Human Rights Book Discussion

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
Blitzer, Jonathan

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever
Reeder, Lydia,

Lydia Reeder's "The Cure for Women" highlights Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi’s crucial role in overturning 19th-century sexist pseudoscience that framed women as naturally sick and unfit for education or work. As the first woman to study at Paris’s Sorbonne medical school, Jacobi used rigorous research to debunk myths surrounding women’s reproductive biology. Alongside suffragists, she challenged male-dominated medicine, which relied on cruel, controlling treatments. The book documents how her scientific studies provided the data needed to dismantle discriminatory beliefs about feminine weakness. Ultimately, this work proved foundational in securing women's health advancements and equal rights, cementing her legacy as a medical trailblazer.

The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy
Pishko, Jessica

Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding.

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
Richardson, Heather Cox

How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy.