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• Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2001
• Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s Prentice Hall (Boston, MA), 2010
• Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2016

1. Whose Detroit? : politics, labor, and race in a modern American city LCCN 2016055835 Type of material Book Personal name Thompson, Heather Ann, 1963- author. Main title Whose Detroit? : politics, labor, and race in a modern American city / Heather Ann Thompson ; with a new prologue. Published/Produced Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1712 Description pages cm ISBN 9781501709210 (pbk. : alk. paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. Blood in the water : the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy LCCN 2016000477 Type of material Book Personal name Thompson, Heather Ann, 1963- author. Main title Blood in the water : the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy / Heather Ann Thompson. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Pantheon Books, [2016] Description xvii, 724 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm ISBN 9780375423222 (hardback) CALL NUMBER HV9475.N716 T46 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Speaking out : activism and protest in the 1960s and 1970s LCCN 2009002668 Type of material Book Main title Speaking out : activism and protest in the 1960s and 1970s / edited by Heather Ann Thompson. Published/Created Boston : Prentice Hall, c2010. Description xiv, 252 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780131942141 (pbk.) 013194214X (pbk.) Shelf Location FLM2015 061875 CALL NUMBER E839.5 .S64 2010 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. Whose Detroit? : politics, labor, and race in a modern American city LCCN 2001003940 Type of material Book Personal name Thompson, Heather Ann, 1963- Main title Whose Detroit? : politics, labor, and race in a modern American city / Heather Ann Thompson. Published/Created Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2001. Description viii, 295 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 080143520X (cloth : alk. paper) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0c4x3-aa Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy02/2001003940.html CALL NUMBER F574.D457 T48 2001 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER F574.D457 T48 2001 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Organization of American Historians Web site - http://www.oah.org/lectures/lecturers/view/1731

  Heather Ann Thompson, who teaches at the University of Michigan, has written numerous popular as well as scholarly articles on the history of mass incarceration as well as its current impact. These include pieces for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and the Huffington Post, as well as the award-winning historical articles "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History" and "Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards." Thompson recently served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. She is the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001) and Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (2016), winner of the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes. She is also editor of Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (2009). Thompson has consulted on several documentary films, including "Criminal Injustice at Attica," and she regularly speaks to radio and print journalists about issues related to policing, civil rights, urban crisis, and prisons.

  Click here for more information about Heather Ann Thompson.

  Twitter: @hthompsn.

• Wikipedia -

  Heather Ann Thompson
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Heather Ann Thompson
  Born August 17, 1963 (age 53)
  Lawrence, Kansas, United States
  Education University of Michigan (B.A.)
  University of Michigan (M.A.)
  Princeton University (Ph.D.)
  Occupation Historian, Author, Activist
  Spouse(s) Jonathan Daniel Wells
  Children Dillon Thompson Erb
  Wilder Thompson Erb
  Ava Thompson Wells
  Website heatherannthompson.com

  Heather Ann Thompson (August 17, 1963) is an American historian, author, activist, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. She won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

  Contents

  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 The Attica Uprising of 1971
  2.2 History of Detroit and the Present Day Motor City
  3 Publications[5]
  3.1 Books
  3.2 Articles
  4 Awards and Recognition
  5 References
  6 External links

  Early life

  Thompson was born in Lawrence, Kansas. Her parents are Ann Curry Thompson, a labor lawyer in Detroit, and Frank Wilson Thompson, Jr, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Her sister is Saskia Thompson (today of Philadelphia, PA). Thompson's early childhood was spent in Bloomington, Indiana and Oxford, England, but in her teen years the family moved to the North Rosedale Park neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. Thompson graduated from Cass Technical High School.
  Career

  Thompson earned a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1987 and completed her PhD at Princeton University in 1995. Thompson was on faculty at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte from 1997-2009, and then on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia from 2009-2015. In 2015, Thompson returned to the Detroit area when she and her husband (historian Jonathan Daniel Wells), accepted faculty positions at the University of Michigan. Thompson writes about the history and current crises of mass incarceration for numerous popular and scholarly publications. Her work can be found in the New York Times, 'Newsweek, NBC, 'Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon, Huffington Post, and Dissent. She has also appeared on NPR, Sirius Radio, and various television news programs in the U.S. and abroad. Several of Thompson’s scholarly pieces, including "Why Mass Incarceration Matters," have won best article awards, and her popular piece in The Atlantic, "How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America," was named a finalist for the Best Media Award given by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.[1] Thompson is a Soros Justice Fellow,[2] sits on the board of the Prison Policy Initiative,[3] and recently served as well on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel to study causes and consequences of incarceration in the U.S.[4] Her books include: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, August 2016); Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001, new edition 2017); and the edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Thompson was also named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.[4]
  The Attica Uprising of 1971

  The culmination of a decade of research, Blood in the Water offers the first definitive account of the 1971 Attica Prison riot. The book was released in August 2016 to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the country's largest prison rebellion and will shed new light on the riot, the state's violent response, and the decades-long implications of Attica for those involved as well as America's criminal justice system. Thompson's research for the book included interviews with former Attica prisoners, hostages, families of victims, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, and state officials as well as significant amounts of material never before released to the public.
  History of Detroit and the Present Day Motor City

  Heather Ann Thompson’s 2001 book, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City is a regularly cited account of Detroit’s history during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. It is a comprehensive account of police brutality and the black political reaction to it in this period, as well as the underlying reasons for why Detroit became such a crucial site of black political activism and black political power after 1973. This book was published by Cornell University Press and a new edition of it is expected in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit riot of 1967. This updated edition is expected to address issues currently facing Detroit as well such as its recent bankruptcy and the current challenges this city faces thanks to record rates of incarceration.
  Publications[5]
  Books

  Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). ISBN 0375423222.
  Thompson, ed. Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (Prentice Hall, 2009). ISBN 9780131942141
  Thompson, Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press, 2001). ISBN 080143520X

  Articles

  Thompson, "How Attica's Ugly Past is Still Protected," Time Magazine, May 26, 2015.
  Thompson, "How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America," The Atlantic, October 7, 2013.
  Thompson, "Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards," Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011).
  Thompson, "The Lingering Injustice of Attica," Oped, The New York Times, September 9, 2011.
  Thompson, "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crises, Decline and Transformation in Postwar American History," Journal of American History (December, 2010).

  Awards and Recognition

  Winner Pulitzer Prize in History, 2017.
  Winner Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, 2017
  Winner Ridenhour Book Prize, 2017.
  Winner J. WIllard Hurst Book Prize in Socio-Legal History, 2017.
  Finalist Silver Gavel Award. American Bar Association. March, 2017. (announcement of award May, 2017)
  Finalist Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2017. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy February, 2017. (announcement of award, April, 2017)
  Winner. Book Prize. New York City Bar Association. January, 2017
  Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy named on 14 "Best Books of 2016" lists including those compiled by The New York Times, Newsweek, Kirkus Review, the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Bloomberg, the Marshall Project, the Baltimore City Paper, Book Scroll, and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, Blood in the Water was named on the Best Human Rights Books of 2016 list, and received starred reviews from Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly.
  Finalist for the National Book Award 2016. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. October, 2016
  Longlisted for the National Book Award 2016. Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. September, 2016
  Finalist, 2015 J. Anthony Lukas Award for Best Work-in-Progress in Non-Fiction, Columbia School of Journalism, March 2015.[6]
  Finalist, 2014 Media for a Just Society Awards for Magazine Article: "How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America" The Atlantic, National Council for Crime and Delinquency.[7]
  Appointed Distinguished OAH Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2013.[4]
  Most Distinguished Scholarly Article Award for “Rethinking Working Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011). Awarded by the Labor Movements Section. The American Sociological Association.
  Best Article in Urban History Award for "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History," Journal of American History (December 2010). Awarded by Urban History Association, 2011.
  Soros Justice Fellowship, The Open Society Institute, 2006-2007.

• MLive - http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/04/university_of_michigan_profess_27.html

  University of Michigan professor wins Pulitzer Prize in history
  heatherannthompson.jpg
  University of Michigan Professor and Historian Heather Ann Thompson won the Pulitzer Prize in history on Monday, April 10, for her book "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy." Photo provided l University of Michigan (Photo provided l University of Michigan)
  Print Email
  Martin Slagter | mslagter@mlive.com By Martin Slagter | mslagter@mlive.com
  Email the author
  on April 11, 2017 at 8:35 AM

  ANN ARBOR, MI - A book by University of Michigan Professor and Historian Heather Ann Thompson has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in history.

  Thompson received the prize on Monday, April 10, as the author of "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy." She won in the category of Letters, Drama & Music "for a narrative history that sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry in seeking the truth about the 1971 Attica prison riots," according to judges.

  Thompson spent more than a decade researching the 1971 prison uprising in upstate New York in which armed troopers and corrections officers killed 39 men - hostages as well as prisoners - and severely wounded more than 100 others during a four-day showdown inside Attica.

  She focuses on the 45 years since, delivering a detailed account of one of the most longstanding and horrific cover-ups in American history, and chronicles the victims' decades-long quest for justice.
  ADVERTISING

  Thompson is a professor in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Residential College. She also is a research affiliate in the Population Studies Center in the Institute for Social Research.

  "Dr. Heather Ann Thompson's Pulitzer Prize in history is an outstanding example of our faculty's talent and commitment to academic rigor being recognized at the highest levels," said U-M President Mark Schlissel in a news release. "I am proud to congratulate her on this amazing achievement."

  Thompson is expected to take part in the Chelsea District Library's Midwest Literary Walk, showcasing nationally recognized authors and poets at venues throughout its downtown on Saturday, April 29, where she will discuss "Blood in the Water."

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/magazine/heather-ann-thompson-thinks-the-justice-system-is-unfair.html?_r=0

  Heather Ann Thompson Thinks the Justice System Is Unfair

  Talk

  Interview by ANA MARIE COX MAY 10, 2017
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  Heather Ann Thompson Credit Andrew T. Warman for The New York Times

  You just won a Pulitzer Prize for your history of the 1971 Attica prison uprising — and the cover-up of the atrocities that happened when the state took the prison back. How did you first become interested in civil rights issues? I grew up in Detroit in the ’70s, and everything was happening at once: The drug war was in full swing, the city of Detroit had been under black leadership for a decade, the recession had taken an incredible toll. I was growing up in the epicenter of America, a white girl in a mostly black city trying to understand all of that politically.

  I have to ask: Are you from Detroit Detroit? Yes.

  You point out not only that the war on crime was a bipartisan effort — it started with L.B.J. but grew under Nixon — but also that it wasn’t really in response to a crime uptick, as many Americans thought at the time. It was pure rhetoric. It was a policy choice, not a crime imperative. Attica helps us understand the emotional fury of the punitive spirit that takes over the country in the ’80s and ’90s. The civil rights movement comes North, and all of a sudden, Johnson starts to sound like Bull Connor, right? It was legitimate when it was the South, but now it’s just a bunch of disorder carried out by thugs.

  I got déjà vu reading the book because some of the language sounded so familiar to what we hear today. That rhetoric is so powerful. And the politics behind it matter. It isn’t just self-serving rhetoric: It’s about rhetoric that lulls voters into feeling that they’re doing something to better the nation when in fact nothing is being done to address the real social problem. What narrative do you give people to make sense of what had happened in the world around them? I was so struck by how the Attica protesters were trying to call attention to terrible prison conditions, but the spin made it seem as if they were the problem.

  What kind of spin? When you tell the nation that hippies are violent, the antiwar protesters are violent, prisoners are violent, civil rights is really about thuggery instead of genuine rights, then, all of a sudden, you look at Kent State, you look at the Chicago convention of ’68, you look at Attica and you completely miss the fact that all the violence was state violence.

  How have people responded to the book? I thought, if anything, the cover-up would be what got attention. You know what everybody focuses on? The conditions. And yet things are much worse today than they were in 1971. We have people serving decades in solitary confinement. We have more life sentences than we’ve ever had. We have more children in solitary confinement. And the overcrowding is worse than it was during Attica.

  Thompson is the author of “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.” She is the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History.

  Age: 53

  Occupation: Author and historian

  Hometown: Detroit

  Her Top 5 Uprisings Of the 20th Century
  1. Wounded Knee, 1973
  2. Attica, 1971
  3. Detroit, 1967
  4. Watts, 1965
  5. Philadelphia, 1964

  If there are some truths that you could make clear to Americans about civil or criminal justice reform, what would they be? There is very little relationship between who is locked up and the concept of justice. Americans don’t understand that people in prison are often there because of where the policing was. What’s more: White people need to start telling the truth about the way this justice system works. Because every white person — particularly middle- and upper-class white people — knows that they are not as worried about their children becoming trapped in the system unjustly.

  Was there anything that surprised you during your reporting? Sometimes I hear from people who have served time who say that prison was a place where they could finally get help, and that has been hard for me to process. I realized that one reason that’s the case with a lot of people is because it’s an institution and, for some people, they actually have health care for the first time, or housing for the first time. That’s what’s so powerfully sad about this whole story: It isn’t that we don’t know how to help people, but that we continue to do it through a prison, as opposed to other institutions. It could be so much better.

• Heather Ann Thompson Home Page - http://heatherannthompson.com/

  Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a native Detroiter and historian on faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the departments of Afro-American and African Studies, History, and the Residential College.

  Her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, has been profiled on television and radio programs across the country, it just won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, The Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and a book prize from the New York City Bar Association. The book was also named a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize in History, a finalist for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association (winner announced May, 2017), and it was named on 14 Best Books of 2016 lists including those compiled by The New York Times, Newsweek, Kirkus Review, the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Bloomberg, the Marshall Project, the Baltimore City Paper, Book Scroll, and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, Blood in the Water was named on the Best Human Rights Books of 2016 list, and received starred reviews from Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. Blood in the Water has also been optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by acclaimed screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Schrapnel.

  Thompson has written extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for the top publications in her field. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (December 2010) and “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011). Thompson’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly on how mass incarceration has distorted democracy in America was named a finalist for a best magazine article award in 2014.

  Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (new edition out May, 2017), and is the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

  On the policy front Thompson served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. The two-year, $1.5 million project was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Thompson has served as well on the boards of several policy organizations including the Prison Policy Initiative, the Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic site, and on the advisory boards of Life of the Law. She has also worked in an advisory capacity with the Center for Community Change, the Humanities Action Lab Global Dialogues on Incarceration, and the Open Society Foundation on issues related to work. Thompson has also spent considerable time presenting her work on prisons and justice policy to universities and policy groups nationally and internationally as well as to state legislators in various states. She has given talks in countries such as France, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, the UK, as well as across the Unites States, including in Hawaii.
  In 2016 Thompson became President-elect of the Urban History Association and, in 2012 the Organization of American Historians named her a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians and, along with Rhonda Y. Williams (Case Western Reserve), she currently edits a manuscript series for UNC Press, Justice, Power, and Politics. She is also the sole editor of the series, American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century published by Routledge. Thompson has consulted on several documentary films including Criminal Injustice at Attica and assisted with other documentary films including one on Criminalization in America by filmmakers Annie Stopford and Llewellyn Smith from BlueSpark Collaborative, another produced by Henry Louis Gates entitled, And Still I Rise: Black Power to the White House for PBS, and one soon to be done on the Bard Prison Initiative.

  DR. HEATHER ANN THOMPSON

  EDUCATION:

  Princeton University. American History, Ph.D., 1995
  The University of Michigan. History, M.A. (With Distinction), 1987
  The University of Michigan. History, B.A. (Highest Honors), 1987

  PUBLICATIONS:

  Books:

  Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, August 23, 2016)
  Thompson, Echoes from the Tombs: The New York City Jail Rebellions of 1970. (forthcoming, 2017)
  Thompson, ed. Speaking Out With Many Voices: Documenting American Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s, (Pearson, 2009)
  Thompson, Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press, 2001). (New Edition of this book, with new material out in May, 2017)

  Articles in Refereed Journals:

  “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Journal of Law and Society. (December, 2014)
  “Lessons from Attica: From Prisoner Rebellion to Mass Incarceration and Back.” In special issue: “Mass Incarceration and Political Repression,” co-edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández. Socialism and Democracy, #66, vol. 28, no. 3 (December, 2014)
  “Writing the Perilously Recent Past: The Historian’s Dilemma.” American Historical Association. Perspectives. (Fall, 2013)
  “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011)
  Article for special issue of Criminology and Public Policy. Debate with Joshua Page on role of guard unions in the crisis of mass incarceration.
  Joshua Page, “Prison Officer Unions and the Perpetuation of the Penal Status Quo.” Criminology and Public Policy. Special Issue: Special Issue on Mass Incarceration. August 2011. Volume 10, Issue 3
  Heather Ann Thompson, “Downsizing the Carceral State: The Policy Implications of Prison Guard Unions.” Criminology and Public Policy. Special Issue: Special Issue on Mass Incarceration. August 2011. Volume 10, Issue 3
  “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History. (December, 2010)
  “Making a Second Urban History.” Essay collection commemorating the publication of Arnold Hirsch’s, Making a Second Ghetto in the Journal of Urban History (May, 2003)
  ”Another War at Home: Reexamining Working Class Politics in the 1960s,”MidAmerica. (September 2000)
  “Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City: Detroit, 1945-1980,” The Journal of Urban History. (January, 1999)

  Chapters in Books:

  “Criminalizing the Kids: The Overlooked Reason for Failing Schools.” In Michael B. Katz and Mike Rose, eds., Public Education Under Siege (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
  “From Researching the Past to Reimagining the Future: Locating Carceral Crisis, and the Key to its End, in the Long 20th Century,” In The Punitive Turn: Race, Prisons, Justice, and Inequality (forthcoming, University of Virginia Press)
  “Blinded by a “Barbaric” South: Prison Horrors, Inmate Abuse and the Ironic History of Penal Reform in the Postwar United States” in Lassiter and Crespino, ed. The End of Southern History? (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  “All Across the Nation: Black Power Militancy in America’s Plants, Prisons, and Southern Piedmont, 1965-1975” in Kenneth Kusmer and Joe Trotter, eds, African American Urban History and Race Relations after World War Two (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
  Author, book chapter. “The Midwestern Freedom Struggle and the Remaking of the Urban America: Lessons from Postwar Detroit” in Rusty Monhollen, ed., The Black Freedom Struggle in the Midwest (Palgrave, to readers)
  “Mayor Coleman A. Young: Race and the Reshaping of Postwar Detroit,” in Roger Biles, ed. American Urban History, (Scholarly Resources Books, June 2002)
  “Rethinking the Collapse of Liberalism: The Rise of Mayor Coleman Young and the Politics of Race in Postwar Detroit,” chapter in David R. Colburn, and Jeffery Adler, eds., African American Mayors, (The University of Illinois Press, April 2001)
  “Urban Uprisings: Riots or Rebellions,” chapter in David Farber and Beth Bailey, eds.The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s. (June 2001)
  “New Autoworkers, Dissent and The UAW: Detroit and Lordstown,” chapter in Robert Asher and Ronald Edsforth, eds., Autowork, (New York: SUNY Press, 1995)

  Guest Edited Journal Issues:

  Invited to co-edit a special issue of the Journal of American History entitled, “Historians and the Carceral State.” June, 2015
  Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State
  Coeditor of a special issue entitled “Urban Spaces and the Carceral State” for theJournal of Urban History. September, 2015
  Introduction: Rethinking Urban America through the Lens of the Carceral State

  Newspaper/Magazine Articles:

  Sessions “Tough on Crime Plans” Won’t Deliver Justice Newsweek. May 13, 2017
  What Happened at Vaughn Prison? Jacobin. February 2, 2017
  Charlotte is Burning. NBC. September 22, 2016
  Attica’s Lessons Went Unlearned: Our Prisons are Still a Disgrace. The Daily Beast. September 13, 2016.
  Lessons from the Attica Prison Uprising, 45 Years Later. NBC. September 9, 2016
  Our Nation in Crisis. Huffington Post. July 11, 2016
  A Public Reckoning with Mass Incarceration. Huffington Post. April 12, 2016
  Putting the Oregon Standoff in Perspective: America’s History of Protest and Its Ironies Huffington Post. January 6, 2016.
  “How Attica’s Ugly Past is Still Protected.” Time Magazine. May 26, 2015.
  “America’s Real State of Emergency: Baltimore and Beyond.” Huffington Post. April 28, 2015
  “Why are Relations Between Black America and the Police so Poor?” BBC History Magazine. February, 2015
  “Ferguson’s Despair and Devastation of White Privilege” Huffington Post. November 30, 2014.
  “Violence in Post-Verdict Ferguson: What We Should Really Be Worried About.”Huffington Post. November 20, 2014
  “Inner City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The Atlantic. October 30, 2014
  “The Fury in Ferguson and Our Forgotten Lessons from History.” Huffington Post.August 18, 2014.
  “The Shame of the Nation: The Fight to Keep Children Locked up for Life.” Huffington Post. August 6, 2014
  “Redemption and the War on Drugs.” TED Talk Weekend. Huffington Post. July 25, 2014
  “Dodging Decarceration: The Shell Game of ‘Getting Smart’ on Crime.” Huffington Post. July 9, 2014
  “Rescuing America’s Inner Cities? Detroit and the Perils of Private Policing.”Huffington Post. June 25, 2014
  “Empire State Disgrace: The Dark, Secret History of the Attica Prison Tragedy.”Salon.com May 24, 2014
  “How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America.” The Atlantic. October 7, 2013
  The Prison Industrial Complex: A Growth Industry in a Shrinking Economy.” New Labor Forum. (Fall, 2012)
  Response from Rob Scott and Thompson Response to Scott: New Labor Forum.(Winter, 2012
  “Criminalizing the Kids: The Overlooked Reason for Failing Schools” Dissent, (Fall, 2011)
  “The Lingering Injustice of Attica.” Oped. The New York Times. September 9, 2011

  Blogs:

  Heather Ann Thompson, The Arc of History and SCOTUS. Life of the Law. June 26, 2015.
  “Are We Any Closer to Ending the Death Penalty? A Word of Caution.” Life of the Law. July 17, 2014. www.lifeofthelaw.org
  “Who Does the Freedom of Information Law Protect? Attica and the Code of State Silence.” Life of the Law. May 16th, 2014. www.lifeofthelaw.org

  Review Essays:

  “Telling it Like it Really Was: Women’s Movement Activism and Movement Making in Postwar America.” Review essay of Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 and Christina Greene, Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina Warriors in Reviews in American History. (March, 2006)
  “Rescuing the Right.” Review of Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors in Reviews in American History (June 2002)
  “Searching for Synthesis: Urban Rioting in Postwar America.” Review Essay. The Journal of Urban History. (March 2000)

  Book Reviews:

  Review of Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (Doubleday, 2009). Against the Current (Fall, 2011)
  Review of Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie (Norton, 2007) in Labor: Studies in Working Class and Labor History (Fall, 2009)
  Review of David Freund, Colored Property (University of Chicago Press, 2007) in Journal of Southern History (Spring, 2009)
  Review of Henry Pratt, Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895-1999 (Wayne State University Press, 2004), in American Historical Review (March, 2006)
  Review of Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Streets: The Cultural Politics of Detroit, in Labor History (Spring 2001)
  Review of Frederick Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here, in Left History (Spring 2001)
  Review of Timothy Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker, in Social History (January 2001)
  Review of Mary Stolberg, Bridging the River of Hatred: The Pioneering Efforts of Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards, in The Michigan Historical Review (September 1999)
  Review of Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, in Against the Current , (January/February, 1998)
  Review of Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone, in Pennsylvania History, (January, 1991)

  Manuscript Series Edited:

  Justice, Power, and Politics. Series coeditor with Rhonda Y. Williams (Case Western Reserve). University of North Carolina Press. Acquisitions Editor, Brandon Proia. Spring 2010-present.
  American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century. Series Editor. Routledge. Acquisitions Editor, Margo Irvin. Fall 2008-present. (Books already secured for this series include: Daryl Maeda, Rethinking Asian-Pacific American Activism inModern America, Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights Movement,Yohuru Williams, Rethinking the Black Power Movement, Marc Rodriquez, Rethinking Chicano Activism in the United States after WW II, Felicia Kornbluh, Rethinking the Disability Rights Movement, Lorrin Thomas, Rethinking the Puerto Rican Rights Movement Permilla Nadasen, Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement, Simon Hall, Rethinking the Anti-War Movement, Annelise Orleck, Rethinking the Women’s Rights Movement; Elizabeth Faue, Rethinking the American Labor Movement; Ellen Spear, Rethinking the Environmental Movement, Andrew Achenbaum, Rethinking the Elderly Rights Movement.)

  Works in Progress:

  Heather Ann Thompson, “Black Activism Behind Bars: Toward a Rewriting of the American Civil Rights Movement.” American Historical Review (submitted and now being revised)
  Heather Ann Thompson, Deep Cover: Surveillance and the Dismantling of Participatory Democracy in Postwar America (Book Manuscript in Progress)
  Heather Ann Thompson, “Surveillance and the Origins of Carceral state.” (article in progress)

  Documentary Films:

  Historical Advisor, film being made by Bard Prison Initiative
  Historical Advisor, film And Still I Rise, by Henry Louis Gates. PBS produced.
  Contributor to documentary in progress for PBS tentatively titled, “Incarceration Nation.”
  Historical Consultant and Interviewee for documentary on the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 done by Emmy award-winning filmmakers Christine Christopher and David Marshall. Title: “Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica.” (Blue Sky Films, 2013)
  Historical Advisor for documentary on Algiers Hijacking of 1972 by Maia Weschsler. Title: “Melvin and Jean: An American Story.” (2013)
  Consultant and Interviewee in National Geographic documentary on the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. “The Final Report: Attica Prison Riot.” 2006\

  AWARDS AND HONORS:

  Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
  The Pulitzer Prize in History, 2017
  The Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, 2017
  The Ridenhour Prize, 2017
  The J. Willard Hurst Prize in Socio-Legal History
  Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist 2017
  Finalist Silver Gavel Award For Media and The Arts (Honorable Mention, May, 2017)
  New York City Bar Association Award 2016, Outstanding Contribution In The Field Of Public Information
  National Book Award Finalist 2016
  New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016
  Top Ten Best Books of 2016 Publishers Weekly
  Top Ten Best Works Of Non Fiction of 2016 Kirkus Reviews
  Top Ten Books of 2016 Newsweek
  Best Human Rights Books of 2016
  Best History Books of 2016 Bloomberg
  Best Books of 2016 Boston Globe
  Best Non Fiction Books 2016 Christian Science Monitor
  Favorite Books 2016 Buffalo News
  Top Ten Non-Local Books of 2016 Baltimore City Paper
  Best Books 2016 The Undefeated
  Best Criminal Justice Books 2016 The Marshall Project
  Best Nonfiction Books 2016 Book Scrolling
  Curator Pick Best of 2016, The Smithsonian
  Best Books of 2016, Tropics Of Meta
  Starred Reviews: Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal
  Finalist for 2015 J. Anthony Lucas Award for Best Work-in-Progress in Non-Fiction. The Columbia School of Journalism. March, 2015
  Finalist for 2014 Just Media Award for Magazine Article: “How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America.” The Atlantic. October 7, 2013. National Council for Crime and Delinquency. (winner announced October, 2014).
  Appointed Distinguished OAH Lecturer. Organization of American Historians. 2013.
  Havens Center Visiting Scholar at University of Wisconsin-Madison during 2012-2013.
  Most Distinguished Scholarly Article Award for “Rethinking Working Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011). Awarded by the Labor Movements Section. The American Sociological Association.
  Best Article in Urban History 2011 Award for “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December, 2010). Awarded by Urban History Association.
  The Soros Justice Fellowship. The Open Society Institute. 2006-2007
  The Franklin Research Grant, The American Philosophical Association. 2005
  The Hackman Research Residency Grant, The New York State Archives. 2004
  Littleton-Griswold Research Grant, American Historical Association. 2004
  The Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Archive Center Research Grant. 2004
  The National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Fellowship. 2000-2001
  The University of North Carolina at Charlotte: National Endowment for the Humanities, Focus Grant: “African American Identity.” 2004; Senior Faculty Research Grant, 2003-2004, 2006-2007; “Teaching American History” Grant U.S. Department of Education. Partnership between Charlotte Mecklenberg Schools and University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2002-2005; CID Grant. Faculty Stipend Award for: The Digital Sound Archive Initiative, 2001; Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant, 2000; Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant, 1999; NEH Latin American Studies Initiative Course Development Grant, 1998-99; Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant, 1998; Faculty Research Support Grant, 1998
  Princeton University: The Rollins Prize, 1990, 1991;The Shelby Collum Davis Merit Prize, 1987, 1988, 1989; Princeton University Fellowship Award, 1987-1992

