New Press Archives

Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis

From Time magazine’s European Union correspondent, a powerful exploration of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, told through the stories of migrants who have made the perilous journey into Europe

In 2015, more than one million migrants and refugees, most fleeing war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East, attempted to make the perilous journey into Europe. Around three thousand lost their lives as they crossed the Mediterranean and Aegean in rickety boats provided by unscrupulous traffickers, including over seven hundred men, women, and children in a single day in April 2015. […Learn More]

Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World

Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. Worldwide, palm oil production has nearly doubled in just the last decade: oil-palm plantations now cover an area nearly the size of New Zealand, and some form of the commodity lurks in half the products on U.S. grocery shelves. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of industrialized nations. […Learn More]

Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia

An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. […Learn More]

The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits

The prizewinning, nationally celebrated account of the slave origins of a major northern city

A brilliant paradigm-shifting book that “transports the reader back to the eighteenth century and brings to life a multiracial community that began in slavery” (The New York Times), The Dawn of Detroitreveals for the first time that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city. Hailed by Publishers Weekly in a starred review as “a necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship,” The Dawn of Detroitmeticulously uncovers the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. […Learn More]

Thick: And Other Essays

In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically “thick”: deemed “thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less,” McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick “transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women” […Learn More]

Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast

A breathtakingly original work of history that uncovers a massive enslaved persons’ revolt that almost changed the face of the Americas

On Sunday, February 27, 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice—in present-day Guyana—launched a massive rebellion which came amazingly close to succeeding. Surrounded by jungle and savannah, the revolutionaries (many of them African-born) and Europeans struck and parried for an entire year. In the end, the Dutch prevailed because of one unique advantage—their ability to get soldiers and supplies from neighboring colonies and from Europe […Learn More]

The Drone Memos: Target Killing, Secrecy, and the Law

In the long response to 9/11, the US government initiated a deeply controversial policy of “targeted killing”―the extrajudicial execution of suspected terrorists and militants, typically via drones. A remarkable effort was made to legitimize this practice; one that most human rights experts agree is illegal and that the United States has historically condemned. […Learn More]

The Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy

A former FBI undercover agent and whistleblower gives us a riveting and troubling account of the contemporary FBI—essential reading for our times
Impressively researched and eloquently argued, former special agent Mike German’s Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide tells the story of the transformation of the FBI after the 9/11 attacks from a law enforcement agency, made famous by prosecuting organized crime and corruption in business and government, into arguably the most secretive domestic intelligence agency America has ever seen. […Learn More]