Books by Thomas Aiello

From its 19th-century roots to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. This book presents the first cultural history of the sport from the street to the highest levels of professional mens and womens competition, chronicling the relationship between the sport and American society.

Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating life of pioneering journalist, television host, bestselling author, and important yet overlooked civil rights figure Louis Lomax, who became one of the most influential voices of the civil rights movement despite his past as an ex-con, serial liar, and publicity-seeking provocateur.

Solemnity is, in its way, a love story. It is a vehicle for its narrator to understand the collapse of his relationship and his sanity, an attempt to answer the three questions Abraham Lincoln posed in his first inaugural address:IS IT POSSIBLE, THEN, TO MAKE THAT INTERCOURSE MORE ADVANTAGEOUS OR MORE SATISFACTORY AFTER SEPARATION THAN BEFORE? (yes)CAN ALIENS MAKE TREATIES EASIER THAN FRIENDS CAN MAKE LAWS? (no)CAN TREATIES BE MORE FAITHFULLY ENFORCED BETWEEN ALIENS THAN LAWS CAN AMONG FRIENDS? (yes and no)The narrator, a small-town Arkansas grocery store manager, begins researching those answers after his wife leaves him, and his history of the failed relationship, told through an engagement of Lincoln's questions about intercourse and aliens. The story begins with the couple's childhood, then progresses through their marriage, their happiness, and the narrator's mental declension, which ultimately unravels his marriage. He soon begins hallucinating both aliens and Abraham Lincoln, and his investigation soon turns to the reasons for their appearance, leading to a stay in a mental hospital. He is, ultimately, crafting a history of his life's meaning, and thus the story is told with the accoutrements of history writing, footnoted, bibliographied, and illustrated. While the story is ultimately a tragedy and uses some academic language and an academic format to structure its narrative, it is still a comedy. It is tale of the South. And it is a love story.

In the 20 years between 1895 and 1915, two key leaders-Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois-shaped the struggle for African American rights. This book examines the impact of their fierce debate on America's response to Jim Crow and positions on civil rights throughout the 20th century-and evaluates the legacies of these two individuals even today.The debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington on how to further social and economic progress for African Americans lasted 20 years, from 1895 to Washington's death in 1915. Their ongoing conversation evolved over time, becoming fiercer and more personal as the years progressed. But despite its complexities and steadily accumulating bitterness, it was still, at its heart, a conversation-an impassioned contest at the turn of the century to capture the souls of black folk.This book focuses on the conversation between Washington and Du Bois in order to fully examine its contours. It serves as both a document reader and an authored text that enables readers to perceive how the back and forth between these two individuals produced a cacophony of ideas that made it anything but a bipolar debate, even though their expressed differences would ultimately shape the two dominant strains of activist strategy. The numerous chapters on specific topics and historical events follow a preface that presents an overview of both the conflict and its historiographical treatment; evaluates the legacies of both Washington and Du Bois, emphasizing the trajectories of their theories beyond 1915; and provides an explanation of the unique structure of the work.

Offers the first critical history of the influential Southern Newspaper Syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955-68).

Presents a collection of essays that examines instances of definitional difference, of contested meaning. The essays move chronologically, but they are by no means comprehensive. The evolution of American history tracks along myriad similar disputes. Instead, each essay is exemplary of historical points where disagreements over language create contested space.

HOW TO DEAL WITH CANCER, LOVE, LOSS, ADDICTION, AND DEATH IN THE SOUTH, WITHOUT GOING COMPLETELY BAT-SHIT CRAZY. The more clairvoyant amongst the citizens might have seen the plague coming. The town's street design, after all, told the story: had the roads of Carbondale, Arkansas been the constellation lines between stars, reaching with the stretch of their potholes and paint to the homes of those infected, they would have told the story of the tripartite battle between Hercules, Hydra, and Cancer itself. On Carpentry is dually a comedy and tragedy about a mysterious outbreak of pancreatic cancer in Carbondale. Like all Southern stories, the novel is replete with crazy old ladies, renegade street ministers, and frustrated lemonade salesmen. There is cocaine. There are Easybake Potatoes. Such are the Confederate flags of our time, flapping in the cool, cancer-ridden, Southern wind.

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved tells the story of the American glue-sniffing epidemic of the 1960s, from the first reports of use to the unsuccessful crusade for federal legislation in the early 1970s. The human obsession with inhalation for intoxication has deep roots, from the oracle at Delphi to Judaic biblical ritual. The...