A historical rediscovery of one of the heroic founders of the conservation movement who was also one of the most infamous racists in American history

Nazism remains an enigma. Historians do not know whether to slot Nazism as a phenomenon of the political “right” or “left,” largely because of a misunderstanding of how central eugenics was to the regime. Eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” was at the core of National Socialism’s domestic policy, foreign policy, culture wars, and even Hitler’s obsession with cars, highways, and city planning. Thus, no coherent understanding of the regime is possible without first grasping the nature of eugenics. Eugenics did not originate with Nazi Germany. It was the culmination of a worldwide movement that was widely accepted by the global scientific and academic community. This book traces the origins of the Nazi eugenics state, working backward down the timeline, tracing from leaf down to the root. We investigate this 100-year trajectory from its beginnings in British and American Academia, delving into the conveniently forgotten inner-workings of a scientific era, uncovering previously unpublished manuscripts, professional correspondence, and conveniently forgotten publications. With the centenary of The Holocaust looming, uprooting the web of professional connections that engendered this movement is in order. The seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims of justice, or rob the living of a future. www.RaceOfMasters.com  NOTE: A preliminary version of this book was circulated amongst academic circles and other interested parties as an Advanced Readers Copy (A.R.C.) in 2015. This version is a part the Eugenics Anthology seven-book series that is currently being completed by A.E. Samaan. Hardbound versions of the books will not be released until the series is complete, and all the puzzle pieces in place. For more information, please visit EugenicsAnthology.com

"What capacity for good lies in the hidden depths of people?" Starting with this question, award-winning author Charles Wohlforth sets forth on a wide-ranging exploration of our relationship with the world. In The Fate of Nature, he draws on science, spirituality, history, economics, and personal stories to reveal answers about the future of that relationship. There is no better place to witness the highs and lows of our treatment of the natural world than the vast wilds, rocky coasts, and shifting settlements of Alaska. Since the first encounter between Captain Cook's crew and the Alaskan Natives in 1778, there have been countless struggles between people who have had different plans for the region. Some have hoped to preserve Alaska as they found it, while others aimed to create something new in its place. Incidents such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill may seem like cause for despair. In the face of such profound tragedies, Charles Wohlforth has found heartening developments in the science of human altruism. This new understanding of what causes humans to cooperate and act conscientiously may be the first step toward taking the actions necessary to preserve an environment that has already been altered drastically in our lifetime. A clear-eyed, original work of research, reportage, and philosophical reflections, The Fate of Nature gives us a chance to change the way we think about our place in society and the world at large.

*THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY NAYEF AL-RODHAN PRIZE 2020* The riveting story of the pioneers who redefined conceptions of 'normality' in the early twentieth century. Under the guiding eye of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, these scientist-explorers - most of them women - made intrepid journeys into far-flung communities all over the world, where they documented radically different social approaches that overturned Western assumptions about human diversity and challenged the era's scientific consensus. Here, the boundary-breaking lives and achievements of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston are brought fully into light for the first time, showing how their trailblazing discoveries helped shape the moral universe we inhabit today. *WINNER OF THE FRANCIS PARKMAN PRIZE 2020* *FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2019*

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That's why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist). The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an epilogue reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.

2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

In this instant New York Times bestseller, renowned economist Thomas Sowell demolishes the myths that underpin the social justice movement The quest for social justice is a powerful crusade of our time, with an appeal to many different people, for many different reasons. But those who use the same words do not always present the same meanings. Clarifying those meanings is the first step toward finding out what we agree on and disagree on. From there, it is largely a question of what the facts are. Social Justice Fallacies reveals how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed. However attractive the social justice vision, the crucial question is whether the social justice agenda will get us to the fulfillment of that vision. History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. More things are involved besides simply mistakes. All human beings are fallible, and social justice advocates may not necessarily make any more mistakes than others. But crusaders with an utter certainty about their mission are often undeterred by obstacles, evidence or even fatal dangers. That is where much of the Western world is today. The question is whether we will continue on heedlessly, past the point of no return.

Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award One of Chicago Tribune's Ten Best Books of 2021 Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking,” Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making “a crucial addition to the literature of our troubled time" (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction). In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. From early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale, Nijhuis’s “spirited and engaging” account documents “the changes of heart that changed history” (Dan Cryer, Boston Globe). With “urgency, passion, and wit” (Michael Berry, Christian Science Monitor), she describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund, explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros, and confronts the darker side of modern conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change wreak havoc on our world, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species including our own.

Congressman Emanuel Celler (1888–1981) was a New York City congressman who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1923 to 1973. Celler’s almost fifty-year career was highlighted by his long fight to eliminate national origin quotas as a basis for immigration restrictions and his battles for civil rights legislation. In Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion, author Wayne Dawkins introduces new readers to a figure integral to our contemporary political system. Celler’s own immigrant background framed his lifelong opposition to immigration restrictions and his corresponding support for reducing barriers for immigrant entry into the United States. After decades of struggle, he proposed and steered through the House the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which eliminated national origins as a consideration for immigration, profoundly shaping modern America. Celler was also a consistent advocate for civil rights. As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 1949 to 1973 (except for a break from 1953 to 1955), Celler was involved in drafting and passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. During his career he was also deeply involved in landmark antitrust legislation, the establishment of US ties with the state of Israel, and the Gun Control Act of 1968, and was the author of three constitutional amendments, including the 25th that established presidential succession. Dawkins profiles a complex politician who shaped the central tenets of Democratic Party liberalism for much of the twentieth century and whose work remains central to the nation, and our political debates, today. From author Wayne Dawkins: Emanuel Celler (1888–1981) could be the most significant US legislator of the twentieth century. He cosponsored three Constitutional amendments—the twenty-third (voting rights for District of Columbia residents), the twenty-fourth (poll taxes banned), and the twenty-fifth (clear succession established if the president is removed from office). And, as a longtime chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he reluctantly cosponsored a fourth—the twenty-sixth amendment (18-year-old voting rights). He is also linked to three-hundred laws, notably the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and his masterpiece, the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965. Over the past decade, Celler, who served fifty years in Congress, has been a supporting cast member in at least a dozen books about immigration or civil rights. He was frequently cited in One Mighty and Irresistible Tide (2020) and noted in two key moments of The Guarded Gate (2019). And he was cited generously in Goliath (2019), a book about Celler’s other passion—antitrust and monopoly busting. But this fall, he will at last be the focus of a full-length biography, Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion. And I believe it will become the go-to book for anyone wanting to know more about this history-making legislator.