Hidden Americans


Book Description

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Gypsies


Book Description

The Gypsies portrayed in this book are the Vlax-speaking Rom, the largest group of Gypsies in the United States, numbering 500,000. Not officially recognized as a minority in the U.S. until 1972, Gypsies have led an almost entirely invisible existence here. Now in this fascinating workthe first complete account of American GypsiesSutherland has produced an in-depth look at the full range of everyday social life among the Rom. Separate, elusive, complex, and unique among the people of the world, Gypsies have preserved their traditional way of life. How have they avoided assimilation? What keeps them apart? How are they organized, and what do they believe? These and other important questions about these hidden Americans are addressed in Sutherlands contemporary study.




Hidden America


Book Description

An Oprah.com “Must-Read Book” Award-winning journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas reveals “enlightening, entertaining, and often poignant”* profiles of America's working class—the forgotten men and women who make our country run. Take the men of Hopedale Mining company in Cadiz, Ohio. Laskas spent several weeks with them, both below and above ground, and by the end, you will know not only about their work, but about Pap and his dying mom, Smitty and the mail-order bride who stood him up at the airport, and Scotty and his thwarted dreams of becoming a boxing champion. That is only one hidden world. Others that she explores: an Alaskan oil rig, a migrant labor camp in Maine, the air traffic control center at LaGuardia Airport in New York, a beef ranch in Texas, a landfill in California, a long-haul trucker in Iowa, a gun shop in Arizona, and the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders, mere footnotes in the moneymaking spectacle that is professional football. “Jeanne Marie Laskas is a reporting and writing powerhouse. She doesn’t just interview the people who dig our coal and extract our oil, she goes deep into the mines and tundra with them. With beauty, wit, curiosity, and grace, she finds the hidden soul of America. Hidden America is essential reading.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks




The Hidden History of American Healthcare


Book Description

Popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality. "For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people—one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s,” says Thom Hartmann. Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan's single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States. Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current “sickness for profit” system. Modern attempts to create versions of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn, including Obamacare. There is a simple solution: Medicare for all. Hartmann outlines the extraordinary benefits this system would provide the American people and economy and the steps we need to take to make it a reality. It's time for America to join every industrialized country in the world and make health a right, not a privilege.




Hidden in Plain Sight


Book Description

Pimp-controlled sex workers, exploited migrants, domestic servants, and sex trafficking of runaway and homeless youth are just a few of the many forms of sex trafficking and labor trafficking going on all around the world-including in the United States. This book exposes both well-known and more obscure forms of human trafficking, documenting how these heinous crimes are encountered in our daily lives. What types of human trafficking crimes are being committed here in the United States? Who are the victims of traffickers? How do we all unknowingly consume the services and products of slavery? And why are human traffickers able to maintain their illicit operations with relative impunity-indeed, with less than .01 percent of human traffickers ever being held accountable for their crimes? Hidden in Plain Sight: America's Slaves of the New Millennium documents how human trafficking and its byproducts touch every community in America, from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods to middle-class suburbs and alcoves of wealthy estates. It presents information derived from narrative accounts of real-life trafficking cases, interviews with convicted human traffickers, empirical research, and criminal case files to expose the grim realities of human trafficking in America, perpetrated by Americans. Readers will grasp the origins, evolution, and extent of the problem; understand how trafficking plays an unrecognized role in our day-to-day lives; and see why advancements in awareness and anti-trafficking resources have not changed the status quo. The victims of trafficking continue to be criminalized by law enforcement, and the offenders continue to exploit and profit from new recruits. This book equips readers with the knowledge needed to identify human trafficking cases and advocate for policy changes to end this scourge in America.




Invisible America


Book Description

CULTURAL ARTIFACTS THAT LEAD TO EXPLORATION OF FORGOTTEN FACTS ABOUT AMERICAN SOCIETY. AMERICAN INCLUDES MATERIAL CULTURE.




Hidden Cities


Book Description

Robert Kennedy, director of the National Park Service, analyzes the discovery of North America and the loss of ancient civilization, from the cities, roads, and commerce of the past as the nation evolved into present day. In Hidden Cities, Robert Kennedy sets out on the bold quest of recovering the rich heritage of the North American peoples through a reimagination of the true relations of their modern-day successors and neighbors. From the Spanish and French explorers that discovered the land that would one day make up the United States to present day in the country, very few Euro-Americans have paid attention to the evidence and meaning of the nation’s heritage. As Kennedy shows the magnificence of the mound-building cultures through the sometimes prejudiced eyes of the founding generation, he reveals the astounding history of the North American continent in a way that sheds important light on the credit Native American predecessors deserve but many refuse to give.




Under the Skin


Book Description

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • "A stunning exposé of why Black people in our society 'live sicker and die quicker'—an eye-opening game changer."—Oprah Daily From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation. In 2018, Linda Villarosa's New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa's article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.




The Hidden History of American Oligarchy


Book Description

Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the history of the battle against oligarchy in America—and how we can win the latest round. Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they're nearly there thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny. The United States was born in a struggle against the oligarchs of the British aristocracy, and ever since then the history of America has been one of dynamic tension between democracy and oligarchy. And much like the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to glaring inequality and the ongoing theft of democracy by that generation's oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively oligarchs have looted our nation's economic system, gutted governmental institutions, and stolen the wealth of the former middle class. Thom Hartmann traces the history of this struggle against oligarchy from America's founding to the United States' war with the feudal Confederacy to President Franklin Roosevelt's struggle against “economic royalists,” who wanted to block the New Deal. In each of those cases, the oligarchs lost the battle. But with increasing right-wing control of the media, unlimited campaign contributions, and a conservative takeover of the judicial system, we're at a crisis point. Now is the time for action, before we flip into tyranny. We've beaten the oligarchs before, and we can do it again. Hartmann lays out practical measures we can take to break up media monopolies, limit the influence of money in politics, reclaim the wealth stolen over decades by the oligarchy, and build a movement that will return control of America to We the People.




How to Hide an Empire


Book Description

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.