Land of Hope

Land of Hope

Author: Wilfred M. McClay

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 1594039380

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For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.


History and Freedom

History and Freedom

Author: Theodor W. Adorno

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-11-05

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0745694500

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Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility. Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress. The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of the domination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist concept of a historicity without history and, finally, his opposition to the traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical.


On the Other Side of Freedom

On the Other Side of Freedom

Author: DeRay Mckesson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0525560572

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"Hope and insight and empathy spring from every page. . . . [McKesson] stares down the faces of bigotry and unfreedom and cynicism and doesn't flinch in writing out our marching orders toward freedom." --Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist From the internationally recognized civil rights activist/organizer and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, a meditation on resistance, justice, and freedom, and an intimate portrait of a movement from the front lines. In August 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism's wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom. Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing from his own experiences as an activist, organizer, educator, and public official, Mckesson exhorts all Americans to work to dismantle the legacy of racism and to imagine the best of what is possible. Honoring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.


Self-Taught

Self-Taught

Author: Heather Andrea Williams

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-11-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0807888974

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In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.


Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing

Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing

Author: Winton Russell Bates

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-05-12

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0761872671

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What does it mean to be a flourishing human in a Western liberal democracy in the twenty-first century? In Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, Winton Bates aims to provide a better framework for thinking about the relationship between freedom, progress, and human flourishing. Bates asserts that freedom enables individuals to flourish in different ways without colliding, allows for a growth of opportunities, and supports personal development by enabling individuals to exercise self-direction. The importance of self-direction is a central theme in the book, and Bates explores throughout why wise and well-informed self-direction is integral to flourishing because it helps individuals attain health and longevity, positive human relationships, psychological well-being, and an ability to live in harmony with nature.


Images of History

Images of History

Author: Richard Eldridge

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190847360

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Human subjects are both formed by historical inheritances and capable of active criticism. Insisting on this fact, Kant and Benjamin each develop powerful, systematic, but sharply opposed accounts of human powers and interests in freedom. A persistent constitutive tension between Kantian and Benjaminan ideals is woven through human life. By examining the two philosophers through this volume, Richard Eldridge attempts to make better sense of the commitment forming, commitment revising, anxious, reflective and acculturated human subjects we are.


History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution

History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution

Author: Mercy Otis Warren

Publisher: Palala Press

Published: 2016-04-27

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9781354838389

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.


Affluence and Freedom

Affluence and Freedom

Author: Pierre Charbonnier

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1509543732

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In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.