  EMPLOYMENT:

  The University of Michigan
  Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies, The Residential College, and The Department of History. Fall 2015-
  Temple University
  Associate Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of History. August 2009-present
  Appointed Associate Director, Center for the Humanities (CHAT). August 2010-present
  The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  Associate Professor. Department of History. August 2002-July 200
  Affiliated faculty Department of Africana Studies, 2004-July 2009
  Appointed to faculty in Public Policy Ph.D. program, 2004-July 2009
  Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Spring 2009)
  The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  Assistant Professor. Department of History. August 1997-August 2002
  The University of Michigan
  Visiting Assistant Professor. Joint Appointment, the Department of History and Residential College. Fall 1995- Summer 1997

  INVITED TALKS:

  **see book tour schedule link for talks not listed here.

  Guest Speaker. Slavery, Race, Revolutionary Abolitionism Yesterday and Today. Collège d’études mondiales/FMSH. Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme. May 17, 2017
  Guest Speaker. Why Mass Incarceration Matters. New York University. April 21, 2016
  Keynote speaker. Inner City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Central Washington University. April 14, 2016
  Guest Speaker. Social Justice, Fostering Humanity. Redeeming the American City Symposium. University of Michigan Law School. March 11, 2016
  Guest Speaker. Why Mass Incarceration Matters. Harvard University, Kennedy School. March 9, 2016
  Guest Speaker. Why Mass Incarceration Matters in the Field of American History. The University of Zurich. Zurich, Switzerland. February 28, 2016
  Keynote speaker. Mass Incarceration. 36th Annual Marion Wright Thompson Lectures. Rutgers University, Newark. February 20, 2016
  Guest Speaker. Why Mass Incarceration Matters. Tarleton State University. February 11, 2016
  Guest Speaker. Why Mass Incarceration Matters. University of Texas, Arlington. February 10, 2016
  Keynote Speaker. Inner City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Osher Life Long Learning. Violence in America series. University of Michigan. January 26, 2016
  Guest Speaker, Civil Rights and the Carceral State in the Clinton Years. Old State House. Little Rock, Arkansas. November 17, 2015
  Guest Speaker. Why Mass Incarceration Matters. The University of Toronto. Toronto, Ontario. November 2, 2015.
  Guest Speaker, Women and Mass Incarceration. Roundtable for Piper Kerman’s Shaw Lecture. The University of Michigan. October 12, 2015
  Congressional Staff Briefing on Mass Incarceration. Washington, DC. October 9, 2015
  Guest Speaker, Why Mass Incarceration Matters to North Carolina. North Carolina Commission on Racial and Ethnic Issues. October 1, 2015
  Guest Speaker. Engaging Race: The Carter G. Woodson Forum on Violence, Citizenship, and Social Justice. University of Virginia. August 27, 2015
  Keynote Speaker: Legislator Forum. Straight Talk on Crime and Punishment. The Riley Institute. Furman University. July 21, 2015
  Keynote Speaker, “The Resilience of White Privilege in the United States since the New Deal” Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen, Germany. June 8, 2015
  Guest Speaker, “The American Carceral State: Rethinking Exception and Rule.” Cambridge University. Cambridge, UK. May 15, 2015.
  Guest Speaker, “Mass Incarceration in America: The New Global Regime?” University of Zurich. Zurich, Switzerland. May 13, 2015
  Guest Speaker, Collins College. Plano, Texas. April 10, 2015
  Guest Speaker, Texas Christian University. Ft. Worth, Texas. April 8-9, 2015
  Guest Speaker, Policing Race. Police Profiling: Causes and Consequences. Center for Race and Ethnicity and Center for Public Policy. Brown University. March 10, 2015
  Guest Speaker, A History of Penal Regimes in Global Perspective, 1800-2015. Symposium. Harvard University. March 5-7 2015
  Guest Speaker, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters.” The University of Hawaii, Manoa. February 27-March 3, 2015.
  Guest Speaker, “Capitalism and the Carceral State.” Histories of American Capitalism Conference. Cornell University. November 8, 2014
  Guest Speaker. The Politics of Mass Incarceration in the Age of Retribution.” The Scope of Slavery: Enduring Geographies of American Bondage Conference. Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University November 7, 2014.
  Guest Speaker. Symposium on Inequality. Washington University. St. Louis, MO. October 24, 2014.
  Guest Speaker, “Fighting a War on Poverty and Waging a War on Crime: Rethinking the Welfare State/Carceral State Divide.” War on Poverty Symposium. University of Pennsylvania. September 19, 2014.
  Guest Speaker, “Distorting Democracy in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Lycoming College. September 16, 2014.
  Guest Speaker, “Why History Matters to Current Incarceration Crisis.” Congressional Briefing. Senate Judiciary Committee. September 12, 2014
  Guest Speaker, “Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration.” Briefing. John Jay College. September 4, 2014.
  Guest Speaker, Summer Institute on Inequality. University of Pennsylvania. June 20, 2014.
  Guest Speaker, “Learning from Detroit: Turbulent Urbanism in the 21st Century.” Conference. The University of Michigan. May 29-30, 2014
  Guest Speaker, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters to our Democracy.” Interfaith Organizing Initiative, Summit on the Intersection of Criminalization and Race. Chicago, Illinois. May 8-9, 2014
  Guest Speaker, “Race, Law, and the American State,” Symposium. The University of Michigan School of Law. April 26, 2014
  Keynote Speaker. Towson University. April 24, 2014.
  Guest Speaker. Yale University. April 8, 2014.
  Guest Speaker. Rutgers University, Camden. April 2, 2014.
  Opening Speaker. Breaking Down the Walls. School of Social Work. University of Pennsylvania. March 29, 2014.
  Keynote Speaker, College of Saint Rose. Albany, NY. March 20, 2014.
  Guest Speaker. Yale University. March 19, 2014.
  Guest Speaker. University of Maryland, College Park. March 13, 2013.
  Guest Speaker. UCLA Institute for Research and Employment’s 2014 conference: “Race, Labor and the Law.” February 28, 2014
  Guest Speaker. Connecticut College. February 24, 2014.
  Keynote Speaker. “Racial Formation, Racial Blindness.” Conference. Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. February 14, 2014
  Guest Lecturer. “The Moral and Ethical Costs of Mass Incarceration in America.” The Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia. February 9, 2014.
  Guest Speaker. Forum on Mass Incarceration. Muhlenburg College. January 23, 2014.
  Keynote Speaker. ““Lock Up America: Why Mass Incarceration Matters To our Cities, our Economy, and our Democracy.” Searchlight Lecture Series. Eastern State Penitentiary. January 7, 2014.
  Guest Speaker, Department of History, Oxford University, Oxford, England. November 19, 2013
  Guest Speaker, Department of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. November 14 2013
  Guest Speaker, Department of History, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. November 11, 2013
  Keynote Speaker, Pennsylvania History Association Annual Conference. Gettysburg, PA. October 19, 2013
  Guest Speaker, Department of History, Auburn University, Alabama. September 24, 2013.
  Keynote Speaker. Conference: The American Racial State in the Long 20th Century. The University of Michigan. May 10, 2013.
  Guest Speaker, “Criminal Justice Today.” The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. April 30, 2013. St. Paul, Minnesota.
  Guest Speaker. Murphy Institute, Labor Breakfast. CUNY. New York, New York. April 19, 2013
  Guest Speaker, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters to All of Us, and What We Can Do About It.” Public Forum. The Duke Human Rights Center, The Sanford Public Policy School, Duke University. March 25, 2013.
  Guest Speaker. “Attica, Attica, Attica! From the Possibilities of Prisoner Rebellion to the Problem of Punitive Justice Policy.” Duke University. March 25, 2013.
  Visiting Scholar Lecture. “The Costs of the Carceral State.” The Havens Center. University of Wisconsin, Madison. February 19, 2013.
  Guest Lecture. “Distorting Democracy: Rethinking Politics and Power in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” University of Wisconsin, Madison. February 20, 2013.
  Guest Speaker, “Lock Up America: Why Mass Incarceration Matters To our Cities, our Economy, and our Democracy.” Bucknell University. February 13, 2013
  Keynote Speaker, “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” For the Detroit School Lecture Series. Regional and Urban Planning. The University of Michigan. February 8, 2013
  Guest Speaker. James E. Beasley School of Law, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. January 30, 2013
  Speaker, “Costs and Consequences of the Carceral State.” Symposium on Mass Incarceration. Tyler Art School. Temple University. November 27, 2012
  Guest Speaker, “Prisons and the Politics of Punitive Justice Policy: Civil Rights and the 21st Century.” University of Mary Washington. October 24, 2012
  Keynote Speaker. “Urban and Labor Affairs in a Time of Mass Incarceration.” The North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University. Detroit, MI. October 18, 2012
  Keynote Speaker.”Which Way Detroit? From Struggles for Civil Rights to the Crisis of Criminalization” University of Michigan, Dearborn. October 17, 2012.
  Keynote Speaker. “Why Mass Incarceration Matters to Postwar Urban History.” Urban History Association. Annual Luncheon at Organization of American Historians Meeting.Milwaukee, Wisconsin. April 18-20, 2012
  Guest Speaker, “From Researching the Past to Reimagining the Future: Confronting the Crisis of Mass Incarceration.” Symposium: A Beautiful Struggle: Transformative Black Studies in Shifting Political Landscapes, A Summit of Doctoral Programs. Northwestern University. Chicago, Illinois. April 12-April 14, 2012.
  Guest Speaker, “Mass Incarceration and the Unmaking of Postwar America.” American History Workshop. University of California, Los Angeles. April 5, 2012.
  Guest Speaker, “Rescuing and Remember Attica,” The New School. New York, New York. March 29, 2012.
  Guest Speaker, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters to Social Workers.” Columbia University School of Social Work. February 26, 2012.
  Guest Speaker, “Ending Today’s Carceral Crisis: Lessons from History.” Confronting The Carceral State: Activists, Scholars and the Exonerated Speak: A Symposium.Black Studies Program of the City College. New York City. February 14, 2012.
  Guest Speaker, “From the White House to the State House to the Row House: Recasting the American Nation through the Politics of Punishment.” University of Sussex. Brighton, UK. February 10, 2012.
  Guest Speaker, “Rethinking the American South and its Historical Legacy in the Age of Mass Incarceration” Queens University, Belfast, Ireland. February 8, 2012
  Guest Speaker, “”Locked Up and Shut Out: Black Women and America’s (not so) Hidden Carceral Crisis” Queens University, Belfast, Ireland. February 6, 2012
  Guest Speaker, “Debating Mass Incarceration and the “New Jim Crow.”Symposium.From Black Modern to Post Blackness: A Retrospective Look at Identity. Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. November 9-11, 2011.
  Guest Speaker, “Lock Up America: Rethinking our Nation’s Past and Present in the Age of Mass Incarceration” University of Wisconsin. Green Bay. Thursday, September 22,2011.
  Guest Speaker, “Attica: Why it Matters.” Conference. 40 Years after the Attica Uprising: Looking Back, Moving Forward. University at Buffalo Law School, The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy Monday, September 12 & Tuesday 13, 2011
  Guest Speaker, “The Imprisonment of a Race.” One-day Conference. Princeton University. March 25, 2011.
  Guest Speaker, “Race, Injustice, and the Challenge of Mass Incarceration for America’s Inner Cities.” Social Justice, Race and Profiling: An Intergenerational Think Tank. Social Justice Institute. Case Western Reserve University. November 19-20, 2010.
  Keynote Speaker. “Redemption Redux? Southern Politics, Economy, and Society in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” 2010 Lecture Southern Association for Women Historians. The Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting. Charlotte, NC. November 4-7, 2010
  Guest Speaker. “Commodifying Punishment in the American South: The Industry and Labor Consequences of making Crime Pay, 1970-Present.” Joint Luncheon of the Southern Industrialization Project (SIP) and the Southern Labor Studies Association (SLSA). Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting. Louisville, Kentucky. November, 2009.
  Guest Speaker. “America’s Second Prison Crisis: Locating the Origins of Today’s Race to Incarcerate, and the Key to its End, in the Long 20th Century.” The University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute symposium, The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequality, and Justice. April 16-17, 2009
  Guest Speaker. “Rewriting the American Civil Rights Movement: Black Activism Behind Bars and its Legacy.” Conference. The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Future of Scholarship.” Sponsored by the Southern Oral History Project.University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. April 2-3, 2009.
  Guest Speaker. “The Attica Uprising of 1971 and the Creation of the Carceral State: Toward a Rethinking of the Fall of the Labor Movement and the Rise of the Right.” Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. University of California,Santa Barbara. February 6, 2009.
  Opening Plenary Participant. Cosponsored by the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University: “Storm Warnings: Rethinking 1968, “The Year that Shook the World”. Fellow participants: Manning Marable, Peniel Joseph, Tom Sugrue, Michael Kazin, Jeremy Suri. Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. March, 2008.
  Guest Speaker. “From Romanticizing and Remembering to Researching and Reassessing: Rethinking the Attica Uprising of 1971 and the Legacies of Black Power.” 2nd Annual Conference, “New Perspectives in African American History and Culture.” UNC-Chapel Hill. April 12, 2008
  Guest Speaker. “Spinning Rebellion: The Attica Prison Uprising, the Media, and the (Mis)Shaping of Working-Class Politics in Post-1970s United States.” Youngstown State University Center for Working-Class Studies 13th Annual Lecture Series 2007-2008. February 26, 2008.
  Guest Speaker. The “Malcolm Lester Lecture” at Davidson University. September 26, 2007
  Guest Speaker. “The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy: Rescuing Prisoner Rights and Rethinking the Nation’s Prison Crisis.”University of California, Berkeley. Boalt School of Law. September 13, 2007
  Guest Speaker, “Why History Matters: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, Prisoner Rights, and Justice Policy Today.” The Open Society Institute, Soros Justice Fellows Annual Meeting.New Orleans. June 12, 2007
  Guest Speaker, “The Perilous Path from the Past to the Present: Rethinking the Current State of Justice Policy in America.” Sanford Institute for Public Policy.Duke University. April 25, 2007.
  Guest Speaker, “Attica: The Civil Rights Movement Behind Bars and its Legacy.”University of North Carolina at Greensboro. March 1, 2007
  Guest Speaker, “The Attica Uprising of 1971: From Civil Rights Dreams to Prison Policy Nightmares.Wake Forest University.February 28, 2007.
  Guest Speaker, “Attica: The Civil Rights Movement Behind Bars.”Rutgers University. October 26, 2006
  Guest Speaker, “No Truth, No Justice: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and the Politics of the Ironic in Postwar America.”Princeton University. Modern America Workshop. October 25, 2006
  Guest Speaker, “The Attica Uprising of 1971: Rescuing the Past and Reclaiming the Future.” The University of Pennsylvania Law School. October 16, 2006.
  Guest Speaker, “Attica! Attica! Attica!: Rebellion, Reaction, and the Legacy of Truths Untold” The University of Michigan. September 21, 2006.
  Guest Panelist. “Getting at Black Power History Sideways and Upside down: New Approaches to, and Understandings of, the Movement.” Metropolitan History Workshop. The University of Michigan. September 22, 2006.
  Guest Speaker. “Rethinking Prison Conditions and Prisoner Abuse in Modern America: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.” Annual Luncheon of the Labor and Working Class History Association. The Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting.Washington,D.C. April, 2006.
  Guest Speaker. “Blinded by the ‘Barbaric’ South: Prison Horrors, Inmate Abuse and the Ironic History of Penal Reform in the Postwar United States.” Conference: “The End of Southern History? Integrating the Modern South and the Nation.”Emory University. March 23-24, 2006
  Guest Speaker: “Rage, Activism and Power: African Americans and the Remaking of the Motor City, 1945-1975.” 10th Anniversary Celebration. Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). September, 2005
  Guest Speaker. “What Happened to Detroit?” Spotlight on Research Television Lecture Series. March 6, 2003
  Guest Speaker. “Detroit Politics in the Sixties and Seventies: Tumultuous Past, Contested Legacy” The Institute for Detroit Studies. February 13, 2003
  Guest Speaker. “Firing Up the Motor City: Polarization and Possibility in Detroit’s Auto Plants, 1965-1975. Eastern Michigan University Heritage Lecture Series 2003. February 12, 2003
  Guest Speaker. “Southern Migrants and the Transformation of Shopfloors Politics in Detroit.” The 1999 Commonwealth Fund Conference, “Two Souths: Towards an Agenda for Comparative Study of the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno.”London, England. January, 1999
  Guest Speaker. “The Fight for Freedom on the Streets and Shopfloors of Postwar Detroit.” The Smithsonian Institution, Program in African American Culture Conference, “The African American Freedom Struggle in the Midwest.”Chicago,Illinois. October, 1998
  Guest Speaker. “The Urban Impact of Restructuring in the Auto Industry: the Case of Detroit.” The International Seminar on Economic and Social Development in the Greater ABC Region.Sao Paulo,Brazil. May, 1997

