in peace, secure within their borders.

Moral realists are fighting to defend and modernize these rules and standards-these sinews of civilization. Moral realism is built on certain core principles. Character is destiny. We can either elect people who try to embody the highest standards of honesty, kindness, and integrity, or elect people who shred those standards. Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become. We can structure our tax code to encourage people to be enterprising and to save more, or we can structure the code to encourage people to be conniving and profligate. Democracy is the system that best enhances human dignity. Democratic regimes entrust power to the people, and try to form people so they will be responsible with that trust. Authoritarian regimes seek to create a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Look, I understand why people don't want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don't just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it's humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That's very different from how we treat people now-in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.
This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline "How America Got Mean." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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