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The New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically chronicles his hilarious adventures in attempting to follow…
the original meaning of the Constitution, as he searches for answers to one of the most pressing issues of our time: How should we interpret America&’s foundational document?&“I didn&’t know how I learned so much while laughing so hard.&”—Andy BorowitzA.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange looks. In the wake of several controversial rulings by the Supreme Court and the on-going debate about how the Constitution should be interpreted, Jacobs set out to understand what it means to live by the Constitution.In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and—because women were not allowed to sign contracts— feebly attempting to take over his wife&’s day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations.The book blends unforgettable adventures—delivering a handwritten petition to Congress, applying for a Letter of Marque to become a legal pirate for the government, and battling redcoats as part of a Revolutionary War reenactment group—with dozens of interviews from constitutional experts from both sides. Jacobs dives deep into originalism and living constitutionalism, the two rival ways of interpreting the document.Much like he did with the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs provides a crash course on our Constitution as he experiences the benefits and perils of living like it&’s the 1790s. He relishes, for instance, the slow thinking of the era, free from social media alerts. But also discovers the progress we&’ve made since 1789 when married women couldn&’t own property.Now more than ever, Americans need to understand the meaning and value of the Constitution. As politicians and Supreme Court Justices wage a high-stakes battle over how literally we should interpret the Constitution, A.J. Jacobs provides an entertaining yet illuminating look into how this storied document fits into our democracy today.Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America
By Mark Hertsgaard. 2024
The moving story of a New Orleans woman who fought for justice and her community even amidst one of the…
city's darkest moments.Mark Hertsgaard and Deborah Cotton were strangers to one another, united only by a love of jazz and New Orlean&’s distinctive Second Line tradition. And then, during a Mother&’s Day parade, they were thrown together when two gunmen fired into the crowd… Deborah Cotton—known to all as Big Red—was among the most grievously injured. She is the driving force of this deeply reported parable of two of America&’s most deeply rooted issues. A racial justice activist in her forties who was born to a Black father and a white mother, Cotton was one of twenty people—including the author—shot in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans. Once one of the largest slave ports, the city has long been a vortex of violence and racism. From her apparent deathbed, Big Red shocked observers by urging mercy for two young Black men accused of the attack. &“Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger,&” she tells Hertsgaard, who, she later said, is &“called&” to investigate what actually happened, and why. Charismatic, complicated, and struck down in her prime, Big Red and her heroic life will captivate readers. In the wake of the shooting, she never stopped fighting as she sought to get to the core of this uniquely American maelstrom. Big Red's Mercy is an illuminating narrative that provides a human and unflinching look at modern America.The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President
By Edward F. O'Keefe. 2024
A spirited and poignant family love story, revealing how an icon of rugged American masculinity was profoundly shaped by the…
women in his life, especially his mother, sisters, and wives.Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his senior thesis for Harvard in 1880 that women ought to be paid equal to men and have the option of keeping their maiden names upon marriage. It&’s little surprise he&’d be a feminist, given the women he grew up with. His mother, Mittie, was witty and decisive, a Southern belle raising four young children in New York while her husband spent long stretches away with the Union Army. Theodore&’s college sweetheart and first wife, Alice—so vivacious she was known as Sunshine—steered her beau away from science (he&’d roam campus with taxidermy specimen in his pockets) and towards politics. Older sister Bamie would soon become her brother&’s key political strategist and advisor; journalists called her Washington, DC, home &“the little White House.&” Younger sister Conie served as her brother&’s press secretary before the role existed, slipping stories of his heroics in Cuba and his rambunctious home life to reporters to create the legend of the Rough Rider we remember today. And Edith—Theodore&’s childhood playmate and second wife—would elevate the role of presidential spouse to an American institution, curating both the White House and her husband&’s legacy. A dazzling and lyrical look at one America&’s most significant presidents as we&’ve never seen him before, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt celebrates five extraordinary yet unsung women who opened the door to the American Century and pushed Theodore Roosevelt through it.To the Gorge: Running, Grief, and Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail
By Emily Halnon. 2024
A riveting narrative of love and loss, grief and joy, as one woman embarks on a quest for a record…