  PAPERS PRESENTED/ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPATION:

  Roundtable. The Clintons. Southern Historical Association. Little Rock, AK. November, 2015
  Roundtable. The Current State of Carceral State History. The Organization of American Historians Meeting. St. Louis, MO 2015
  Roundtable. The Crisis of the 1970s. The American Historical Association Annual Meeting. New York City. January, 2015
  Roundtable. Understanding the Protests in Ferguson. The American Historical Association Annual Meeting. New York City. January, 2015
  Roundtable. “The Carceral State.” Social Science History Association. Toronto, Canada. November 6, 2014.
  Roundtable. “Urban Cities in the Global Age.” Urban History Association Annual Meeting. October 12, 2014. Philadelphia, PA.
  Roundtable. “Mass Incarceration in America.” The Association for African American Life and History. Memphis, Tennessee. September 26, 2014.
  Roundtable Participant. Film Screening: “Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica.” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA. April, 2013
  Roundtable Participant. “State of the Field: Historians and the Carceral State.” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA. April, 2013
  Roundtable Participant. Film Screening: “Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA. 2013
  Roundtable Participant. State of the Field: Carceral State and Prison Studies.” American Studies Association Annual Meeting. Puerto Rico. November, 2012
  Panelist. “Criminalizing the Kids: Rethinking Poor Performance and Choice in America’s Urban Schools.” Conference. Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). Baltimore, MD. November 17-20, 2011.
  Panelist. “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History.” Symposium. Historians and the Carceral State: Writing Policing and Punishment into Modern U.S. History.” Rutgers University. March 5, 2009.
  Panelist. “What do Prisons have to do with the fall of the Auto Industry?” Roundtable Participant. North American Labor History Association Annual Meeting. Detroit, Michigan. October, 2009.
  Panelist. “Leading the Movement from Behind Bars: Rewriting the Struggle for Racial Equality in the United States 1965-1975.” Panel title: “Student Protests”? The U.S., West Germany, and Poland in the 1960s-70s. American Historical Association Annual Meeting. New York City. January 2009.
  Roundtable Participant. “On Trial Decades Later: The American Civil Rights Movement, Memory, and the Politics of Retrospective Justice.” Social Science History Association Annual Meeting.Chicago. November, 2007
  Roundtable Participant. “Seeing the Forest Not Just the Trees: Towards a Synthetic History of Urban and Suburban Development in Postwar America.” New Directions in Urban and Suburban History. Pacific Coast Branch. American Historical Association. August 5, 2006.
  Panelist. “Attica: Rebellion, Murder, and Justice Deferred.” The Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting.Washington,D.C. April, 2006
  Roundtable Participant. “Writing Attica Anew and Again.” Race, Roots, & Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power Conference. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. March 30-April 1, 2006.
  Roundtable participant. “New Directions in the Study of Black Power: From Oakland to Attica.” Annual Meeting Association for the Study of African American Life and History.Buffalo,New York. October 5-9, 2005.
  Roundtable participant. “Radical Labor Activism: From Past to Present.” The Southwest Labor Studies Association Meeting.Santa Barbara,California. May 5, 2005
  Panelist. “Beyond ‘Urban Crisis': Reexamining the political legacy of the Sixties in America’s inner cities.” Society for American Cityand Regional Planning History.St. Louis,Missouri. November 6, 2003
  Roundtable Participant. “Global Politics and the American Labor Movement.” The North American Labor History Conference.Detroit,Michigan. October 16, 2003.
  Roundtable Participant. “Autoworkers in the 1950s,” The North American Labor History Conference. October 17-19, 2002.Detroit,Michigan.
  Panelist. “The Language of ‘Black Manhood’ and Worker Activism on Detroit’s Shop floors: 1968-1971,” The European Social Science History Association Meeting.Amsterdam,Netherlands. April 12-16, 2000
  Panelist. “The Radical Roots of the Black Liberal Ascendancy.” The American Historical Association Annual Meeting.Chicago,Illinois. January, 2000
  Panelist. “’A Ruling without Reason'; Black Militancy, Legal Liberalism, and White Disaffection with the Motor City, 1969-1973.” Social Science History Association. Twenty-first Annual Meeting.New Orleans,Louisiana. October, 1996
  Panelist. “Detroit Scholarship: Future Directions.” Roundtable Discussion Participant. The Eighteenth Annual North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University. Detroit,Michigan. October, 1996
  Panelist. “Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City:Detroit, 1945-1980.” The Center for Recent United States History Conference–Contested Terrain: The Transformation of Postwar Political Culture, 1945-1955. The University of Iowa. April 20, 1996
  Panelist. “Work Stoppages, Auto Worker Militancy and the State: the United States and Canada, 1950-1980.” The Seventeenth Annual North American Labor History Conference,Wayne State University.Detroit,Michigan, 1995
  Panelist. “The Disease of Racism: An African American’s ‘Insanity’ and Institutionalization.” The American Historical Association.Chicago,Illinois. January, 1995
  Panelist. “Another War At Home: Autoworkers and Their Foremen on the Shop Floors of Detroit, 1963-1973.” The State Historical Society of Wisconsin Conference, “Towards a History of the 1960s.”Madison,Wisconsin. April, 1993

  CONFERENCE COMMENT/CHAIR:

  Chair of Session entitled, “Gender and Southern Prisons.” Southern Association of Women Historians. June 11-14, 2015. Charleston, South Carolina.
  Chair of session entitled, “Genealogies of the Carceral State: Crime Policy, Crisis, Race, and Resistance in Twentieth-Century America.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting. New Orleans, LA. January 2012.
  Comment on session entitled,“From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Rise of Punitive Policy at the Federal, State, and Local Levels.” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. Milwaukee, WI. April, 2011.
  Chair and comment on session entitled, “Desegregating Backlash: Liberals and African Americans in the Making of Modern Conservatism.” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. Milwaukee, WI. April, 2011
  Chair of session entitled, “Exploring Political Networks in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL. January 2012.
  Chair of session entitled, “”Black Children and Boundaries of Innocence, 1896-1968: Gendered Criminalization, Training ‘Productive’ Future Citizens, and Rural Hosting Programs as Sites of Racial Transformation.” 96th Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). October 5-October 9, 2011. Richmond, Virginia.
  Chair of session entitled, “Politics and Policy in the Post-Civil Rights City.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting. January 6-9, 2011. Boston, Massachusetts.
  Chair of session entitled, “Suburban Diversity, Civic Identity, and Racialized Politics in Postwar America.” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. April 7-10, 2010. Washington, DC. Chair and Comment of session entitled, “Forced Labor in the South after Slavery: the Longue Duree.” Conference on Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South College of Charleston, March 11-13, 2010
  Chair of session entitled: “Rethinking the 1970s” the Long Civil Rights Movement in the Decade of Political Realignment. American Historical Association Annual Meeting. January 7-10, 2010.
  Comment on papers read at session entitled “Struggles for Economic Justice in the post-1960s American South” Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. March 26-29, 2009.
  Chair of session entitled: “Reinventing Urbanity in Post-WWII America.” Urban History Association Meeting.Houston,Texas. November 5-8, 2008.
  Chair of session entitled: “Urban Renewal across the Regional Divide: American Values and Redevelopment Practices in Post-World War Two American Cities.” The Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting.Memphis,Tennessee. March 29-April 1, 2007
  Comment on papers read at session entitled, “Culture and Civil Rights in the Sixties and Seventies.” The Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting.Memphis,Tennessee. April 3-6, 2003
  Comment on papers read at session entitled, “Breaking the Mold: Gender, Class, Region, Race and Union Organization: White Collar Workers and Class Identity in the Twentieth Century.” The Twenty-Third Annual North American Labor History Conference.Wayne State University.Detroit,Michigan. October 2001.
  Comment on papers read at session entitled, White Collar Workers and Class Identity in the Twentieth Century.” The Twenty-Second Annual North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University.Detroit,Michigan. October 2000.
  Comment on papers read at session, entitled, “Made in Detroit: Local Histories, Local Politics.” The American Studies Association.Detroit,Michigan. October 2000
  Chair of session entitled, “New Perspectives on the New Deal.” The Graduate History Forum. University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Charlotte,North Carolina. March 22, 2000.
  Chair of session entitled, “Working Class Narratives from the Post-IndustrialCity.” The Twenty-First Annual North American Labor History Conference.Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan. October, 1999
  Comment on papers read at session entitled, “New Thoughts on the 1960s.” The Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting.Toronto,Ontario. April 22-24, 1999

  ELECTED OFFICES:

  President-Elect, Urban History Association, 2017
  President, Southern Labor Studies Association, 2008-2009

  BOARDS/COMMITTEES:

  Diversity Scholars Network. Member. 2017-present
  Editorial Advisory Board Member, Advances in Sustainability and Environmental Justice. Journal.
  Partner/Speaker. Humanize the Numbers Project. The University of Michigan. 2015-2016
  Advisory Board Member. Detroit Metropolitan Area Study Project. Institute for Social Research. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 2014-
  Appointed, Humanities Scholar for the Humanities Action Lab’s nationally traveling, multi-platform public humanities project on the history and human experience of incarceration. The New School for Public Engagement. Consulting scholar for project April 2015 – January 2016.
  Board Member, Labor and Working Class History Association, 2011-2014
  Nominating Committee Member, Urban History Association, 2014-2017
  Nominating Committee Member, Labor And Working Class History Association, 2013-2015
  Advisory Board Member. Media and the Movement: Journalism, Civil Rights, and Black Power in the American South. Duke University and the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of the American South.
  National Study Team Member. “The Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration in America.” Study funded by the National Academy of Sciences, The MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice. Washington, D.C. Ongoing, 18 month study.
  Appointed Advisory Panel Member, The Future of Work Initiative. Open Society Institute. New York City, NY. 2014
  Advisor: Center for Community Change. 2014
  Editorial Board Member: Journal of Human and Civil Rights (University of Illinois Press). 2014
  Serving on panel of experts writing position paper on rebuilding the labor movement for the AFL-CIO: “The Future of Worker Representation.” Report to be presented to the AFL-CIO leadership at National Convention 2014.
  Appointed Editorial Board, Journal of Social Criminology. 2014
  Appointed Advisory Panel Member, Life of the Law Project. 2013
  Board Member, Prison Policy Initiative, 2012
  Member, Scholars Strategy Network. http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/
  Appointed to Board of Contributing Editors, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, 2012-2015
  Committee Chair, Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book by a historian on the civil rights struggle from the beginnings of the nation to the present. The Organization of American History. May 2013-May 2014.
  Committee Member, Most Distinguished Scholarly Article Award Committee. Labor and Labor Movements Section, American Sociological Association. 2013.
  Committee Member, Ellis Hawley Prize for best book on political institutions and political economy since the Civil War. The Organization of American Historians. May 2012-May 2013.
  Committee Chair, Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History. Urban History Association, 2010.
  Committee Member, Herbert Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation. Labor and Working Class History Association, 2010-2011
  Committee Chair, Nomination Committee. Southern Labor Studies Association, 2010-2011
  President. Southern Labor Studies Association, 2007-2009
  Appointed to Board of Contributing Editors, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, 2006-2009
  Appointed to Advisory Board,Wayne State University Press: “African American Life Series,” 2004
  Elected to Board of Directors, Urban History Association. January, 2003
  Elected to Board of Directors, Labor and Working Class History Association. October, 2002

  PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS:

  The Society of American Historians
  The American Historical Association
  The American Studies Association
  TheAssociation for the Study of African American Life and History
  The Labor and Working Class Studies Association
  The National Council of Black Studies
  The Organization of American Historians
  The Social Science History Association (Criminal Justice Network)
  The Southern Historical Association
  The Southern Labor Studies Association
  The Urban History Association

  COMMUNITY/PROFESSIONAL BOARDS:

  Member, Board of Directors. Eastern State Penitentiary, a Historical Site. Philadelphia, PA.

