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A radical reinterpretation of'Attica,'the revolutionary 1970s uprising that galvanized abolitionist movements and transformed prisons. Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

A groundbreaking look at how America exported mass incarceration around the globe, from a rising young historian“American Purgatory will forever change how we understand the rise of mass incarceration. It will forever change how we understand this country.” —Clint Smith, bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across AmericaIn this explosive new book, historian Benjamin Weber reveals how the story of American prisons is inextricably linked to the expansion of American power around the globe.A vivid work of hidden history that spans the wars to subjugate Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the conquest of the western territories, and the creation of an American empire in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American Purgatory reveals how “prison imperialism”—the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations—is written into our national DNA, extending through to our modern era of mass incarceration. Weber also uncovers a surprisingly rich history of prison resistance, from the Seminole Chief Osceola to Assata Shakur—one that invites us to rethink the scope of America's long freedom struggle.Weber's brilliantly documented text is supplemented by original maps highlighting the global geography of prison imperialism, as well as illustrations of key figures in this history by the celebrated artist Ayo Scott. For readers of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration—at home and abroad—as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons.

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle.

A redistricting crisis is now upon us. This surprising, compelling book tells the history of how we got to this moment—from the Founding Fathers to today's high-tech manipulation of election districts—and shows us as well how to protect our most sacred, hard-fought principle of one person, one vote. Here is THE book on gerrymandering for citizens, politicians, journalists, activists, and voters.“Seabrook's lucid account of the origins and evolution of gerrymandering—the deliberate and partisan doctoring of district borders for electoral advantage—makes a potentially dry, wonky subject accessible and engaging for a broad audience.” —The New York TimesGerrymandering is the manipulation of election districts for partisan and political gain. Instead of voters picking the politicians they want, politicians pick the voters they need to get the election results they're after. Surprisingly, gerrymandering has been around since before our nation's founding. And with technology, those drawing the redistricting lines have, now more than ever, been able to microtarget their electoral manipulations with unprecedented levels of precision. Nick Seabrook, an authority on constitutional and election law and an expert on gerrymandering (pronounced with a hard G!), has written an illuminating, urgently needed book on how our elections have been rigged through redistricting, beginning with the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and extending to the twentieth century's gerrymandering battles at the Supreme Court and today's high-tech manipulations of election districts. Seabrook writes of Patrick Henry, who used redistricting to settle an old score with political foe and fellow Founding Father James Madison (almost preventing the Bill of Rights from happening). He writes of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, and corrects the mistaken notion of the derivation of the term “gerrymander.” He writes of Abraham Lincoln and how his desire to preserve the Union led him to manipulate the admission of new states in order to maintain his majority in the Senate. And we come to understand the place of the Supreme Court in its fierce battles regarding gerrymandering throughout the twentieth century. First was Felix Frankfurter, who fought for decades to prevent the judiciary from involving itself in disputes concerning the drawing of districts. Then came the Warren Court and its series of civil rights cases culminating in the landmark decision (Reynolds v. Sims), written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which says that state legislatures, unlike the United States Congress, must have representation in both houses based on districts containing equal populations—with redistricting as needed following each census. The result has been ever-increasing, hard-fought wrangling between the two political parties after each census. Seabrook explores the rise of the most partisan gerrymanders in American history, put into place by the Republican Party after the 2010 census, and how the battle has shifted to the states via REDMAP—the GOP's successful strategy of the last decade to control state governments and rig the results of state legislative and congressional elections.