Although American society will not become race-blind anytime soon, the meaning of race is changing, and processes of racial formation now are quite different than those prevailing just two generations ago. Massey puts the present moment in historical perspective by reviewing progress toward racial equality through successive historical epochs, from the colonial era to the age of Obama. He ends by exploring the contours of racial formation in the United States today, outlining a program for a new civil rights movement in the twenty-first century.

Eighteenth-century constitutional commitments guaranteeing rights-to-remedies were shaped when members of the propertied classes were the prototypical litigants and governments' criminal justice systems were nascent. Twentieth-century egalitarian norms expanded the imagination of what justice could produce, and courts turned into sites of democracy. The particular and peculiar practices of adjudication produce, redistribute, and curb power among disputants who disagree in public about the import of legal rights. But new procedures—alternative dispute resolution (ADR)—encourage, and sometimes require, disputants to mediate or to arbitrate disputes privately as a predicate to or in lieu of using the public forum of courts.

Having published her celebrated English translation of the Iliad in 2015, Caroline Alexander is uniquely positioned to reflect on the process (and challenges) of rendering a modern translation of Homer. She analyzes her work, and that of previous translators, using the principles outlined by the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold.