City of Inmates

By Kelly Lytle Hernández,

Book cover of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965

Book description

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle…

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Why read it?

1 author picked City of Inmates as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book has hugely influenced my thinking on US racism, imprisonment, and immigration, especially my second book. By studying a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Lytle Hernandez demonstrates how “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” This argument was a revelation that opened new ways for me to see the connections among different people swept away into cages. Like Dunbar-Ortiz, she reveals how settler colonialism connects working-class white, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican people targeted for arrest, imprisonment, and removal. Crucially, she reads “rebel archives” of those people who resisted their subjugation and fought for justice, showing how they never…

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Book cover of Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

Who Is a Worthy Mother? By Rebecca Wellington,

I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…

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