100 books like Troublemakers

By Kathryn Schumaker,

Here are 100 books that Troublemakers fans have personally recommended if you like Troublemakers. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools

Jonathan Zimmerman Author Of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools

From my list on student activism.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.

Jonathan's book list on student activism

Jonathan Zimmerman Why did Jonathan love this book?

This is one of those books that reminds you of something that was hiding in plain sight, but that you somehow overlooked: Black students who desegregated schools in the South were disproportionately female. Take the Little Rock Nine, for example: six women, three men. Rachel Devlin takes us inside the lives of these brave Black girls, who incurred enormous risks to help America live out its founding creed: all men (and, now, women) are created equal. We are all in their debt, whether we realize it or not.

By Rachel Devlin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Girl Stands at the Door as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education

The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.

In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable…


Book cover of Ellery's Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition & Sparked the Battle Over School Prayer

Jonathan Zimmerman Author Of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools

From my list on student activism.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.

Jonathan's book list on student activism

Jonathan Zimmerman Why did Jonathan love this book?

Talk about a badass. In 1956, 16-year-old Ellery Schempp protested his school’s mandatory prayer and Bible-reading period by reading silently from the Koran. He was kicked out of class and sued his school district, insisting that the First Amendment barred it from promoting a particular religious creed. Eventually, in Abington v. Schempp, the Supreme Court agreed. But along the way, kids called Schempp and his family “Commies” (it was the 1950s, remember) and his principal tried to get Tufts University to rescind its admission offer to him. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court permitted a football coach and devout Christian to pray on the field after games. It’s worth asking what would have happened if—like Schempp—the coach was reciting a Muslim prayer instead. 

By Stephen D. Solomon,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ellery's Protest as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Often, great legal decisions result from the actions of an unknown person heroically opposing the system. This work details how one person's objection to mandatory school prayer became one of the most controversial cases of this century.


Book cover of Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

Jonathan Zimmerman Author Of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools

From my list on student activism.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.

Jonathan's book list on student activism

Jonathan Zimmerman Why did Jonathan love this book?

Here’s the only full-scale biography of the most important student activist in American history. Mario Savio registered Black voters during the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and then led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, when the university tried to prevent civil-rights demonstrators from protesting on campus. Savio’s story is yet another reminder about the radical roots of free speech, which is too often dismissed at contemporary universities as a conservative or even reactionary impulse. It wasn’t, and it isn’t. 

By Robert Cohen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Freedom's Orator as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Here is the first biography of Mario Savio, the brilliant leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, the largest and most disruptive student rebellion in American history. Savio risked his life to register black voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964 and did more than anyone to bring daring forms of non-violent protest from the civil rights movement to the struggle for free speech and academic freedom on American campuses. Drawing upon previously
unavailable Savio papers, as well as oral histories from friends and fellow movement leaders, Freedom's Orator illuminates Mario's egalitarian leadership style, his remarkable eloquence, and the…


Book cover of Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

Jonathan Zimmerman Author Of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools

From my list on student activism.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.

Jonathan's book list on student activism

Jonathan Zimmerman Why did Jonathan love this book?

In this day of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” it’s easy to forget how our elite universities marginalized or simply excluded Black faculty and students. Stefan Bradley tells their stories for the first time, showing not just how African-Americans changed these institutions but also how their Ivy League experiences altered their own perceptions of America. We have a lot to learn from these “old heads”—about race, education, and much else—if we will simply stop for a moment, and listen.

By Stefan M. Bradley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Upending the Ivory Tower as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies
Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society
Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society

The inspiring story of the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed America's leading educational institutions and paved the way for social justice and racial progress

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight-Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell-are American stalwarts that…


Book cover of Technologies of Freedom

Raphael Cohen-Almagor Author Of Confronting the Internet's Dark Side: Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway

From my list on the internet's history, development, and challenges.

Why am I passionate about this?

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, DPhil, St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, is Professor of Politics, Olof Palme Visiting Professor, Lund University, Founding Director of the Middle East Study Centre, University of Hull, and Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Raphael taught, inter alia, at Oxford (UK), Jerusalem, Haifa (Israel), UCLA, Johns Hopkins (USA), and Nirma University (India). With more than 300 publications, Raphael has published extensively in the field of political philosophy, including Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance; Challenges to Democracy; The Right to Die with Dignity; The Scope of Tolerance; Confronting the Internet's Dark Side; Just, Reasonable Multiculturalism, and The Republic, Secularism and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab.

Raphael's book list on the internet's history, development, and challenges

Raphael Cohen-Almagor Why did Raphael love this book?