• Pulitzer Prizes Web site - http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/heather-ann-thompson

  Biography
  Photo: Graham MacIndoe

  Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. She has written on the history of mass incarceration, as well as its current impact, for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarcerations in the United States and has given Congressional briefings on this subject. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s.

  The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in History
  For a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
  Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon)
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  For a narrative history that sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry in seeking the truth about the 1971 Attica prison riots.
  Winning Work
  Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

  By Heather Ann Thompson

  On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, the prisoners negotiated with officials for improved conditions during the four long days and nights that followed.

  On September 13, the state abruptly sent hundreds of heavily armed troopers and correction officers to retake the prison by force. Their gunfire killed thirty-nine men—hostages as well as prisoners—and severely wounded more than one hundred others. In the ensuing hours, weeks, and months, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. And, ultimately, New York State authorities prosecuted only the prisoners, never once bringing charges against the officials involved in the retaking and its aftermath and neglecting to provide support to the survivors and the families of the men who had been killed.

  Drawing from more than a decade of extensive research, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on every aspect of the uprising and its legacy, giving voice to all those who took part in this forty-five-year fight for justice: prisoners, former hostages, families of the victims, lawyers and judges, and state officials and members of law enforcement. Blood in the Water is the searing and indelible account of one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century.

  -- from the publisher

QUOTED: "Thompson mostly adds detail to an oft-told tale--sometimes fluidly and dramatically, to be sure, but in no real way significantly. Thompson fails to put the rampage in proper historical and cultural context, so one of the signal events of a tumultuous time emerges shorn of critical nuance. Her account is long on sympathy for inmates and their champions, but light on insight into what might have caused prison administrators and state officials to react to the challenge as they did."

A riot, not an uprising
Bob McManus
142.4 (Nov. 2016): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

By Heather Ann Thompson

Pantheon, 752 pages

IT HAS BEEN 45 years since a single bolt failed in a critical gate at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, allowing 2,200 convicts to pour into an exercise yard and then into history. Pausing only long enough to fatally beat a guard, they took 42 hostages and, with them, partial control of the prison.

Four days and 50 minutes later, in a blaze of tear gas and gunfire, New York state retook the prison-a horrifyingly violent yet ultimately necessary exercise. When it was over, 29 convicts and nine hostages (prison guards and civilian employees) had been shot dead. Eighty-nine others, mostly inmates, lay wounded. And a bitter, decades-long debate began.

Now comes University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson to stir the Attica pot one more time with a new history called Blood in the Water. She spent 13 years at the task, and her paving-block of a book might hold some interest to those scores of millions of American not yet born when the riot erupted and was suppressed. In the end, though, Thompson mostly adds detail to an oft-told tale--sometimes fluidly and dramatically, to be sure, but in no real way significantly.

Thompson fails to put the rampage in proper historical and cultural context, so one of the signal events of a tumultuous time emerges shorn of critical nuance. Her account is long on sympathy for inmates and their champions, but light on insight into what might have caused prison administrators and state officials to react to the challenge as they did. What transformed an unexceptional prison riot into the culturally iconic bloodbath that it became? Readers looking for balanced answers will be hard-pressed to find them here.

The fact is that Thompson wears her politics on her sleeve. She doesn't like Republicans, especially then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. (Richard Nixon and his crew hover menacingly in the background.) And the more radical the player (hard-left lawyer William Kunstler, say, or Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, both "citizen observers"), the more favorable the tilt. Rioters are rarely "inmates" and never "convicts"--terms that suggest individual responsibility for their condition. Rather they mostly are "prisoners," which vaguely hints at noble victimhood.

And, of course, Thompson presents Attica variously as an "uprising" and a "revolt," rather than what it actually was: an opportunistic event that deposited 2,200 thoroughly startled inmates, virtually all serving well-deserved sentences, into a prison exercise yard along with 42 justifiably terrified hostages.

This isn't to suggest that the inmates didn't have legitimate complaints. They did. Nor that the response to the riot was in any way coherent or disciplined. Surely it was not, and the consequences were calamitous. But all of this is well-trod turf. The literature on Attica is vast, and the danger of one more popular history--especially one coming 45 years after the fact--is that it will be presented in a historical vacuum. This one is, and it's Thompson's fault.

Readers would scarcely know that Attica was shaped, if not inspired, by a tempestuous decade-plus that began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy eight years earlier and would end with the resignation of Richard Nixon three years hence.

Attica came five years after race-driven riots blistered many American cities; three years after the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Chicago political-convention riots; and a year after the shootings at Kent State University. Fold in a roiling antiwar movement and rising racial tension generally, and you have one of the more contentious periods in American history.

Perhaps more to the point, Attica erupted just two short weeks after the death of Black Panther co-founder George Jackson as he attempted to escape California's San Quentin prison. That killing effectively completed a radicalization, if not a racialization, of the American penal debate.

No surprise, then, that Thompson presents Attica as a racially driven event. There is some truth to that notion; certainly the majority of the convicts were black or Hispanic, and the prison administrators, guards, and state troopers who retook the facility were overwhelmingly white. Mutual racial animus was common.

But this view misses a critical point, which is that the rationale for harsh conditions at the core of the riot dated to the mid-19th century and long preceded racial imbalances in New York's prison population. Austerity and penitence were the governing principles behind incarceration--hence, penitentiary--and while those ideas were both deplorable by modern standards and unlikely to have survived America's civil-rights revolution, they were not racially discriminatory.

This was a distinction without much practical difference that September. Violent disturbances recently had occurred in New York City's jails and at Auburn Correctional Facility, 100 miles from Attica. And radical rhetoric was raising cell-block tension generally. That is, there was plenty of warning of what was coming, even if prison administrators were oblivious to it.

So when the explosion came, the entire Rockefeller administration--the governor himself, Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald, Attica Warden Vincent Mancusi, the State Police, and the National Guard--was out to lunch. Here Thompson shines, describing a government paralyzed both by ignorance of critical details and a shocking absence of protocols for confronting politicized prison riots.

The incoherence functionally precluded a peaceful resolution of the affair and ensured that when the end did come, it would be far bloodier than necessary. But while sins were committed, that was more out of incompetence than malevolence.

All of this was on Rockefeller. But, to balance the ledger, he was also responsible for maintaining order at New York's 20 other prisons and their 12,200 increasingly restive inmates, the majority convicted of violent crimes, and most having served prior sentences. Who knows where surrender to Attica inmate demands, especially for prosecutorial amnesty, would have led?

Justifiably or not, Attica's recapture actually set a tempering example. New York's next major prison disturbance didn't occur until January 1983, and it was expeditiously resolved. Then-Governor Hugh Carey and his brilliant prisons commissioner, Thomas Coughlin, had by then remade the system into the national model that it is today.

Thus, for all practical purposes, Attica is a historical event akin to New York City's Civil War-era draft riots--a heavily racialized horror story, but with only academic contemporary relevance. Attempts by Thompson (and her reviewers) to link the riot to more timely topics--America's so-called "mass incarceration epidemic," for example--are unconvincing.

New York's maximum-security prisons 45 years after Attica are troubled places. But as was the case before the riot, the blame resides as much with the character and behavior of the inmates as with anything else. Crime comes with consequences, as it must.

Bob McManus is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. He covered Attica and its aftermath as a reporter and an editor at the Albany Times-Union.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McManus, Bob. "A riot, not an uprising." Commentary, Nov. 2016, p. 41+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470559220&it=r&asid=8ce0d58ecb7d0abfb744afba5ce55211. Accessed 25 May 2017.

QUOTED: "essential for any collection on the history, politics, or society of post-World War II America."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A470559220
Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (History)
Thomas J. Davis
127.3 (Feb. 15, 2002): p163.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/

Thompson, Heather Ann. Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Cornell Univ. 2002. c.336p. illus. index. ISBN 0-8014-3520-X. $29.95. HIST

Using as a pivot the spectacular riots that gripped Detroit in July 1967, Thompson (history, Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte) casts the Motor City turned murder capital as a symbol of America's post-1945 urban crisis. She traces Detroit's fragmented civic, labor, and racial politics from the 1930s through the 1980s to argue that more than black-white racial polarization determined the transformation of American inner cities. Thompson argues that Detroit and other northern cities in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were battlegrounds between contradictory visions of a revolutionary, uplifting Great Society and of a reactionary, repressive, law-and-order society. The clashes were no less divisive and fierce than those of the Civil Rights Movement, which were occurring in the South at that time. On city streets and shop floors and in courtrooms, the struggle for equitable housing, worker dignity, and an end to discrimination and police brutality enlisted a biracial cast of reformers, she argues, while featuring the determination of a militant black middle class. Thompson's engrossing work challenges an array of interpretations about postwar urban America, race relations, labor relations, the triumph of Reagan conservatism, and more. Essential for any collection on the history, politics, or society of post-World War II America.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Davis, Thomas J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Davis, Thomas J. "Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (History)." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2002, p. 163. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA83245980&it=r&asid=eb6eb6f6d0c28f5a3c172151288b9cac. Accessed 25 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Heather Thompson's work adds to the growing literature on the historical trajectory of urban decline and revitalization in the U.S. Whose Detroit? tells an important story of the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city that found itself on the front line of a war for democratic principles at home and abroad."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A83245980
Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
Lionel Kimble, Jr.
90.3 (Summer 2005): p332.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.
http://www.jaah.org/

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001, reprinted in 2004. Pp. 302. Paper $19.95.

Heather Thompson's study of Detroit examines the rise and decline of interracial cooperation among politicians, organized labor, white liberals, and community activists. This coalition proved important as each group worked to define the political future of Detroit during the 1960s and 1970s. Thompson argues that black labor activists, in particular those affiliated with the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), working with white politicians and activists, worked to enact reform policies around workplace discrimination, police brutality, and other issues.

The study begins in the immediate post-World War II period as "Detroiters came home from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific and began converting their auto plants to peacetime production." Detroit's place as a major war production hub has been well documented. In addition to its reputation as an "arsenal for democracy," Detroit's history of race relations has been chronicled by historians Dominic Capeci in Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (1984); and Thomas J. Segrue in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996). During the war, organized labor and business leaders maintain a tenuous detente in efforts to preserve peace in the workplace. However, according to Thompson, following the war this relationship became strained. As Detroit converted to a peacetime economy, city politicians on the left and the right worked to reshape politics within the prevailing liberal New Deal political framework.

Thompson in many ways tells a familiar story in her discussion of how white and black Detroiters defined New Deal liberalism during the war. With the high levels of support for trade unionism among African American and white workers seeking job security, wages, and benefits, each group defined workingmen's rights in distinct ways. For example, during this period, white members of the Detroit Congress of Industrial Organizations overwhelmingly opposed equal rights for African American workers. In response, African American workers used their wartime experiences to push for equal treatment in a number of new arenas.

As increasing numbers of African Americans moved into the city, whites grew less sympathetic to the plight of black workers, and tensions over access to city resources fueled the 1943 race riot. Despite these conflicts some interracial cooperation in Detroit's political arena was achieved. During the postwar period social activists and members of the city government managed to advance a liberal civil rights agenda, but this alliance proved short lived and African Americans saw little improvement in housing, employment, and public education.

Following the 1967 riot, liberal whites steadily distanced themselves from more militant civil rights groups and became more conservative. In addition, Thompson argues that white liberals publicly rejected radical political platforms advocated by more progressive factions within the organized labor movement. To complicate matters, by the 1970s much of the influence wielded by DRUM in matters outside the workplace had begun to wane. In spite of these setbacks, Thompson argues that the 1971 election of Detroit's first African American mayor, Coleman Young, demonstrated the successful influence of this fading radical-liberal coalition in shaping city politics. Black Detroiters managed to maintain considerable political power, despite the loss of influential political allies.

One of the more interesting aspects of Thompson's work is the rediscovery of the case of James Johnson. Johnson, a 35-year-old African American auto worker, who shot and killed several white co-workers in "retaliation for numerous racially based offenses that he believed he had long endured." The events surrounding Johnson's arrest and trial served as a microcosm for the frustrating conditions African Americans faced in Detroit during this period. Johnson's trial was used as a forum where "radicals, liberals, and conservatives sought to have their views of 'justice' prevail."

Well-researched, Whose Detroit? offers readers some insights into the current shape of Detroit's political landscape. Although Thompson presents an attractive narrative, a deeper analysis of the relationship between the labor movement and electoral and racial politics is missing. This could have been done with a more detailed exploration of the membership of DRUM. For example, who were the members of the organization? Where did they live? Were they active solely in the workplace or did their organizing campaigns also involve the larger community or religious institutions? Also, did any DRUM member wield any influence in Detroit's electoral politics, as did former United Auto Workers' Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor? Young's administration coincided with the decline in political influence of radical civil rights activists within Detroit's organized labor movement.

This last issue is especially important, as Thompson correctly points out, because black and white Detroiters held differing visions of liberalism, equal rights, and access to municipal resources. The legacy of this labor-liberal coalition in Detroit politics is questionable, and perhaps this alliance represented an historical anomaly that could only have occurred under those ideal political circumstances. Aside from these issues, Heather Thompson's work adds to the growing literature on the historical trajectory of urban decline and revitalization in the U.S. Whose Detroit? tells an important story of the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city that found itself on the front line of a war for democratic principles at home and abroad.

