Alamosa Public Library

A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.

"Class paints an intimate and heartbreaking portrait of motherhood as it converges and often conflicts with personal desire and professional ambition. Who has the right to create art? Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued in our culture? In clear, candid, and moving prose, Class grapples with these questions, offering a searing indictment of America's educational system and an inspiring testimony of a mother's triumph...

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from...

This book looks at the remarkable men and women whose low-profile accomplishments contribute to the running of the nation, from coal miners and oil rig workers to migrant laborers and air traffic controllers. Five hundred feet underground, the author asked a coal miner named Smitty, "Do you think it's weird that people know so little about you?" He replied, "I don't think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works." This book...

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, as exalted by widely taught formulations such as “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx,...

Argues that government, big business, and the elite have damaged America's middle class by reducing demand for its skilled workforce thereby reducing its buying power and influence on the economy.

The newly discovered slave narratives of John Washington and Wallace Turnage-and their harrowing and empowering journey to emancipation. Slave narratives, among the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five surviving post-Civil War. This book is a major new addition to this imperative part of American history-the firsthand accounts of two slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, who through a combination of...

"A profound and provocative examination of America in crisis, where unemployment, deindustrialization, and a bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in an epidemic of diseases of despair--drug abuse, gambling, suicide, magical thinking, xenophobia, and a culture of sadism and hate. America, says Pulitzer Prize­-winning reporter Chris Hedges, is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair...

A look at what kind of work Americans did, the homes they lived in, the goods they bought, the entertainment they sought, and the society and history that shaped their world ...

Documents the plight of the unemployed and working poor in the United States since 1980, following the lives of several families over the course of thirty years through reporting, memoir, stories, photographs, and analysis.