This is a classic. The book provides an early assessment of the impact of new communications tools on freedom of expression. Pool observed how electronic networks were emerging and transforming the nature of print, arguing that we need to learn how to live with technology and make the most of it. Electronic technologies, Pool envisaged, will become the dominant mode of communication. Pool further envisaged that electronic technology would allow a great degree of diversity, more knowledge, easier access, and freer speech. He provided a lucid and perceptive analysis of the relation of American law to technology and its regulation. Pool was concerned with the negative consequences of new technology and feared its excessive regulation. It is not computers but policy that threatens freedom, he warned. This seminal work encapsulates many of the questions we face today. The challenges Pool described came to life as the pressures on government to…

By Ithiel de Sola Pool,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Technologies of Freedom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How can we preserve free speech in an electronic age? In a masterly synthesis of history, law, and technology, Ithiel de Sola Pool analyzes the confrontation between the regulators of the new communications technology and the First Amendment.


Book cover of Secrets: The CIA's War at Home

Seth Rosenfeld Author Of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power

From my list on spies and radicals.

Why am I passionate about this?

Seth Rosenfeld is an independent investigative journalist and author of the New York Times best-seller Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. As a staff reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle, he specialized in using public records and won national honors including the George Polk Award. Subversives, based on thousands of pages of FBI records released to him as a result of several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, won the PEN Center USA’s Literary Award for Research Nonfiction Prize, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine Award, and other honors.

Seth's book list on spies and radicals

Seth Rosenfeld Why did Seth love this book?

Starting with his experience as publisher of an anti-war newspaper in the 1970s, and relying on official records released under the Freedom of Information Act, Mackenzie reveals how the CIA used undercover operatives to sabotage the dissident press and developed a system of secrecy agreements and pre-publication review boards that spread throughout the federal government in efforts to silence former intelligence agents and other would-be whistle-blowers. This brilliant book is the last work by the late Mackenzie, who dedicated his life to defending the First Amendment. He was a long-time associate of the Bay Area’s Center for Investigative Reporting, which with his wife, Jane Hundertmark, completed it after his untimely death.

By Angus MacKenzie,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Secrets as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This eye-opening expose, the result of fifteen years of investigative work, uncovers the CIA's systematic efforts to suppress and censor information over several decades. An award-winning journalist, Angus Mackenzie waged and won a lawsuit against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act and became a leading expert on questions concerning government censorship and domestic spying. In "Secrets", he reveals how federal agencies - including the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and the CIA - have monitored and controlled public access to information. Mackenzie lays bare the behind-the-scenes evolution of a policy of suppression, repression, spying, and harassment. Secrecy…


Book cover of Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

Louis V. Clark III Author Of How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century

From my list on understanding each other in a troubled world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was born on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin. Raised during the often troubled, often wonderful decade of the 1960s, I learned to stand up for what I thought was right. I joined forces with my beautiful wife during our high school years, and together, we ran away to build our own life aided by the Oneida principle of “looking ahead seven generations.” Encountering many obstacles along the way, including a poetry professor who said that what I wrote wasn’t poetry and a theater professor who said that if what I wrote was any good it was already being done. Still, I continue to write.

Louis' book list on understanding each other in a troubled world

Louis V. Clark III Why did Louis love this book?

This book will capture the attention of anyone who was lucky enough to live through the most troubled, most enlightening, and most musical time in America in the 1960s. The book tells the story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a show that pushed against the tried and true aura of American capitalism. An unjust war was taking lives in VietNam, and censors were trampling on the First Amendment, which the Brothers worked against in a very interesting way.

By David Bianculli,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Dangerously Funny as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now in paperback, a rollicking history of the rise and fall of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour —“A stunningly alive portrait of the 1960s and of two very different men who ‘refused to shut up’ and thereby made TV history” (People).

A dramatic behind-the-scenes look at the rise and fall of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour—the provocative, politically charged program that shocked the censors, outraged the White House, and forever changed the face of television.

Decades before The Daily Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour proved there was a place on television for no-holds-barred political comedy with a decidedly antiauthoritarian…


Book cover of Separation of Church and State

Daniel L. Dreisbach Author Of Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers

From my list on separation of church and state in America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have long been fascinated by the messy, tumultuous intersection of religion, politics, and law in American history, and I have made it the focus of my professional pursuits as a constitutional attorney, academic, and author. I am especially interested in the founders’ views on the prudential and constitutional relations between church and state and religion’s contributions to civic life. Did the founders believe religion was an “indispensable support,” to use George Washington’s phrase, for republican government, or did they envision a secular polity committed to a separation between religion and the state? These questions engaged the founders, and they continue to roil political culture in the 21st century.  