Lionel Kimble, Jr.

University of Illinois at Springfield

Kimble, Lionel, Jr.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kimble, Lionel, Jr. "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City." The Journal of African American History, vol. 90, no. 3, 2005, p. 332+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA139571804&it=r&asid=98a1d575816cd261a8e5f87f4cf29662. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A139571804
Heather Ann Thompson. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
Lionel Kimble, Jr.
30.1 (Spring 2004): p152.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Clarke Historical Library
http://www.lib.cmich.edu/clarke/mhr.htm

Heather Ann Thompson. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. 245. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $19.95.

Heather Thompson's work, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, examines the rise and decline of cooperation among African-American unionists, community leaders, and liberal white political groups as they worked to shape Detroit's political landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. Thompson argues that a coalition of African Americans, especially those affiliated with the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), and white political activists worked to advance reforms that addressed such issues as workplace discrimination and police brutality. Early campaigns brought some successes, but following the 1967 flot, liberal whites distanced themselves from the more militant forms of civil rights protests and from political platforms advocated by more radical factions within the organized labor movement. To complicate matters, by the mid-1970s organized labor's influence began to wane in many areas outside the workplace. In spite of these setbacks, Thompson argues that the 1971 election of Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, demonstrated the success of this fading radical/liberal coalition. African Americans gained considerable power in Detroit politics despite the loss of their formerly influential liberal-labor alliance.

Although Thompson presents an attractive narrative, she does hOt attempt a deeper analysis of the relationship between the labor movement and electoral and racial politics. This could have been accomplished through a more detailed examination of the membership of DRUM. (For example, who were its members? What influence, if any, did these people wield in electoral politics? Did some members use their experience to further their own political aspirations?) In addition, she should have devoted more attention to the ways in which Mayor Young's administration addressed the declining political influence of organized labor. Because Thompson did not consider such questions in her narrative, the reader is left wondering whether such a liberal-labor alliance was a historical anomaly that could only have occurred under ideal political circumstances.

Lionel Kimble, Jr.

Owen R. Duston Visiting

Assistant Professor of History

Wabash College

Kimble, Lionel, Jr.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kimble, Lionel, Jr. "Heather Ann Thompson. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City." Michigan Historical Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, p. 152+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA118851775&it=r&asid=7e5202c4a4720771b81be2fe28a86164. Accessed 25 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Thompson's study is a triumph of social and political history. She connects in a most engaging style events on the street, the factory floor, and the courtroom, and convincingly shows the political realignments that have remade Detroit."
"This book adds much to our understanding of the late twentieth century US and is a welcome addition to the literature."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A118851775
Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus)
John F. Lyons
(Spring 2003): p311.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001)

US LABOUR AND URBAN historians have recently produced a variety of studies focusing on the second half of the 20th century and particularly on the decline of organized labour, racial problems in northern cities, and the fate of liberalism. In this engaging study, Heather Ann Thompson combines all three concerns as she reveals a history of political struggle among conservatives, liberals, and radicals in 1960s and 1970s Detroit that shaped the future of the city. Although Thompson, who grew up in Detroit and is now a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, offers few explicit comparisons from other cities, she argues that this conflict was replicated elsewhere and that as liberalism declined in national politics it triumphed in inner cities, which had become centers of political power and economic opportunity for the Black middle-class.

Building on the work of other historians of Detroit such as Tom Sugrue and Jeffrey Mirel, Thompson paints a vivid picture of the plight of Blacks in the city that led them to take to the streets in July 1967 in the bloodiest riot the US experienced during that tumultuous decade. After World War II, as more Blacks moved into Detroit, Whites segregated Blacks into overcrowded and inferior housing, underfunded schools, and unskilled work, and Blacks faced higher levels of unemployment than Whites. Black civil rights activists sought to integrate the neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces, and Jerome Cavanagh, liberal mayor of Detroit from 1962 to 1970, promised to use government money to alleviate the worst ravages of racism, but both were unable to achieve much. While stressing the role that economic factors played in fueling the 1967 riot, Thompson pays particular attention to police brutality. Blacks repeatedly clashed with an overwhelmingly White racist and violent Detroit police force. Little wonder that a police action against an illegal drinking party led to the riot in the summer of 1967.

After the 1967 riot, White liberal politicians in Detroit faced increasing opposition from Black and White radicals, who wanted a revolutionary overhaul of society, and White conservatives, who opposed the Great Society and the civil rights movement. Between 1967 and 1972, groups of Black nationalists and White leftists organized in opposition to the liberal establishment, which had failed to improve the lot of Blacks. They gained popular support for their opposition to police brutality, their demand for Black control of schools in Black neighborhoods, and their call for economic justice. While Blacks accused Stop the Robberies Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS), a special unit the police department, of brutality, White conservatives supported their touch stance on crime. White conservatives accused the liberal establishment of appeasing lawbreakers and opposed school integration and bussing.

Throughout the book, Thompson draws links among developments in city hall, on the streets, and in the city's auto plants. As police brutality fueled resentment in Detroit's Black neighbourhoods, racial discrimination, the abuses of White foremen, and deteriorating working conditions angered Black autoworkers. The leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAWO, long recognized as racial progressives, promised to end racial discrimination in hiring and promotion and stop foreman abuses but, in practice, union officials bowed to the wishes of their conservative White members who wanted to maintain their monopoly on skilled jobs and promotions. In May 1968 Black workers in the Chrysler Assembly Plant (Dodge Main) founded the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the first of a number of "RUMs" throughout the auto plants, which called for the appointment of more Blacks to positions of power in the company and the UAW, and protested racist supervisors. Subsequently, the RUMs united and formed the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), which blended Marxism and Black nationalism by declaring Black workers as the vanguard of a revolution. While Detroit's RUMs and the League had virtually collapsed by 1971 because of opposition from UAW leaders and because they alienated most White workers and some Black workers with their sectarianism, factionalism, and Marxist rhetoric, worker dissent over working conditions and safety continued. In response to a series of wildcat strikes in 1973, however, the UAW leadership not only sided with the car companies but gathered their supporters together and violently attacked the picketing workers, forcing them back to work and ending the rank-and-file rebellion.

While labour leaders set out to destroy the Black radicals, civic liberals gained new respect from the city's growing Black working-class and poor as they appeared more activist and sympathetic to Black demands. In particular, Thompson claims, liberal judges and politicians proved especially adept at dealing with the high-profile court cases involving Blacks who challenged racist practices. She especially focuses on the case of James Johnson Jr., a 35-year-old Black automobile worker at the Chrysler Plant who killed two White foremen and a White fellow worker on 15 July 1970, and used racial discrimination and conditions at the plant as part of his defense in his 1971 trial. Thompson weaves the story of James Johnson throughout the book as a metaphor for the discrimination, hopes, disappointments, and frustrations of all Black Detroiters. When Johnson was found not guilty of murder by reason on insanity, Thompson claims that liberalism and electoral politics gained new credibility and the appeal of radicalism declined.

As many White conservatives left the city and the radical Left waned, the stage was set for the rise of Black liberalism. In 1973 the city elected its first Black mayor, Coleman Young, a UAW organized in the 1930s and civil rights activist. Subsequently, Young maintained the support of Black Detroiters by employing Blacks in city positions, including the previously all-White police department, and by portraying himself as a defender of Black Detroit against increasingly hostile White suburbs. Because the White population continued to flee the city and the car companies relocated or cut workers' wages, Thompson concluded that Black liberals came to political power in Detroit as the city faced economic crisis and as liberalism declined in national politics.

Thompson's study is a triumph of social and political history. She connects in a most engaging style events on the street, the factory floor, and the courtroom, and convincingly shows the political realignments that have remade Detroit. The book could have been improved, however, it Thompson had spent more time finding out the views of those in the White neighborhoods. She makes extensive use of local archives and oral history collections, but undertook virtually no oral interviews herself. Oral interviews would have helped to undercover in greater detail the ideas of White conservatives who do not get the same coverage as liberals or Black nationalists, and often remain faceless and nameless throughout the book. Thompson also claims that the findings in Detroit on the triumph of city liberalism and the decline of organized labour are applicable elsewhere but offers little evidence for this. Focusing on the UAW leaderships' destruction of the rank-and-file rebellion in the 1970s, for example, she argues that the actions of union leaders played a large part in the decline of the US labor movement. To substantiate this claim, however, she needs to make far more comparisons with other cities and other unions. Despite these limitations, this book adds much to our understanding of the late twentieth century US and is a welcome addition to the literature.

Lyons, John F.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lyons, John F. "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus)." Labour/Le Travail, 2003, p. 311+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA102155419&it=r&asid=7ab53088d061474213765e900de5d8c7. Accessed 25 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Thompsom has done some valuable and highly suggestive work here, especially in her investigation of the connections between student organizations and labor politics, and between political careers and high-profile trials. ... Obviously, this is an author with a wealth of archival information, who has a lot more to say about Detroit."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A102155419
Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
Jerry Herron
44.4 (Fall 2002): p430.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Wayne State University Press
http://wsupress.wayne.edu/journals/criticism/criticismj.html

by Heather Ann Thompson. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 295. $35.00 cloth.

This is the kind of book that while you're reading it, you keep wanting it to be a whole lot better than it is. Not because it's bad. Just the reverse. Because it isn't, and because it could be and should be a whole lot better since all the essentials are here: a powerful story, a talented young scholar trying to do the right thing, and most important of all, a worthy cause to be served.

It's the worthy cause that puts Heather Ann Thompson's Whose Detroit? in company with several other, recent books--books by young scholars who grew up in or around Detroit, who went to graduate school, got their degrees, and then decided to do right by their home town. There is, for example, Thomas Sugrue's crucial investigation of race and economics, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; or Suzanne Smith's study of Motown music, Dancing in the Street, or John Hartigan's wonderful examination of whiteness and "hillbillies" in Detroit, Racial Situations. Now, thanks to such works as these, there's a whole revisionist genre of Detroit studies, the aim of which is to show what Americans generally don't know about the city, but think they always already understand, and also to expose the cost that such ignorance exacts from us all, because Detroit is the most American place in this country, when it comes to race and racism, class and labor and the kinds of violence, overt and otherwise, that ignorance breeds. Detroit is not the exception, as most people elsewhere would like to believe; it's the rule (merely exaggerated), so that what we don't know about Detroit is what is bedeviling the rest of us, no matter whether we credit this truth or not.

And that's right where Heather Thompson (Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina/Charlotte) begins and ends her story about "politics, labor, and race in a modern American city," as the subtitle puts it--with the insistent, and justified, claim that Americans fail to understand Detroit at their peril:

By excavating the history of inner-city Detroit and its labor
movement, and by re-examining their respective fates as the
twentieth century neared its close, this book demonstrates the
following central claims: America's urban centers did not merely
waste away by the 1980s; political tensions among radicals,
conservatives, and liberals after World War II shaped urban America
as surely as did racial clashes; and finally the U.S. labor movement
always had more power over its destiny than its leaders
imagined. (8)

We get it wrong, in other words, when we write the city off as the failed, empty product of racial politics run amuck. The story is more complicated, and more complicatedly ours--all of ours--than that, as Thompson says in her conclusion: "[I]t would be a tragic mistake to see American urban centers by the mid-1980s as simply the doomed place that many whites left and where the economy took a nosedive" (219). And that's the important story she sets out to tell, about what most people don't know, or else don't want to credit about postwar Detroit. There's nothing inevitable about this most typical American city and the devastation that has taken place here; it is the result of choices that people made. And we might have chosen otherwise. But we didn't.

Thompson has organized her book around the story of an African American auto worker, James Johnson, Jr., whose name is probably unknown now even to most people in the city where he lived, and where his life went disastrously and dangerously wrong. "While Johnson is clearly not an Everyman," Thompson reasonably cautions,

his participation in the Second Great Migration to Detroit during
the 1950s, as well as his experiences in Detroit's auto plants,
courtrooms, and city streets during the 1960s and 1970s, were
certainly understood by many Motor City residents and plant
workers. Johnson's story is emblematic of the complexity that was
Detroit and the urban North writ large between 1945 and 1985. (2)

As a child growing up in the rural south, Johnson had been a victim of both poverty and racism. (At age nine, he witnessed the lynching of a cousin, who was reputed to have fallen in love with a white woman.) The hope of a better life brought him north, to Detroit, when he was eighteen. What he found, instead of prosperity, was an industrialized and unionized form of racism of exactly the sort that he was trying to escape. Johnson had, from childhood, suffered mental troubles and a pathological dread of white peolple, exacerbated obviously by the terrors he'd seen. Although he found a place in an auto plant, as he'd hoped, he never escaped discrimination there. His frustrations culminated in July 1970, as a result of a dispute with a supervisor at work. Johnson went home, got a gun, and came back to the Chrysler factory where he worked, and proceeded to kill three men before allowing himself to be taken into custody by security officers.

It's the things that led up to Johnson's mental break, and the murders, and the events that followed, that make him an engaging subject for Thompson. And Johnson's story is important, and revelatory, and genuinely tragic. He affords Thompson access to the "emblematic complexity" that she is trying to convey, involving local politicians, the police and the courts, labor unions, radical political organizations, reporters, Great-Society liberals, and a lot of just plain citizens. Johnson was acquitted, by reason of insanity, his attorneys pleading racism as the underlying cause of his mental debility. And he later won a worker's compensation case against Chrysler, for the racist abuse he'd suffered on the job. He would ultimately be released from the state institution where he was confined for four years, in a legal case that has all the drama and double-dealing of revenge tragedy. And then he just vanished from sight.

Which gets to the point I made at the outset, about wishing that this was a better book than it is. Johnson's story is important, and compelling, and terrible. But by threading it through her book in a haphazard fashion, Thompson loses the power of her narrative, which gets bogged down in accounts of politicians and labor leaders that frequently suffer for lack of dramatic interest. Don't get me wrong. This is not a bad book. The problem is that Thompson's strengths as historian and archivist and the strength of her main story make you wish it was either a political biography of James Johnson, or else a historical investigation of radical labor in Detroit. But trying to be both at once, the project fails to achieve all that it might have.

