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Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.Kid Olympians: True Tales of Childhood from Champions and Game Changers (Kid Legends #9)
By Robin Stevenson. 2024
Triumphant, relatable, and totally true biographies tell the childhood stories of a diverse group of international athletes who have captured…
the world’s attention at the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, like Simone Biles, Jesse Owens, Naomi Osaka, Tatyana McFadden, and 12 other incredible olympians.Athletes throughout history have dreamed of competing in the Olympics—and some were kids themselves when those dreams and plans began! In Kid Olympians: Summer, discover the childhood stories of legends such as: Usain Bolt, who used to skip practices to go to the arcade and play video games.Serena Williams, who sometimes hit her tennis ball over the fence on purpose!Tatyana McFadden, who had to fight to be allowed on her school’s track teamFeaturing kid-friendly text and full-color illustrations, you’ll be inspired to dream bigger, faster, and higher than ever before! The diverse and inspiring group also includes Michael Phelps, Yusra Mardini, Dick Fosbury, Ibtihaj Muhammad, Gertrude Ederle, Nadia Comaneci, Ellie Simmonds, Tommie Smith, Wilma Rudolph, and Megan Rapinoe.Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name? #4)
By Mary Fairhurst Breen. 2023
The activists between these pages have stood up for the queer community, whether on their own behalf or in support…
of people they love. Some made a difference by confronting injustice; others dared to be fully themselves.See It, Dream It, Do It: How 25 people just like you found their dream jobs
By Colleen Nelson, Kathie MacIsaac. 2023
From award-winning author Colleen Nelson, and literacy advocate Kathie MacIsaac, twenty-five profiles present a plethora of jobs, and people, making…
it easier than ever for young people to see their dreams and to live their dreams!Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy
By Damien Lewis. 2022
The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Vanity Fair, Best Books of 2022 Booklist, Best Books of 2022 Singer. Actress.…
Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all &“negroes and Jews.&” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine, bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer&’s life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers—a cover for her spying work—Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served—the US, France, and Britain. Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Lewis upends the conventional story of Josephine Baker, explaining why she fully deserves her unique place in the French Panthéon.Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions
By Kate Cooper. 2023
FINALIST: THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2023The vibrant and surprising lives of the women in Augustine's Confessions While many know of…
Saint Augustine and his Confessions, few are aware of how his life and thought were influenced by women.Queens of a Fallen World tells a story of betrayal, love, and ambition in the ancient world as seen through a woman's eyes. Historian Kate Cooper introduces us to four women whose hopes and plans collided in Augustine's early adulthood: his mother, Monnica of Thagaste; his lover; his fiancée; and Justina, the troubled empress of ancient Rome. Drawing upon their depictions in the Confessions, Cooper skilfully reconstructs their lives against the backdrop of their fourth-century society. Though they came from different walks of life, each found her own way of prevailing in a world ruled by men. A refreshingly complex and compelling portrait of Augustine, Queens of a Fallen World is the riveting story of four remarkable women who set him on course to change history.Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians
By Tara Isabella Burton. 2023
An exploration into the curation of the self in Western civilization from Da Vinci to Kim Kardashian.In a technologically-saturated era…
where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to stand out and be seen. As the forces of social media and capitalism collide, and individualism becomes more important than ever across a wide array of industries, "branding ourselves" or actively defining our selves for others has become the norm. Yet, this phenomenon is not new. In Self-Made, Tara Isabella Burton shows us how we arrived at this moment of fervent personal-branding.As attitudes towards religion, politics and society evolved, our sense of self did as well, moving from a collective to individual mindset. Through a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) "self-creators" in the modern Western world, from the Renassiance to the Enlightenment to modern capitalism and finally to our present moment of mass media, Burton examines the theories and forces behind our never-ending need to curate ourselves. Through a vivid cast of characters and an engaging mix of cultural and historical commentary, we learn how the personal brand has come to be.They were a small group of conspirators who risked their lives by plotting relentlessly to obstruct and destroy the Third…
Reich from within. The Gestapo nicknamed this shadowy confederation of traitors the &“Black Orchestra.&” This is their tension-filled story. As the &“Final Solution&” unfolds, a loose network of German military officers, diplomats, politicians, and civilians are doing everything in their power to undermine the Third Reich from the inside: reporting troop movements to the Allies, feeding disinformation to the Nazi high command, plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and more. The Gestapo nicknames this shadowy confederation of traitors the &“Black Orchestra.&” Its players include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a dissident Lutheran pastor, and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, a staff attorney at the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. In this tension-filled narrative, Tom Dunkel traces the perilous movements of these &“white knights&” as they and their families face constant danger of being exposed and executed. Some act out of moral outrage and patriotism. Some want to atone for their own Nazi sins. When their treasonous activities are finally discovered, Hitler&’s SS and the Gestapo are hell-bent on taking bloody revenge as the end of the war rapidly approaches and lives hang in the balance. White Knights in the Black Orchestra is a tautly written, meticulously reported account of men and women heroically resisting Hitler&’s ruthless regime. It packs the punch of the best espionage thrillers, but the cat-and-mouse drama and plot twists are grounded firmly in fact. This is a stirring story of people willing to risk all by doing the right thing in a country gone mad, a story that may prompt readers to ask themselves &“What would I have done?&”We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel
By Eric Alterman. 2022
A bestselling historian uncovers the surprising roots of America&’s long alliance with Israel and its troubling consequences Fights about the…
fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments&’ significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel&’s 1948–1949 War of Independence (called the &“nakba&” or &“catastrophe&” by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews&’ collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel&’s image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Deeply researched, We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine
By Anna Reid. 2023
&“A beautifully written evocation of Ukraine's brutal past and its shaky efforts to construct a better future.&”—Financial TimesBorderland tells the…
story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centuries, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia's wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918-1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain, it has the potential to become one of the most powerful states in Europe. In this finely written and penetrating book, Anna Reid combines research and her own experiences to chart Ukraine's tragic past. Talking to peasants and politicians, rabbis and racketeers, dissidents and paramilitaries, survivors of Stalin's famine and of Nazi labor camps, she reveals the layers of myth and propaganda that wrap this divided land. From the Polish churches of Lviv to the coal mines of the Russian-speaking Donbass, from the Galician shtetlech to the Tatar shantytowns of Crimea, the book explores Ukraine's struggle to build itself a national identity, and identity that faces up to a bloody past, and embraces all the peoples within its borders.The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
By Hugh Ryan. 2022
This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the…
policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. The Women&’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women&’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City&’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women&’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher. Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women&’s House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired. Winner, 2023 Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book AwardCrimeReads, Best True Crime Books of the YearWithout Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother
By Peggy O'Donnell Heffington. 2023
A historian explores the complicated relationship between womanhood and motherhood in this &“timely, refreshingly open-hearted study of the choices women make…
and the cards they&’re dealt&” (Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can&’t Sleep). In an era of falling births, it&’s often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others—the vast majority, then and now—who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone. Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O&’Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history—how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal—is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all.Circumventing the Law probes the rabbinic logic behind the use of loopholes, the legal phenomenon of finding and using gaps…
within law to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. The logic of ha’aramah, a subset of rabbinic legal circumventions mostly defined as a tool for private life, underpins both well-known circumventions, such as selling leaven before Passover, and lesser-known mechanisms, such as designating an animal intended for sacrifice “blemished” before birth to allow it to be slaughtered for food instead. Elana Stein Hain traces the development of these loopholes over time, revealing that rabbinic literature does not consistently accept or reject loopholes. Instead, rabbinic Judaism applies categories of evasion (prohibited), avoidance (permitted), and avoision (contested) to loopholes on a case-by-case basis. The intended outcome of a given loophole determines its classification, as does the legal integrity of the circumventive process in question.Yet these understandings of loopholes are not static—instead, rabbinic attitudes toward loopholing change over time. Early works display an objective, performative understanding of the self and of intention, but evolve over time to reflect more subjective and intimate understanding of the self and intention. This evolution redefines what legal integrity means in Jewish legal philosophy.Circumventing the Law brings readers through the Second Temple period to the modern era to see how loopholing has evolved over millennia. With a focus on late antiquity, Stein Hain explores tannaitic literature, the Palestinian Talmud, and contemporaneous Greco-Roman and Persian thought to show that when warranted, Jewish rhetoric and philosophy around understandings of loopholes was a unique phenomenon that relied on changes in understanding the definition of integrity itself, a key finding for scholars of Jewish Studies and of religious and of secular law writ large.Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe
By Erik Loomis. 2015
A provocative analysis of labor, globalization, and environmental harm by the award-winning historian and author of A History of America…
in Ten Strikes. In the current state of our globalized economy, corporations have no incentive to protect their workers or the environment. Jobs moves seamlessly across national borders while the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain bound by them. As a result, labor exploitation and toxic pollution remain standard practice. In Out of Sight, Erik Loomis—a historian of both the labor and environmental movements—follows a narrative that runs from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. He demonstrates that our modern systems of industrial production are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. The only difference is that the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable. In this Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America—the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA—were actually union victories. Using this history as a call to action, Out of Sight proposes a path toward regulations that follow corporations wherever they do business, putting the power back in workers&’ hands. &“The story told here is tragic and important.&” —Bill McKibben &“Erik Loomis prescribes how activists can take back our country—for workers and those who care about the health of our planet.&” —Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH)This book presents a thorough analysis of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s memory culture, focusing particularly on commemorations and representations…
