Here are 100 books that Abolition Geography fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m an awkward academic who thinks, writes, and teaches about US immigration and imprisonment regimes and their growth out of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. I’m strongly motivated by things that I hate. I want to understand how and why we are facing such catastrophic problems, so that we can figure out how to undo them. My work is partly motivated by my personal history as the daughter of immigrants who moved to support their families and survive in the aftermath of war. As a privileged person in the US, I'm not directly affected by the state violence I study. I also know that we're not going to have a future unless we get there together.
Danticat offers a gorgeously written memoir tracing her father’s life as US migrant, her uncle’s life as community leader who stayed in Haiti, and her relationship to both across both countries. The book was motivated by her Uncle Joseph’s horrifying, tragic death in the Krome Detention Center (originally built to detain Haitian refugees and notorious for abuses) after he fled home to claim asylum. But it is much more than a recounting of his death. It is a chronicle of a deeply connected family whose love exceeded borders. I cannot get this book out of my head. It helps my students understand that the violence of US borders is not abstract and cannot be captured in statistics or political rhetoric. It is about real people who navigate seemingly overwhelming obstacles put before them—sometimes building new lives from nothing, sometimes succumbing to the violence of US regimes.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography A National Book Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book
From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far away from so many who she loved, she and her…
I’m an awkward academic who thinks, writes, and teaches about US immigration and imprisonment regimes and their growth out of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. I’m strongly motivated by things that I hate. I want to understand how and why we are facing such catastrophic problems, so that we can figure out how to undo them. My work is partly motivated by my personal history as the daughter of immigrants who moved to support their families and survive in the aftermath of war. As a privileged person in the US, I'm not directly affected by the state violence I study. I also know that we're not going to have a future unless we get there together.
Yes, history is important. This is a recurring theme in my courses, because if we don’t know how we got here, then our efforts to address the urgent problems we face will be hampered by our inability to understand the root causes of those problems.
Public intellectual Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz once again does us a great service with her latest book in revealing the deep roots of racist oppression against citizens and noncitizens. She explodes the foundational myth of the United States as nation of immigrants, showing how this country is instead defined by settler colonialism—the efforts to destroy Indigenous civilizations to build a new, permanent society with the exploited labor of enslaved Black people, and migrant workers of all kinds. Her book crucially helps us understand how Native people and immigrants are not opposed to each other, but are instead subjugated by the same forces and thus share struggles for…
Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States
Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple…
I’m an awkward academic who thinks, writes, and teaches about US immigration and imprisonment regimes and their growth out of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. I’m strongly motivated by things that I hate. I want to understand how and why we are facing such catastrophic problems, so that we can figure out how to undo them. My work is partly motivated by my personal history as the daughter of immigrants who moved to support their families and survive in the aftermath of war. As a privileged person in the US, I'm not directly affected by the state violence I study. I also know that we're not going to have a future unless we get there together.
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 relinquished themselves to racist incarceration.
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 Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest,…
I’m a journalist in Edmonton, Canada, who covered former premier Jason Kenney’s rise through Alberta politics, in which he tapped into the populist zeitgeist of Donald Trump and Brexit, and his eventual implosion. I have a newsletter on Substack, "The Orchard," where I cover the intersection of politics, the media, and corporate power. Through my journalism, I’ve developed a keen interest in this age of mass discontent we find ourselves in, with right-wing political and economic elites promising to blow up the entire system they embody while feckless liberal politicians seek to tinker around the edges to make the established order more palatable.
Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.
The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.
Walia describes how this segmentation undermines labour standards for all and fuels a xenophobic backlash against the depredations of global capitalism.
In Border and Rule, one of North America's foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.
Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders…
My early memories of San Francisco in the late 1970s are anything but glamorous. We lived in a crummy apartment down the street from the People’s Temple, and my preschool, in the always gray Sunset, served carob, not chocolate. Despite decamping for the greener pastures and white sands of Carmel-By-The-Sea, I was forever hooked by the gritty magic of San Francisco. I eventually returned to the city’s foggy Richmond District, where now I ruminate on past adventures, plot new ones, and write about the place I love. I'm the author of Moon Napa Sonoma, Moon California, and Moon Northern California, and my work has appeared in 7x7, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Alaska Magazine.
Rebecca Solnit’s San Francisco is an onion; not one to be peeled back, but one whose paper skins remain overlapping in layered complexity. Reflecting the city’s élan, this odd-sized book is a beautiful compendium of exquisitely illustrated maps, each unique in style and in juxtaposing themes. You’ll open it to find one plotting Bay Area culinary establishments against its Super Fund sites; then flip to a quixotic mapping of murders and Monterey Cypress; then to another revealing the lost world of South of Market or the Third Street corridor from 4000 B.C.E. to 2001. Each map has a corresponding essay, many written by writers other than Solnit, adding to the vibrancy of voices in this masterwork of a diverse and complex place.