on the Pacific Crest Trail. When Emily Halnon lost her beloved mother to a rare uterine cancer at just sixty-six years old, she wanted to do something monumental to honor the person her mother had been: adventurous, courageous, inspiring. Emily&’s mom had taken up running in her late forties; she ran her first marathon at fifty. She learned to swim at sixty so she could do triathlons, and she lived through a grim diagnosis with extraordinary joy and strength, still going for long bike rides and walks up until the final weeks before her death. She even went skydiving to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. It was going to take something special to pay tribute to such a remarkable, lifeloving spirit. Emily, already an accomplished ultrarunner (inspired to initially start running by her mother), decided to try to break the record for the Fastest Known Time by a woman on the Pacific Crest Trail&’s 460 miles across Oregon. As she laid out plans for her run, she began to wonder: Could she also break the men&’s record? To the Gorge takes the reader through her 7 days, 19 hours, and 23 minutes on the trail, covering nearly sixty miles a day on foot over rugged terrain, and battling all the issues that could arise during such a monstrous undertaking: hammered muscles, golf ballsized blisters, sleep deprivation, alpine storms, and debilitating self-doubt. All the while, she simultaneously struggles with how to get through the profound grief of losing her mom and grapples with how to move forward after experiencing devastating loss. Interwoven with Halnon&’s eight-day effort are her remembrances from her mother&’s life and death, exploring the complicated experience of grief—and what shines through it. To the Gorge will resonate with anyone whom life has hit with a hardball and has had to dig deep as they wonder how they will pull through. Filled with adventure and heart, To the Gorge invites readers to consider what our greatest losses can teach us about how to live the one life we get.Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up
By Stanton T. Friedman. 2005
Exposing the U.S. government's biggest-kept secret: a fifty-eight-year UFO cover-up.Top Secret/Majic is the result of nuclear physicist and renowned UFO investigator…
Stanton T. Friedman's twenty-one year search for the truth about the mysterious Operation Majestic 12, President Truman's top-secret UFO investigation team. In this updated edition of his landmark book, he tells the incredible tale of the July 1947 recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, and the establishment by President Truman of a truly all-star cast to deal with the saucer and its non-human inhabitants. The first four Directors of Central Intelligence, the first Secretary of Defense, and several outstanding scientists and military leaders were part of the team. Through painstaking research and startling evidence—including documents that have never before been published.You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets
By Jodi Wellman. 2024
A kick-in-the-pants wake-up call to start living meaningfully in light of how many Mondays you have left from longtime coach,…
positive psychology expert, and Penn Resilience Program instructor Jodi Wellman "Wellman poses a profound question we too often avoid: How many Mondays do you have left? This book will jolt you out of complacency and redirect your limited time toward joyful, meaningful pursuits." - Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Regret, Drive, and A Whole New Mind How many Mondays do you have left? Does that question send you into a panic spiral, or are you convinced that, unlike everyone in the history of life on earth, you will somehow avoid the tragic end and live to tell the tale? Statistically, we get about 4,000 Mondays in our lifetime, so if you're halfway through your life, you might have roughly 2,000 Mondays to go. The good news is that you are in charge of how you spend those days: toiling at a job you hate, or creating a career you love; scrolling mindlessly for hours a day, or pursuing the hobbies and travel that light you up; dreading the end, or living a full life that allows you to greet the Grim Reaper with a smile. Built around the principles of positive psychology, You Only Die Once is the jolt that will bring you back to life, no near-death experience required. Full of practical takeaways and research-backed content, this book will motivate readers to take action on the life they want to be living, acting like a defibrillator for the soul. Accompanied by author Jodi Wellman's charming illustrations, this book won't lecture you about eating more kale or insist that the only path forward is to quit your job and move to Provence (although it's not not suggesting you do that either. The latter, that is. We'd never ask anyone to eat more kale.). Instead, it's a real-life guide to small changes that reawaken your passion and curiosity for life. Packed with inspiring stories, exercises, quizzes, quotes, and a step-by-step plan to awaken the liveliest version of you, You Only Die Once is the healthy dose of mortality you need to start living with urgency and meaning.This book is about the therapeutic environment of the Maggie’s centre and explores the many ways this is achieved. With…
an unconventional architecture as required by the design brief, combined with Maggie’s psychological support programme, this special health facility allows extraordinary therapeutic effects in people, to the point that one can speak of therapeutic power.After tracing the story of the Maggie’s centre, the book reveals its fundamentals: Maggie’s Therapeutikos (the-mind-as-important-as-the-body), the Architectural Brief and the ‘Client-Architect-Users’ Triad. It continues by unfolding Maggie’s synergy-that between people and place-which increases users’ psychological flexibility helping them tolerate what was intolerable before. Although comfort and atmospheres are paramount, they are not enough to define the therapeutic environment of the Maggie’s centre. Only by looking at neuroscience that can give us scientific explanations of empathy, feelings and emotions and only considering space neither neutral nor empty, but full of forces that envelop people in an embodied experience, can we explain what generates wellbeing in a Maggie’s centre.The book concludes by critically evaluating the Maggie’s centre as a model to be applied to other healthcare facilities and to architecture in general. It is essential reading for any student or professional working on therapeutic environments.Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History
By Kim A. Wagner. 2024
In this &“forensic, unflinching, devastating work of historical recovery&” (Sathnam Sanghera), Bud Dajo—an American atrocity bigger than Wounded Knee or…