Daniel's book list on separation of church and state in America

Daniel L. Dreisbach Why did Daniel love this book?

This is perhaps the most talked-about book of the last generation on church-state relations. It offers a sweeping survey of the conceptions and rhetoric of church-state separation in American political and legal traditions from colonial times to the mid-20th century.  

Philip Hamburger challenges the notion that “separation of church and state,” as developed in 20th-century jurisprudence, is a fundamental American principle deeply embedded in the nation’s political and constitutional traditions. Rather, he argues, the rhetoric of separation emerged from the cynical politics of late-18th-century disestablishment battles and was picked up in the next century by nativists seeking to marginalize Catholics (while preserving Protestant hegemony) and by liberals intent on establishing a secular polity. I read few pages in this book that failed to prompt reflection or challenge long-held assumptions.

By Philip Hamburger,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Separation of Church and State as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later.

Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members…


Book cover of Media Scandals

Igor Prusa Author Of Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual

From my list on scandal and why it matters.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a Czech scholar in Japanese studies and media studies who became spontaneously interested in the way media scandals unfold in Japan. For ten years, I was studying Japanese scandals at The University of Tokyo (Ph.D. 2017), and I developed a new approach to Japanese scandal as a highly mediatized social ritual that tends to preserve the status quo while generating commercial profit. After my return from Japan, I continued my scandal research at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and I'm currently teaching media & communication theory at Ambis University Prague. In 2023, Routledge finally published the results of my decade-long research in my new book titled Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual.

Igor's book list on scandal and why it matters

Igor Prusa Why did Igor love this book?

I believe that this book is a nice starting point for students (starting with undergraduates) who are interested in learning more about media scandal via particular examples.

I was attracted by the book because it focuses on some of the most influential and notorious media scandals in history. What I found particularly useful for my research was the detailed timeline that helped me to put the wide-ranging scandals into historical perspective.

This is why I personally recommend this book to anyone interested in the social phenomenon of media scandal.      

By Alan Bisbort,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Media Scandals as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This fascinating volume offers an overview of the most influential and notorious media scandals, from newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger's groundbreaking 1735 trial for printing and publishing false, scandalous, malicious and seditious statements to Dr. Phil McGraw's 2008 thwarted attempt to force his television cameras inside Britney Spears' hospital room, from the attempts to ban literature by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg to the excesses of gossip mongers like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Geraldo Rivera, and Matt Drudge. It delves into the tabloid press and walks through the minefields of political opinion shapers,…


Book cover of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy

Natasha Lindstaedt Author Of Democratic Decay and Authoritarian Resurgence

From my list on why the world is becoming more authoritarian.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a political science professor who has always been interested in authoritarian regimes, how they function, and how they control their citizens. In particular, I find it fascinating why citizens may genuinely adore and respect the (sometimes outrageous) autocrats that lead them, even though they rule with an iron fist. Additionally, the rise of authoritarianism in democracies also caught my attention. Terms like “slow-moving coups” and “insurrections” are being used when referring to democracies now. In some ways, this is shocking to me—but it’s motivated me to better understand how this happenedand the ways in which autocracies and democracies seem to be mimicking each other.

Natasha's book list on why the world is becoming more authoritarian

Natasha Lindstaedt Why did Natasha love this book?

Legal scholars have offered a lot of insights into how democracies fall apart, but one of the more interesting books from constitutional scholars is How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. Using a case study of the US to illustrate, this book demonstrates how important constitutional design is in preventing democratic backsliding, as the book explains how would-be autocrats can take advantage of constitutions to flex their own power. And though the US constitution has often been heralded as a model document for new democracies to follow, somewhat surprisingly, it’s not ideal for maintaining a democracy; it actually suffers from two sins of being overly rigid on the one hand, and too vague in shaping the parameters of executive power on the other. This book is both a guide and a cautionary tale.

By Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Z Huq,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked How to Save a Constitutional Democracy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Democracies are in danger. Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self-rule. In the United States, the tenure of Donald Trump has seemed decisive turning point for many. What kind of president intimidates jurors, calls the news media the "enemy of the American people," and seeks foreign assistance investigating domestic political rivals? Whatever one thinks of President Trump, many think the Constitution will safeguard us from lasting damage. But is that assumption justified? How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to…


Book cover of A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools
Book cover of Ellery's Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition & Sparked the Battle Over School Prayer
Book cover of Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

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Interested in the First Amendment, the Vietnam War, and presidential biography?

The Vietnam War 243 books