Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions. The Lies That Bind is an exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. There are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict....

A history of a quintessentially American place - the rural and small town heartland -- that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world. When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, she expected to find her new home to be isolated. Struck by the gap between reputation and reality, she dug into the making of the modern heartland, and the wider her story became, she realized she'd uncovered an unheralded crossroads of...

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of dramatic upheaval in American universities as a new generation of scholar-activists rejected traditional humanism in favor of a radical ideology that denied objective truth. In The Victims' Revolution, critic and scholar Bruce Bawer provides the first history of this radical movement and a sweeping assessment of its intellectual and cultural fruits. Once, Bawer argues, the purpose of higher education had been to...

Journalist Robbins explores the ways group identity theories play out among cliques--and the students they exclude. She reveals the new labels students stick onto each other today, the long-term effects of this marginalization, and the reasons students in these categories are often shunned. Then she celebrates them. The homogenization of the US education system has made outcasts more important than ever. In this conformist, creativity-stifling society,...

"Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi recount their experiences talking to people from all walks of life about race and identity on a cross-country tour of America. Spurred by the realization that they had nearly completed high school without hearing any substantive discussion about racism in school, the two young women deferred college admission for a year to collect first-person accounts of how racism plays out in this country every day -- and often in unexpected...

A young girl living on the coast of South Carolina dreams of her distant relatives on the shores of Africa and beyond. Indigo Dreaming is a poetic meditation between two young girls--on different sides of the sea--who wonder about how they are intricately linked by culture, even though they are separated by location. The girls' reflections come together, creating a vision of home, as well as a celebration of the Black diaspora.

"As borders vanish, more people travel, cultures mingle, and communications across continents become easier, aren't relations between people supposed to be getting less fraught? Why then are people retreating into the refuges of religion, nationality, race, and region? In France the Roma are deported en masse, in Italy Prime Minister Berlusconi has called undocumented workers an 'army of evil' and in Oklahoma, where Muslims are only 0.2 percent of...