Faculty Bibliography

Because Barack Obama and his communist-Nazi-progressive gorillas don't want you to have them, that's why! In Beck's "all is possible" world, viewers learn that Obama may (or may not) have a secret "enemies list" and that his health-care bill may (or may not) extend coverage to house pets

They eventually settled in Chicago, where George found work in a Campbell Soup factory, [Ida Mae Brandon Gladney] in a hospital. There no longer were "colored" and "white" signs to degrade them, but the specter of racial caste was omnipresent. The Gladneys survived by exploiting the small but significant advantages of Northern life, while retaining the work ethic of their rural Mississippi roots. In one especially telling episode, Ida Mae had to decide whether to join a strike against her hospital or cross an angry picket line to pay the monthly bills. It wasn't a hard decision, Ms. [Isabel Wilkerson] explains. "The concept of not working a job one had agreed to do was alien to Ida Mae." In 1998, Ms. Wilkerson accompanied Ida Mae Gladney on a visit to Mississippi. It was October, and cotton was still in the fields. "We cross a gravel road," Ms. Wilkerson writes, and "Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big, 'Let's go pick some."' Ms. Wilkerson wasn't thrilled by the prospect of two black women trespassing on what was very likely a white man's plot of ground, but Mrs. Gladney insisted. "It's as if she can't wait to pick it now that she doesn't have to," Ms. Wilkerson writes. "It's the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will." The experience fired old memories. "I just couldn't do it," Mrs. Gladney confessed. "I'd pick and cry. I ain't never liked the field." The next day she visited the local cemetery, surveying the headstones of people she left behind. "Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?" her brother-in-law asks. "No, I'm gonna be in Chicago," she replies

Few people know this better than [Wilbert Rideau]. Convicted of the murder of a white bank teller in 1961, Mr. Rideau, who is black, spent 44 years in prison, most of them at Angola, before being released. His painfully candid memoir, "In the Place of Justice," is indeed, as its subtitle promises, "a story of punishment and deliverance," told by a high school dropout who escaped Angola's electric chair to become an award-winning prison journalist. As such, Mr. Rideau is the rarest of American commodities -- a man who exited a penitentiary in better shape than when he arrived. Angola, though, was a living hell. Like other prisons in the Deep South, it used a trusty system in which violent, gun-toting inmates served as guards. Everyone carried a weapon for protection, usually a blade. The weakest inmates served as slaves, or "galboys," a process that began with the "turn-out," in which the new arrivals were sized up, challenged and frequently gang-raped. "Slavery was commonplace in Angola," Mr. Rideau writes, "with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage." In 2005, the man Life magazine had featured as "The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America" was granted yet another trial. This time, the jury convicted Mr. Rideau of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced him to a term of 21 years. "Because I had served more than double that," he explains, "I was freed on the spot."

Mr. [Daniel Okrent]'s description of the Prohibition era is a narrative delight. The Republicans, who controlled the White House and Congress in the 1920s, were largely indifferent to its success. Even those who did care were unwilling to spend the king's ransom needed to enforce it. There were never enough agents, and very few of them proved "untouchable." The accompanying laws, meanwhile, provided enough loopholes to guarantee failure. Sacramental wine was permitted, allowing fake clergymen to lead bogus congregants in nonreligious romps. Farmers who fermented their own cider and "fruit juices" were given special exemptions, making them extremely popular neighbors. Doctors, dentists and even veterinarians were free to write prescriptions for remedies like "Richardson's Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters," which contained 47.5 percent alcohol (95 proof). In the 1920s, Charles Walgreen expanded his drugstore chain from 20 stores to an astounding 525 -- a spurt ludicrously attributed to his introduction of the milkshake. Much of the illegal liquor had a foul taste, leading to the introduction of mixed drinks with tonic water and ginger ale. The lure of the speakeasy, with its dance floor and powder room, led to the sexual integration of the all-male drinking culture. "Social life in America," Mr. Okrent writes, "was changed forever." What was America's wettest city? Mr. Okrent lists a number of contenders -- including Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco -- but hands the title to Detroit, the corrupt, booming blue-collar metropolis known widely as "the city on a still." At its lawbreaking best in the 1920s, Detroit housed more than 20,000 speakeasies, about one for every 30 adults. The local Board of Commerce estimated that the illegal-alcohol business employed 50,000 people, excluding sticky-fingered police officers and politicians; it was the city's second-largest industry, behind automobile manufacturing. Geography also played a role, as Canadian bootleggers, assisted by Detroit's notorious Purple Gang, smuggled alcohol freely across the border in trucks, railroad cars and high-powered speedboats. Huge fortunes were made and multiplied, Mr. Okrent says, perhaps the biggest by Sam Bronfman, who bought Joseph E. Seagram & Sons after he had come to dominate "the large-scale, cross-border smuggling trade." As the chief Prohibition enforcement officer admitted, "You cannot keep liquor from dripping through a dotted line."