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Showing 41 - 60 of 1999 items
By Julia Scheeres, Allison Gilbert. 2022
*Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award* The first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you&’ve…
never heard of At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she&’d lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills. When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area. Armed with moxie and samples of her work, she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered more than twenty million readers. Told in cinematic detail by bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert, Listen, World! is the inspiring story of a timeless maverick, capturing what it means to take a gamble on self-fulfillment and find freedom along the way.By Mary Clark, Peter Bearman, Catherine Ellis, Stephen Smith. 2011
New Yorkers remember 9/11 in this landmark volume of oral history commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks—A &“staggering book…
of living memory&” (Booklist, starred review). Within days of September 11, 2001, Columbia&’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to collect the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. With follow-up interviews spanning years, the project produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities in New York City. After the Fall presents a selection of these fascinating testimonies, with heartbreaking and enlightening stories from a broad range of New Yorkers. The interviews include first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants, and others who were interviewed numerous times since the 2001 attacks. The result is a remarkable time-lapse account of the city as it changed in the wake of 9/11, one that will resonate powerfully with New Yorkers and millions of others who continue to feel the impact of the most damaging foreign attack to ever occur inside the United States.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.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?&”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.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.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 YearBy 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.By Nicholas Morton. 2022
How the Mongol invasions of the Near East reshaped the balance of world power in the Middle Ages For…
centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region&’s complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region&’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long-standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. The Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia. This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.By Dan Berger. 2023
A new history of Black Liberation, told through the intertwined story of two grassroots organizers The Black Power movement, often associated…
with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world.By Sam W. Haynes. 2020
A bold new history of the origins and aftermath of the Texas Revolution, revealing how Indians, Mexicans, and Americans battled for survival in one of the…
continent&’s most diverse regions The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land, historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved. This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.By Avinoam Yuval-Naeh. 2024
One of the most persistent, powerful, and dangerous notions in the history of the Jews in the diaspora is the…
prodigious talent attributed to them in all things economic. From the medieval Jewish usurer through the early-modern port-Jew and court-Jew to the grand financier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary investors, Jews loom large in the economic imagination. For capitalists and Marxists, libertarians and radical reformers, Jews are intertwined with the economy. This association has become so natural that we often overlook the history behind the making and remaking of the complex cluster of perceptions about Jews and economy, which emerged within different historical contexts to meet a variety of personal and societal anxieties and needs.In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes this association by focusing on one specific time and place—the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil. But as the economy modernized in the seventeenth century, finance became the hinge of national power. Finance’s rise in England provoked intense national debates. Could financial economy, based on lending money on interest, be accommodated within Christian state and society when it had previously been understood as a Jewish practice?By projecting the modern economy and the Jewish community onto each other, the Christian majority imbued them with interrelated meanings. This braiding together of parallel developments, Yuval-Naeh argues, reveals in a meaningful way how the contemporary and wide-ranging association of Jews with the modern economy could be created.By Grant Farred. 2024
Apartheid, ironically, provided Grant Farred with the optimal conditions for thinking. He describes South Africa’s apartheid regime as an intellectual…
force that, “Made thinking apartheid, more than anything else, an absolute necessity.” The Perversity of Gratitude is a provocative book in which Farred reflects on an upbringing resisting apartheid. Although he is still inclined to struggle viscerally against apartheid, he acknowledges, “It is me.” Unsentimental about his education, Farred’s critique recognizes the impact of four exceptional teachers—all engaging pedagogical figures who cultivated a great sense of possibility in how thinking could be learned through a disenfranchised South African education. The Perversity of Gratitude brings to bear the work of influential philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. The book tackles broad philosophical concepts—transgression, withdrawal, and the dialectic. This leads to the creation of a new concept, “the diaspora-in-place,” which Farred explains, “is having left a place before one physically removes oneself from this place.” Farred’s apartheid education in South Africa instilled in him a lifelong commitment to learning thinking. “And for that I am grateful,” Farred writes in The Perversity of Gratitude. His autopoiesis is sure to provoke and inspire readers.By William Urban. 2013
A look at the tumult and transformations in warfare during the eighteenth century—and the world-changing events that resulted. The…
eighteenth century in Europe was a period of significant economic, political, and technological upheaval—which led to the American and French revolutions, and ultimately paved the way for Europe&’s domination of much of the world during the nineteenth century. The wars and political maneuvering of Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great transformed Prussia and Russia into major players in European politics. France, then the richest nation in the West, survived losing successive wars, then bankrupted itself assisting the Americans in an unnecessary war of revenge. Britain became the model of economic and financial efficiency and made itself supreme in North America, the Caribbean, and in India, only to face such financial troubles that its leaders antagonized its colonial subjects in America. This engaging new book by an esteemed military historian traces the evolution of war-making throughout this turbulent period—the politics, the weaponry, the organization of armies, and the transformation of mercenaries into professionals. This illuminating and highly readable account concentrates not just on high politics and military strategy, but also on the everyday experiences of those involved, giving us a fascinating glimpse into the human drama of eighteenth-century warfare.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.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.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.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 Kozol