of the Anfal and Halabja atrocities. The author employs a transdisciplinary approach that draws on Memory Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Heritage Studies, Kurdish Studies, Literary Studies and Trauma Studies, to analyze cultural objects such as Kurdistani literary novels, museums, and school curricula. The book introduces two key concepts: the "phantomic museum" and the "apostrophic museum." The former explores the fragile and politicized nature of memories of missing individuals who disappeared during Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaigns and who have never been found, primarily as they return in the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum. The latter examines how the addressing – apostrophizing – of Kurdistan, in and by the Amna Suraka museum in the city of Sulaymaniyah, institutionalizes “official” and highly politicized versions of the past.Queen Caroline and the Power of Caricature in Georgian England (Queenship and Power)
By Ian Haywood. 2023
This book will be the first dedicated study of the remarkable role of Georgian caricature in the equally remarkable Queen…
Caroline controversy of 1820-21. When the newly crowned George IV, formerly the Prince of Wales, refused to recognise his estranged wife Caroline as the rightful queen of the Britain, her refusal to rescind her claim to the throne provoked a huge campaign of sympathy and support that almost toppled the government. The British people rallied round the ‘injured’ queen in their hundreds of thousands, and massed rallies, processions, protests and petitioning became daily news.The Queen Caroline controversy was the zenith of the ‘Golden Age’ of caricature, a tour-de-force of imagination, wit, inventiveness and sheer political mischief. In image after image, Caroline triumphs over her cowardly and conniving enemies, subverting gender and political hierarchies, and giving a presence and voice to her unenfranchised followers. This book therefore aims to chronicle and analyse this achievement.The Martin Duberman Reader: The Essential Historical, Biographical, and Autobiographical Writings
By Martin Duberman. 2013
&“A wonderful introduction to Duberman&’s writing but is also a fitting tribute to a man who has devoted his life…
to promoting social change&” (Publishers Weekly). For the past fifty years, prize-winning historian Martin Duberman&’s groundbreaking writings have established him as one of our preeminent public intellectuals. Founder of the first graduate program in LGBT studies in the country, he is perhaps best known for his biographies of Paul Robeson, Lincoln Kirstein, and Howard Zinn—works that have been hailed as &“magnificent&” (USA Today), &“enthralling&” (The Washington Post), &“splendid&” and &“definitive&” (Studs Terkel, Chicago Sun-Times), and &“refreshing and inspiring&” (The New York Times). Duberman is also an equally gifted playwright and essayist, whose piercingly honest memoirs Cures: A Gay Man&’s Odyssey and Midlife Queer have been called &“witty and searingly candid&” (Publishers Weekly), &“wrenchingly eloquent&” (Newsday), and &“a moving chronicle&” (The Nation). His writings have explored the shocking attempts by the medical establishment to &“cure&” homosexuality; Stonewall, before and after; the age of AIDS; the struggle for civil rights; the fight for economic and racial justice; and Duberman&’s vision for reclaiming a radical queer past from the creeping centrism of the gay movement. The Martin Duberman Reader assembles the core of Duberman&’s most important writings, offering a wonderfully comprehensive overview of our lives and times—and giving us a crucial touchstone for a new generation of activists, scholars, and readers. &“A deeply moral and reflective man who has engaged the greatest struggles of our times with an unflinching nerve, a wise heart, and a brilliant intellect.&” —Jonathan KozolIndigenous Peoples and Constitutional Reform in Australia: Beyond Mere Recognition
By Bede Harris. 2024
This book examines whether Australia’s constitution should be reformed so as to enable the country to fulfil its obligations under…
the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which it ratified in 2009. The book surveys the history of the constitutional status of Australia’s Indigenous peoples from the time of colonisation through to the current debate on ‘Indigenous constitutional recognition’. However, it argues that the term ‘Indigenous constitutional recognition', implying that mere acknowledgement of the existence of Indigenous peoples is sufficient to meet their legitimate expectations, misrepresents the nature of the project the country needs to engage in. The book argues that Australia should instead embark upon a reform programme directed towards substantive, and not merely symbolic, constitutional change. It argues that only by the inclusion in the constitution of enforceable constitutional rights can the power imbalance between Indigenous Australians and the rest of society be addressed. Taking a comparative approach and drawing upon the experience of other jurisdictions, the book proposes a comprehensive constitutional reform programme, and includes the text of constitutional amendments designed to achieve the realisation of the rights of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. It ends with a call to improve the standard of civics education so as to overcome voter apprehension towards constitutional change.A Cultural History of Late Meiji Japan: Empire and Decadence
By Alistair Swale. 2023
Scholarship on Japan’s development from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century has, perhaps quite understandably, been dominated by…
attention given to Japan’s emergence as a world power through a succession of military conflicts, and the burgeoning of a modern literary canon. This book argues that the emergence of empire and high culture needs to be more thoroughly integrated with an awareness of popular culture in urban life, a culture that at times exhibited a less than whole-hearted enthusiasm for the trappings of 'civilization', - a culture that was, in a sense, ‘decadent’. It integrates coverage of popular culture across diverse media and platforms, accentuating the emergence of new modern forms that evolved from the inter-relation between textual, visual and performative traditions such as kōdan and gidayū. The commentary is seasoned with reference to contemporary narratives, aiming to capture more ‘on the street’ perceptions of momentous events such as war and natural disasters, as well as the more arcane or curious media sensations of the moment. These included exposés of scandalous conduct in high places, new fads in popular entertainments and riveting stories of human interest whether it be crime or tragedies of modern urban living.