This difficulty becomes clear in the general organization of materials. There are eight chapters, each dealing concurrently with the main subjects of the study: race, labor, politics. But it's not always clear what the point is, or how individual discussions (which are often wonderfully detailed) are meant to advance our understanding of Detroit. To prove once more that the post-migration North was just as racist as the pre-migration South is not exactly necessary. The question is why, and how, this happened, which is more in the way of a cultural studies question, of the sort that Thompson is not prepared usually to ask. Nor is she typically interested in the larger historical context of her local narrative: the national political scene, the war in Vietnam (and how it inflected racial politics), the assassinations of the 1960s. There is no strong sense of chronology, from chapter to chapter. And what is perhaps the most troubling feature of Thompson's writing is her tendency to use commonplaces and cliches and undefined terms (liberal, radical, conservative) as if their meaning were indisputable and clear. One example will suffice:

[W]hite police officers were not the only ones hostile to living in
Detroit after it came under black leadership. As [Coleman] Young
began a second term as mayor, whites' hostility to his rule had
escalated to such a degree that their ongoing exodus from the city
that had begun slowly in the 1950s became a virtual stampede in the
1970s and early 1980s. (206)

Yes, the city did change hands racially speaking. But this shorthand, white "stampede" is not the way to understand what went on, as Thompson herself would seem to argue. How many people left, in which year exactly, who were those people, how much money did they make, how was their behavior different from or similar to the behavior of other migrants in U.S. cities? That's what we need to understand.

Which is not to say that this is a bad book. Far from it. Thompsom has done some valuable and highly suggestive work here, especially in her investigation of the connections between student organizations and labor politics, and between political careers and high-profile trials. And what is perhaps most valuable of all, her regrettably slight investigation of the role played by women in "radical" labor organizations, and how gender politics came to inflect the more familiar politics of race in the 1960s. Obviously, this is an author with a wealth of archival information, who has a lot more to say about Detroit. What I hope happens now is that she will write those other books that this one is clearly a preparation for.

Jerry Herron

Wayne State University

Herron, Jerry
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Herron, Jerry. "Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City." Criticism, vol. 44, no. 4, 2002, p. 430+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA102981651&it=r&asid=266c53083ae1ba5b1b58fe03c450d0da. Accessed 25 May 2017.

QUOTED: "a must for anyone involved in the criminal justice system; also for the general reader interested in prisons."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A102981651
Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
Frances O. Sandiford
(Dec. 16, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp

[STAR]Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Pantheon. Aug. 2016. 752p. photos. maps. notes. index. ISBN 9780375423222. $35; ebk. ISBN 9781101871324. CRIME

Even after 45 years, the uprising at the New York State prison in Attica holds its fascination. In September 1971, the inmates took over the prison for four days until Gov. Nelson Rockefeller sent in troops to quell it. In the course of events, 43 inmates and guards were killed and many personal stories evolved. In contrast to the far shorter version by Tom Wicker (A Time To Die), Thompson's (history, Univ. of Michigan; Whose Detroit?) full-length account begins with the warning signs that were ignored, a day-to-day chronicle of the uprising, and for most of the book, details of the aftermath of political repercussions. Readers beware: it is a mammoth volume, with no letup of material. For the most part, Thompson is on the side of the inmates, but she does acknowledge that the guards were victims, too. Furthermore, she brings to light the most subtle forms of government corruption within the prison system. All in all, a dramatic retelling of a memorable event in our history and a cry for justice in the face of institutional authority.

Verdict A must for anyone involved in the criminal justice system; also for the general reader interested in prisons with a lot of time on their hands.--Frances O. Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sandiford, Frances O. "Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy." Xpress Reviews, 16 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562943&it=r&asid=c82b636f9097e89cd3df3f691c34ceca. Accessed 25 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Thompson's book is a masterpiece of historical research; it is thoroughly researched, extensively documented and reads like a novel. Her sympathies clearly lie with the prisoners and the families of the hostages but the analysis is fair and evenhanded."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562943
'Blood in the Water' does a magnificent job of rewriting the Attica story
Terry Hartle
(Sept. 26, 2016): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference

Byline: Terry Hartle

In September 1971, roughly 1,000 prisoners at Attica Correctional Facility near Rochester, NY rioted and took some 40 guards and civilians as hostages. After several days of tense and complex negotiations involving the prisoners, outside observers, and the state of New York, the uprising was brutally crushed.

The Attica uprising dominated the news at the time. But as the years passed, the details of the story faded. And, perhaps since prisoners are not generally regarded as a sympathetic group, it is little known today beyond those who study criminal justice.

Thanks to Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, a magnificently comprehensive study of the incident by University of Michigan professor Heather Ann Thompson, this important event is likely to now receive the attention that it merits.

Thompson sets the stage by noting that even by the standards of the time, Attica was a hellhole. Prisoners were systematically underfed (the state spent 63 cents per day on food for each inmate) and their mail was censored (or simply destroyed if it happened to be in Spanish, a language prison officials did not speak). They were only allowed one bar of soap and a single roll of toilet paper a month. They got to shower once a week. Medical care and dental care were infrequent and substandard. Discipline was swift, arbitrary, and severe.

The rioters' initial list of demands mostly focused on these basic issues and for a while it looked as if a settlement might be reached. But there was a huge sticking point: The prisoners wanted amnesty for their actions during the uprising but a guard had been killed when the riot started and there was no way that the state would grant amnesty, even though the hostages themselves pleaded with the state to do so. As time went by, tensions rose and positions hardened and, eventually, the state allowed New York State Police, the National Guard and assorted volunteers to retake the facility.

They were not trained for the task and poorly supervised. They carried weapons designed to cause the greatest possible carnage. Within 30 minutes, some 130 inmates and hostages had been shot: 29 prisoners and 9 hostages died. The prisoners who survived were subject to an orgy of official violence with, Thompson says, even medical officials committing acts of torture.

But the Attica nightmare was just beginning. Led by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the state launched a systematic effort to prevent a full investigation or exposure of the abuses that had taken place. A meeting shortly after the riot was held at Rockefeller's house to allow those who had approved the retaking of the prison to agree on a story. Several state investigative panels were empaneled (and systematically undermined) and a large number of prisoners were indicted.

No charges were ever filed against those who retook the prison despite clear evidence that excessive and reckless use of force had been commonplace. Thompson makes clear that evidence was destroyed to make such a step impossible and, whenever investigators seemed to be getting close, their efforts were shut down by the state.

Eventually, public interest lawyers successfully sued the state and many of the prisoners killed or injured during the retaking (or their estates) received modest settlements. Ironically, the last group to settle were the survivors of the hostages. After promising to take care of them, the state quickly sent workers' compensation checks to the families of the deceased. They neglected to tell them that cashing the check meant foregoing the right to sue the state for any damages. The last monetary settlement came in 2005 - more than three decades after the riot.

The savage retaking of the prison and the vengeance meted out afterward to the prisoners who survived makes for grim reading. A few of the public officials involved in this long saga deserve praise, such as Dr. John Edland, the Rochester Medical Examiner who insisted - despite great pressure from state officials - that the hostages had been killed by weapons fired by those retaking the prison. Or New York State Judge Michael Telesca, who brokered settlements of the suits filed against the state by the prisoners and families of the hostages. But the list of public servants who acted nobly is distressingly short.

It is commonplace to suggest that trust in government was shattered in the 1970s by revelations about the Vietnam War and Watergate. Attica should be on the list as well. But, thanks to the cover up organized by the state officials, the extent of government misconduct was never widely known.

Thompson's book is a masterpiece of historical research; it is thoroughly researched, extensively documented and reads like a novel. Her sympathies clearly lie with the prisoners and the families of the hostages but the analysis is fair and evenhanded.

There is some controversy surrounding the book because Thompson identifies by name individuals who may have killed inmates during the retaking, even though they were never charged with any wrongdoing. It's not clear that such speculation is even needed - the catalogue or abuses and litany of mistakes are extensive enough to represent a strong indictment of everyone involved in the retaking. So readers can decide for themselves whether it was necessary or desirable to identify individuals for alleged misconduct.

Despite the exhaustive research, Thompson makes clear that there are many official records that are still under lock and key. Indeed, she writes of revisiting one of the large archives where she uncovered some of the most useful documents only to discover that the materials had been moved. Nobody will admit to knowing where they went. In short, even 45 years later, the cover up continues.

Perhaps at some distant time we will have the absolutely definitive historical study of the Attic prison riot. Until we do, "Blood in the Water" will provide the most accurate, complete, and horrifying record.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hartle, Terry. "'Blood in the Water' does a magnificent job of rewriting the Attica story." Christian Science Monitor, 26 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464744940&it=r&asid=ead1b07269b1a18eb340b9ebe1d03ea5. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A464744940
A Riot as Omen of Trauma in Prisons Today
Mark Oppenheimer
(Aug. 19, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC17(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com

CORRECTION APPENDEDNot all works of history have something to say so directly to the present, but Heather Ann Thompson's ''Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,'' which deals with racial conflict, mass incarceration, police brutality and dissembling politicians, reads like it was special-ordered for the sweltering summer of 2016.

But there's nothing partisan or argumentative about ''Blood in the Water.'' The power of this superb work of history comes from its methodical mastery of interviews, transcripts, police reports and other documents, covering 35 years, many released only reluctantly by government agencies, and many of those ''rendered nearly unreadable from all of the redactions,'' Ms. Thompson writes. She has pieced together the whole, gripping story, from the conditions that gave rise to the rebellion, which cost the lives of 43 men, to the decades of government obstructionism that prevented the full story from being told.

Ms. Thompson's book has already been in the news because she names state troopers and prison guards who might have been culpable in these deaths. But the real story here is not any single revelation, but rather the total picture, one in which several successive New York governors are called to account as much as anyone on the ground that week in September 1971 in Attica, N.Y.

The inmates at Attica Correctional Facility had not planned to riot. True, some inmates considered themselves Black Panthers or Maoist revolutionaries. Everyone knew about George Jackson, the Panther, prison radical and author of ''Soledad Brother,'' who had been shot to death by prison guards in San Quentin, Calif., earlier that year. In July, there had been a strike in the Attica metal shop. In a prison sociology class, inmates in a racially mixed group were reading Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

Conditions were ghastly. Inmates were underfed. Each got one bar of soap and one roll of toilet paper a month and was permitted one shower a week. Broken bones went untreated and prisoners lost teeth for want of basic dental care.

But what finally turned Attica the town or prison into Attica the uprising was a misunderstanding, not discontent. On Sept. 8, 1971, a prisoner had been accused of hitting a guard. The next morning, after more prisoner infractions and a miscommunication among guards, a group of prisoners was locked in a tunnel connecting one part of the prison to another. Believing themselves sitting ducks, with guards coming to beat them up in reprisal, the prisoners attacked the guards in the tunnel and, in some cases, each other.

When prisoners in other parts of the facility figured out what was happening, they began to arm themselves -- with two-by-fours, chair legs, whatever. When the prisoners in the tunnel finally burst out, they found the other inmates were taking over the prison.

From Sept. 9, when the uprising began, to its brutal end on Sept. 13, about half the inmates gathered in D Yard. They created a society, good and bad. They made some rules by consensus, elected leaders and listened to speeches. They cooked and ate. Early in the riot one guard, William Quinn, died after a blow to the head; he fell and was trampled. After that, guards taken hostage were treated well. At least two inmates were raped by fellow inmates. Some prisoners beat up their least favorite guards. Others raided the dispensary for drugs to shoot up.

For some prisoners, this reversion to a state of imagined freedom was nightmarish; for others, blissful. One prisoner, Ms. Thompson writes, ''watched in amazement as men embraced each other, and he saw one man break down into tears because it had been so long since he had been 'allowed to get close to someone.''' Another hadn't seen the stars in 22 years.

The eyes of the nation were on Attica. The inmates invited observers into the prison, including the radical defense lawyer William M. Kunstler and Tom Wicker, a columnist for The New York Times. (Louis Farrakhan declined an invitation.) The observers became de facto intermediaries, relaying demands that included religious freedom, an end to censorship of their letters, a healthy diet (''stop feeding us so much pork'') and doctors who would actually treat them.

Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller rejected the prisoners' demand that he visit. In briefings at his Pocantico Hills estate, he took an approach that mixed high-minded disdain with nave optimism that the problem would resolve itself.

On Sept. 13, a motley crew of New York State Police officers, National Guardsmen and assorted volunteers moved to retake the prison. They entered shooting. In the crossfire 33 prisoners were killed, along with nine hostages (after Quinn). As autopsies later revealed, with one exception, all the corrections officers who died were killed by bullet wounds -- in other words, by friendly fire.

Had it only painstakingly reconstructed the events of that week in 1971, Ms. Thompson's book would have been a definitive addition to a growing shelf of Attica literature, from Wicker's ''A Time to Die'' (1975) to ''Uprising,'' a 2011 e-book by Clarence B. Jones. (There are several documentaries, too.) But the uprising and its suppression barely get us halfway through the story.

After Attica, the state convened numerous panels to investigate. There were class action lawsuits. A special state's attorney filed charges -- dozens against the convicts, none against the state police or the corrections officers who tortured inmates after the uprising was put down.

Nor was the state interested in helping the widows of slain corrections officers. The state connived to persuade these destitute young mothers to accept small workers' compensation checks and give up their right to sue for damages.

Eventually there was mass clemency for both sides, a pittance of money for guards as well as prisoners, and never, to this day, an admission of wrongdoing by the state. The last monetary settlement came in 2005.

A book this long (571 pages, not including acknowledgments and footnotes) and bleak could have been unbearable, but every time its pages bog down, along comes a pick-me-up of an unexpected insight. How many have thought about what dentures mean to the imprisoned? Ms. Thompson lingers over ''the prisoner eyeglasses and dentures that had been smashed by correction officers and troopers'' after the retaking of the prison. As one of the investigative panels had pointed out, ''these were needed for 'eating and seeing' and, therefore 'involve fundamental human rights.'''

