Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Politics & Social Sciences (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Douglas A. Blackmon

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

Ward Farnsworth

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Library Book

Susan Orlean

4.3 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Face: One Square Foot of Skin

Justine Bateman

4.2 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

Michael J. Sandel

4.5 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Caste: A Brief History of Racism, Sexism, Classism, Ageism, Homophobia, Religious Intolerance, Xenophobia, and Reasons for Hope

University Press

3.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe, Matthew Blaney, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting (now with Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting)

Pamela Druckerman

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption

Alex Marlow

4.9 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century

Josh Rogin, Robert Petkoff, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

Michael Knowles

? on Amazon

2 HN comments

Coraline

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

William Dalrymple

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

What We Owe to Each Other

T. M. Scanlon

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

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euroclydononMay 10, 2017

Bricks made in Birmingham in the 20's, turpentine plantations... Reminds me of the forced labor chronicled in Slavery by Another Name, which is a great read that I highly recommend.

https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-A...

cf498onJune 17, 2019

Slavery by another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon is a good book on the topic. Its not so clear cut that the civilwar actually ended slavery, it took quite a bit longer to end slavery like conditions.

cf498onJune 26, 2019

Prison labor has a long tradition as been seen as a source of income in form of a cheap involuntary labor. To the point that you got people imprisoned on arbitrary laws to keep that workforce large enough. Many states exploited this hard after the ban of slavery, to the degree that offenses where made up, like not being allowed to change your employer as a freemen in order to keep the slave like workforce large enough. If you look at the history its hard to pin the moment where this ought to have ended. After the worst offenders of openly racist laws aimed at forcing people into slave like conditions got revoked and three wars relying on the draft happened, the war on drugs had started with another set of arbitrary prosecutions. The history of incentives to acquire more prisoners is quite a bit older then the private prison complex.

edit: About the history of prison labor as a replacement for slavery, "Slavery by another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon is a great book on the topic.

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