Pursuit Of Freedom is a remarkable account of a family's life, beginning with Nazism, followed by Communism in Hungary. A moving personal drama, and an important historical memoir of this turbulent era. Not a chronicle of horrors, but a depiction of hope and triumph and profound gratitude. A celebration of freedom, inspiring readers to turn adversity into strength and success and finding courage for optimism about the future.
The book depicts the struggles of 12 year old Maya who rebels against her family and social norms in pursuit of freedom. She refuses an arranged marriage and escapes home to get an education in a catholic boarding school. Eventually she lands in America of the 1960s and is embroiled in emotional and spiritual struggles as she realizes the wider ramifications of freedom. She returns on the brink of globalization and finds the traditional society at home withering and heading towards dissolution. India 1940s and radical American campus 1960s! American Dream of an Indian girl that ends with an unexpected twist! .a richly imagined and deeply felt testimony to the timeless human impulse that informs all our lives. Dr. Robert Hamburger Professor of English, New Jersey City University
Andreas Magdalos grew up in South Africa. He befriended a young black boy named Matthew Matsimani. To Andreas and Matthew, their friendship seemed to be nothing extraordinary ... until Andreas’s mother conveyed her outrage. And why not? At the time, apartheid—racial segregation—was the law in South Africa. But Andreas saw this separation as injustice and wondered why the rest of the country seemed so blind. Soon, the opinions of Andreas get him into trouble with the South African police. In an effort to separate their son from the battle he hopes to fight for the black citizens of Africa, his parents send him to Greece. Despite love and adventure, far from the segregation turmoil, Andreas can’t shake the feeling that he belongs in South Africa. He returns, and two childhood friends find themselves reunited as they battle side-by-side for the removal of apartheid in their country. In Pursuit of Freedom is a depiction of the South African apartheid from the perspective of a white man and a black man, friends together. Both feel the injustice of the law. Both are willing to risk lives and reputations to fight for civil rights. In the center of a troubled nation, they band together for one cause, despite the rampant devastation reaped on their lives. Their story proves that equality does not come without cost.
As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.
This first-time paperback edition, now updated, describes and analyzes Cuba's history from the English capture of Havana in 1762 through Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, the Cuban Revolution, and the Missile Crisis to Fidel Castro's defiant but precarious present state.
During much of his life Voltaire's plays and verse made him the toast of society, but his barbed wit and commitment to reason also got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the King, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. His personal life was as colourful as his intellectual one. Voltaire never married, but had long-term affairs with two women: Emilie, who died after giving birth to the child of another lover, and his niece, Marie-Louise, with whom he spent his last twenty-five years. With its tales of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs and tireless battles against critics, Church and King, Roger Pearson's brilliant biography brings Voltaire vividly to life.
In Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom, Mary P. Nichols argues for the centrality of the idea of freedom in Thucydides' thought. Through her close reading of his History of the Peloponnesian War, she explores the manifestations of this theme. Cities and individuals in Thucydides' history take freedom as their goal, whether they claim to possess it and want to maintain it or whether they desire to attain it for themselves or others. Freedom is the goal of both antagonists in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta and Athens, although in different ways. One of the fullest expressions of freedom can be seen in the rhetoric of Thucydides’ Pericles, especially in his famous funeral oration. More than simply documenting the struggle for freedom, however, Thucydides himself is taking freedom as his cause. On the one hand, he demonstrates that freedom makes possible human excellence, including courage, self-restraint, deliberation, and judgment, which support freedom in turn. On the other hand, the pursuit of freedom, in one’s own regime and in the world at large, clashes with interests and material necessity, and indeed the very passions required for its support. Thucydides’ work, which he himself considered a possession for all time, therefore speaks very much to our time, encouraging the defense of freedom while warning of the limits and dangers in doing so. The powerful must defend freedom, Thucydides teaches, but beware that the cost not become freedom itself.
Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays of wide historical and geographic scope which engages the legacy of diaspora, colonialism and slavery. The contributors explore the confrontation between Africa’s forced migrants and their unwelcoming new environments, in order to highlight the unique individual experiences of survival and assimilation that characterized Atlantic slavery. As they focus on the African or Afro-diasporan populations under study, the chapters gauge the degree to which formal independence, coming out of a variety of practices of opposition and resistance, lasting centuries in some cases, has translated into freedom, security, and a "good life." By foregrounding Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone African and Afro-descendant concerns, over and against an often Anglo-centric focus in the field, the book brings a more representative approach to the area of diaspora or Black Atlantic studies, offering a more complete appreciation of Black Atlantic cultural production across history and across linguistic barriers.
Hushed figures wading by the dark of night through infested swamps, scurrying through the densest woods, silently creeping to the next way station in a long journey that could take them to dignity, freedom, and self-determination. The edge-of-your-seat adventures of fugitive slaves fascinate students and engage them in the story of the Underground Railroad. In Pursuit of Freedom shows you how to turn that student interest into a multifaceted history experience. As a social reform movement and an act of political subterfuge, the Underground Railroad responded to the moral crises of its day yet also wrought ethical dilemmas of its own. Beginning with a detailed overview of American slavery and the abolitionist movement, William Kashatus puts the Railroad into context, distinguishing history from mythology while opening rich moral and ethical questions for consideration. By examining the times hands on through social studies disciplines like geography, economics, civics, ethics, and Constitutional law, students develop their own interpretation of the Railroad and express it through reading, writing, reflection, and projects. Kashatus also offers a wide variety of hands-on methods that bring the Underground Railroad to vivid life, including how to: teach with source documents and photographs write local-history research papers think critically about the ethical questions surrounding the Railroad perform in-class dramas decode slave songs. Go beyond your textbook's facile depiction of the Underground Railroad, energize your teaching of antebellum history with In Pursuit of Freedom, and watch as your students make a journey of their own--into knowledge of the past, empathy for the people of another time, and a love of historical inquiry.