My Lai, yet today largely forgotten—is revealed, thanks to the rediscovery of a single photograph. In March 1906, American soldiers on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines surrounded and killed 1000 local men, women, and children, known as Moros, on top of an extinct volcano. The so-called &‘Battle of Bud Dajo&’ was hailed as a triumph over an implacable band of dangerous savages, a &“brilliant feat of arms&” according to President Theodore Roosevelt. Some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain, saw the massacre for what it was, but they were the exception and the U.S. military authorities successfully managed to bury the story. Despite the fact that the slaughter of Moros had been captured on camera, the memory of the massacre soon disappeared from the historical record. In Massacre in the Clouds, Kim A. Wagner meticulously recovers the history of a forgotten atrocity and the remarkable photograph that exposed its grim logic. His vivid, unsparing account of the massacre—which claimed hundreds more lives than Wounded Knee and My Lai combined—reveals the extent to which practices of colonial warfare and violence, derived from European imperialism, were fully embraced by Americans with catastrophic results.Your Vote Matters: How We Elect the US President
By Rebecca Katzman. 2024
This engaging and comprehensive illustrated guide will answer all kids' questions about how the president is elected!There's never been a…
timelier moment for kids to learn the importance of voting. Your Vote Matters walks readers through all the ins and outs of voting in America -- and more specifically, voting in presidential elections.This easy-to-understand guide explains every step in the presidential election process -- from who is eligible to run for president to what the president does once they are sworn into office. Learn about campaigning and debates, the difference between caucuses and primaries, and how the Electoral College works, plus information about who is eligible to vote; the many different ways citizens can vote on (and leading up to) Election Day; what happens after the final ballots are cast; and tips on what to consider when deciding which candidate should get your vote.Each page of this nonfiction guidebook also features full-color artwork, including photographs, maps, illustrations, charts, and infographics aimed at making the information inside as accessible and kid-friendly as possible.Your Vote Matters is the perfect book to not only help kids understand how elections work -- but why it's important to participate in every single one.Folklore of Lake Erie
By Judith S. Neulander. 2024
Welcome to a very different Lake Erie—where ghost ships sail silently, a Black Dog brings doom to sailors who see…
it, and sea monsters swirl in the murky depths above a UFO base. In Folklore of Lake Erie, Judith S. Neulander presents these captivating tales and many more from the smallest, yet arguably the most peculiar, of the Great Lakes in North America.Whether you are embarking on a discovery of the vampire crypt that lurks in the shadows while Lincoln's ghost train speeds past on its eternal journey or reminiscing about the tall tales your grandfather used to share, this delightful treasure trove of folklore and local traditions from the Lake Erie region contains legends and stories that are both astonishing and entertaining.Endlessly captivating and easily accessible, Folklore of Lake Erie is a distinctive compilation of eerie and enchanting narratives from across the years that will surprise and delight readers. Just be sure to keep an eye out for any peculiar Black Dogs that may cross your path along the way.Grieve, Breathe, Receive: Finding a Faith Strong Enough to Hold Us
By Steve Carter. 2024
What do you do when your world seems to be falling down all around you? When loss is too much…
to bear? When disappointment becomes your new reality? Pastor Steve Carter is certain you&’ll find hope and life through these three simple yet profound steps: Grieve. Breathe. Receive.In 2018, in light of further misconduct allegations against Willow Creek Community Church founder and senior pastor Bill Hybels, Steve Carter announced publicly that he was resigning from his dream job as a lead pastor at that church. After posting his resignation online, he turned off all of his devices and began to weep on his wife's shoulder. The next morning as he was taking a walk to process all the thoughts and feelings tumbling around in his mind, he cried out to Jesus in desperation, begging for an answer. "What am I supposed to do now?" He expected nothing but the silence that had overwhelmed him since hitting send on his message to the world, but before he could take two steps, a gentle whisper impressed three words upon his heart: grieve, breathe, receive.Those three words would become a profound mantra for Steve in the season he would soon begin—a season focused on healing. Deep healing. The kind that comes after painful trauma. In this book, Steve is more personal and vulnerable than he's ever been, and by doing so he encourages all of us to:Allow ourselves the necessary time and space to properly GRIEVE what is, what you thought it was going to be and how key people let you down rather than fill our days with activities and commitments that distract us.Slow down to BREATHE in God's grace, His peace, and His love . . . and to learn how to exhale all the negativity, pain, resentment, and bitterness we carry within us.Be open to RECEIVE all the lessons, surprises, and healing God knows we need for every part of us to be made whole. This process of grieving, breathing, and receiving was a life-restoring gift from God for Steve and his family, and he is certain that it will bless anyone who prayerfully follows it.Mrs death misses death
By Salena Godden. 2023
Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted from spending eternity doing her job and now she seeks someone to…
unburden her conscience to. Wolf Willeford, a troubled young writer, is well acquainted with death, but until now hadn't met Death in person - a black, working-class woman who shape-shifts and does her work unseen. Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death's scribe, and begins to write her memoirs. Using their desk as a vessel and conduit, Wolf travels across time and place with Mrs Death to witness deaths of past and present and discuss what the future holds for humanity. As the two reflect on the losses they have experienced - or, in the case of Mrs Death, facilitated - their friendship grows into a surprising affirmation of hope, resilience and love. All the while, despite her world-weariness, Death must continue to hold humans' fates in her hands, appearing in our lives when we least expect herJoining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an…
immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways. The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history. In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda's 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship's 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee's Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous. An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic pastOur history has always been contraband: In defense of black studies
By Colin Kaepernick. 2023
Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to…
discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum. Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, and many others. Our History Has Always Been Contraband excerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight backCome Fly with Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)
By Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas. 2019
2020 Space Hipsters Prize for Best Book in Astronomy, Space Exploration, or Space HistoryCome Fly with Us is the story of…
an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as &“payload specialists&” came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA&’s struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks. While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107.Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America (New Directions in Tourism Analysis)
By Cathy Rex and Shevaun E. Watson. 2022
This book addresses the interconnected issues of public memory, race, and heritage tourism, exploring the ways in which historical tourism…
shapes collective understandings of America’s earliest engagements with race.It includes contributions from a diverse group of humanities scholars, including early Americanists, and scholars from communication, English, museum studies, historic preservation, art and architecture, Native American studies, and history. Through eight chapters, the collection offers varied perspectives and original analyses of memory-making and re-making through travel to early American sites, bringing needed attention to the considerable role that tourism plays in producing—and possibly unsettling—racialized memories about America’s past. The book is an interdisciplinary effort that analyses lesser-known sites of historical and racial significance throughout North America and the Caribbean (up to about 1830) to unpack the relationship between leisure travel, processes of collective remembering or forgetting, and the connections of tourist sites to colonialism, slavery, genocide, and oppression.Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America provides a deconstruction of the touristic experience with racism, slavery, and the Indigenous experience in America that will appeal to students and academics in the social sciences and humanities.Converting the Missionaries: The Wheeler Family and the Ojibwe
By Nancy Bunge. 2024
This book tells the uncommon story of a missionary family in the Midwestern United States, and their interactions with the…
indigenous Ojibwe. When Leonard and Harriet Wheeler arrived at La Pointe, Wisconsin in July of 1841, hoping to help the Ojibwe understand and accept the value of Christian civility, they did not expect such a profound transformation of their own lives. The Wheelers’ empathy for the Ojibwe not only grew during their twenty-five years of mission work in Northern Wisconsin, much of it spent trying to protect the Ojibwe from predatory whites, it also influenced the lives of their children.Gregg Herken's Brotherhood of the Bomb is the fascinating story of the men who founded the nuclear age, fully told…
for the first timeThe story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller-the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction.How did science-and its practitioners-enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War? The story of these three men, builders of the bombs, is fundamentally about loyalty-to country, to science, and to each other-and about the wrenching choices that had to be made when these allegiances came into conflict.Gregg Herken gives us the behind-the-scenes account based upon a decade of research, interviews, and newly released Freedom of Information Act and Russian documents. Brotherhood of the Bomb is a vital slice of American history told authoritatively-and grippingly-for the first time.Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July
By James A. Colaiaco. 2006
On July 5th, 1852, Frederick Douglass, one of the greatest orators of all time, delivered what was arguably the century's…
most powerful abolition speech. At a time of year where American freedom is celebrated across the nation, Douglass eloquently summoned the country to resolve the contradiction between slavery and the founding principles of our country. In this book, James A. Colaiaco vividly recreates the turbulent historical context of Douglass' speech and delivers a colorful portrait of the country in the turbulent years leading to the civil war. This book provides a fascinating new perspective on a critical time in American history.American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow
By Jerrold M. Packard. 2002
For a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, a quarter of all Americans lived under a system…
of legalized segregation called Jim Crow. Together with its rigidly enforced canon of racial "etiquette," these rules governed nearly every aspect of life--and outlined draconian punishments for infractions.The purpose of Jim Crow was to keep African Americans subjugated at a level as close as possible to their former slave status. Exceeding even South Africa's notorious apartheid in the humiliation, degradation, and suffering it brought, Jim Crow left scars on the American psyche that are still felt today. American Nightmare examines and explains Jim Crow from its beginnings to its end: how it came into being, how it was lived, how it was justified, and how, at long last, it was overcome only a few short decades ago. Most importantly, this book reveals how a nation founded on principles of equality and freedom came to enact as law a pervasive system of inequality and virtual slavery.Although America has finally consigned Jim Crow to the historical graveyard, Jerrold Packard shows why it is important that this scourge--and an understanding of how it happened--remain alive in the nation's collective memory.