Mizzou Must-Reads: Social Sciences
 

In her bestselling classic, Kay Redfield Jamison changed the way we think about moods and madness. One of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. Jamison reveals both its terrors and the cruel allure that prompted her to resist taking medication.

How did the AIDS epidemic spread so far before it was taken seriously? And the Band Played On is both a tribute to the heroes in science, politics, public health, and the gay community who struggled to alert the nation of the danger, and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.

This essay was based on lectures Woolf delivered at two women's colleges at Cambridge University in 1928. While employing fictional narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the series of lectures are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. "[Fanon] demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images." - Robert Coles, The New York Times

Published in 1963, it gave a description of "the problem that has no name": the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives.

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. A powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document.

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood. The experience is her own-as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother-but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere.

In powerful and persuasive prose, Mill asks and answers provocative questions relating to the boundaries of social authority and individual sovereignty. This texts presents one of the most influential studies on the nature of individual liberty and its role in a democratic society.

Classic, Renaissance-era guide to acquiring and maintaining political power. Today, nearly 500 years after it was written, this calculating prescription for autocratic rule continues to be much read and studied.

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." ~W.E.B. Du Bois~ In these 1903 essays, Du Bois describe the magnitude of American racism and demand an end to it. He draws on his own life for an articulate exploration of the moral and intellectual issues surrounding the perception of blacks within American society.