There are vivid villains and heroes. For every vicious guard, for every Governor Rockefeller, who peddled the lie that prisoners had cut the hostages' throats, there is a Dr. John Edland, the medical examiner who told the truth about who killed the hostages, or a Malcolm Bell, the Wall Street lawyer who, seeking a little adventure, became a special prosecutor, then blew the whistle on how his superiors were thwarting cases against state troopers.

Ms. Thompson's sympathies are with the prisoners. In her epilogue, she draws a straight line from the trauma of Attica to the Rockefeller drug laws, whose sentencing guidelines have caused the prison population to mushroom up to the present. But she is just as concerned with the undertrained, overworked guards. They knew what had caused Attica. After the uprising, Jerry Wurf, president of the correction officers' union, called for more ''secure and humane penal facilities'' rather than the ''decaying relics of penal theories discarded long ago.''

And yet in 1971 the State of New York had only 12,500 prisoners, a number that grew, by 2000, to almost 74,000. None of them can vote. But they can still strike or riot, and it's Ms. Thompson's achievement, in this remarkable book, to make us understand why this one group of prisoners did, and how many others shared the cost.

Blood in the Water

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

By Heather Ann Thompson

Illustrated. 724 pages. Pantheon. $35.

Correction: August 20, 2016, Saturday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Because of an editing error, The Books of The Times review on Friday about ''Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,'' by Heather Ann Thompson, misstated the number of hostages killed during the retaking of the prison on Sept. 13. It was 9, not 10.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: PHOTO (C17); Inmates of the Attica Correctional Facility negotiating with Russell G. Oswald, lower left, the state prisons commissioner, in September 1971. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ASSOCIATED PRESS);Heather Ann Thompson (C18)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Oppenheimer, Mark. "A Riot as Omen of Trauma in Prisons Today." New York Times, 19 Aug. 2016, p. C17(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461042333&it=r&asid=0d3e1a15a0f06569d852e3767735f869. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A461042333

McManus, Bob. "A riot, not an uprising." Commentary, Nov. 2016, p. 41+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA470559220&asid=8ce0d58ecb7d0abfb744afba5ce55211. Accessed 25 May 2017. Davis, Thomas J. "Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (History)." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2002, p. 163. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA83245980&asid=eb6eb6f6d0c28f5a3c172151288b9cac. Accessed 25 May 2017. Kimble, Lionel, Jr. "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City." The Journal of African American History, vol. 90, no. 3, 2005, p. 332+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA139571804&asid=98a1d575816cd261a8e5f87f4cf29662. Accessed 25 May 2017. Kimble, Lionel, Jr. "Heather Ann Thompson. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City." Michigan Historical Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, p. 152+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA118851775&asid=7e5202c4a4720771b81be2fe28a86164. Accessed 25 May 2017. Lyons, John F. "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus)." Labour/Le Travail, 2003, p. 311+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA102155419&asid=7ab53088d061474213765e900de5d8c7. Accessed 25 May 2017. Herron, Jerry. "Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City." Criticism, vol. 44, no. 4, 2002, p. 430+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA102981651&asid=266c53083ae1ba5b1b58fe03c450d0da. Accessed 25 May 2017. Sandiford, Frances O. "Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy." Xpress Reviews, 16 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA476562943&asid=c82b636f9097e89cd3df3f691c34ceca. Accessed 25 May 2017. Hartle, Terry. "'Blood in the Water' does a magnificent job of rewriting the Attica story." Christian Science Monitor, 26 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA464744940&asid=ead1b07269b1a18eb340b9ebe1d03ea5. Accessed 25 May 2017. Oppenheimer, Mark. "A Riot as Omen of Trauma in Prisons Today." New York Times, 19 Aug. 2016, p. C17(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA461042333&asid=0d3e1a15a0f06569d852e3767735f869. Accessed 25 May 2017.

• H-Net Reviews
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717/reviews/167211/hull-thompson-blood-water-attica-prison-uprising-1971-and-its-legacy
  Word count: 2063

  QUOTED: "a magisterial, 571-page book that details both the appalling brutality and the devastating consequences of this country’s single worst prison disaster."
  "Blood in the Water, a finalist for the National Book Award, is a monument not only to scrupulous scholarship but also to sheer doggedness. Thompson was forced to expend enormous effort securing her material since crucial files mysteriously disappeared."

  Hull on Thompson, 'Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy'
  Author:
  Heather Ann Thompson
  Reviewer:
  Elizabeth Hull

  Heather Ann Thompson. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon, 2016. 752 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-375-42322-2.

  Reviewed by Elizabeth Hull (Rutgers University at Newark)
  Published on H-Socialisms (February, 2017)
  Commissioned by Gary Roth

  Attica

  University of Michigan history professor Heather Ann Thompson spent thirteen years scrutinizing almost four decades' worth of court transcripts, interviews, police and legislative reports, official correspondence, and individual testimonies. The result was Blood in the Water, a magisterial, 571-page book that details both the appalling brutality and the devastating consequences of this country’s single worst prison disaster.

  Blood in the Water, a finalist for the National Book Award, is a monument not only to scrupulous scholarship but also to sheer doggedness. Thompson was forced to expend enormous effort securing her material since crucial files mysteriously disappeared, and the relatively few documents she was able to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act were heavily redacted. That she eventually gained access to a trove of valuable new information was in spite of ongoing official resistance. In 2006 a courthouse librarian in Buffalo, New York, granted her access to caches of documentation recently stored in the facility’s back room. As Thompson writes, she “hit pay dirt” because this new data enabled her to write what is far and away the most comprehensive account to date of the Attica uprising (p. xiv).

  Before describing the rebellion itself, Thompson provides a rich context within which to understand its causes. She makes clear, for instance, that the inmates’ grievances were manifestly well founded. Their medical care was abysmal, they were chronically underfed (New York State spent only sixty-three cents a day on food for each man), and they received scant provisions (one roll of toilet paper a month). Worse, the inmates enjoyed no religious freedom, their mail was either censored or, if written in Spanish, simply discarded, and they were subjected to round-the-clock racial epithets and brutal, often capricious, discipline.

  Yet, Thompson explains, the uprising was provoked less by these grievances than by unfounded but alarming rumors that within minutes gave rise to what a special commission later described as one of the bloodiest battles since the Civil War. Thus began the so-called Attica Invasion. On September 9, 1971, roughly thirteen hundred prisoners seized control of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York and captured thirty-nine hostages. They subsequently issued a series of demands, pledging to release the hostages as soon as prison officials met these demands. They also requested a team of outside observers to help them negotiate with the state, and soon had assistance from such distinguished public figures as New York state senator John Dunne, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and US representative Herman Badillo.

  The state eventually agreed to many of the inmates’ demands--but flatly refused to consider the one they considered most crucial: the granting of amnesty. Yet escalating tensions, misunderstandings, and the hardening of positions notwithstanding, on September 12 negotiations were still ongoing and a nonlethal resolution still seemed possible--until Governor Nelson Rockefeller authorized an invasion. Helicopters signaled the start of this invasion. Upon seeing them flying overhead, many inmates cheered, assuming that at long last the governor was arriving to break the impasse. How misplaced was their optimism: the planes were suffusing the air with tear gas, and once their targets were enfeebled six hundred armed men stormed the yard, shooting blindly and with wild abandon. The book’s title comes from a prisoner, blinded by tear gas, who later observed that ten minutes into the assault “all I could see was blood and water” (p. 187).

  The troopers could be compared to Keystone cops were their actions less savage. They were poorly trained (if trained at all), and--shockingly--provided neither instructions nor supervision. Some carried their own firearms; others were handed unfamiliar weapons designed to inflict maximum devastation. Notably, all these weapons were disbursed by officials who agreed that no serial numbers would be recorded, every commando would remove his badge, and any incriminating paperwork would be destroyed. Then, in one thirty-minute free-for-all the guards and state troopers besieged the compound, shooting anything that moved. Ultimately forty-three people ended up dead: ten correctional officers and civilian employees and thirty-three inmates. Subsequent autopsies established that with one exception every death was caused by bullets--that is, friendly fire.

  For months and even years after the last body was removed from the compound and the remaining blood washed off the skywalk, prison officials continued wreaking vengeance on the surviving prisoners, treating them with wanton, almost unimaginable savagery. Thompson observes that even the facility’s medical staff “tortured” the inmates (p. 220). In detail painful to read, the author catalogues much of this abuse--scorching inmates with cigarettes, plunging their heads into toilets, crushing their feet, and forcing them to run through gauntlets while club-wielding guards beat them every step of the way. Thompson notes that in addition to physical abuse, officers also engaged in petty acts of cruelty--preventing inmates from eating or reading by smashing their dentures or “accidentally” stepping on their glasses.

  Thompson is appropriately rough on New York State, devoting considerable attention to its sophisticated, decades-long, and well-coordinated campaign to conceal its own complicity in the Attica debacle, prosecute the prisoners while fully immunizing those responsible for the blood-bath, and ensure, through a variety of stratagems, that none of Attica’s victims received adequate compensation. The cover-up, engineered by Governor Rockefeller, was a travesty. Through deceit, intimidation, political and legal maneuvering, and sheer obstructionism, he and his minions succeeded (in some cases to this day) in concealing both the identities of anyone responsible for the Attica carnage and much of the evidence relating to the state’s own misconduct. As a result, not a single charge was ever filed against those who authorized or executed the onslaught or, in its wake, brutalized the surviving prisoners.

  Instead, perversely, the state labored mightily to prosecute the inmates, none of whom had guns and who, as every team member later attested, treated the hostages humanely throughout the five long days of the stand-off. Government officials even dispatched troopers to funeral homes and morgues in the vain hope they would discover injuries not caused by gunshot wounds that could be blamed on the inmates. New York State also engaged in unseemly maneuvers, one after another, to safeguard its financial interests--most egregiously, as Thompson recounts, by asking befuddled and still grieving family members to sign away what they later discovered was their right to file future legal claims. In exchange for such waivers they received only paltry checks from the state’s Workmen’s Compensation fund. Thanks to the heroic efforts of public interest attorneys, these family members eventually received additional, although small, compensation from the state. For sixteen years, one widow was forced to make due on thirty-six dollars a week. The last check arrived in 2005--thirty-six years after the uprising. Some prisoners, or their estates, also received modest reimbursements.

  Among the legion of low- and high-level state officials who played a role either in the takeover or its cover-up, Thompson considers Rockefeller the most blameworthy. His actions were premature at best, tragically unnecessary at worst. He authorized the takeover when negotiations still had the possibility of succeeding and sanctioned the use of lethal weapons when the unarmed prisoners, already disabled by tear gas, could have been subdued without bloodshed. Thompson also faults the governor for remaining cavalier throughout--most obviously by declining to visit Attica during the riot despite pleas from the negotiating team and the hostages. Rather, she notes, he and his aides enjoyed an opulent breakfast at his Fifth Avenue apartment at the same time the prisoners and hostages were mired in a mud slick that lacked both a sewage system and a source of clean water. Ultimately, she asserts, he ordered the invasion for one major reason: to advance his political career by establishing his law-and-order bona fides.

  Rockefeller may also have been influenced by the FBI’s erroneous claim that “the prisoners are all standing the guards at attention with knives at their throats threatening to kill them should they sit or fall down” (pp. 81-81) and President Richard Nixon’s insistence that the attack was masterminded by “black militants” and their “communist supporters” (pp. 199-200, 266). The governor may also have been swayed by the “fake news” then being brandished even by such estimable sources as the New York Times. One day after the rebellion was squashed, this paper of record reported that “prisoners slashed the throats of utterly helpless, unarmed guards who they had held captive through the around the-clock negotiations, in which the inmates held out for an increasingly revolutionary set of demands.” The Times corrected itself the next day, reporting that “Autopsies Show Shots Killed 9 Attica Hostages Not Knives; State Official Admits Mistake” (p. 196).

  Although villains abound in Blood in the Water, the book also features a few brave and principled heroes: public interest lawyers (William Kunstler, Gene Tenney, William Cunningham, and in particular the redoubtable Elizabeth Fink) who fought long and passionately with scant remuneration and even at their own expense to secure justice for Attica’s victims; New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, whose honest exposes countered the official misinformation; Dr. John Edland, the Rochester medical examiner who, in the face of great pressure to conceal the truth, accurately reported that the prisoners died of gunshot wounds inflicted by those retaking the prison; New York State Judge Michael Telesca, who in the face of great resistance successfully won settlements for the victims and their families; and Malcolm Bell, a Wall Street lawyer who first became a special prosecutor and then a whistleblower by revealing how his supervisors were sabotaging cases brought against state troopers.

  Thompson states in her epilogue that the Rockefeller drug laws, enacted in 1973, remain Attica’s most durable legacy. These laws were in direct response to the prison rebellion, she maintains, and were nonpareil in their harshness--imposing severe mandatory minimum sentences on anyone convicted of a drug offense and stripping almost all discretion from sentencing judges. New York’s prison population accordingly went from 12,500 in 1971 to nearly 74,000 by the year 2000. Many other states and the federal government also passed punitive new legislation, lengthening sentences, eliminating “perks” (such as education grants), and restricting appeals. As a consequence, the United States now has the dubious distinction of housing more prisoners than any other country on earth.

  Attica spawned a second legacy, this being heightened cynicism by a citizenry already disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate and already disinclined to trust government at any level. That New York State would strive so mightily to conceal its malfeasance, insulate from any liability the troopers and prison guards whose rampage resulted in multiple deaths, and begrudge the victims of this rampage so much as a modicum of legal and financial recompense, is difficult to reconcile with a country supposedly dedicated to equal justice under law.

  Finally, Attica confirmed--were confirmation necessary--how cheap are the lives of prisoners, and in particular how cheap the lives of prisoners who are black or brown. Before, during, and long after the uprising security guards subjected the inmates--largely men of color--to relentless racial slurs: they whipped them, stripped them naked, spat in their faces. One prisoner implored his captors to remember that “we are not beasts” (p. 78). Blood in the Water is ultimately a cautionary tale--about what can happen when government is neither transparent nor accountable; when individuals are not constrained by laws, virtuous leaders, and moral codes; and when anyone in power regards other people as less than human.

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