FROM POVERTY TO WEALTH, FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA, AND FROM CHILD SOLDIER TO U.S. MARINE Born into the Congolese wilderness, Tchicaya Missamou became a child soldier at age 11. As a horrific civil war loomed across his country, Tchicaya began using his militia connections to ferry jewels, cash, computers, and white diplomats out of the country. By 17, he was rich. By 18, he was a hunted man, his house destroyed, his family brutalized in front of him by his own militia. By 19, he’d left behind everything he’d ever known, escaping to Europe and, eventually, to America. Incredibly, that was only the start of his journey. In the Shadow of Freedom is the uplifting story of one man’s quest to achieve the American Dream. Tchicaya Missamou’s life is a shining example of why America is a gift that should not be taken for granted, and why we are limited only by the breadth of our imagination and the strength of our will.
This dystopian novel features a young artist living in New York City. She questions her identity in a nation that is eliminating all laws in the name of freedom. But what does it mean to be free?
Winner of the Lincoln Prize A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective. At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.
Did you know that many of America’s Founding Fathers—who fought for liberty and justice for all—were slave owners? Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were “owned” by four of our greatest presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role slavery played in the founding of America. From Billy Lee, valet to George Washington, to Alfred Jackson, faithful servant of Andrew Jackson, these dramatic narratives explore our country’s great tragedy—that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles. These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but traditionally have been left out of the history books. Their stories are true—and they should be heard. This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.
Few individuals have had as great an impact on the law--both its practice and its history--as A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, he has distinguished himself over the decades both as a professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, and as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals. But Judge Higginbotham is perhaps best known as an authority on racism in America: not the least important achievement of his long career has been In the Matter of Color, the first volume in a monumental history of race and the American legal process. Published in 1978, this brilliant book has been hailed as the definitive account of racism, slavery, and the law in colonial America. Now, after twenty years, comes the long-awaited sequel. In Shades of Freedom, Higginbotham provides a magisterial account of the interaction between the law and racial oppression in America from colonial times to the present, demonstrating how the one agent that should have guaranteed equal treatment before the law--the judicial system--instead played a dominant role in enforcing the inferior position of blacks. The issue of racial inferiority is central to this volume, as Higginbotham documents how early white perceptions of black inferiority slowly became codified into law. Perhaps the most powerful and insightful writing centers on a pair of famous Supreme Court cases, which Higginbotham uses to portray race relations at two vital moments in our history. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 declared that a slave who had escaped to free territory must be returned to his slave owner. Chief Justice Roger Taney, in his notorious opinion for the majority, stated that blacks were "so inferior that they had no right which the white man was bound to respect." For Higginbotham, Taney's decision reflects the extreme state that race relations had reached just before the Civil War. And after the War and Reconstruction, Higginbotham reveals, the Courts showed a pervasive reluctance (if not hostility) toward the goal of full and equal justice for African Americans, and this was particularly true of the Supreme Court. And in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which Higginbotham terms "one of the most catastrophic racial decisions ever rendered," the Court held that full equality--in schooling or housing, for instance--was unnecessary as long as there were "separate but equal" facilities. Higginbotham also documents the eloquent voices that opposed the openly racist workings of the judicial system, from Reconstruction Congressman John R. Lynch to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan to W. E. B. Du Bois, and he shows that, ironically, it was the conservative Supreme Court of the 1930s that began the attack on school segregation, and overturned the convictions of African Americans in the famous Scottsboro case. But today racial bias still dominates the nation, Higginbotham concludes, as he shows how in six recent court cases the public perception of black inferiority continues to persist. In Shades of Freedom, a noted scholar and celebrated jurist offers a work of magnificent scope, insight, and passion. Ranging from the earliest colonial times to the present, it is a superb work of history--and a mirror to the American soul.
In the early nineteen thirties Ayi Tendulkar, a young journalist from a small town in Maharashtra, travelled to Germany to study. Within a short time he married Eva Schubring, his professor’s daughter. Soon after the short-lived marriage broke up, Tendulkar, by now also a well-known journalist in Berlin, met and fell in love with the filmmaker Thea von Harbou, divorced wife of Fritz Lang, and soon to be Tendulkar’s wife. Many years his senior, Thea became Tendulkar’s support and mainstay in Germany, encouraging and supporting him in bringing other young Indian students to the country. Hitler’s coming to power put an end to all that, and on Thea von Harbou’s advice, Tendulkar returned to India, where he became involved in Gandhi’s campaign of non-cooperation with the British and where, with Thea’s consent, he soon married Indumati Gunaji, a Gandhian activist. Caught up in the whirlwind of Gandhi’s activism, Indumati and Tendulkar spent several years in Indian prisons, being able to come together as a married couple only after their release – managing thereby to comply with a condition that Gandhi had put to their marriage, that they remain apart for several years ‘to serve the nation’. In this unique account, Indumati and Tendulkar’s daughter, Laxmi Tendulkar Dhaul, traces the turbulent lives of her parents and Thea von Harbou against the backremove of Nazi Germany and Gandhi’s India, using a wealth of documents, letters, newspaper articles and photographs to piece together the intermeshed histories of two women, the man they loved, their own growing friendship and two countries battling with violence and non-violence, fascism and colonialism. Published by Zubaan.
"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.
From nationalbestselling author and humanitarian Zainab Salbi, a powerful look at what happens when we heal our shadows and align with our core values. “May this book help create bridges to a much bigger and kinder world.” —Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road and Revolution from Within “If you want to know what true self-power is, then read this book. It will open your inner eye to the beauty of your own being.” —Deepak Chopra, MD, author of The Healing Self and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success How can we transform our collective fear and the deep divisions between us into meaningful change? In Freedom Is an Inside Job, bestselling author, humanitarian, and TV personality Zainab Salbi shares that to transform our outer world, we must turn towards our inner world. After years of working as a successful CEO and change-maker, Salbi realized that if she wanted to confront and heal the shadows of the world, she needed to face her own shadows first. Holding nothing back, Salbi shares pivotal moments from her personal life alongside poignant and fascinating stories from her encounters around the world. Through her stories, we learn that if we want to create real change, we need to heal the inconsistencies within our own values, actions, and goals. As Salbi explores her own riveting journey to wholeness, readers learn how embarking on such a journey enables each of us to create the world we want to live in. “So long as we are conflicted within, we will continue to have conflict without,” writes Salbi. “If we want to change the world, we need to begin with ourselves. This is the path to freedom.”
In this important and controversial book, one of our leading literary theorists presents a major philosophical statement about the meaning of literature and the shape of literary texts. Drawing on works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, by other writers as diverse as Sophocles, Cervantes, and George Eliot, by thinkers as varied as William James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Jay Gould, and from philosophy, the Bible, television, and much more, Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience. Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature, history, and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency, chance, and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and "backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism, helps to liberate us from the false certainties of dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral choices available to us.
"It began with an uncanny encounter on busy Seventh Avenue. Two men pass each other in the street, walking along calmly one minute -- struck down the next by a horrific fate. All over Manhattan, soundless detonations cut down prince and pauper alike.... One one man, Doc Savage -- scientist, adventurer and superman -- can penetrate the eerie enigma that threatens to bring the mightiest city on earth to its knees."--[P.4] of cover.