What makes a place? "Infinite City", Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically - connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of "Vertigo". Across an urban grid of just…
I’m a historian of early modern Europe. I have a particular interest in the history of violence and social relations and how and why ordinary people came into conflict with each other and how they made peace, that’s the subject of my most recent book Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe, which compares the entanglement of everyday animosities and how these were resolved in Italy, Germany, France and England. I’m also passionate about understanding Europe’s contribution to world history. As editor of The Cambridge World History of Violence, I explored the dark side of this. But my next book, The Invention of Civil Society, will demonstrate Europe’s more positive achievements.
I love this book because it changed the way I look at the world. It was a game changer when it was first written in French in 1949 and remains essential reading for anyone interested in European History.
Braudel offers a panoramic view of Europe’s diverse civilizations and how they were shaped by the continent’s environment and geography. Centred on the Mediterranean Braudel ranges across time and space and explores the interaction, exchange and conflict between people who lived on the sea, in the mountains and on the plain.
It remains a classic because Braudel was a rare thing among historians – he was a great writer.
The focus of Fernand Braudel's great work is the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century, but Braudel ranges back in history to the world of Odysseus and forward to our time, moving out from the Mediterranean area to the New World and other destinations of Mediterranean traders. Braudel's scope embraces the natural world and material life, economics, demography, politics, and diplomacy.
When I was young, my passions were flying and art. I became a pilot at age 17. Later, I became an architect, and much later, in 2000, I decided to become a fine art photographer. After ten years of shooting from the ground, I decided to take to the air again and began shooting aerial photographs, primarily of cities. I now have three aerial books published: LA NY, Thames & Hudson, Paris From the Air, Rizzoli, and London From the Air, Rizzoli. My aerial photographs are exhibited and collected throughout the world.
If you could only have one book featuring the world from above this would be it.
It’s oversize and gorgeous. Yann is the photographer who pioneered this kind of socially conscious photography. If you only looked at the pictures it would be satisfying enough, but Yann is an environmentalist, and the chapters highlight the beauty and fragility and danger of the planet we all share.
Both low- and high-level aerial photographs document places around the world and form the starting point for discussions of ecology, sustainable development, and the current state of the world.
Growing up in what was becoming Silicon Valley, I escaped to San Francisco on weekends and, through it, fell in love with what other great cities have to offer. However, as an environmental writer and TV producer there in the 1980s, I became aware of how cities exploit the territories on which they rely. A winter sojourn in the most lovely, fragile, and ingenious of all towns—Venice—in 1985 focused my too-diffuse thought on what might otherwise seem a contradiction.The lagoon cityis, as John Ruskin said, the finest book humanity has ever written; I owe it my life and the book it inspired.
This book opened my eyes to the often cataclysmic consequences of European exploration and colonization of islands and continents beyond itself, a shockwave of transformations and extinctions that have impoverished the human and biological diversity of the Earth continuing to the present.
Crosby—a pioneer of environmental history—often writes with wry humor about a very serious topic. His chapter on the invasion of the eastern Atlantic islands and its aftermath ("The Fortunate Isles") is especially good.
People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But as Alfred W. Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. European organisms had certain decisive advantages over their New World and Australian counterparts. The spread of European…
Growing up, my father was a biologist and my mother was a children’s librarian, so I suppose it’s no surprise that I’ve become a children’s book author who writes about valuing the planet where we we live. I’ve always had a deep love of reading and some of my most cherished childhood memories are of walking through the woods behind our house, with one parent or another identifying the plants, animals, amphibians, birds, and insects that shared our land. My very first piece of writing was a poem about an owl that I wrote in first grade, and now all these years later, I’m still reading, writing, and recommending books that celebrate our marvelous world.
Believe it or not, this is a book I’ve used successfully in the classroom with teenagers!
The premise is that if we shrank the world down to just 100 people, we could then see what percentages of people shared nationalities, languages, school systems, types of jobs, etc. Or we can see who uses certain resources or has different possessions.
What I like about this book is that it’s impossible to wrap our minds around numbers in the millions and billions, but by breaking huge statistics down to just factors of 100, we can understand these concepts that illuminate how we’re sharing the planet. Kids love this book!
This is the new paperback edition of a beautiful and unique book, which explains facts about the world's population in a simple and fascinating way. Instead of unimaginable billions, it presents the whole world as a village of just 100 people. We soon find out that 22 speak a Chinese dialect and that 17 cannot read or write. We also discover the people's religions, their education, their standard of living, and much much more...This book provokes thought and elicits questions. It cannot fail to inspire children's interest in world geography, citizenship and different customs and cultures, whether they read it…
I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love that Basso can take me so far inside someone's mind that I can begin to understand not just what they think and feel but how and why they think and feel it.
This book contains the very systems and processes that we use to make knowledge and meaning, and I love learning about a way of knowing and making meaning that is very different from mine—entirely logical, purposeful, valid, and different from mine.
This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.
Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences…
